EIGHT
RATHOK
Six of them. Boiling out of the darkness in a wave of rotted flesh and shattered bone.
Debtor-wraiths. The dead who defaulted, bound to the Ledger even in death, transformed into something that hungers and hunts and never, ever stops.
I shove Ivalys against the wall. Position myself between her and the oncoming wave. My axes come up, edges gleaming in the blue-gray light of the night-sight compound.
Six. I can handle six.
The first one reaches me.
It used to be human. The shape is still roughly right—two arms, two legs, a head that might have held thoughts once. But death and debt have twisted it into something else. Skin like parchment stretched over too-sharp bones. Its mouth is open, screaming without sound, an endless silent wail of hunger and agony.
My axe takes its head before it touches me.
Skull separating from spine in a spray of black ichor. The body stumbles two more steps, hands still reaching, still grasping for the debt it can never collect. Then it collapses in a heap of twitching limbs.
No time to watch it fall.
The second wraith is already on me. Faster than the first—fresher, newer, the memory of life still driving its hunger. Claws rake across my chest, shredding leather, drawing blood in four parallel lines that burn like fire. I grunt, pivot, bury my axe in its skull so deep, the blade lodges in its spine.
Can’t free it. The third wraith is coming.
I release the axe. Grab the wraith’s corpse by the throat. Swing it like a club, slamming it into the third attacker. Both go down in a tangle of limbs and rotting flesh. I stomp down on a throat. Feel cartilage crunch. Stamp again—an eye socket caves beneath my boot. A third stomp shatters what remains of a ribcage into splinters.
Blood—mine, red and hot—drips from my chest. Pain is distant. Pain is for later. Now is killing.
The fourth wraith is smarter. It hangs back, circling, looking for an opening. It used to be something more than human—orc, maybe, judging by the size. The shadow-curse twisted it even in death, making it faster, stronger, more dangerous than its human counterparts.
We face each other. Predators recognizing kin.
It lunges. A feint—I see it too late. Its real attack comes from the left, a bone-shard dagger driving toward my throat. I catch the blade with my bare hand. Bone punches through my palm, grinding against my own bones, black blood welling around the wound.
The wraith’s dead eyes widen. It didn’t expect me to stop it.
I pull it closer. Watch confusion flicker across its rotted features. And drive my tusk through its eye socket.
Skull crunches. Brain matter splatters. I keep pushing until my tusk scrapes the back of its skull, until I feel the thing that powered it—the contract-core, the debt-hunger—shatter into nothing.
Four down. Two left.
They come together. A coordinated attack from wraiths old enough to remember tactics, old enough to have been soldiers or hunters or something that knew how to kill. I yank my axe free from the second corpse, swing it in a wide arc that forces them apart.
One darts left. The other goes right.
I can’t watch both.
I choose left. The wraith sees me commit, tries to reverse, but momentum is a bitch, and physics don’t care about the undead. My axe takes it in the shoulder, splits through the collarbone, buries deep in its chest. Not a killing blow—these things don’t die from chest wounds—but enough to slow it.
I spin to face the other?—
It’s not there.
It went for Ivalys.
No.
