“Anhuset, stop.” She paused long enough to stare at him. “Stop,” he repeated. “The more you move, the higher they'll go and the tighter they'll get.” His own tethers hadn't traveled any farther up his body than his calves and were loose enough that he regained his footing and stood.
Her eyes rounded at the sight, and she halted her thrashing. The vines stopped their creep as well, though they didn't retreat or loosen on her. “So we're stuck here while whatever that is...” She tilted her head toward the mist only a stone's throw away from them. “Consumes us.”
“Pray that isn't so,” he said. He wouldn't offer any false reassurances. He had no more idea than she what lay in store for them.
The preternatural mist had slowed its rush to a slow lap, dissipating in spots until it no longer resembled a ground-hugging cloud.
Serovek's lips parted in a silent gasp. “Lover of thorns and holy gods,” he breathed in a whisper.
He'd prayed never to see this very sight ever again, yet once more a vast crowd of the dead stood in front of him, their regard far heavier than the vaporous forms they wore.
Icy fingers of panic closed his throat for a moment, rendering him mute. The necromantic magic he was sure still lingered inside him had somehow managed to attract restless ghosts without his knowledge or control.
“Anhuset.” He forced her name past his teeth. She turned her head just enough to give him a quick glance without taking her eye off the host of apparitions watching them in return. “Have my eyes changed?”
Her scowl darkened even more, not with anger but puzzlement. “No. They're still the same. Cold-water blue and just as strange as they always are.”
He might have chuckled at her comment were they in different circumstances.
The throng of spectral watchers rippled before him, tattered shapes whose details sharpened for a moment into men, women, and children. There were thousands of them crowding the bridge deck, some gliding away from the main group to flutter along either side of and behind him and Anhuset until they were surrounded.
“Who are you?” He wondered if they'd speak as those who'd followed the Wraith kings into battle had done.
One shape in the front and center of the shifting mist separated from the rest to drift toward him. A woman, lithe and nearly as tall as Anhuset. Her nebulous features hinted at a comeliness bordering on the sublime. In life she must have been breathtaking to behold.
As she drew closer, Serovek inhaled sharply. He recognized her. One of the statues behind him wore her face. A queen, crowned in a diadem whose jewels had been pried out by a long-dead thief. As he'd done with the faceless king, Serovek had paused to admire her image. He hadn't expected to confront her specter.
She didn't speak, but nonetheless a voice sounded clear in his mind in a tongue he understood. “A dark song is your spirit, Wraith king, a hymn of the broken. We heard its dirge across the ravine.” Her phantasmal gaze passed over him, leaving frost ribbons on his clothes where it touched. “A general of the dead with the taint of the damned on him.”
There was no condemnation in her words, no judgment, yet Serovek briefly closed his eyes, sick to his soul at their truth. When he opened them again, she was still in front of him, and beyond her Anhuset watched him with a wary, puzzled expression.
The queen had addressed him by the title given to the five who'd fought the galla. “How do you know me?” he asked. “Did you and yours serve under my banner?” The Kai dead had followed Brishen while the human dead had answered to Serovek, Andras, Gaeres and Megiddo.
Again, only a voice in his mind answered. “We serve no one. All of the dead heard the summons of a son of the Old blood.”
This time the ghostly throng behind her spoke aloud, repeating in hollow unison ancient Kai words once uttered by Brishen's eidolon on Saruna Tor.
“Rise and come forth, ye sleepers and ye wanderers. Come forth and prepare for war. Rise. Rise.”
“Oh fuck.” Anhuset's face had gone the color of a dead fish. “All my wealth for a sword and shield right now.”
Serovek shuddered hard enough that he would have fallen to his knees had the vines not held him upright. Those words had seeded more than a few of his nightmares, always preceding grotesque images of Megiddo tortured by the galla. He shoved aside the guilt and abiding horror to concentrate on the queen.
“We wished only to cross to the other side as a faster way to the Lobak valley,” he said. “We've no interest in exploring your city, only passing through it.”
She shook her head. “The dead and the damned already reside in Tineroth, Wraith king. There's no welcome for you and yours here.” The spectral queen smiled a sad, bitter smile. It faded, and behind her the court of phantoms sighed, the sound like the last gasp of the dying. “We've come to warn you. The guardian of Tineroth waits at the gate. Those who enter, don't leave. Go back the way you came.”
He was about to reassure her that was exactly what he intended when Anhuset pulled on her bonds in an attempt to free one arm. “Margrave, look to the far battlement right of the gate.” Serovek did as she instructed, spotting a lone figure perched like a raptor on the battlement's narrow ledge. “Whoever that is,” Anhuset continued. “They aren't a ghost.”
She was right. The wind howling up from the ravine whipped the figure's pale hair around their head, partially hiding their face. They were too far away for Serovek to make out any specific features, but the dull gleam of sunlight on steel told him the watcher wore armor, and the pole arm casually tucked into the crook of their elbow spoke of a warrior's ease with weaponry.
Like the bridge and the city it led to, something about that distant figure raised internal alarms, even if the phantom queen's words hadn't already done so.
“We can't stop you from entering Tineroth,” she said, her voice no longer strong in his mind but more of a resonance heard in a deep well. “But you, like others before you, will die there if you do.”
Serovek was no stranger to war, against the living, the dead, and the demonic, but a shorter path to the monastery wasn't worth risking their lives more than necessary, and his instincts told him the guardian the queen warned him about was more than a solitary warrior with a sharp blade.
She gestured with a pellucid hand, and the vines fell away from his and Anhuset's legs, retreating with a loud hiss as serpentine as their movements. “Your choice,” the queen said. “Farewell.” Her form faded, the last bits of mist shredded by the wind. The crowd of ghosts accompanying her lost shape and definition, melting into the obscuring fog that rolled back toward the city before enveloping it entirely in a gray shroud.
Serovek no longer saw the guardian, though he was sure they still watched him and Anhuset with malevolent intent.
Anhuset strode to where her knife lay on the deck, no longer covered by the vines. “What did the ghosts say? I could tell the one was speaking to you in your thoughts.”
“Turn back and live or go forward and die,” he replied. “I'll give you and the others details once we're off this bridge and back on the road.”
She wiped a hand across her sweating brow, no longer scowling now that she had her blade back. “I was hoping you'd say that. I'd rather face Chamtivos than keep company with ghosts and whoever watched us from the battlement.” A quick look back over her shoulder toward the mist wall. “Not a ghost,” she said. “But I think someone or some thing I'd not want to cross if I didn't have to.”