Ringil advanced into the graveyard, one bent-kneed step at a time. Clouds broke apart overhead, and the Kiriath blade glinted in the sudden smear of bandlight. The cry was not repeated, but now he could make out smaller, more furtive sounds. The sounds, he reckoned unenthusiastically, of someone digging.

You will be a great hero.

Yeah, right.

He found Bashka’s mother, as it seemed, grubbing around in the dirt at the base of a recent headstone. Her burial shroud was torn and soiled, revealing rotted flesh that he could smell from a dozen paces upwind even in the cold. Her deathgrown nails made an unpleasant raking sound as they struggled with the casket she had partially unearthed.

Ringil grimaced.

In life, this woman had never liked him. As temple officiator and priest, her son was supposed to despise Ringil for a worthless degenerate and a corruptor of youth. Instead, as a schoolmaster and man of some education himself, Bashka turned out to be far too enlightened for his own good. His easygoing attitude to Ringil and the late-night philosophical debates they occasionally got into at the tavern earned him vitriolic reprimands from visiting senior priests. Worse still, his lack of condemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy that ensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town. The mother, naturally enough, blamed the degenerate Ringil and his evil influence for her son’s lack of advancement, and he was not welcome in the schoolmaster’s house while she drew breath. This latter activity had come to an abrupt halt the previous month, following a swift and unquenchable fever, sent presumably by some preoccupied god who had overlooked her great righteousness in religious matters.

Trying not to breathe through his nose, Ringil tapped the flat of the Ravensfriend on a convenient grave to get her attention. At first she didn’t seem to hear the noise it made, but then the body twisted wrenchingly around and he found himself looking into a face whose eyes had long ago been eaten by whichever small creatures took care of that sort of thing. The jaw hung slack, most of the nose was gone, and the flesh of the cheeks was mottled and holed. It was remarkable that Bashka had even recognized her.

“Come on out of there,” said Ringil, readying his sword.

It did.

It came through the dead woman’s rib cage with a cracking, sucking sound, a corpsemite fully a yard long not counting the tendril appendages it had used to puppet the corpse’s limbs. It was gray in hue, not unlike some species of smooth-skinned maggot, which its body in many ways resembled. The blunt snout of the thing ended in chomping jaws set with horny ridges that could shatter bone, and Ringil knew that the tail end looked much the same. Corpsemites didn’t excrete their waste, they oozed it from pores along the slug-like body, a substance that, like their saliva, was lethally corrosive.

No one knew where they came from. Folklore had it that they were originally lumps of witch’s snot, hawked up and animated to voracious life by their evil owners for reasons most of the tales were rather vague on. Authorized religion insisted variously that they were either ordinary slugs or maggots, possessed by the souls of the evil dead, or demonic visitations from some cemetery hell where the spiritually unworthy rotted, fully conscious, in their graves. Archeth had had a slightly saner theory: that the mites were a mutation produced by the Kiriath’s experiments with lower life-forms centuries before, a creature designed to dispose of the dead more efficiently than conventional scavengers would.

Whatever the truth, no one was quite sure what level of intelligence the corpsemites had. But somewhere in their evolution, natural or otherwise, they’d learned to use the carcases they fed upon for a whole host of other purposes. A body could serve them as a hiding place or an incubation bed for their eggs; if not too badly decayed, it might become a means of rapid motion or disguise; and, in the case of humans or wolves, it could be a digging tool. It was the use of human corpses that triggered the spate of zombie sightings throughout the northwest whenever the winters were hard.

Ringil had occasionally wondered whether the corpsemites didn’t also manipulate carcasses as a form of play. It was entirely his own macabre idea, conjured up when he first read about the creatures in accounts by travelers to the Kiriath wastes. After all, he reasoned to his father’s librarian, a corpsemite’s own secretions would eat through a wooden casket nearly as fast as a corpse’s decaying hands could open it, so why else would they bother? The opinion of the librarian, and later of his father, was that Ringil was a very sick young man who ought to concern himself, as his elder brothers already did, with more natural pursuits like riding, hunting, and bedding the local wenches. His mother, who no doubt already had her suspicions, said nothing.

From his one or two previous encounters with these creatures, Ringil also knew that they could be very—

The corpsemite flexed its body free of the encaging ribs, leapt straight at him.

—fast.

He hacked sideways, rather inelegantly, and succeeded in batting the thing away to the left. It hit a headstone and dropped to the ground writhing, sliced almost in half by the stroke. Ringil brought the sword down again and finished the job, mouth pursed with distaste. The two severed halves of the creature twisted and trembled and then lay still. Demons and the souls of the evil dead were not, it seemed, up to repairing that kind of damage.

Ringil also knew that corpsemites moved in groups. As the slimy filigree of a tendril appendage touched his cheek, he was already spinning around to face the next one. The drops of secretion burned. No time to wipe it off. He spotted the creature, coiled on top of a Yhelteth tomb, skewered it on reflex. The tendrils recoiled and the thing made angry chittering noises as it died. Ringil heard a clatter of response from the other side of the tomb and saw movement. He stepped wide around the worked stone slab, saw the two smaller mites hauling themselves up out of the wreckage of a rotted coffin and its equally far-gone contents. A single downward blow sliced them both irreparably open, body fluids gushing like pale oil from the wounds. He did it again, just to be sure.

The fifth mite landed on his back.

He didn’t think at all. In retrospect, he guessed it must have been pure revulsion that drove him. He dropped the sword with a yell, reached down to the fastenings of his jerkin, and tore them open with both hands. In the same motion he shrugged himself halfway out of the garment while the corpsemite was still finding out that the leather was not his real skin. The jerkin sagged under the creature’s weight, helped him to pull clear. The tendrils around his waist and over his shoulders were still creeping toward each other and they didn’t have time to tighten against the movement. His left arm came free and he whirled like a discus thrower, hurling the bundle of jerkin and mite off his right sleeve and away among the headstones. He heard it hit something solid.

Tendrils had touched him on the chest and back—later he would find the weals. Now he snatched up the Ravensfriend and stalked after his jerkin, eyes and ears open for any remaining members of the group. He found the garment, partially dissolved, at the base of an ancient moss-grown slab near the back of the cemetery. Not a bad throw, that, from a standing start. The corpsemite was still trying to disentangle itself from the leather and flapped confusedly at him as he approached. Its jaws were bared and it was hissing like a new sword in the cooling trough.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered and plunged the Ravensfriend down point-first, impaling the mite on the earth. He watched with somber satisfaction as it died. “That was clean on today, you little shit.”