* * *
He made his way through the spring night, smiling all the way. The eastern horizon was growing steadily brighter. Christendom would remember him, he fancied, for all time. It was his hope that both the chroniclers and the minstrels would write about his exploits, and place him amongst the hallowed ranks of the great saintly warriors of Christendom.
He turned his face to the heavens, and then surveyed the countryside about him.
Yes. He knew where he was, now. He had tread through this place earlier in the night, but had not yet recognized it then for what it actually was, or what had happened there. He understood that he was within half a day’s ride to both the cities of Tours and Poitiers. He knew he was closest, though, to the tiny hamlet of Moussais – better known as Moussais of the Battle. Looking carefully, he could even see the hovels and the church in the distance.
His smile deepened.
It was in this place – some two hundred years earlier – where a force of Franks, under the command of the mighty Charles the Hammer, had done battle against the vile Saracen host. They had come up out of Iberia, but Charles had smashed them – forever halting the heathen’s savage encroachment into Christendom. Had Charles the Hammer not prevailed on that day, the faith of Christ that Ragenard kept so fiercely would have perhaps been extinguished, replaced with the worship of the vile Saracen demons Termagant, Mahoun and Apollyon.
He turned his face to the heavens again and laughed heartily. What better place was there, then, to have victory against his own abhorrent foe? He hoped that his forebears – those who had fought and died here in the year of Our Lord 732 – would be proud of his achievement, however modest it was by comparison.
He dropped to one knee, so as to take the earth and grasp it in his hands. It was then, however, that the smell of sorcery reached his nostrils.
He rose to his feet immediately, and put a hand to his sword-hilt.
Somewhere behind him, he heard the sound of movement and rumbling and scraping. He spun around. It was not just behind him, though, it was all about him.
A hideous ghoul sprung from the earth somewhere before him, and he drew his sword and cleaved it in two. But then two more took its place, followed by another four. He slashed and kicked through them furiously. But still more and more emerged – within only minutes, there was an army of them, and they had utterly surrounded him – some clambered out of the ground, some climbed out of what seemed to be pure shadow. Two-hundred-year-old fingers – many dozens of them – tore and dug at his face. Heavy bones and corroded pieces of iron clubbed and bashed at his head and shards of bone punctured through his chain shirt and stuck deep into the flesh below. His sword-hand had been bitten into and his weapon ripped away. There were dozens of them, then soon over a hundred. Some among them were deeply wrong in their construction – some had two heads or two pairs of arms or legs, some were even made of both man parts and horse parts together.
Suddenly they had all halted, as if frozen. They did not move, and neither did Ragenard – his arms and legs were held now firmly in place by several ghouls each.
And then, after what seemed like an age, many of the dead men began to move and shift about.
Through them all, he could see a dark figure some distance away. It slowly approached, and, like the Red Sea for Moses, the throng of dead men parted dutifully.
Soon, the figure was standing before the warrior.
It was the necromancer. His neck was only a bloody stump – the blood was no longer flowing, however – and he held his own severed head in his hands before him.
“Hail, Ragenard,”
“What is this? How?” Ragenard said, the best he could. Bone-hands clung to his face and his jaw. “You said yourself that you cannot raise a body from the dead with...”
“No, I cannot do as Christ did,” he said. “There is a hex, however, that a magician can place on himself. It is a great secret among great secrets – it binds the soul to the body, ensuring that, after death, it remains in place for longer than it ought to.”
Ragenard put his mouth into a snarl, but he was speechless.
“And I must say that I am glad that it has actually succeeded.”
The necromancer’s hands lifted his pale head up, and set it firmly in its rightful spot atop his neck.
His hands then he put to either side of the warrior’s face, and took tight hold.
“If the sea of fire is to be my final end, Ragenard, know that I will see you there, too.”
The necromancer’s grip on the warrior’s head tightened, but then loosened. He let go and walked away several paces, and then turned to look upon the captive warrior once again.
The necromancer then made a motion with his hand.
The massed host of revenants took that as their instruction to make a martyr of Ragenard, and this they did. Despite their mindlessness, they acted slowly and deliberately; they tore the warrior apart piece by piece. He screamed bloody curses and blasphemies until there was nothing left of him.
The necromancer stood by, forcing himself to watch the grisly scene. He wanted to be certain that the beast of a man was truly gone from the world.
As the hundreds of ghouls slowly shuffled back to their age-old resting-places, he could not help but wonder about where the warrior Ragenard would end up, at the other end of things. He could not help but wonder, then, about where he would find himself.
That thought would turn out to be his last, however: the magic he had cast to preserve his consciousness had at that moment run its full course. His head came away, and the necromancer fell down dead, then, becoming what he was supposed to be.
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