Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian Page B

pain. At first it was raging mortal agony, foremost in his mind. But then it too had grown numb in the cold—in particular when he was first submerged in the icy waters of the lake. He didn’t know cold could burn so. Cold burned with an inferno without end, and then it  . . . receded. And thus pain became secondary, a constant sensation of remote horror that simply slipped in the back of his mind and lurked—for now.
    Or, maybe pain was just a memory, and was not there at all.
    Duke Hoarfrost pumped his chest in and out, or did something that caused a movement inside of him. Something; he was not sure what. He could hear the cold air swishing through the holes in his flesh, a soft hiss. It was almost curious to consider it, to listen. . . . Too bad he was so stiff, so cumbersome—he had never remembered being so peculiarly solid and heavy before, as though he was not made of meat but granite.
    Am I dead? he thought, for the first time voluntarily, directly. But it was a lazy thought, a dreamlike passing thought with no emotion attached to it. And so he did not give it more than cursory attention, let it pass on into the void with other insignificant filaments of images and dream-fragments.
    As though he had mused out-loud, Beltain, his son, spoke.
    “What has happened, father?” he whispered. It was unclear whether he was afraid to speak up in a full voice or if he was unable to do so from the shock.
    “What has happened to me?” the Duke echoed. He listened not to Beltain but to his own words. Somehow he found it now easier to speak once again, to form words on the exhalation of breath, as though the practice of pumping his own lungs was merely an old rhythm he could reclaim so that it was again becoming a habit. Inhale, exhale, his mechanism was working like clockwork.
    And then he shook himself like a dog with great sudden strength that was not inhuman but merely impossible, considering the condition of his body. And he sent bits of water and ice flying around him. He flexed his arms, stomped his feet, his torso covered in iron plate and wet tunic.
    “Am  . . . I . . . dead?” he said out-loud, practicing, as the air hissed out of his chest.
    And suddenly there was an unexpected answer.
    A man stepped forward stiffly, from among the ranks of his foot soldiers, and he said in an equally wooden, stone-cold voice. “My . . . Lord. You’re not the only one. I fear me, I’m dead too.”
    He pulled off his damaged helmet and showed a head wound that could not belong to a man walking upright. Hair clotted with blood at the left side of his temple showed broken bits of skull and brains pouring out of him in rivulets, freezing against his bluish-white face.
    There were groans and exclamations in the crowd.
    Beltain pulled his warhorse up tight, for it started to snort and roll its eyes in terror.
    And then, one after another, more men stepped forward. They removed hauberks and shirts, parted chest-plates, raised sleeves and lifted helmets. What was revealed could not be called a proper nightmare. For no human history had the words in any language to describe the carnage done to a body that is dead and ravaged and void of living fluids, missing limbs, with stilled organs and lack of movement, yet which continues supporting the living soul.
    There were old legends, tales told to scare the young, of the blood-drinking vurdulak and vampir, the God-forsaken undead who rested in their coffins during day but rose at night to walk the darkness in order to appease an unholy hunger. Other legends spoke of incorporeal ghosts, skeletal creatures that would not rest, of ghouls and shades and bodies possessed by demonic forces, of drowned maidens that devoured men, of hoary forest spirits that lurked below the roots of ancient trees and swallowed the living beneath ground.
    Yet there was no mention of men who simply would not die, would not leave their mauled and broken bodies, no matter how terrible the damage was.