The Ruby Knight

started.’
    ‘Aren’t we going to eat breakfast first?’ Kalten objected.
    ‘You really don’t want anything in your stomach, Kalten,’ Tynian replied. ‘Believe me, you don’t.’
    They walked out into the field.
    ‘They don’t seem to have been doing as much digging here,’ Berit said, looking around. ‘Maybe the Zemochs don’t know where the Thalesians are buried after all.’
    ‘We can hope,’ Tynian said. ‘I guess this is as good a place to start as any.’ He picked up a dead stick and prepared to draw a diagram on the sodden ground.
    ‘Use this instead,’ Sephrenia advised, handing him a coil of rope. ‘A diagram drawn on dry ground is all right, but there are puddles here, and the ghosts might not see the whole thing.’
    ‘We really wouldn’t want that to happen,’ Tynian agreed. He began to lay out the rope on the ground. The design was a strangely compelling one with obscure curves and circles and irregularly shaped stars. ‘Is that about right?’ he asked Sephrenia.
    ‘Move that one slightly to the left,’ she said, pointing.
    He did that.
    ‘Much better,’ she said. ‘Repeat the spell out loud. I’ll correct you if you do anything wrong.’
    ‘Just out of curiosity, why don’t you do this, Sephrenia?’ Kalten asked her. ‘You seem to know more about it than anybody.’
    ‘I’m not strong enough,’ she admitted. ‘What you’re really doing in this ritual is wrestling with the dead to compel them to rise. I’m a little small for that sort of thing.’
    Tynian began to speak in Styric, intoning the words sonorously. There was a peculiar cadence to his speech, and the gestures he made had a slow stateliness to them. His voice grew louder and more commanding. Then he raised both his hands and brought them together sharply.
    At first nothing seemed to happen. Then the ground inside his diagram seemed to ripple and shudder. Slowly, almost painfully, something rose from the earth.
    ‘God!’ Kalten gasped in horror as he stared at the grotesquely mutilated thing.
    ‘Talk to it, Ulath,’ Tynian said from between clenched teeth. ‘I can’t hold it here very long.’
    Ulath stepped forward and began to speak in a harshly guttural language.
    ‘Old Thalesian,’ Sephrenia identified the dialect. ‘Common soldiers at the time of King Sarak would have spoken it.’
    The ghastly apparition replied haltingly in a dreadful voice. Then it made a jerky pointing motion with one bony hand.
    ‘Let it go back, Tynian,’ Ulath said. ‘I’ve got what we need.’
    Tynian’s face was grey and his hands were shaking. He spoke two words in Styric, and the apparition sank back into the earth.
    ‘That one didn’t really know anything,’ Ulath told him, ‘but it pointed out the spot where an earl is buried. The earl was in the household of King Sarak, and if anyone around here knows where the king’s buried, he would. It’s right over there.’
    ‘Let me get my breath first,’ Tynian said.
    ‘Is it really that difficult?’
    ‘You have no idea, my friend.’
    They waited while Tynian stood gasping painfully. After a few moments he coiled up his rope and straightened. ‘All right. Let’s go and wake up the earl.’
    Ulath led them to a small knoll that stood nearby. ‘Burial mound,’ he said. ‘It’s customary to raise one when you bury a man of importance.’
    Tynian laid out his design atop the mound, then stepped back and began the ritual again. He finished it and clapped his hands once more.
    The apparition that rose from the mound was not as hideously mutilated as the first had been. It was dressed in traditional Thalesian chain-mail and had a horned helmet on its head. ‘Who art thou who hast disturbed my sleep?’ it demanded of Tynian in the archaic speech of five centuries past.
    ‘He hath brought thee once again into the light of day at my urging, My Lord,’ Ulath replied. ‘I am of thy race and would speak with thee.’
    ‘Speak quickly then. I am discontent that thou hast done this thing.’
    ‘We seek the resting place of His Majesty King Sarak,’ Ulath said. ‘Knowest thou, My Lord, where we might search?’
    ‘His Majesty doth not lie on this battlefield,’ the ghost responded.
    Sparhawk’s heart sank.
    ‘Knowest thou what befell him?’ Ulath pressed.
    ‘His Majesty departed from his capital at Emsat when word reached him of the invasion of Otha’s hordes,’ the ghost declared. ‘He took with him a small party of his household retainers.