Zit pulled the hood of her Cloak of the Chameleon up to make sure she was fully covered as she lay on the low, sandy rise. Then she put the spyglass to her eye and peered down on the city below.
At a first glance, it didn't look too bad. There was no sign of widespread devastation, none of the tumbled buildings an earthquake would have created. The city was low-lying, sitting on the riverside as the lazy currents of the Driva flowed past.
Dabirri's walls, too, were low. They were really nothing more than a way to impose a customs barrier. The city hadn't been under threat for centuries, all it's neighbours found it too useful as a trading hub. But there it was; the first evidence of a problem. A section of the wall appeared to have been undermined, leaving a thin strip of crenellations above hanging undamaged while below was a rubble-filled gap.
Image by Roberto Bellasio from Pixabay
That was the point where Zit noticed the other clue. There was no movement. Not anywhere. No sign of guards on the gates, no sign of movement within the city. No smoke from chimneys or temple altars. Not even any birds flying above.
The brief from Sir Galuk had been just that; brief. She had received a short note on rice-paper that just read "Go to Dabirri, Zithaka. Find out what has happened there and why it is no longer in contact. Don't do anything active, just get the information and report back with all haste."
Well, thought Zit, she wasn't going to find out much just peering at the place from a distance. She needed to get a closer look. She had her cloak, which was definitely among her most prized magical items. It hid her from sight, as well as masking her scent and body heat. Moving silently was something she was perfectly capable of doing herself.
It was time to go down and see what she could see.
The gates of Dabirri hung open. That was normal, they were only ever closed at night, and not often even then. Less normal was that it appeared they had been closed and barred, then broken open. Whatever had hit them had shattered two of the three hinges on each gate. They hung at a skewed angle with the bar lying in the dust broken into splintered pieces twenty feet inside.
There were no bodies.
All around were signs of struggle, but they were just tracks in the dirt, occasional broken weapons and arrows. But no bodies. Not a single one.
Pulling the cloak tight around herself, Zit started to move stealthily through the city, keeping her back to walls and being careful to minimise times when she had to be silhouetted. Dabirri was a sprawling desert town, and the streets and bazaars should have been heaving with locals and merchants. But there was no-one around.
Every door had been broken open, but all the shops and houses showed darkened interiors with no sign of life. In the bazaar, the stalls and stands showed only a few signs of disturbance, but the fruit on the stands was rotting, and the spices were starting to blow in the wind.
Image by Mariusz Godlewski from Pixabay
As she approached the centre of town, the Great Square of Temples, Zit heard movement. It wasn't loud, it sounded like something was being slowly, methodically dragged for a short way, dropped with a squishy thumping sound, and then another moved.
Very gingerly moving around until she reached a shaded alleyway, she edged closer to the square. Finally she was able to kneel down and look around the corner at a height that wouldn't be obvious to a casual observer. What she saw was not good, making her gag and pull back to regain her composure.
Piled in the square were the bodies. All of them. They were formed into massive gruesome heaps, corpses thrown into pyramids of rotten flesh with no care or regard for their dignity. Many of them had obviously fatal injuries, with a disproportionate number having skulls dented and crushed by some kind of blunt implement.
Moving among and between the heaped mounds of the murdered citizens of Dabirri, Zit saw undead; skeletons bearing spears and shields, and mummies wrapped in filthy bandages. The mummies were taking corpses from the piles, and dragging them by the feet with unnatural strength to an altar in the centre of the square.
She knew that the world was being subjected to the horrors of an undead invasion. Indeed, she had battled undead herself on a few occasions. Admittedly that usually involved visiting deserted tombs with a view to acquiring their contents rather than dealing with an army of them. She had recently been clearing misguided undead-worshipping cultists out of Kelos. But this was the first time she had seen so many working to a common purpose, guided by clear intelligence.
Standing at the altar were a trio of horrifying creatures. Much larger than men, they were beast-headed things with the bodies of heavily muscled men and the heads of beasts; a jackal, a crocodile and a hippopotamus. Their skins were jet black, so dark they just seemed to absorb light. In their hands they wielded long, slim sceptres.
Image by Ольга Фоничева from Pixabay
Each time a corpse was dumped unceremoniously on the altar, it was touched on the forehead by one or other of the sceptres. A few seconds later, it lurched back into a false semblance of life, sitting upright with unsteady, jerky motions before being shoved off by a mummy to make way for the next body. Once off the altar, the newly revived zombies were given a spear and shield and directed to join an ever-swelling company of freshly created undead.
The population of Dabirri had been in the tens of thousands. Zit knew that this many new spears added to the undead horde would be a massive shock for the armies of the living being gathered to try to oppose them.
Sure, Galuk had told her just to gather information and not do anything active. But she knew that he knew exactly what she was like. She used her initiative. It was surely a reason why he trusted her with missions like this. That and her youthful charm, of course.
There was no way she could just leave these demons to add all those bodies to their ranks. Hidden within her camouflaging cloak, Zit thought for a few minutes, considering the options available to her. Then she reached into a pouch on her belt and pulled out a wand, far longer than the pouch was deep.
She regretted having to use this item; it had been specially obtained for her by an old friend by the name of Tarfoll, for a considerable personal sacrifice. She'd never had to use it's power before, but now felt like the time. Using this wand wouldn't be a direct attack, exactly, so she thought her cloak would continue to hide her while she focused on the power of the spell the wand would bring forth.
Pointing the wand into the sky above the square, she murmured the command word.
Within seconds, the cerulean blue desert sky was filled with roiling black clouds, centred over the square. She'd wondered what Tarfoll had meant when he said the wand cast "Storm of Vengeance, but widened with metamagic." Now she found out, and so did the beasts below.
A deafening clap of thunder rang out, and two of the three beast-headed demons clutched their ears, screaming in confusion and wrath. Mummies, skeletons and zombies looked up into the deep, dark sky as rain began to pelt down on them. But this was no ordinary rain; every drop was vicious acid, eating into unthinking undead faces and bodies. More importantly, it was dissolving the heaps of corpses in the square; thousands of bodies turning into slime that flowed into the drains that led to the great river nearby.
After a few seconds of this, Zit was able to harness the next power of the storm, bringing bolts of lightning crashing down onto the square. The first three were focused one each on the demons, blasting them back to the hell from which they came leaving nothing but smoking pairs of hooves or claws. The rest she used to blow apart the largest of the remaining pyramids of bodies, flinging pieces of flesh across the square and allowing the acid rain to eat away at those deeper inside the heaps.
With this, Zit knew she was done; she pulled out a scroll, read the words, and was instantly teleported far away to a place of safety from which she could report to Sir Galuk.
The armies of men were spared from dealing with huge numbers of additional undead, and there were three less demons to worry about. She was sure Tarfoll would understand why she'd used his wand. She was also sure that Galuk would read her the riot act for exceeding the instructions he had given her. But that was why she was his best spy.
This post has been inspired by a writing prompt in the Worldbuilding community - Worldbuilding Prompt #407 - Spy POV
It's also a follow on to one of my previous posts, Worldbuilding Prompt #404 - A Meeting of Minds
Like so may of the creative writing posts I've done, it's inspired by events in the homebrew Dungeons & Dragons world I run. I hope you like it !