Faithful Servants Read Online Free PDF Page A

preserved for their funerals, and even now were only beginning to show the first signs of decomposition. Others were little more than fleshy skeletons, their bones tied crudely together with twine where tendons had fallen away.
    Behind them all, a man stood in the center of the lights, obscured from the chest down by a long dining table repurposed as a workbench. Stacks of books and bubbling alembics cluttered every surface, along with stranger implements and silvery surgical tools with whose use Salim was thankfully unfamiliar. Though the man’s face was the same as that on the stone head in the servants’ hall, this version was older, and so drawn and haggard as to resemble his zombie subjects. Above the face, a black crown of long thorns and vertical spikes pierced and pricked at his brow, holding back long, dark hair.
    Lord Mirosoy looked up from the book he’d been studying, yet his face barely registered the newcomers’ presence. With one finger still marking his place in the text, he flicked his hand toward his uninvited guests.
    “Lord Mirosoy appears to have embarked on some
    significant life changes of late.”
    “Kill them,” he said, and went back to reading.
    The undead convocation shuffled forward.
    Connell growled—a deep, resonant rumble in surprising contrast to his usual excited tenor. Three-fingered talons flexed.
    “No,” Salim said, and put a hand on the eidolon’s shoulder.
    Connell looked at him in puzzlement, but Salim simply squeezed once and then released him. He stepped forward and drew his sword.
    The eidolon might be better in a fight than he let on, but that wasn’t the point. Salim had seen enough to tell that these people were no ghouls, no vampire spawn or vengeful wraiths. These were just farmers, their corpses denied the slow transition into the same dirt they worked, forced to walk again at the whim of some spoiled lord.
    This wasn’t a fight. Nor even an execution.
    It was a funeral rite.
    The zombies approached, and Salim flowed like a river to meet them.
    The undead fought silently, and Salim did the same, the only sounds the swirl of his robes and the wine-glass ring of steel sliding free of flesh, punctuated by the thumps of corpses hitting the floor. They moved to surround him, and he let them, whirling like a dervish, blade kissing them lightly in the only blessing he knew how to give.
    Rest, he thought as a child’s body slid from his sword, crumpling to the fouled floor. Rest.
    And then he stood alone. Around him, the hardwood was covered with bodies, splayed once more in the posture of death that, while undignified, was so much more than they’d had a moment before. He looked down at the corpses and wished them well.
    At last they had Mirosoy’s attention. The lord looked at them as if dazed, struggling to understand the mess of bodies staining his ballroom floor. “Who are you?” he asked.
    “It’s me, Master!” The eidolon’s voice was the whining, eager tone of a dog hoping to regain its master’s good graces. “I’ve come back to help you! Please don’t be angry!”
    Mirosoy ignored his creation, instead focusing on the dark-eyed man moving toward him, sword drawn. The lord’s voice didn’t waver. “And you?”
    “Just a friend,” Salim said. “One who’s come to do you a favor.”
    His sword lashed out.
    “No!” Connell’s scream was grief bordering on pain. The eidolon leaped for Salim’s back, talons outstretched, but it was already too late. Salim’s upward slash carved a shining arc toward Mirosoy’s face.
    The blade missed the man’s cheek by inches. With a tiny clink of metal on metal, Salim’s sword caught one of the black, curving thorns of the crown and tore it free from the summoner’s head. Mirosoy gasped at the sudden absence, or perhaps at the furrows the embedded thorns carved through his scalp. The crown fell to the table, and Salim followed it down, sword hilt gripped in both hands. Blade met crown with Salim’s full