The Silent Army Read Online Free PDF Page A

scared the Sisters, but after the recent grisly work they’d employed him for, they were suitably afraid of Inquisitor Darsken Murdro. He had a commanding presence. He had a reputation for finding the darkest secrets and unearthing them. He was of the Louron, which in and of itself was enough to make some nervous, but now? Now he had shown them that he could wake the dead and make them tell their discoveries to the living.
    There were secrets kept by every living being. Those weren’t the secrets that bothered the Sisters.
    It was the secrets of the dead that worried them. More importantly, how Desh Krohan would respond to those secrets.
    The Sisters waited in silence, uncertain they wanted to know the answer to that particular query.
    Darsken Murdro walked along the edge of the Mid Wall and observed those around him. From time to time his staff tapped the ground in a measured thump, but otherwise he was silent.
    There was a pathway around the Mid Wall that he was certain was not deliberate. People were avoiding touching the barrier, as if it might be paper and would slip away from them should they try to use it as a support. Refugees with nothing were still avoiding actually using the wall as shelter. Instead they took whatever supplies they had and placed them on the ground a dozen feet from the edge.
    The people around him were scared. He could understand why. Their world, or at least a portion of it, had been torn from the ground and raised into the sky. That was the sort of thing that tended to make people edgy.
    On the wall itself stood an army of silent statues. They were made of stone. It was impossible to miss that. Just the same, from time to time they moved, looking in one direction or another, shifting their weight to favor this leg instead of that. Far more unsettling, occasionally they would melt into the very stone of the Mid Wall and step out in a different spot, as if they were dropping through water.
    He could understand the wariness of the homeless masses forced to stay near the wall. It was late, the sun long since set, and cold enough to leave most breathing puffs of steam as they huddled together or jealously guarded what they had left in the world.
    Darsken moved among them but was not one of them. He walked because he needed to clear his mind from his earlier work.
    He needed to prepare himself for when Desh Krohan came for him as he would inevitably do. It would not be long now. The Sisters would have spoken with the First Advisor, and he would want more answers than they could provide.
    Darsken leaned against the cold stone wall and closed his eyes for a moment. Not far away someone made a gasping sound, surely thinking he must be mad for daring to touch the Mid Wall. Madness was always an option, of course. Sometimes it seemed a delightful distraction from the world around him.
    “Why did I say yes?” he mused to himself. The sorcerer had asked his assistance, nearly begged him to speak to dead Goriah, and he had agreed. His logic was sound enough. Better that he take the risk of speaking with the dead than the sorcerer himself do it.
    Inquisitors were trained in necromancy. They had to be in order to gain certain knowledge that would otherwise be lost. Once set on a trail, the Inquisitors almost never let go until they found the answers to their questions by any means necessary. That was the true reason they were feared. There were always rumors that they tortured their targets, and from time to time they earned the secrets they needed that way, but mostly the Inquisitors knew that torture was almost never a reliable method of gaining information. People would lie to escape the pain of a hot brand or metal pinchers. Empathy, observation and patience. Those were the best methods.
    Still, when necessary, any tool in the box would suffice to find the answers required.
    Desh Krohan could have performed the necromancy himself. Would have, very likely, despite the laws against it, because it was one