Interesting discussion! One thing's for sure, cremation will almost certainly become a widespread practice in Camar in the future.
Assuming it survives, that is.
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Chapter 215
THE MORNING OF THE LIVING
Black char and ash hung heavily in the air as the dawn settled over Camar. Parts of the city still burned, and whole city blocks within the Docks were in ruins. Only the recent poor weather and the soaking that the storms had brought to Camar had kept the entire city from being claimed in a terrible conflagration.
Some of the flames that burned in the city were not accidental. In several squares across the city, great pyres sent clouds of fine ash into the air. Men with drawn faces and dirty uniforms brought steady streams of carts to these bonfires, consigning corpses or parts of corpses into the flames.
In the Docks, a gathering of sorts had come together along the edge of the Waterfront Market along the eastern side of the harbor. Several dozen men and women were assembled there, most of them clad in stained and dirty uniforms, all of them armed.
Corath Dar sat on a low wall of crumbling bricks on the edge of the market. His body was slumped in a pose of utter and complete exhaustion.
Valor was propped up against his leg, ready to be lifted again at a moment’s notice. The fighter’s head was bowed.
“I thought I would find you here.”
Dar lifted his head to see Shay standing before him. The scout was holding a travel mug of beaten iron, which she handed to him. It contained steaming coffee.
“Thanks.” He swallowed the warm liquid.
“Talen thought he’d find you at the palace, at Tiros’s headquarters, but I knew you’d be down here, in the thick of it. Where’s Allera?”
“She’s at the makeshift hospital that they opened over by the Raven’s Bridge,” the fighter said. “Things were winding down when I last saw her, about...” he looked at the sky, “Maybe an hour ago, I don’t know.”
“You look like crap.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, well I feel like crap.”
She sat down next to him on the wall. “Pretty rough night, from what I hear.”
“Yeah.”
“We came in toward the end of it. Apparently what happened was limited to the immediate environs of the city; at least we haven’t heard anything about the dead rising elsewhere. We didn’t have any trouble at Cattalia, and that’s only about a mile outside of the city walls.”
Dar didn’t interrupt; Shay seemed to need to talk about it.
“We came in along the causeway. There was an old graveyard outside the city gates there, and there were a lot of skeletons. It took us the better part of two hours to fight through them and get to the Western Gate. Talen destroyed... dozens of them, maybe a hundred. They seemed drawn to him like moths to a flame.”
“Sword,” Dar said.
Shay nodded. “He... he had been pushing our new recruits pretty hard. I... I didn’t like it, but I guess he was right. We only lost a few people last night... they burned their bodies, like all the rest...”
Dar grunted. He had learned a lot about losing men under his command.
“Once we got up to the Gold Quarter, things were a lot quieter. The Ducal Guard had established a perimeter, and Tiros was coordinating sorties into the parts of the city where the fighting was most intense. Most of the worst was here, in the Docks.”
Dar downed the rest of his coffee. He knew that first-hand. He and Allera had dove right into the worst of it, gathering armsmen and others as they went, helping to solidify defensive outposts where scared and disoriented people could gather in relative safety. They had done that... six, seven times? Finally they had ended up down here, not far from the Pauper’s Hill on the eastern edge of the city, where they had found deserted streets overrun with undead. At one point he and six men had come around a bend in a street to come face to face with over two hundred skeletons, which had rushed at them in a wave. They’d fallen back to a grog shop on the corner, where Dar had used
Valor to crush skeleton after skeleton as they’d surged through the door. It had taken just over ten minutes, and when it was done, only he and two others were left standing. They’d retreated to the top of the stairs leading to the place’s second story, and between the landing and the front door there were strewn piles and piles of shattered bones.
The whole night had been like that, scenes of chaos and violence and cowardice and heroism. Allera had twice
restored him, filling him with a reservoir of new strength that he’d then expended in battle. He’d lost count of how many skeletons and zombies he’d hacked to pieces. At one point he’d faced a small knot of ghouls, a half-dozen of the creatures. Fortunately he’d had Allera at his side during that encounter, as one of the undead monsters had gotten lucky, hitting with a claw that had paralyzed him. She’d destroyed the undead with a wave of positive energy, then released him from the fell grip of their power. A minute later, they had been back in the fray, fighting zombies.
“How many dead?” he said.
Shay did not respond at once. “When I left the command center, Tiros was estimating maybe a quarter of the city’s population, maybe a third. We won’t know for sure until we gather all of the survivors. A lot of people escaped the city, fleeing into the countryside, or out into the bay. Skeletons and zombies cannot swim.”
“Nor do they breathe; they can walk on the bottom,” Dar pointed out. “They’re going to be finding those things in unexpected places for quite some time, I think.”
Shay nodded, acknowledging the point.
“While I’m appreciative of the coffee, why aren’t you with Talen?” he asked her.
“He sent me to find you, and Allera,” Shay said, but she had hesitated; that wasn’t the whole reason, but Dar did not press her.
“All right, let’s go find the marshal and the knight commander,” Dar said, forcing himself to his feet. He found one of the officers organizing the people in the market square, letting her know where he was going. Technically, he supposed he was in command here, but he’d been too busy destroying undead most of the night to issue many orders. Mostly he’d just told people what they needed to do to stay alive. For some, it had been enough.
The officer was an older veteran of the Watch; women did not serve in the legions. “Yes sir, colonel. We’ll keep organizing patrols, and sending survivors to the protected gathering points.”
“You do that,” Dar said, and he started walking down the street with the scout, his steps slow and tired.
