The Shield of Weeping Ghosts by James P. Davis

contours of what might have once been a decorative carving, now worn to an indiscernible shape by centuries of exposure. Short, dark hair curled from beneath the edges of her mask, and he caught the scent ofwildflowers as she stood back. Suspicious, he remained silent and wasn’t sure she even expected an answer to her strange question.
    “Bastun.”
    He turned to see Thaena motioning for him to join her at the entrance. Anilya’s hand fell away as she continued to observe the ancient walls with the casual grace of an experienced conspirator. Thankful for the interruption, Bastun quickly took his leave of the durthan and her cloying perfume.
    “The doors,” Thaena said. “I detect no wards upon them, but I sense something here that eludes my magic. Can you examine them as well?”
    “Of course,” he said. He glanced once again at the durthan who had wandered back to stand with her men. Shaking his head slightly at what to him seemed the greater mystery—the durthan—he studied the doors for signs of disturbance. The wood was new, fashioned in Rashemen and set with large iron bracers, simple and unadorned.
    A spell came to mind and he stepped into the drift before the doors in order to reach them. Before he could cast, his boot struck something solid in the snow. Cautiously, he prodded the drift with his staff, causing it to tumble away in clumps from the hidden object. His eyes widened as he pushed away more and more snow.
    Glistening white hands and arms reached from the snow, preserved in the pose of their horrible final moments. Faces appeared as he brushed away the snow, each frozen in a screaming rictus, as if pleading with whatever had felled them to either spare them or let them die. Thaena stared at the bodies piled against the doors, then knelt to reach for a dropped necklace of bear claws and teeth. Each of the corpses bore a similar talisman, the trappings and clothing of Rashemi berserkers on each one.
    “Bear Lodge,” Duras whispered, though his voice thundered in the silence of the grisly scene.
    “The hathran’s fang,” Thaena added, turning the necklace over her wrist.
    “No surprise that,” said Ohriman, the tiefling approaching nearby and observing the bodies with a disgusted sneer. “Setting up camp in a place like this, bound to find it a bit colder sooner or later.”
    “Hold your tongue, outlander,” Duras growled, “or I’ll hand it to you.”
    “These were Rashemi,” Thaena said sternly, though her
    eyes never left the bodies. “They certainly did not freeze to death.”
    “I didn’t mean to imply that they did, Lady Witch,” Ohriman replied with a mocking bow, then added as he straightened, “Just that there’s a reason most folk avoid Shandaular.”
    A dark patch on the eastern wall drew Bastun closer, sparking a memory. Kneeling, he avoided looking at the icy body of a young berserker, a man barely old enough to join the fang.
    Brushing some snow away from the stone, Bastun found a darker substance mixed beneath it. Pulling his hand back, the familiar scent of brimstone filled him with alarm as he uncovered another sigil of ash, just like the ones that marred the wychlaren’s path. A bone-numbing cold stole his voice and he doubled over in pain, rolling away from the wall and struggling to breathe. Once-sightless eyes blinked at him and rolled in their sockets, bits of ice falling away from a furrowing white brow as the dead man’s jaw opened to issue a weak murmur of hunger.
    The others backed away quickly, frost forming on their weapons as more of the bodies began to break the ice that surrounded them. Pale flesh cracked, gaping jaws closed, and waves of freezing cold reached out for the warmth of the living.
    Thaena stumbled into Duras, breath steaming from behind her mask. Bastun scrambled backward on his hands as the dead pushed away from the wall and tried to rise.
    “Bleakborn,” he croaked, his throat raw and aching with cold. There were stories of outlanders