November 1069

We left shortly after eating breakfast, riding and walking out as a column of men. I rode at the front along with Hubert, the leader of this little group, while Malfoy rode further back. We passed under the tree and the tree-snake, and then kept on going. We rode for about an hour, the latter half of which took us through a somewhat winding forest road, before we came to the sight of the attack.

There wasn't much left; a few bones, the broken and half-eaten head of a horse, along a number of shattered branches, scattered leaves, and one fallen tree. The stench of decay that permeated the area just drove in the point further. The horses were nervous, and I couldn't blame them.

"Alright," I said, getting off Shadowfax and moving towards the decapitated remains. "Let's see what we got." I crouched down next to the head, wrinkled my nose at the smell, and looked around.

Not the best site for an ambush, in my opinion. The section of road here was fairly straight, the woods weren't very thick, and it was all very flat. That ruled out most ambush predators; even if some could take on a group of armed men all on their own, instinct was a powerful thing. There had been a lot of better spots on the way to this point, which suggested that a) something had been stalking them and gotten bored, b) this had been an attack of opportunity, or c) the patrol had come upon something that violently objected to being discovered or interrupted.

There was a good amount of dried blood around the severed head, particularly the neck, which meant that whatever haemophage was running around preferred human blood. Not terribly surprising, all things considered; consumption of blood was usually a medium for consumption of life force, and most supernatural predators that ate that way preferred humans.

Sometimes, learning about magic sucked. Knowing just how many creatures liked to eat humans and why was part of that.

I got up and slowly circled the horse, idly dragging my staff along the dirt road. I made a full rotation, willed the circle into being, and then kept walking so the soldiers would get the wrong impression. As I did so, I stretched out my arcane senses, which were constrained by the circle, and tried to sense anything about the severed head. Death tended to leave its mark in various ways.

It took a few moments for me to parse what I was sensing, and then a few more to move past the obvious and unremarkable markers of death to anything less... normal still clinging to the remains after at least three sunrises. After that though, the conclusion was fairly obvious.

"Well?" Malfoy asked, having walked right up to me sometime in the past minute, though he hadn't broken the circle.

I shot him an irritated look as my concentration wavered. "Remnants of magic. Not the regular kind." I frowned. "Feels like necromancy, sort of. Greasy and foul."

"Revenant or draugr, then, as I said."

I hummed and turned around to look at Hubert. "You don't do nighttime patrols, right?" I asked, pitching my voice louder.

"Only of the walls," he cried back.

"Not all revenants are discomfited by sunlight," Malfoy said in a lower tone.

"Sure. But whichever one did this, if one did this, felt confident enough to attack a group of eight armed men. That rules out the ones that are."

Corpse-vampires, or revenants, or auto-possessing ghosts, or whatever you want to call them, didn't seem to follow many rules, at least the way Rowena told it. I'd asked her about some of them shortly after we'd met, trying to obliquely patch some of the holes in my knowledge. The Black Court had replaced the older type rather definitively, and they were a lot more… standardized.

The only general rules for corpse-vampires were that they couldn't cross thresholds, drank blood and ate human flesh, and were generally stronger and tougher than they were in life. Other weaknesses, like garlic, sunlight, obsessive counting, holy water, and so on were less reliable, possibly psychosomatic. Though, admittedly, holy water was harder to acquire nowadays, so maybe it just hadn't been tested that often; you couldn't just buy some from your local clued in or bemused priest, after all.

Though maybe I could get some from John, make it a part of my emergency kit. Would be useful.

That said, a corpse-vampire rubbed me the wrong way. If farmsteads were disappearing, but not burning down or getting damaged, that meant that either people were being attacked and killed in the day, or something was breaking in at night, past the threshold. And while a reanimated corpse could easily take a couple, and maybe their children, eight armed men was a different matter.

"Revenant doesn't fit," I finally said. "One on eight? Not without an edge. And it couldn't get past thresholds either to get at the families that have disappeared."

"Wouldn't need to if it could move around during the day."

"Sure, but." I waved around at the area. "One on eight. I've fought necromantically animated corpses before. They're tough, sure, strong and fast, but not that strong. So there had to be something more."

"Then call it a draugr, until disproven," he said.

"Not really how investigations work. You may assume a particular cause, but you generally try to prove notions, not disprove them," I said. "And if it is a draugr we've got a problem."

The short version of draugr, or draugar as I think the plural was, was that they were Scandinavian zombie wizards. That missed a lot of nuance, but also adequately captured just how big of a threat they were. Sure, myths and stories didn't usually credit them with the full breadth of a typical wizard's capabilities, but they were capable of enough to be terrifying, even to most wizards.

Most wizards didn't have the Dummy's Guide to Grand Necromancy in their head.

Now, granted, I didn't want to use that knowledge for a number of reasons. Necromancy was an inherently dark art; even using it in legal ways and towards good ends was a massive gray area. Frankly, I'm pretty sure I only got away with animating Sue because there was an apocalypse going on and I technically hadn't broken the Fifth Law; on a better day, forget Morgan, Luccio might have censured me. With her sword. And if Salazar or Malfoy, especially Malfoy, saw me use necromancy, there would be a lot of awkward questions. Too many.

But, as much as I didn't want to use it, I also couldn't forget about that ace in the hole. And faced with the choice of someone dying – even Malfoy – or using it, I would. I just hoped it wouldn't come to that.

"Now the real question is what we're going to tell them," I said. "Are we going to mention draugr or revenants?"

Malfoy snorted. "Why bother? They're mundanes; they're completely irrelevant in a conflict like this."

I shot him a really flat look. "They're people. And the whatever may not necessarily be alone. If it is a draugr, do you want to worry about any ghouls it may have attracted at the same time?"

"If there were ghouls, the men weren't very effective, were they?" he asked, waving around.

I sighed and looked away. "Something about this is off. It was assumed to be a bandit problem, people consistently disappearing without a trace for long enough to word to filter up to… the earl. Except now, when we get here, a whole group of armed men have died. Why? What prompted the change?"

"Maybe all the local farmsteads ran out," Malfoy said dryly.

"Malfoy, shut the fuck up," I snarled. I broke the circle and started pacing. "Sudden escalation doesn't happen without a cause. Now, maybe we've got a second predator, maybe the first is limited in its rangings and is getting more desperate, maybe it's just gotten bolder. But we still need to figure out the why, because that helps narrow down the what."

This would be a lot easier if I had Bob. Just let him loose, find the lair of whatever was causing this, get his opinion, and then go kick its teeth in. But I didn't have Bob, I didn't know how to find him, and more, I didn't know if Bob was even around. He must have existed in some form before Etienne the Enchanter bound him, but that just put a lower limit on his age, sometime around the time of the Inquisition which, oh, right, shit. I'm actually going to have to deal with that, assuming I don't die of heroism-related stupidity before that.

Great. Just great.

Anyway. Bob. The trouble with Bob was that I was the one that gave him his name, or at least his latest name. If he had a name before Bob, I certainly didn't know it – and to actually summon him, I needed that name. Otherwise, I was looking for a single spirit of intellect in the entirety of the Nevernever. That's like looking for a needle in a haystack made out of more haystacks. Fractal haystacks.

I knew he had beef with Mab. That was about the only thing I could go on to find him. And that just really wasn't enough on its own.

I stopped pacing and moved back to the column of men, stopping by Hubert and his horse.

"Well?" he asked.

I sighed, looked around, and glanced back over my shoulder at Malfoy, who was making his own inspection of the head. Then I lowered my voice. "Would you believe me if I said a walking corpse?"

Hubert's late-twenties, mustachioed face made a disturbed expression. "A week ago, I would have said no," he said slowly.

"And now?"

Hubert looked past me, at the severed head. "I don't know."

"Do you know where all the attacks happened? Before this, I mean," I said, waving at the head.

He shook his. "No. Just around here. Lord Reginald might know."

I clicked my tongue. "Annoying. Were any of the attacked farmsteads near the castle, or the village that's nearby?"

"Trematon. And some," he said with a nod.

I looked around the woods and reached out with my arcane senses again, trying to get a feel for if Salazar was around. I didn't find him, though, really, I also didn't expect that to work. Salazar, for all his personal faults, struck me as someone too smart and intelligent to go around flashing a neon sign saying "MAGIC HERE" for all with the Sight to see. I mean, hell, I'd never done that, and I'd done some really crazy things.

"Then we're going to Trematon," I said.

"Why?" Hubert asked, though it was a curious why rather than an indignant why.

"Because the people in charge of any place usually ignore folk superstitions until something's staring right at them," I replied. "And I'd like to find out what folk tales are told around here."

Author's Note: Man, I wish Skyrim draugr were closer to mythological draugar. Then they'd actually be, you know, interesting and fun and challenging to fight, rather than pushover zombies (except for the Fus-Ro-Dah'ers). Granted, "pushover" zombies describes basically 99% of Elder Scrolls enemies, considering the only real scaling is in HP and damage, but my point stands.