Night of Nine Tails by P.D. Workman

Author:P.D. Workman [Workman, P.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: pd workman

Chapter Eighteen

Reg ran her fingers through her braids, massaging her scalp like she did when she woke up in the morning and was trying to get her brain running.

“I don’t know anything about draugrs. How am I supposed to come up with something?”

“I probably know more about draugar than anyone other than the Witch Doctor, and you know all about the Witch Doctor. The two of us together should be able to come up with something. And the plural form is actually draugar, not draugrs—”

“I don’t care! Do you think they’re going to be correcting my grammar?”

Corvin fell silent, tucking his chin and looking down at the table.

“Tell me what you know about them,” Reg snapped.

He licked his lips. “Distilling everything I know about them into a short conversation is not going to be easy.”

“We’re not getting any closer while you stall.”

He nodded his acknowledgment. “As I said, there are myths in most cultures about undead or reanimated corpses. Zombies, draugar, vampires, barrow-wights, revenants; even the Asian cultures have jiang shi, ganshi, kyonshi, and ro-langs. There are remarkable similarities between all of them—”

“I’m sure.”

Corvin heeded her impatient tone and moved on in his lecture. “The Vikings and other cultures started putting large stones over graves to prevent the dead from rising again. That is where our tradition of marking the graves with slabs of stone comes from, only now we stand them up instead of laying them over the body to keep it there.”

“So that’s what we need to do? Pin them down with something heavy?”

“Well, as it turned out, the Vikings found that the stones were not enough to prevent dead bodies from being raised as draugar. If men were able to move the stones onto the grave, they were able to remove them off again in the night. Or else the bodies were reanimated in the grave, and the draugar were big and strong enough to move them themselves.”

“So, no stones.”

“No.” Corvin licked his lips again. He focused for a moment on the room, and Reg could feel the spell he had cast to guard against spies. She rubbed her arms, trying to rub away the itchy, uncomfortable goosebumps.

“So is there any way to defeat the draugrs?”

“The Vikings decided that the only way to prevent bodies from being reanimated was to burn them or bury them at sea.”

“But we’re not trying to stop bodies from being reanimated. They already have been, right?”

“The same principles apply. Bear with me. Remains have been discovered in Syria that show that stone age man had disinterred bodies that had previously been buried and crushed the skulls and separated them from the bodies. And of course, the Egyptians frequently destroyed the brains in their mummies during their burial rituals—”

“I thought they saved them. In jars.”

“Not the brains. And the latest studies show that they—” Corvin stopped himself. He held up his hands. “Let’s just say they were not preserved. No need to get any more graphic than that.”

“Right. Zombies are bad enough.”

“Suffice to

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