“You fight well.” The wind carried away the last syllable of every word and the straining travelers had to listen closely to make out the meaning of each. “You put a great many of the dead to sleep, for which they are eternally grateful.”
“Hoy?” Simna smiled tautly. “Come a little closer, Mr. Bones, and I’ll gladly assist you in joining them.”
The white skull swiveled. Empty sockets peered into the swordsman’s living eyes. “That is not to be the way of things, master of a steel tooth.”
“Then what is the way of things? Tell us.” Without lowering his guard for an instant, Ehomba queried the expired but animate mediator.
Simna muttered knowingly. “Always the questioner, Etjole, even when the one replying is Death itself.”
“We are not Death,” the skeletal envoy explained softly. “Only dead. The difference is of significance.” With a sweep of one white-boned arm, it indicated those mounted warriors waiting patiently behind it. “We are the Brotherhood of the Bone. This forest we claim as ours, a place of quietude and darkness in which to linger after life has given us up but before death claims us forever. Here we dwell but do not exist, occasionally taking out the frustration of being neither or either on those mortals foolish or courageous enough to dare the byways that we haunt.” A chalky arm pointed in their direction.
“You are sufficiently brave to pass, but there is a problem.”
“A problem?” Simna laughed humorlessly. “You send dozens of your own to try and slay us where we stand and now you say there is a ‘problem’?” He tossed his sword easily back and forth, swapping it from hand to hand. “Come forward, the lot of you, and we’ll show you how Simna ibn Sind and the great sorcerer Etjole Ehomba deal with their problems!”