The Thousand Names
Page 58
Bobby was sitting on the flagstones nearby, with Feor beside him. The Khandarai girl had her skirt drawn up, exposing a set of vicious scratches along one leg, and the corporal was helping her with a bandage. That answered that question, anyway, but now that she was in motion Winter couldn’t bring herself to just lie down again. She dragged herself up to a sitting position and tried to speak, but managed only a faint croak.
Graff hurried to her side. He handed her a canteen, and she drank greedily, tepid water trickling down her chin and soaking her collar.
“Are you all right?” he said when she was finished.
No, I’m fucking not all right, she wanted to say. I was nearly torn apart by demons. What do you think? But Graff looked pretty close to the edge himself, and in any case that would a poor way to repay him for saving her life. So she forced a shaky smile and said, “I think I’ll live.”
“Thank God. Folsom thought he saw you come in, but we couldn’t be sure until you got close. That was goddamned brave of you, charging the lot of them like that.” He paused, making it clear by his expression that by “brave” he meant “insane.”
“There were more of them coming up behind us,” Winter said. “I figured our only chance was to make it to the square.”
“Ah,” Graff said. “Well.”
“Thank you,” Winter said.
He looked embarrassed for a moment, and then his expression turned grim. “You may change your mind before long. You’re not much better off in here than out there.”
Winter took a proper look around for the first time. The company square was tiny, only ten yards to a side, leaving a small patch of flagstones in the center inhabited by the three corporals, herself, Feor, and a few wounded. Beyond that, a double line of rankers held stolidly to their lines, presenting an unbroken fence of bayonet points. She couldn’t see past the wall of blue-uniformed backs, but she could hear the hissing of the demons beyond.
“They’d bury us if they really tried a rush,” Graff said quietly. “They shy away from steel, thank God, but I don’t know why. Sticking them doesn’t seem to bother them any. But anytime we weaken the line, even a little, they go for it like we’ve rung the dinner bell. They nearly had us when Folsom and I went out to bring you back.”
“Why aren’t we shooting them?”
“For one thing, I can’t spare the men to load,” Graff said. “For another, it doesn’t help much. God be good, I saw one of them keep going with a hole the size of my fist right through him. They don’t die like men, so what good is throwing lead at them?”
Winter realized for the first time that Graff was scared. She’d never seen him afraid before, at least not in battle. Only a thin veneer of military professionalism held him together. And he’s a veteran. She looked around at the steady backs of the Seventh Company with a new respect.
“We can’t stay here,” she said. “They’re just waiting us out.”
“Looks that way,” Graff said. “But that’s the trick, isn’t it? That last charge was the closest we’ve gotten to the door, and I lost two men just getting that far. If we try to push all the way to the doorway we’ll be crushed.”
Two men. Winter’s throat closed again for a moment. Two men had died just to rescue her, Bobby, and Feor. She didn’t even know which two—they were just “men,” rankers, expendable assets on the strength report. She fought down an urge to ask Graff for their names. Later. If we get out of this alive.
“Bugger all the saints with bloody rolling pins,” Winter swore. It didn’t make her feel any better. “Give me a minute.”
She crawled over to where Bobby sat beside Feor, finishing her bandage. To Winter’s surprise, the Khandarai girl’s cheeks were wet with tears. Bobby caught Winter’s eye and shook her head.
“She seems all right to me, sir,” Bobby said. “Maybe she’s just scared? When that thing grabbed you I nearly screamed the roof down.”
“You weren’t the only one,” Winter said. “Are you hurt?”
“Just scratches.”
Winter nodded and sat down on the other side of Feor. The girl looked up at her, dark eyes blinking away tears.
“Does it hurt very badly?” Winter said in Khandarai.
“No,” Feor said. “Bobby is being kind. I will be fine.”
“Then—”
“Akataer. My brother.” She gestured weakly at the side of the square. “These are his creations, the product of his naath. I can feel his agony.”
“Forgive me if I don’t feel sorry for him,” Winter said, more harshly than she intended. “His demons are trying to kill us.”
“They are not demons,” Feor said. “They are dead spirits, bound to their corpses and forced to serve.”
“That sounds like a demon to me,” Winter said. “How do we kill them?”
“You cannot. They have died once already. Now the body is just a . . . container. They will keep going, until . . .” She hesitated, then forged on. “Until Akataer releases them, or until he dies.”
“Wonderful. Is there anything we can use against them?” Winter tried to remember her fairy tales. What works on demons? “Holy water? Silver bullets? Not that we have any. Chanting scripture?”
“You do not understand,” Feor said. “They are not demons. Not separate entities. They are part of him, part of his naath. They consume him, little by little. I have seen him tired and weak after binding a half dozen for a day’s labor. This many?” She shook her head. “He will not recover.”
“Oh,” Winter said. Feor’s tears had stopped, and she simply looked weary. Winter felt a rising blush in her cheeks, which she tried to ignore. She opened her mouth, found she had nothing to say, and closed it again. Feor lay back against the flagstones and closed her eyes.
Folsom tapped Winter on the shoulder. She turned and clambered awkwardly to her feet, legs screaming protests. He offered her the hilt of her sword.
“One of the men picked this up,” he said.
“Thanks.” Winter sheathed it. Even her hands seemed to ache. “And thanks for coming to get me.”
He shrugged. With the immediate danger gone, the big corporal seemed to have reverted to his normal taciturn persona.
“I don’t suppose you have any brilliant ideas on how to get out of here?”
Folsom shook his head. Winter sighed and limped around the inside of the square, searching for inspiration.
The men couldn’t salute, and didn’t dare take their eyes off the monsters that waited just beyond the wall of bayonets. Nevertheless, she heard their whispers underneath the omnipresent hiss of white smoke. Every second man seemed to be reassuring his fellows now that the lieutenant was here.
“Lieutenant Ihernglass will get us out.”
“He came with more troops. Got to be.”
“The lieutenant always figures something out . . .”
Whatever reassurance her presence brought the men seemed to drain confidence from Winter in equal measure. She could feel the weight of their hope, their faith, stacking higher and higher on her shoulders until she wanted to collapse under the burden and simply die. She wondered briefly if this was how Captain d’Ivoire and Colonel Vhalnich felt every day. Is there some magic formula they teach you at the War College to deal with it? Or do you just go numb eventually? This was just a single company. She could hardly imagine what it would be like to have the entire regiment leaning on you for support.
Damn it. Focus! Her head felt like it was filled with cotton. There’s got to be something. From where she was standing, she could see the doorway, just fifty or sixty feet away. As close as that, and as distant as the moon.
If we can get there, we’re safe. The passage was only wide enough for three or four men at a time. The Seventh Company could defend that against these creatures for hours. The problem was that sixty feet. If we break the square, they’ll pull us down. But they’re not quick. She had outrun them easily in the tunnel. We just need a few seconds, really. Enough time to get past them.
Her eye lit on something just inside the edge of the square. It was a metal-framed lantern, scavenged from one of the wrecked carts. They must have carried it in with them. Now that she was looking, she could see several more, scattered where the men had dropped them. So add a half dozen lanterns to that tally. Does that help?
A few seconds . . .
• • •
The hardest part was doing it all without weakening the square so much that the walking corpses would surge through. Orders had to be passed from man to man, since she didn’t dare distract them all by shouting. Plus, who knows how much those things understand? It was like a giant game of pass-the-story, each man telling his neighbor, with Winter following along behind to straighten out the inevitable misunderstandings.
Eventually, they had a pile of uniform jackets in the center of the square. Winter kept her own, since she was sweating enough that she didn’t trust her undershirt to conceal her properly, but everyone else was in shirtsleeves. Beside that they had a smaller pile of cartridge pouches, each a loose leather sack containing the twenty rounds of ammunition that the rankers kept on them. Bobby and Folsom were hard at work on those, while Graff helped her with the lanterns.
It seemed like hours before they were finished. Winter expected a charge the entire time, waiting for the green-eyed corpses to lose patience and simply surge into and over the bayonets to finish what they’d started. But they remained at bay, confident or just uncaring.
Finally, when everything was ready, she stood beside Folsom, facing the doorway. Graff hurried over, carrying an improvised torch in each hand, and Winter lit both with the last of her matches. He touched his torches to Bobby’s, and then to one more, which he handed to Winter.
“Okay.” Winter blew out a long breath and looked up at Folsom. “If this gets us all killed, let me just say in advance that I’m sorry.”
The big corporal grunted and hefted the cartridge pouch he held. A twist of cloth dipped in lamp oil served as a makeshift fuse. Winter gingerly touched her torch to the very end and sent up a silent prayer of thanks when the whole affair didn’t go off there and then. Once it was alight, Folsom didn’t wait. He gave the thing a heave, and it disappeared over the heads of the men in the square to fall in among the monsters.
They got two more lit and thrown. Then there was a single agonizing second of waiting, in which Winter pictured the pouches bursting when they hit the ground, or the tapers being snuffed out by the wind of their passage—
The sound of the first one going off was disappointing, more of a muffled thud than the massive boom of a cannon. It was accompanied by the merry zip and zing of lead balls ricocheting off the stone floor. After tearing open enough cartridges to mostly fill the little sack with powder, she’d stuffed musket balls in until it was nearly bursting. The idea was that it would be something like a load of canister, spraying balls in all directions. Without a musket’s barrel to channel the blast, the balls wouldn’t go far or hit hard, but she hoped it would still be enough to damage something.
Two more blasts, almost simultaneous, announced the explosion of the other two bags. The wall of green eyes in front of her thinned out as the corpses turned to see what was happening or were knocked down by the blasts. She heard someone cry out, struck by a stray ball. She’d been afraid of that, but it was too late to worry about it now. A few seconds.
“First rank, hold!” she screamed, tearing her throat raw. “Second rank, past me, charge!”
The men had been instructed by the same chain-of-whispers method, and she was frankly surprised when they did what she wanted them to. One face of the square, the one closest to the doorway, erupted with cheers and shouts as men surged forward, leading with their bayonets. Behind them, the second rank of each of the other faces—the innermost line of the square—dropped their weapons, rushed to the center pile, and picked up a uniform jacket in each hand. They rushed past her in a body, into the gap behind the advancing men, where the creatures were just starting to turn back to face their escaping prey.
Just beside her, a ranker tossed one of his jackets. It was a good throw, landing squarely across the face of one of the monsters. The thing plucked at the coat with both hands, but before it could tear the fabric away Winter reached out and touched her torch to the uniform’s sleeve. The lamp oil spattered across it caught instantly, and soon the entire jacket was a mass of flames. The sizzle of burning flesh mixed with the ever-present hiss, and black smoke gouted upward to discolor the white.
Bobby, Folsom, and Graff were all wielding torches, touching off the coats the rankers flung whenever they found a target. Those creatures they set aflame staggered away, or were pushed or kicked aside. Once he’d disposed of his burden, each ranker ran for it, sprinting for the doorway behind the vanguard of men still carrying bayonets.
“First rank, run!” Winter shouted.
The last of the square backed away a few steps and ran, holding on to their muskets. The monsters following hard on their heels were met by more flung coats, and once afire they blocked the path of their fellows. Winter saw a couple of men go down, tripped or grabbed from behind, but the rest made it past her. She started to backpedal as the wall of corpses approached, then turned to run.
Feor had gone ahead with the first wave, but she’d stopped by the doorway, while the rankers had sprinted out into the passage to press back any of the creatures that were still waiting there. Winter skidded to a halt beside her as the men of her company surged past, a river of tattered blue and white undershirts, carrying muskets or coats or no weapons at all.
“Go!” Winter waved them onward. Folsom had gone with the vanguard. Winter caught sight of Bobby trying to push backward against the tide of rankers, and she waved the corporal onward. Finally, the last few men hurried past, with Graff bringing up the rear.
“Something’s wrong with them,” Graff said, puffing to a halt. “Look.”
The oil-damped coats were going out, throwing the room into relative darkness once again. Winter could see the dead things as vague shapes in the firelight, with green eyes cutting through the smoke here and there. They didn’t seem to be pursuing. In fact, they’d all frozen in place, as though some vital force had suddenly been removed.
“Is that everyone?” Winter said. “I saw a couple of men fall.”
“We picked ’em back up again,” Graff said. “That’s every man who wasn’t already dead out the door. Except the captain and the colonel, poor bastards.”
The captain and the colonel. “Right.” Winter waved him on up the corridor. “Go. I’ll be right behind.”
Graff saluted and hurried after the rest. Winter and Feor remained in the doorway.
The green lights went out all at once. The corpses toppled wherever they stood, sprawling in heaps across the flagstones. Here and there flame still clung to them, filling the air with the smell of burning cloth and flesh.
The captain and the colonel. She’d almost forgotten about them. But they must be dead. They weren’t in the square, so they must be dead.
“Fuck,” Winter said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
She chewed her lip for a long moment, then rounded angrily on Feor. “You’d better go after—”
“I’m going with you,” Feor said.
“No, you are—” Winter caught Feor’s expression and suddenly felt too tired to argue. “All right. But stay close.”
Feor stepped up and took her hand again. Winter raised the torch over her head, took a deep breath, and hurried back into the gloom.
MARCUS
Marcus gave a grunt as he wrenched his saber free, stepping away from the demon’s still-scrabbling hands. His next carefully aimed stroke split its skull, sending up a torrent of white smoke. Then he r
etreated to where Janus waited in the shadow of one of the twisted statues. The thing kept thrashing behind him, but without a head it was blind.
“We’re almost there,” Janus said, tapping the corner of the statue’s plinth with the tip of his sword. “Two more, I think.”
“Fucking saints,” Marcus said. “How many men did Khtoba have left?”
He knew objectively that they’d been lucky. Some of the Seventh Company had managed to form a square after all, and they were attracting the attention of the vast majority of the creatures. Picking their way around the edge of the vast cavern, he and Janus had to deal with only the scattered remnants, and he’d disposed of a dozen or so of those. But it felt like they’d been at it forever. He’d opened his jacket, his undershirt was soaked with sweat, and someone seemed to have added several tons of lead to his sword. His shoulder ached abominably from the impact of steel on bone, and the bite on his hand throbbed.
At least the colonel knew where he was going. Or he says he does, anyway. They’d been weaving through the statues, cutting down the demons singly or in pairs, but Janus had kept to a relatively constant direction. Marcus hadn’t asked where they were going, because he frankly didn’t want to know. He just hoped like hell the colonel had some kind of plan.
“Two,” Marcus said after a moment. “Okay.”
“I’ll go right; you go left,” Janus said. He didn’t even seem winded. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Marcus lied.
“Go!”
They spun around opposite sides of the statue. Two of the green-eyed creatures stood in the gap between another pair of idols, as idly as a couple of sentries. They looked up, mouths opening to trickle white smoke, as the two officers charged.
Janus’ first instinct had been the correct one. As usual. Nothing Marcus had been able to do had put an end to the creatures’ scrabbling parody of life, but their bodies could be damaged as easily as any human’s. A good hit to the legs would leave them nothing to do but crawl. He ducked and aimed low, swinging the heavy cavalry saber in two hands like a sledgehammer. The demon’s outstretched hands brushed past his cheek and over his shoulder, while his blow caught the thing on the knee. Flesh and bone exploded, bloodless as rotten wood, and Marcus spun away from the clutching fingers as the suddenly unbalanced monster toppled.