How many have we buried? he thought bleakly. That’s the answer.
Some of the duke’s men finally found him, their eyes bulging with horror as they begged him for answers he could not give. He took a moment to look up to the slope above the camp where they had buried most of the dead, a spot that received more sun than most, which had made the frozen ground easier to dig. A swarm of clumsy shapes were clambering from the burial trenches there, slipping and tumbling but always moving downhill toward the living.
“Take their heads off,” he told his men. “Without a head they fall and stay down. Take their heads!”
He was relieved to see a bulky shape he felt sure was Brindur gathering men of his own, and beyond that, like a single tree still standing after a great windstorm, Vigri’s banner had been raised and someone was waving it in the air, drawing more survivors.
As Duke Isgrimnur’s own small troop set about cutting down the dead that surrounded them, he saw others doing the same. The rout was halted, the men recovering, and the tide of battle finally seemed to be turning, or at least he hoped so. But many of the Rimmersmen had realized what they fought and were weeping even as they cut and hacked at the clumsy dead things.
More cursed Norn tricks, Isgrimnur thought, and this one the foulest of all. Still, they could not hope to defeat our greater numbers with such slow-moving foes, even if they are our dead comrades. Something tugged at his thoughts, something beyond the moment’s struggle. But wait, what followed the last time they created such a horror? The White Foxes always have more than one purpose—
His mind suddenly clear, Isgrimnur began to bellow, “’Ware the gate, men! ’Ware the mountain! All eyes watch for the White Foxes!”
Other voices picked up the duke’s call and added their own, lifting their warnings above the shouts and curses of those fighting the dead. As Isgrimnur hacked the head from a stumbling thing that would have pulled down one of his soldiers from behind, a sentry’s horn sounded raggedly from the base of the mountain near the gates. He heard some of his men shouting, “The gate!” and “The mountain!” and “The gates are open!” Another screamed, “The whiteskins are coming!”
Isgrimnur cursed himself for being right, and also for not being right swiftly enough. “That is the real danger!” he bellowed. “Men, close up. Fight your way toward the Nakkiga Gate. We are attacked! The Norns are trying to flee the mountain!”
But that did not make sense, he realized even as he shouted it. Where would the Norns flee to? The mountain was surely their last refuge. Still, it was clear now from the eddying shapes moonlight made of the battling men that those nearest the gate, the sentries and the engineers tending the siege weapons, were bearing the main brunt of a wave of attackers.
“It’s the ram, damn it!” the duke cried out as he finally understood. “Hurry to the ram! Vigri! Brindur! They mean to destroy the ram!”
His men could replace the great tree that was its body, he knew, but if the Norns managed to ruin or make off with the mighty iron head of the bear, it could not be replaced before winter came. There was not enough iron left in the camp to forge another without leaving the army weaponless.
“Leave the dead where they are and cut your way toward the gates!” he shouted. It was like a dream, like his dream, like falling helplessly into darkness. “By all that is holy, does no one hear me? Protect the ram!”
Porto would never forget that night—the night the dead woke up. He and the rest of Aerling Surefoot’s men had found a new tunnel on the mountain, killed its single guard after an exchange of arrows, then blocked the passage at the end of the cavern with heavy stones and logs. With so much to do, they had not returned from the mountainside until after dark. It had been a fearful task, clambering down those icy, treacherous slopes when they did not dare light a torch for fear of lurking Norn bowmen, so by the time they reached the bottom the Mountain Goats had collapsed into sleep in a great huddle without bothering to find their way back to their designated fires.
Porto woke at the first shouts, but in his weariness he took the cries for something less fearful—men brawling among themselves perhaps, a common thing during this long, bone-chilling siege. It was only when he heard the great, creaking noise of the Nakkiga gates swinging open and the nearest sentries shouting their alarms, that Porto realized something dire was happening.
Mounted shadows swept outward from the gate, cutting down all before them in an unnatural near-silence. Even the cries of their victims were louder than the muffled hooves of the attackers’ mounts. Then, as Porto hurried forward, trying to find one of the scattered groups of soldiers to join, he saw that the duke’s camp was being attacked not just from the front, but from the rear as well, creating terrible confusion.
A man-shaped figure came staggering toward him out of the dark. At first he thought it was some hideously wounded Northman—which, in a way, it was, although this one’s wounds had killed him days or weeks earlier. The thing barely had eyes, just gleaming wetness deep in the sockets, and its rotting shroud exposed gaping, bloodless wounds in its face and chest.
The dead, he realized, terrified but also strangely unsurprised. The Norns have raised the dead. Our dead.
He dodged the thing’s clumsy reach but was almost caught by a swipe from the rusting knife clutched in its other hand. The thing did not even seem to realize it was armed, swinging both arms aimlessly, and Porto thanked God and all the saints that the things were slow as he leaped past it and brought his sword around hard enough to slice the dead man’s neck to the bone. The corpse stumbled, then slowly turned toward him as if its head were not half severed. Porto dragged his sword free and this time hacked at the corpse’s legs until he smashed its shin into a ragged white pulp of bone and unbleeding flesh and the thing finally toppled. Meanwhile he could hear the cries of his fellows as the shadowy White Foxes from the gate darted in and out among the Northmen, dealing death and terrible wounds, seemingly at will.
Porto finally severed the corpse’s head from its shoulders, stilling its movements, but he had been driven away from the nearest group of his fellow soldiers and now stood by himself in a swirling chaos of men and shadows. Some of the dark shapes seemed impossibly swift, others slow as dying insects. He called out for Aerling and the rest of the Mountain Goats but he might as well have been shouting in an empty forest.
Something careened toward him, a huge dark shape that, only at the last instant, he saw was a horse and rider. He had only time to throw himself flat on the snowy ground before he felt the wind of the rider’s stroke pass just above him. When he rolled over the Norn had vanished into the dark again.
Porto did not know how long he had been fighting, or even whether many of his fellows still lived. His greatest fear, though, had not come to pass: he had destroyed half a dozen walking corpses and crippled several others, but none of the dead faces had been Endri’s. He hoped that if the demon-spell had roused the dead boy, the stones piled on his grave had kept him in the ground.
As he stood for a moment, head bowed, fighting for breath, he heard a shout of something like triumph. It didn’t sound like the poisonous cry of one of the Norns but like that of a good, hoarse mortal man, and he felt a sudden hope. What had happened?