'Yes, Dragosani,' the DO gulped, finding his voice. 'They are trying to speak to you.'
'I can see that, fool!' Dragosani snapped. 'Well then, speak to them. Find out what they want.'
The DO perched himself on the edge of a steel chair in front of the radio. He took up the handset, flipped switches, said: 'This is Zero. All call-signs acknowledge, over?'
The replies came in sharp, numerical succession: 'Call-sign One, OK, over.'
Two, OK, over.'
'Three, OK, over.' And so on rapidly through fifteen call-signs. The voices were tinny and there was some static, but over and above that they all seemed a little too shrill, all contained a ragged edge of barely controlled panic.
'Zero for call-sign One, send your message, over,' said the DO.
'One: there are things out in the snow!' the answer came back at once, One's voice crackling with static and mounting excitement. 'They're closing on my position! Request permission to open fire, over?'
'Zero for One: wait, out!' snapped the DO. He looked at Dragosani. The necromancer's red eyes were open wide, like clots of blood frozen in his inhuman face.
'No!' he snarled. 'First I want to know what we're dealing with. Tell him to hold his fire and give me a running commentary.'
White-faced, the DO nodded, passed on Dragosani's order, was glad that he wasn't stuck out there in a pillbox in the snow — but on the other hand, could that be any worse than being stuck in here with the madman Dragosani?
'Zero, this is One!' One's voice crackled out of the radio, almost hysterical with excitement now. 'They're coming in a semicircle out of the snow. In a minute they'll hit the mines. But they move so… so slowly! There! One of them stepped on a mine! It blew him to bits — but the others keep coming! They're thin, ragged — they don't make any noise. Some of them have — swords?'
'Zero for One: you keep calling them "things". Aren't they men?'
One's radio procedure went out of the window. 'Men?' his voice was completely hysterical. 'Maybe they are men, or were — once. I think I'm insane! This is unbelievable!' He tried to get a grip on himself. 'Zero, I'm alone here and there are… many of them. I request permission to open fire. I beg you! I must protect myself…'
A white foam began to gather at the corners of Dragosani's gaping mouth where he stared at a wall-chart, checking One's location. It was an outbuilding pill-box directly below the command tower but fifty yards out from the Chateau itself. Occasionally as the snow swirled he could see its low, squat dark outline through the bullet-proof bay windows, but as yet no sign of the unknown invaders. He stared out into the snow again, and at that precise moment saw a blaze of orange fire erupt to throw the outbuilding into brief silhouette — and this time there came a low crump of an explosion as another mine was tripped.
The DO looked to him for instructions.
Tell him to describe these… things!' Dragosani snapped.
Before the DO could obey, another call-sign came up unbidden: 'Zero, this is Eleven. Fuck One! These bastards are all over the place! If we don't open fire now they'll be crawling all over us. You want to know what they are? I'll tell you: they're dead men!'
That was it. It was what Dragosani had feared. Keogh was here, definitely, and he was calling up the dead! But where from?
Tell them to fire at will,' he coughed the words out in a spray of froth. Tell them to cut the bastards down — whatever they are!'
The DO passed on his orders. But already, from every quarter, dull explosions were beginning to pound all around the Chateau; the harsh clatter of machine-gun fire, too. The defenders had finally used their own initiative, had commenced firing almost point-blank on a zombie army that came marching inexorably through the snow.
Gregor Borowitz had not lied. He had indeed known his History of Warfare, and especially in his native land. In 1579 Moscow had been sacked by Tartars from the Crimea; there had been arguments about the division of the loot from the city; a would-be Khan had challenged the authority of his superiors; he and his splinter-group of three hundred horsemen had then been stripped of loot, rank, most of their weapons and whipped out of the city. Disgraced and scavenging where they could, they had ridden south. It had rained heavily and they had bogged down in a marshy triangle of forest where rivers overflowed their banks. There a five-hundred-strong Russian force riding to the relief of the beleaguered city had come across them in the mist and rain and cut them down to a man. Their bodies had gone down in mud and mire, never to be seen again — until now.
Nor had they needed much persuasion from Harry; indeed they'd seemed merely to be waiting for him, ready at a moment's notice to fight their way free of the bitter earth where they had lain for four hundred years. Bone by bone, tatter by leathery tatter they had come up, some of them still bearing the rusted arms of yesteryear, and at Harry's command they'd moved on the Chateau Bronnitsy.
Harry had stepped out of the Mobius continuum inside the perimeter walls; the defenders of those walls, gazing outward, hadn't even seen him or the agonising emergence of his long-dead army. Moreover, the machine-gun emplacements on the outer walls were pointing the wrong way; which all combined with the night and the snow to give him excellent cover.
But then there had been the tripwires and other intruder detection devices, and now there was the minefield and the inner ring of disguised pill-boxes.
For Harry none of these obstacles was any great problem: they weren't even obstacles when at will he could simply step out of this universe and back into it a moment later in any room in the Chateau where he chose to reappear. But first he wanted to see how his back-up force was making out: he wanted the Chateau's defenders fully engaged in the business of protecting their own lives, not the life of Boris Dragosani.
At the moment he was down on his belly in a shallow depression, huddled behind a headless bone-and-leather thing which a moment ago had marched ahead of him towards the pill-box outbuilding where call-sign One and his machine-gunner second in command sat and gibbered through their viewing slits, firing long bursts into the wall of death which slowly bore down on them. A large percentage of Harry's army — about half of his three hundred — had emerged from the earth in this sector, and the mines were quickly taking an unfair toll of them. Even now the pill-box and its chattering gun were dealing Harry's army terrific blows.
He decided to take out the pill-box, broke open Gregor Borowitz's shotgun and slipped cartridges into the double breach.
Take me with you,' begged the Tartar who shielded
him. 'I helped sack a city once, and this is but a palace.' His skull head had been taken off by shrapnel from a landmine, but that hadn't seemed to matter much. He still held up a massive, battered iron and bronze shield, its rim dug into the cold earth, upright in the snow, using his own bones and the shield to give Harry as much cover as possible.
'No,' said Harry, shaking his head. 'There won't be much room in there and I'll need to get in and get it over with. But I'd be obliged for the use of your shield.'
Take it,' said the corpse, releasing the heavy plate from fingers of crusted bone. 'I hope it serves you well.'
A mine went off somewhere to the right, its flash turning the falling snow orange for a moment and its thunder shaking the earth. In the momentary burst of light, Harry had seen an arc of skeletal figures stumbling ever closer to the dark huddled shape of the pill-box; so had the men inside. Armour-piercing machine-gun bullets screamed in the air, blowing apart Tartar remains and coming dangerously close. For all that Harry's ancient shield was heavy, still it was rotten with rust and decay; he knew it wouldn't stop a direct hit.