“Men. Lots of them. They’ve just come walking out of the woods.” I couldn’t see Evis’s face, but I could hear the puzzlement in his voice. “They’ve attacked the catapult crews.”
“Are they winning?”
“Depends on your point of view.”
“Evis. Now is not a good time for cryptic.”
“They’re taking arrows and bolts by the dozen. Aside from one having his legs hacked off, they’re still coming.”
“What?”
“They’re getting slaughtered, Markhat. But they’re not dying. Or at least they’re not falling down like polite dead men tend to do.”
A flash so bright it lit up Evis in silhouette shone outside. He leaped back from the spy-hole, blinking and cussing.
“The cylinders,” he said, before I could ask. “Lit up. Like magelamps, but brighter.” He waved his hands in front of his face. “I hope this isn’t permanent.”
“Was that Hisvin too?”
Evis shrugged, still blind. “No idea.”
Screams rose up from outside.
Screams, and a wind. It built and rose and whipped and howled. It switched directions, it beat against the wounded House with fists of debris.
The walls shook. The floor beneath groaned as timbers shifted.
Buttercup dropped her dolls, stood and opened her mouth to howl.
Mama waddled forward and stuffed a huge chunk of taffy candy right into Buttercup’s mouth.
The banshee tried to spit it out, but Mama held her lips shut, and within a moment Buttercup was smiling and chewing and beaming up at Mama.
The wind intensified. Softer, wetter thuds joined the sharper pelting of rocks on the walls, and I realized the louder ones were the impacts of bodies carried by the gale.
Something smashed through the window. We scattered. Evis snatched up the rolling projectile and hurled it back outside. I don’t think anyone but Darla saw its eyes or blood-soaked beard, and though she stood close and took my hand she didn’t scream.
“Damn wand-wavers are gonna take the House down whether they means to or not,” shouted Mama. “I reckon it’s time.”
Lightning joined the wind, bolt after bolt, so many and so fast they lit the window with a constant, harsh light. I could see limbs whipping, debris flying, blinding bolts of light arcing down, shadows flying briefly in the instant between being born and being extinguished by the next furious bolt.
I heard words, in the thunder. The huldra exulted, echoing them, awash in the proximity and intensity of the sorcery being hurled just yards from my boots.
Something in the forest roared, louder than the thunder, louder than the ringing in my ears. It roared and it charged, and we all saw monstrous blood-oaks go down, saw them torn from the earth and cast aside as though they were brambles.
And then came the stones. They fell from the sky, each trailing acrid smoke that lingered in the air and swirled about and burned eyes and choked throats. The stones fell almost silently, save for a whistling, but when they reached the ground, they simply obliterated all they touched with a flash and a crack even brighter and louder than the lightning.
A stone struck the House, tearing through it from roof to cellar in the blink of an eye. The floor beneath us tilted. Timbers began to groan in a long, building, awful noise that that set my teeth on edge.
A sudden rush of falling stones fell about the thing in the forest. More trees went flying, as it rolled, and then it was still.
The rain of stones ceased. Then the lightning. Then the wind, which died as abruptly as it had been born, dropping its volleys of limbs and lumber in a single great tumble.
Evis dared poke his head through the shattered window.
He didn’t suddenly sprout arrows, so I let go of Darla and joined him.
Outside was ruin.
The catapults were simply gone. Only shallow craters remained. Bodies were everywhere. Many began to move as I watched, though with the clumsy, slow gestures of the stunned and the injured.
A single glowing blue stave lay alone on the blackened earth. As I watched, a man clad in beggar’s clothes stumbled toward it, picked it up, and carried it toward the woods, ignoring the showers of sparks the thing loosed at his head.
Evis shook his head.
“The one with the red scarf. See him? Over there?”
Evis pointed. I found the man he meant. He was on his back, a pair of longbow arrows lodged deep in his chest.
As I watched, the man sat up, snapped off both arrows with no apparent hesitation or pain, and then rose to his feet and picked up a sword before calmly and methodically beginning to slaughter any injured soldiers stirring in the yard.
“That’s not considered good sportsmanship,” whispered Evis. “Dead man or not.”
I shuddered. Because the red-scarfed man was certainly dead. As he was joined by a dozen of his brethren, and then more and more and more staggered to their feet, I realized why they all seemed so familiar.
They were dressed in rags. Some were barely dressed at all. All were filthy. Many were barefoot. But even in their disarray, there was something familiar about them all.
They were familiar because I knew them. They were the Broken-the beggars, the weed-heads, the drunkards, the addicts. The men who’d survived the War in word only. The ones who’d returned with limbs intact, but their spirits slain or mortally, incurably wounded.
And then I knew they hadn’t survived. They hadn’t returned. Not as the living.
They belonged to the Corpsemaster. They always had. They walked among us, begging, lying still and silent in rags in alleys, haunting the docks, scrambling under porches and stoops-among us, but not living.
They’d just been waiting. Waiting for Hisvin’s call.
My heart sank. We knew. We knew the Corpsemaster’s dark secret, knew the source of his secret, private army-they were our dead. Harvested during the War, when there had been so many. He’d raised them up and he’d kept them walking and he’d brought them home, all so he could keep them against a day such as today.
Evis turned away from the carnage. His dead white eyes held the same realization.
Darla joined us. I pulled her away before she saw too much.
“Who won?” she asked. “Is it over?”
“Can’t say. Catapults are gone, though. They won’t be building any new ones tonight, either.”
Darla frowned. “Then why do you look like you’ve seen your own ghost?”
Evis spoke before I could answer.
“Damn,” he said. “Damn damn damn.”
I whirled. Evis had already turned from the window, and was heading for the door.
“Time to go, ladies and banshees,” he said. “Right now.”
Before I could speak, he laid hands to the makeshift barricade against the door and simply tore it away.
Another casual heave pulled the bar from its mounts. He didn’t bother with the locks. He just shoved the door right out of its frame.
I did risk a glance out the window. I did see soldiers ride out of the woods. They cleared a section of yard of Hisvin’s dead by riding them down, or pinning them to the ground with lances.
Behind the mounted soldiers were more horses. They carried wheeled things behind them, things I’d never seen-fat black iron cylinders, each as long as a man was tall, and open and flared at one end. Each of the contrivances was riding on a pair of sturdy iron wheels and accompanied by four men on foot.
The men quickly unhitched the things from their teams and wheeled them around so that the open ends pointed toward us. Then they gathered at the front of each contraption and busied themselves with bags and boxes.
Evis grabbed me.
“No time,” he said. “Go!”
Darla grabbed my hand as I was propelled through the door. “I need an answer,” she said.
We ran. Evis scooped a cussing Mama up and carried her while she kicked and scratched.
“To what?”
“You know what. Are we, or aren’t we?”