Chapter 5: Six Go South

"Six," Leofric said. "I remember when six was a hand of cards, not a war party."

"Six is what we have," Godwin said. He walked at Erlich's left shoulder, bow slung and spear across his back, the easy rolling gait of a man covering ground he'd already read. "And you've never played an honest hand in your life."

"Honest hands lose."

Behind them, in a loose column, came the baron's household: Brunner with his scarred shield and the same steady tread he'd carried through the dock fight, the scalp wound crusted but unbandaged; Baron Volker in a gambeson that had seen better decades, a fresh sword on his hip; and Tomas, sixteen and all elbows, carrying a bundle of torches and a spear he didn't yet know how to hold. The boy kept adjusting his grip. Every fifty yards he adjusted it again.

"Keep the point down," Brunner said, without turning. "You'll trip and gut a rock."

Tomas flushed and lowered the spear. "I knew that."

"Then do it."

The scrub swallowed them inside half a mile. The trail south of Magyar was a suggestion at the best of times — a pale line through wild thyme and thorn, cut by nothing heavier than a shepherd's flock. Dusk came on fast, bled the color out of the hills, and the stars came up hard and white overhead. No moon. The air carried salt from the harbor and, underneath it, a sweetness that didn't belong. Something organic, turning. The smell they'd caught on the wind the night before, stronger now.

Erlich led in silence. He had his shield on his arm and a spear in his right hand, and he walked with a tracker’s economy — without waste, without pause, reading the ground ahead before his boots touched it. He remembered him like this from the northern fells, on the approach to a wyrm-kin lair three winters back. The lieutenant's face kept that closed stillness, the look of a man who had already decided what was going to happen and was simply walking toward it.

"Smell that?" Godwin murmured.

"It's stronger than last night," Leofric said.

No one answered. They walked.

The ruins broke the skyline an hour after nightfall — first as a thickening of the dark ahead, then as shapes, then as a spine of broken walls against the stars. Old temple precinct, older than the town, older than the kingdom. The orcs had built it two centuries ago during the Great War, a forward shrine to the carnivore-gods they fed with meat and blood, and when the war ended they'd left it to the scrub and the gulls. No one in Magyar could remember the last living soul who'd walked here by choice.

They could hear them before they saw them.

It started as a rustling in the thorn to the left. Then the right. Then ahead — a shuffling chorus that resolved into the sound of many feet dragging through dry brush. Not one or two. Not a dozen. Dozens. All around them, closing from three sides at once.

Erlich stopped. The column bunched behind him.

"Circle," he said, flat and fast. "Backs to the rise. Brunner, shield out and face front. Godwin, the bow — thin them while you can. Tomas. Torches. All of them. Light them now."

Tomas fumbled the flint. His fingers were stiff and wrong and the first spark missed the pitch. The second caught. The third. One torch flared, then another, and the scrub around them jumped into orange relief — and with it, the dead.

They were everywhere. Dozens of pale figures shambling out of the darkness, faces slack and mouths working, arms reaching. Fishermen and townsmen and things that had been buried too long to name. They came on in a loose ring, not fast but without pause, and the sound of them was a dry sea dragging across the brush. A figure at the edge of the torchlight wore a canvas apron streaked with fish-scales — Ansel from the smokery, dead two weeks and walking now in his work-clothes. Tomas made a sound low in his throat. "Ansel," he breathed.

Godwin's bow sang. One dropped. Two. Three. Four — a shaft through an eye, another through a throat, the third and fourth into bodies that pressed on anyway. He'd opened his second quiver before the gap closed and he was shouting over the string.

"Too many — I can't thin this—"

"Then don't thin it," Erlich said. "Spears up. Let them hit the points."

The line snapped shut.

Brunner took the center with that grinding, patient repetition — shield braced, spear thrusting over iron, every strike a dead thing down. Godwin stepped into the gap beside him, short spear in both hands now, arrows spent, and the two of them held the front — straining, cracking, but holding — and did not break. The baron fought at the right, sword-work still ugly but committed, and Leofric worked the left with hatchet and torch, chopping at anything that clawed past the spear-points.

Erlich stood at the center of the line, not in it but behind it, reading the whole shape of the fight. When a walker broke through on the right he was there, driving it back. When the left wavered he stepped across and steadied it. He moved only when the line required him, and the line required him often.

Tomas did not move at all.

He stood behind the ring with the torches clutched in both hands, and his face was a mask of white shock. The dead were ten paces away and closing, and the boy had locked — knees stiff, jaw slack, eyes too wide and fixed on nothing. The torch flames trembled in his grip and the light wavered with them.

"Tomas." Godwin's voice, sharp over the shoulder. "Light forward. Keep them high."

Nothing.

"Tomas!"

The boy's mouth worked. No sound. A walker came lurching out of the dark toward the rear of the circle — a woman in a rotting shift, jaw unhinged, fingers hooked — and Tomas saw her and did nothing. The light dropped.

Godwin crossed the circle in three strides. He took the boy by the shoulder and shook him, hard, once. "Torches. Up. Now." He put his own spear in the boy's free hand. "You hold the light. That is your job. You do your job and we live. You drop it and we die in the dark. Do you understand?"

Tomas stared at him.

"DO YOU UNDERSTAND."

The boy lifted the torches. His hands were shaking. The flames steadied. He lifted them higher, and the light held, and the line behind him did not break.

The dead pressed on. The necromancer was emptying his kennel — flinging every corpse he had, the dregs and the fresh and everything in between, in a blind wave of panic. This wasn't an ambush. An ambush had shape, timing, a mind behind it. This was a boy with a bloody pendant and a dying well and more terror than sense, spending everything at once because he didn't know how to spend it slow.

It almost worked.

The line buckled on the left. Leofric went down under two of them — one on his shield, one at his legs — and only the baron turning and swinging wild with his sword kept the gap from opening. Godwin bellowed over the noise, "Hold! Hold, damn you, one at a time, put them down and don't look at the rest!" and his voice was a beam in the dark, something solid to brace against, and the line found its shape again.

Erlich stepped into the worst of it. Three walkers piled onto his shield at once and he held them there, one arm braced, the kind of strength that didn't come from training. Godwin saw it and put shafts into two skulls. The third Erlich killed himself, a short hard thrust that dropped it at his feet, and the gap closed.

They cut through.

Slowly. Ugly. At cost — the baron's arm bled from a gouge above the elbow, Leofric limped where a dead hand had twisted his ankle, and Brunner's shield was splintered to kindling. But they cut through. The final corpse crumpled where the torchlight gave out, and the night emptied of movement.

Six of them stood in a ring of corpses, breathing hard, and the temple precinct rose around them in the guttering light. Broken walls half-swallowed by scrub. The faces of old gods carved into the surviving blocks — blunt tusks, filed teeth, mouths open in permanent hunger. And among the stones, more bodies: the walkers that had been milling here before the party arrived, now stilled on the ground where they'd fallen.

Erlich walked forward through the dead, spear still in hand, and read the ground. The precinct told him what the fight had already shown: the necromancer had spent everything. Thrown every corpse he commanded at the threat in the scrub, and lost.

"There," he said.

A dark stair cut beneath a block of temple masonry that had once been an altar. The steps were worn smooth, and the air rising from them was warm and foul and wrong.

"That's where they came from. That's where he is."

He looked back at the five of them — bloodied, beaten, still on their feet. Tomas had the torches still burning, and his hands had stopped shaking.

"We go down," Erlich said.

No one moved. The air from the stair was warm as a throat, and the torches guttered in the updraft. Tomas stared into the dark mouth of the steps, and his hands had stopped shaking, but his face had not.