Chapter 4: They Come From the South

The gravedigger's candle guttered in its tin, and he flinched at his own shadow on the headstones.

"Three cups of the cheap stuff," Leofric said from his perch on a listing stone angel. "Every night since the first one walked. That's what the barman told me."

"Three cups isn't cheap," Godwin said. He was crouched at the cemetery wall, arrow on the string, his gaze tracking the dark lane that led down into the fishing quarter. "Not on a gravedigger's wage."

"He's afraid. Fear spends coin quicker than thirst." Leofric tilted his head at the man huddled by the candle. "Aren't you, friend?"

The gravedigger said nothing. His lips moved around words that wouldn't form.

Erlich stood apart from the others, at the crest of the hill where the sailor's temple blocked the sea wind. He had been there since nightfall, arms folded, his eyes on the southern dark. The direction Peto's killer had gone. The direction every walker had come from. The scrub was black ink below the stars, and it gave nothing back.

"Lieutenant." Godwin's voice changed register. "Lights on the waterfront."

Erlich turned. Not lights — torch-glow swaying in the lanes below the docks, and under it, movement. Too much movement. Shapes resolving out of the dark in numbers that didn't belong to any living fisherman's night.

"They're not coming from the burial ground," Erlich said. "They're already in town."

He was off the hill before the words cooled. Godwin and Leofric were behind him without being called, and the gravedigger's candle went out in the rush of their passing, leaving him alone among the stones with only the sound of his own breathing.

The fishing quarter was a scrum before they reached it.

Baron Volker's household had formed up at the mouth of the dock lane — Brunner in the center with his shield braced and his spear level, the baron himself at the right with a sword he held like a man remembering a lesson from twenty years ago. Two townsmen with boathooks flanked them, pale and grim, and behind them a woman was dragging children into a doorway and heaving the bar across it.

The dead came up the waterfront in a shambling tide. Fishermen, townsmen, a woman in her burial shift, a boy no older than Tomas — all of them pale as old cheese, mouths working, arms reaching. More than the night before. More than all the nights before put together. Godwin counted as he ran and stopped counting.

"Brunner!" Erlich called, closing the last yards. "Hold the center. My lord — the left lane, there's a blind alley, they'll flank through it. Leofric, with the baron. Godwin, the right — shoot what you can."

Orders delivered without fuss, without doubt — the same even cadence he used for anything. The baron moved. Leofric moved with him, hatchet out, one of his jokes dying on his tongue. Godwin was already on one knee with an arrow drawn to his ear.

The first walker came around the chandler's corner at a lurching run — wrong, terribly wrong, a lurch that should have been impossible — and Godwin put a shaft through its eye at thirty paces. It folded and the one behind it tripped over the body. Godwin's second arrow took that one through the throat while it was still scrambling. The third caught a townsman in the chest and spun him into a stack of fish crates that came apart in a dry crash of salt-crusted wood.

Then the gap closed, and the screaming started.

The scrum was ugly. Brunner worked the center with the grinding rhythm of a forge — shield up, spear punching over the rim, the grinding repetition of a man who'd done the labor for two decades and would do it for two more. Every thrust put a dead thing down. Every reset brought another dead thing into range. The pile of still bodies grew at his feet, and still they came.

The baron held the left lane with Leofric, and it was barely enough. Volker's sword-work was rusty — he swung wide, he stepped wrong, he let a walker inside his guard and only Leofric's hatchet chopping through its reaching arm saved him from the teeth. But he kept swinging. He kept his feet. He was a baron in name only, and he was earning the name tonight.

Erlich fought at Brunner's right shoulder, spear and short sword both drawn. He moved without waste — step, thrust, withdraw, reset. The dead came on and the dead went down. His face was closed and still, the face of a man not fighting a battle but solving a problem, and the problem had a shape now he could almost read.

Godwin's bow sang from behind the line, arrow after arrow, each finding a skull or a spine or a joint that stopped the dead from walking. He'd opened a second quiver before the tide slowed, and his fingers bled where the string had cut them. He shot until there was nothing left to shoot that wasn't already in spear-range.

Brunner went down.

Three of them — two fishermen and the boy, the dead boy who shouldn't have been there — hit his shield at once. The dock plank under him was old, salt-rotten, and it split with a sound like a breaking rib. Brunner's leg punched through the gap and he went sideways, shield pinned awkwardly under his ribs, spear spun beyond reach. The dead came down on top of him in a pile of pale flesh and grabbing hands and one of them got its fingers into his collar and another hooked his belt and Brunner's mouth opened on a sound that wasn't a word — a grunt, short and hard, the noise a man makes when he knows he's a heartbeat from being torn apart.

Godwin was ten yards back and already moving before Brunner hit the dock.

He didn't think. He ran. Broad shoulders and quick feet, the gift Godwin carried into every fight, and he crossed the distance before the dead could finish what they'd started. He drove two of them off Brunner and into the harbor in a single brute collision, shoulder first, a hit that would have staggered a living man. The third he caught by the collar and the thigh and hurled after the others. Then he was standing over the man-at-arms with his arming sword out, a short blade made for close work, and he split the skull of the fourth walker as it came scrabbling over his back.

Brunner got his dagger up from the ground and into the belly of a fifth and Godwin hauled him upright by the shoulder of his gambeson. The man-at-arms had a scalp wound that ran blood into his collar, shield gone, breathing in short hard pulls. He found a dead man's spear at his feet and stepped back into the gap with it.

"Steady," Godwin said. "You're steady."

Brunner nodded once. That was all.

The last walker toppled at the edge of the dock where the water lapped against the pilings, and the night went quiet.

Godwin counted the bodies in the torchlight and gave Erlich a number. Leofric whistled through his teeth. The baron leaned on his sword and tried to catch his breath. Brunner stood where he'd stood before, spear in hand, blood running into his collar from the scalp wound, and would not sit. His eyes were fixed on the dead boy's corpse where it lay among the crates — the boy who'd been part of the pile that took him down. His mouth moved around a word that wouldn't come.

"How many more nights," he said. His voice was scraped tin, meant for no one. "A man only has so many in him."

Then he pulled his gaze away and set his jaw, and the shield of his face was back.

"Every one of them," Erlich said. He was at the dock's edge, facing south into the black scrub beyond the harbor's last mooring. "Every single one came up the waterfront from the south."

He turned and walked back along the dock, stepping between the bodies. "Look at them," he said. "No grave-dirt on their clothes. No torn nails, no spade-cuts on the hands. These dead didn't claw themselves out of coffins." He stopped at the boy's corpse and knelt. The burial shift was clean, the fingers pale and whole. "They were drawn. Commanded up through sealed grave dirt and sealed boxes by a working that doesn't touch the surface at all."

He straightened, his eyes on the black scrub beyond the harbor's last mooring. "Every corpse, every single one we've cut down since the first night, came from that direction. The graveyard is not your enemy. The dead are born somewhere out there, and we're going to find where."

The baron wiped blood from his brow. "South of Magyar there's nothing."

"There's a ruin. An old orc temple. On the rise above the creek. A couple of miles."

Volker stared at him. "Empty since the war. Two hundred years empty."

"Then someone's taken up residence." Erlich looked at the dead on the dock, at the southern scrub where the goat-track vanished into thorn and dark. "That is where we go tomorrow."

"How many men?" the baron asked.

"The three of us. And whatever household you can put in the field."

Volker looked at his wounded man-at-arms, at the bodies on his docks, at the fishing boats still tied and idle in the harbor. Whatever he'd been before Magyar's dead began to walk — a minor lord of a minor town, a baron in name only, a man who poured his own sour wine for guests — it had been worn thin. But it hadn't broken.

"I'll have Brunner," he said. "And my squire. Tomas is young, but he's steady enough for a torch. Six of us."

Erlich studied him for a moment, then nodded. The baron did not return the gesture. He stood counting the dead on his docks, and the number did not comfort him.