You can t hurt me, I said. I m a Drood.
Means nothing to me, said the dead man. Means nothing to any of us. We are here to hurt you and break you and make you die badly. And then we ll take you back with us, drag you down into the depths of the sea, to the cold and the dark and the silence. Forever.
Nothing worse than a chatty dead man, Molly said briskly. I don t think that s his voice, Eddie. I think that s someone else speaking through him.
Is that you, Crow Lee? I said. I ll be coming for you soon. And all the armies of the world, living or dead, won t be enough to stop me.
Let us rest, said a soft, wet chorus of voices.
We didn t want to die. But this is worse.
You wouldn t think someone with the power to raise an army of the dead would feel the need for psychological warfare, said Molly. This is just meant to disturb us by appealing to our better nature. Lot he knows. I don t have one. I had it surgically removed long ago, when it got in the way of having serious fun.
We didn t ask to be called up into the light again, said the dead man, looking straight at me with his eyeless face. The dark will be that much harder to bear now that we ve been made to remember what light is like. The cold will be that much worse now that we ve been made to know warmth again. And since we can t take our anger out on the one who raised us, we ll take it out on you.
Listen, I said. I don t know whether there s really any of you left in there or not. Whether these are your voices are not. But if you re really here, if you ve been made to suffer, I give you my word: I will avenge you. You hear that, Crow Lee? I will make you pay for this!
The moment I stopped talking, they all surged forward, stumbling over their broken and decayed feet, reaching out to Molly and me with rotting hands. Grasping hands, full of all the awful strength of the raised dead. I armoured up immediately, the golden armour encasing me from head to toe in a moment. It seemed to me the dead hesitated, as though they hadn t expected that, and then the will behind them drove them on. I went to meet them, my hands clenched into golden fists. Because if they wanted a fight, I was just in the mood to give them one. After what had been done to my family, all their anger was nothing compared to mine. They threatened me and Molly and the rescue of my family. To hell with that, and to hell with them all.
The nearest dead man grabbed on to my golden arm with both of his bony hands, and to my shock I could feel his cold wet grasp, right through the armour. It couldn t get through, couldn t get at me, but I could still feel it. And that wasn t supposed to be possible. I d never felt anything like it before. What the hell had Crow Lee raised here, and what had he put into them?
I ripped the dead man s arm off and threw it away. Water ran like blood from the empty socket, but the dead man barely staggered. I punched him full in the face with my golden fist and knocked his head right off. The body didn t fall, so I kicked its feet out from under it and walked right over the thrashing body on the deck to get to the next. I waded into the army of the risen dead, striking about me with vicious strength. I showed them no mercy because they had none in them for Molly or me. I ripped them apart with my armoured strength, tearing them limb from limb, knocking them down and trampling them underfoot, because they were dead and beyond any pain. And because I didn t care. They were just in the way.
They swarmed around me, packing in close, trying to slow me down so they could pull me down. They clung on to me with their dead hands, beat against my armour with their bony fists, and scrabbled at my neck and face with clawed hands. And I just hit them until they fell apart and fell away. They were actually quite fragile after so long in the sea, and all of Crow Lee s power wasn t enough to make them a match for Drood armour. Anyone else might have found the dead men terrifying, even dangerous but for me, in my armour, they were just targets. I hit them and broke them and it felt good, so good. I smashed through their ranks, ripped them apart, tore off their heads and threw them aside. I picked some up bodily and threw them off the edge of the Pier and back into the sea. Where they belonged.
I fought my way into the heart of them, striking out through the curling mists, the dead pressing so close around me now I couldn t have missed them if I d tried. My golden fists made wet squelching sounds as they sank deep into rotting flesh and collapsed chests. I struck them down and walked right over them, hearing brittle bones crack and break under my heavy golden feet. They beat at me with their dead fists but they couldn t reach me inside my armour. Crow Lee thought he could frighten me, thought he could drag me down, because I didn t have my armour anymore without my family, because he thought I was just a man. He should have known better. On the worst day I ever had, I was still a Drood.
Dead hands slipped away from me as fists broke and shattered harmlessly against my armour. I didn t feel their attacks. Sometimes they threw their arms around me, several of them at once, trying to pull me down through accumulated weight and numbers; but I d just break their arms and throw them away again. Sometimes, several of them at once would hang on to my arms, and I could feel their squirming hands through the armour like bloated wet spiders. And then I d throw them off me so violently they left their hands behind and I had to scrape them off me. Torn off heads rolled back and forth on the bare floorboards and I kicked them around like footballs. Sometimes the mouths still moved, jaws opening and closing as though trying to say something. I didn t listen. It wasn t going to be anything I wanted to hear.
I struck them down, I tore them apart, picked them up and threw them away. And laughed while I did it.
Inevitably, some of the dead got past me, ignoring me to head straight for Molly. Probably seeing her as an easier target. More fools, them. I caught glimpses of Molly through the fog as I fought, her standing her ground, her face calm and thoughtful as she lashed out at them with all the magics at her command. She called lightning and it stabbed down through the fog, blasting bodies into pieces and setting others on fire. But some of them were so damp, so saturated with water from their time in the sea, the flames couldn t get a hold. Steam boiled off them, but they kept going. She gestured sharply, and some of the dead just exploded, chunks of rotting flesh flying through the air like soft shrapnel. The explosive spells worked well, but I knew how much that kind of magic took out of Molly. She could only target one dead man at a time. And there were so very many of them.
They pressed forward, reaching out to her with cold implacable hands, and she had no choice but to back away. She threw up a shimmering protective screen between them and her, and the dead men hesitated. Molly forced out a series of powerful Words, and the base of her screen dug deep into the floorboards, securing it in place. It had been powerful enough to hold off the shades in Egypt, but the raised dead were more solid. They pressed right up against the protective screen, throwing all their weight against it, and as more and more joined in, they slowly forced the shimmering screen back inch by inch. The screen s energies burnt dead flesh where it touched, but they didn t care. They couldn t feel it. They forced the screen back through sheer weight of numbers, and Molly had no choice but to back away before it.