A third one was rising.
“Leesil, run to me, now!” Khalidah shouted.
He had no intention of letting either Magiere or Leesil fall prey to these things. He still needed them to get to Beloved—especially if so many of its undead were gathering to it.
At more screaming and screeching, Khalidah glanced toward where Magiere had been. Still, all he saw were two shadows flailing at each other.
Magiere slashed at her attacker again, barely able to see its shape in the dark through smoke and cast-up sand. Her hardened nails tore through something soft in its face—an eye socket perhaps. At its scream, hunger welled up and burned in her chest and then her throat and finally her mouth.
She brought the blade across, below her last strike.
The glow of the dagger’s hair-thin centerline disappeared for an instant as it cut into something solid. And that thing’s snarls and shrieks choked off instantly.
All of its flailing stopped. Its grips on her belt and hauberk faltered.
She struck down with her free hand where instinct told her to, and her palm slapped upon its scalp. Her fingers closed instantly on sand-clotted hairs, and she brought her blade back the other way well beneath her grip.
Just before the crackle and sizzle of flesh, she thought she heard scrambling upon the sand to her left. Then the head of her prey came loose in her grip.
Leesil kicked into the face of the creature scrambling toward him. Its head lashed back, and he rolled back into a crouch. And it still kept coming. He crossed both blades, dropped forward to one knee, and slashed outward high and low as it closed.
One blade’s edge sliced across its sunken belly. The other’s tip tore through one side of its neck. It lurched back.
When he expected a shriek or gasp, he heard nothing in the dark. He saw its shape crumple upon itself, and he quickly looked for Magiere.
“No, run!” Ghassan shouted again.
Leesil saw something else in the dark scramble across the sand to his right ... straight toward where he’d last seen Magiere. From the corner of his eye, he saw his own opponent hunch ... and spring.
Khalidah watched Leesil stall, and grew furious. And for what was now needed, he could not expend energies on widening his sight to see more clearly in the dark. Thankfully, Ghassan would not dare interfere for what had to be done now.
He dug into his robe, pulled out a sage’s crystal, and after swiping it once across his robe, he cast the crystal toward Leesil. Sudden light tumbling through the air distracted the wounded creature scrambling after the half-blood.
Leesil was startled by light and looked back.
In that off-balance instant, Khalidah focused with his will and used his thoughts to wrench the half-blood. Leesil arched backward, landing on his back, and Khalidah quickly wrenched him again. Leesil slid, flipped, and tumbled wide-eyed to the edge of the stone slab.
Khalidah snatched the collar of Leesil’s hauberk, and by both will and physical effort, pulled the half-blood onto the stone.
“Do you have a crystal?” Khalidah demanded.
Leesil barely gained his feet. “What ... what did you—?”
“Answer me, now!”
Light beyond the slab vanished.
Khalidah’s head swiveled as he looked into the dark. His crystal was gone, and so was the creature that had come after Leesil. That was expected once that thing understood the light could not affect it.
There were still two more out there in the dark—at least two. When he glanced aside, Leesil at least had a crystal out, and Khalidah did not question where it had come from.
“Light it,” he commanded, “and toss it toward Magiere. We must get her here on the stone instead of the sand.”
That second crystal would not last as long on the sand as his before being pulled down as well. He heard the half-blood swipe the crystal on his thigh. Light brightened the darkness an instant before the crystal shot out through the air. It landed some thirty paces out, and he spotted a dark-clad figure picking itself up and clutching a dangling object in one hand.
It was Magiere, and the object in her free hand appeared to be a head.
That left only one of the creatures unaccounted for—unless there were more hiding underground.
“What are those things?” Leesil asked.
“Watch the sand around this stone,” Khalidah ordered, and then called to Magiere. “Run to us! Quickly!”
“Magiere, come on,” Leesil called to her. “Get over here.”
Finally she came, and Khalidah got a better look at what she still held. The remaining hair on the severed head meant it was a younger one, or rather that it had been infected and turned less than a handful of years ago.
Magiere’s eyes were still fully black, and between her parted lips showed teeth like those of a predator. For an instant, it brought back that terror-filled night of agony when she had torn apart his last host, a’Yamin. He could not help looking down at the white metal dagger in her other hand, and he remembered as well that burned blade cutting him apart.
How fitting it would be if he used that blade on her in the end.
“Back to back,” he ordered harshly, and looked away to where Leesil’s crystal had fallen. “Watch in all directions. They cannot come up through stone, so they will have to show themselves first.”
That the second crystal had not been pulled down caused both relief and frustration. Either the last one had fled—if there were only three—or it knew better than to betray its position, now that its prey was aware of it.
Khalidah would have preferred to take one whole. Perhaps in its hunger-maddened thoughts would have been some memory or notion of exactly where it was being summoned. Even so, by this point in their travels, he had his own notion.
“You know about these things?” Leesil whispered from behind on Khalidah’s left.
Khalidah hesitated. How much should he say, considering any answer would bring more questions?
“Yes, I have read of them.” He had done more than that. “Old folktales, still told among desert tribes about the eastern provinces before the empire, called them ‘ghul.’”
Khalidah heard a low grating hiss from Magiere who was behind on his right. She had not known of them. That was obvious. They had been used to clear outer sentries when forces first approached to siege the ancient Bäalâle Seatt. He had been the one to lead that siege.
“What are they?” Leesil asked.
“Undead, of course, by what they did here, likely coming in the following night after whatever attacked these nomads first.”
“Why didn’t they wait to get the bodies after burial?”
Khalidah scoffed. “Because they eat the living, not the dead. Once life leaves a victim’s flesh, there is no life left to feed them. But they are solitary. I have never read of more than one attacking at a time.”
The last part was true, though conjurers under his command had enslaved them in numbers before assaulting the seatt. But any one of his conjurers had been able to control only one ghul. There had been at least three here tonight, possibly working together.
“What about the victims?” Leesil pressed. “Will they ... get up when the next night comes?”
Khalidah hesitated. Some tales were close to the truth that he knew. They claimed any victim who did not die was possessed by feral demonic spirits with no intellect. And slowly they changed as hunger drove them mad.
Again, close to the truth, but not quite.
“No,” he finally answered. “The process—from what I have read—is not the same as for ... well, there is no word in my language to match your ‘vampire.’”
Khalidah said no more, though he listened now that Leesil was silent. Between Magiere’s labored breaths, he heard not a grain of sand shift. In a calm night without a breeze, that still did not mean the ghul had moved on. They could not travel at any worthwhile pace underground and never truly did so. To avoid them as with other undead meant waiting for daylight.