“Tigra!” Sorak said.
The tigone roared and took a running leap, bringing the first corpse down. It jerked convulsively as Tigra tore it apart, and the scattered parts continued to twitch and writhe upon the floor.
Sorak swung his sword as the second corpse came stumbling toward him, its rotting fingers, with bones poking through, reaching for him. Galdra whistled through the air and cleaved the zombie completely in two, and where the magic blade had passed, acrid smoke issued from the twitching flesh and bones.
The third zombie lurched toward him, its burial clothes in rotting tatters, its feet nothing but bones, its face little more than a grinning skull. Sorak swung his sword again, knocking the head clean off the shoulders. Smoke issued from the zombie’s neck, or what was left of its neck, but still the body came lurching forward, arms stretched out, skeletal fingers grasping. Sorak swung his sword again, chopping off one arm. It fell to the floor, smoking and twitching, but still the corpse came on. Then it fell as Tigra leapt upon its back, daws and teeth rending it apart
Sorak heard the sound of running footsteps, guards on the stairs. He was about to tell them that it was all over when he saw two more zombies stumble through the doorway, followed by a third, and yet a fourth.
And as he watched, the scattered remnants of the first corpse Tigra had torn apart writhed toward one another across the floor and began to join themselves together once again.
“Gith’s blood!” said the guard captain, as the walking dead lurched and swayed toward Sorak across the gaming hall. And two more were coining in.
Sorak lunged to meet them, and the guards drew their weapons and joined the fray. The zombies were unarmed, and they did not move quickly, but as each one fell, hacked to pieces by Sorak or one of the guards, another came in to take its place. And, moments later, the ones that fell came up again, their rotting body parts joined back together. The guards and Sorak laid about them with their blades, and Tigra leaped from one walking corpse to the other, savaging them and rending them to pieces.
Sorak noticed that the ones he had dismembered and struck down twitched for a short while, then grew still, nothing but rotting flesh and bones on the floor. The others, torn apart without Galdra, always reshaped and attacked again. A severed arm lay twitching, then began to drag itself across the floor to rejoin itself to its torso. A skull that had been split apart became magically fused back together. One of the guards ran a zombie straight through the chest with his sword, but the blade passed through the corpse’s ribs with no apparent effect, and the zombie kept on coming, impaling itself on the sword until its bony fingers closed around the guard’s throat and started squeezing. The half-elf screamed, but the others could spare no time to save him, and he went down beneath the corpse’s weight.
Krysta came running back downstairs, having quickly grabbed her blade. Several more zombies came lurching through the doorway and Sorak charged them, chopping his way through, swinging Galdra like a scythe. As they fell, he encountered three more in the garden just outside the door. They went down before his blade and became nothing more than rotting bones and body parts upon the ground, but another was coming down the path toward him.
Krysta’s voice cried out behind him, “Sorak, look out!”
He swung around and chopped out with Galdra just as another zombie came stumbling back out of the gaming hall toward him. The corpse was cut in two by the elvish steel, and the smoking, severed halves of its body collapsed to the ground.
Sorak saw Krysta cut her way through several of them and come running up to his side. Three more of the zombies followed her out the door. Together, she and Sorak cut them down, but only the ones that Galdra struck remained dismembered on the ground. The others, it seemed, could not be stopped.
“Running them through does not do any good,” said Krysta, gasping for breath. “You can cut them to pieces, but the pieces keep coming back together. Five of my guards are already dead, and the others are hard pressed. But it’s you they’re after. See, here come two more.”
As she spoke, two more zombies came stumbling out the door, heading toward them. With a roar, Tigra flew out behind them and landed on both in a flurry of claws and teeth. But Sorak knew it was, at best, a temporary reprieve. Only Galdra, it seemed, could truly be effective against them. Behind them, inside the gaming house, the sounds of fighting were diminishing. There was a scream, followed by another, and yet another as Krysta’s guards were overwhelmed.
“Kank’s blood!” said Krysta, looking beyond Sorak and pointing, her eyes wide with horror. “Look!”
Sorak turned to gaze in the direction she was indicating. He looked out through the open gate, the strangled body of the unfortunate gatekeeper lying on the ground beside it, and saw that the entire street beyond was full of walking dead. There were dozens of them, shambling down the street like specters, some recently dead and still recognizable as human, some no more than skeletons. And even as he looked, the sounds of struggle in the gaming house behind him stopped completely. The last of Krysta’s guards had fallen. The corpses started coming back out toward them.
“We are going to die,” said Krysta. Not if I awake the Shade, thought Sorak, and wondered if even the Shade, for all his fearsomeness, could deal with such a sheer weight of numbers. “No,” he said, aloud, “not you. It’s me they’re after.”
“They killed all my guards,” she said. “Only because they were in their way,” Sorak replied. “Get away from me! Run, and you’ll be safe!”
“I won’t leave you,” Krysta said, hefting her sword as the zombies closed in on them from both directions. Tigra brought two of them down, but more were coming.
“I have no time to argue with you,” Sorak said. He quickly transferred Galdra to his left hand and, with his right, struck a sharp blow on Krysta’s chin. As she collapsed, he caught her, then dragged her off the path and dumped her behind a rock outcropping in the garden.
“If you hadn’t done that, I was about to hit her myself,” said a familiar voice.
Sorak spun around and his jaw dropped as he saw a young villichi priestess standing behind him, dressed for battle, her white hair tied back, sword in one hand, dagger in the other. “Ryana! How... what are you doing here?” She slashed out with her sword and knocked the head off a walking corpse, then kicked the still-ambulatory body back into the pool. “Someone had to watch out for you,” she said.
“Behind you!”
But with the sharply honed instincts of a villichi fighter, she was already spinning around, sword flashing, and another zombie fell as she sliced through its rotting waist with one vicious stroke.
“I’d already dropped that one before,” she said. “They don’t stay down, do they?”
“They do if Galdra strikes them,” Sorak said, wondering why the Shade wasn’t manifesting. There were more of them coming, far too many, even for the Shade.
“Galdra?”
Then Sorak became aware of a curious, warm, floating sensation stealing over him, suffusing him. A lilting voice that sounded like an echo from some far-off canyon came to him, speaking in his. mind, saying, “Sorak... let go.”
“Kether,” he whispered.
“Sorak... we have a lot of company,” said Ryana, her voice betraying anxiety despite her outward bravado.
“Let go, Sorak. Let go.”
“Ryana!” he called out. “Use this!”
She quickly sheathed her dagger and caught his blade as he tossed it to her, and then he felt himself fading away gently into a lulling, soothing warmth. He knew now why the Shade had not responded to the threat. There was a still-greater power within him, something that seemed to be a part of him, and yet was not a part of him, an entity that seemed to come of its own volition, not from within him, but from... somewhere else. As his vision faded into a stark yet comforting white haze, he could dimly hear Ryana calling out to him, and then her voice was fading, too. “Sorak!” Ryana shouted.