“I’m almost out,” Tycho said.
There were two other soldiers beside them with rifles aimed at the doors, but neither of them had fired. Wren glanced at the young Hellans and saw their hands shaking and lips moving with silent prayers.
“We can barricade the door with the tables and things!” Wren pointed back at the office furniture in the middle of the room.
“Yes, a barricade!” Tycho fired again. “Go, go!”
Wren let go of his hand and ran back to the office area where the makeshift war room had frozen in the middle of its business as every bloodless face stared in horror at the doors slowly cracking apart from the outside.
“The tables! Get the desks, grab everything, use it to block the doors!” she shouted.
One by one, the clerks and servants blinked back to life, cast frightened nods at one another, and began lifting the tables and scrambling like drunken crabs to carry the furniture to the doors. The pale Italian slowly stood up, drew his golden rapier, and staggered after them.
“Miss Wren?” The Duchess stepped gracefully out of the way of four men with a chest of drawers. “I understood this particular crisis to be over. You subdued Baba Yaga, didn’t you?”
“I did, and this isn’t her fault,” Wren said. “Well, I mean it is, but it’s not a new problem. You see, Yaga did wake up the corpses from the graveyards for hundreds of leagues all around, that’s true, and she did twist up those poor souls pretty badly with her nightmares, but she didn’t create them, and she didn’t control them. She just woke them up, is all.”
“Ah.” Lady Nerissa nodded calmly. “So then, all of the dead souls that she woke up will continue to walk the earth on their own until something or someone stops them?”
“I’m afraid so.” Wren glanced at an over-turned chair by her foot. Part of her wanted to grab the chair and rush to help build the barricade, but the rest of her wanted to stay as far from the doors as possible.
And besides, one more chair won’t make any difference.
A young man shrieked, and the sound echoed through the dark hall, bouncing and bouncing again from every angle. Wren winced and spun about, trying to find the source of the cry, and she caught sight of a clerk on the far side of the office area pointing not at the doors where Tycho was directing the construction of the barricade but to another pair of doors at the opposite end of the room. The doors were open and three corpses stumbled through them, grunting as they clawed at the stale air.
Nine hells!
“Hey! We need that there, I mean, back there! Go, that way!” Wren waved and pointed frantically at the open doors as she tried to catch the attention of the servants still rushing to block Tycho’s doors. A half dozen of them saw her and turned to look where she was pointed, and a chorus of panicked curses and shouts erupted from their pale lips.
“Come on, there’s only three of them!” Wren grabbed the chair at her feet and rushed across the dark chamber, splashing through the cold puddles as quickly as her long black skirts would allow.
Two more corpses staggered out of the doorway. And then another.
Wren glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone was following her, and her heart dropped into her belly when she saw only two young men with chairs and candlesticks jogging halfheartedly in her wake. They were at least a dozen paces behind and falling farther behind with every step she took.
Oh gods, I’m alone.
Wren splashed to a halt in the middle of a puddle and threw her chair out in front of her, perhaps in the hope that it might make the dead men and women stumble for half a second. But the six corpses shuffled forward faster and faster, parting to pass around the chair on both sides, their rotting faces hanging apart on threads of skin and strings of muscle, their filthy bones exposed around their eyes and fingers.
All six of them reached for her.
All six of them stared at her with frozen black eyes.
All six of them moaned with frozen black tongues.
“No!” Wren threw up her arms, praying that there was enough aether in the sunken chamber to form a solid wall in front of her.
The thin wisps of white vapor on the floor rushed forward and upward like a wave, but instead of rising into a barrier, it swept on through the six corpses like a hurricane. Wren watched in wide-eyed wonder as the aether wind tore at her stumbling attackers, forcing them backward with their arms raised to shield their frostbitten faces. Then one of the corpses collapsed to the floor, and Wren, with arms still raised to guide the aether, stared at the pale ghostly shape that washed out of the fallen body.
Then a second corpse fell, tipping over backward very slowly and gently until it smashed into a puddle of filthy water in a depression in the floor, and again, Wren saw the dim face of a ghost flying away into the shadows.
Nine hells! I’m knocking the souls right out of their bodies? Is that even possible? I mean, it must be, obviously, but still, shouldn’t Omar have warned me I could tear a soul from a body? Unless, he didn’t know…
Wren dropped her arms to her sides for a moment to rest her shoulders and stumble back from the four remaining dead men and women, who tottered uncertainly on their frozen legs and then began stumbling toward her again.
“Stay away!” She shoved both hands toward just one of the corpses and the resulting blast of aether knocked the fragile ghost of an old woman free of the body, which smashed down to the floor. The shadow form of the woman hovered above her desiccated corpse for a moment, and then vanished.
I can stop them. I can stop all of them!
Wren shoved her hands out toward the remaining corpses, her silver bracelets jangling as they slammed against her wrists, and she hurled the aether through the frozen bodies to yank the souls free and send them drifting into the darkness. The last three bodies slumped to the floor in a haphazard pile of black and white and blue limbs gleaming dimly with aether crystals in the torchlight.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw the two porters still standing a few paces behind her, clutching their chairs and candlesticks. “It’s all right,” she said. “They can’t hurt us now.”
The young men slumped forward with exhausted smiles and set their chairs down.
Wren looked out across the dark cavernous space to the far end of the room where Tycho and the others were still piling furniture up against a single pair of doors. She waved at them, knowing that they couldn’t possibly see her in the gloom, and called out, “It’s all right! I can stop them! We’re going to be all right! Don’t worry!”
“Miss!” one of the porters cried.
Wren saw him pointing over her shoulder and she turned to look over the bodies of the six soulless corpses to see three more dead bodies rush out of the open doorway behind her, with more shadowy forms rustling in the darkness beyond them.
“Everybody get behind me!” Wren shouted as she backed toward the office area.
If I can knock a soul free of a dead body, it can’t be much harder to knock one free of a living body, can it? I need to be careful. Very, very careful, or I might kill everyone in the room.
She kept her eyes on the dead people pouring out of the ancient doors. On and on they came, more and more frozen and rotten faces plunging out of the shadows.
Where on earth are they all coming from? There really must be nine hells after all!
The new wave of corpses moved faster than the last, stumbling and loping as quickly as their frozen legs would allow, their fingers fixed in icy fists and claws, their crystallized eyes locked open, their blackened tongues raised behind yellow teeth, and all of them moaning and grunting as they raced toward the warm bodies in the light.
“Stay behind me!” Wren yelled over her shoulder.
Woden, be my shield!
She swept her arms left and right, dragging thin waves of aether back and forth across the floor to knock the corpses from side to side, and occasionally ripping a ghost free to let its body crumple to the floor. But with each sweep of her arms, the aether drifted a bit farther away into the darkness, leaving it a bit thinner and weaker as it struck the oncoming wave of dead bodies.