“I hope so,” replied Sameth. He could sense the Dead on the road behind them now, coming up quickly. There seemed to be no hope of safety anywhere ahead. No stout farmhouse or barn, or a stream, whose running water the Dead couldn’t cross. In fact, the road went down to become a sunken lane, even darker and more closed in, a perfect site for an ambush.
As Sam thought of that, he felt his sense of Death suddenly alter. It disoriented him at first, till he realized what it was. A Dead spirit had just risen in front of them, somewhere in the darkness around the high-banked road. Worse than that, it was new, brought out of Death at that very moment. These were no self-willed Dead spirits that had infiltrated through the Perimeter. They were Dead Hands, raised by a necromancer on the Ancelstierran side of the Wall. Controlled by the necromancer’s mind, they were much more dangerous than rogue spirits.
“Stop!” screamed Sam, his voice cutting through the beat of rain and footsteps on the asphalt. “They’re ahead of us. We have to leave the road!”
“Who are ahead, boy?” shouted Cochrane, furious again. “This has gone quite far enough. . . .”
His voice faltered as a figure stumbled out of the shad-ows ahead, out into the middle of the road. It was human, or had once been human, but now its arms were hanging threads of flesh, and its head was mostly bare skull, all deep eye hollows and shining teeth. It was unquestionably dead, and the reek of decomposition rolled off it, over the soft smell of the rain. Clods of earth fell from it as it moved, showing that it had just dug itself out of the ground.
“Left!” shouted Sam, pointing. “Everyone go left!”
His shout broke the silent tableau into action, boys leaping over the stone wall that bordered the road. Cochrane was one of the first over, throwing his umbrella aside.
The Dead thing moved, too, breaking into a shambling run as it sensed the Life it craved. The sergeant propped himself against the wall and waited till it was ten feet away. Then he emptied his heavy .455 revolver into the creature’s torso, five shots in quick succession, accompanied by a gasp of relief that the weapon actually worked.
The creature was knocked back and finally down, but the sergeant didn’t wait. He’d been on the Perimeter long enough to know that it would get back up again. Bullets could stop Dead Hands, but only if the creatures were shredded to pieces. White phosphorus grenades worked better, burning them to ash—when they worked. Guns and grenades and all such standards of Ancelstierran military technology tended to fail the closer they got to the Wall and the Old Kingdom.
“Up the hill!” shouted Sam, pointing to a rise in the ground ahead, where the forest thinned out. If they could make it there, at least they could see what was coming and have the slight advantage of high ground.
A harsh, inhuman cry rose behind them as they ran, a sound like a broken bellows accidentally trodden on, more squeal than scream. Sam knew it came from the desiccated lungs of a Dead Hand. This one was farther to the right than the one the sergeant had shot. At the same time, he sensed others, moving around to the right and left, beginning to encircle the hill.
“There’s a necromancer back there,” he said as they ran. “And there must be a lot of dead bodies, not too far gone.”
“A truck full of those Southerlings . . . ran off the road near here, six weeks ago,” said the sergeant, speaking rapidly between breaths. “Nineteen killed. Bit of a . . . mystery where they was going . . . anyway . . . churchwarden at Archell wouldn’t . . . have ’em . . . the Army crematorium neither . . . so they was buried next to the road.”
“Stupid!” cried Sameth. “It’s too close to the Wall! They should have been burnt!”
“Bloody paper-pushers,” puffed the sergeant, nimbly ducking under a branch. “Regulations say no burying within the . . . Perimeter. But this is . . . outside, see?”
Sameth didn’t answer. They were climbing the hill itself now, and he needed all his breath. He sensed there were at least twelve Dead Hands behind them now, and three or four on each side, going wide. And there was something, some presence that was probably the necromancer, back where the bodies were—or had been—buried.
The top of the hill was clear of trees, save for a few wind-blown saplings. Before they reached it, the sergeant called a halt, just short of the crest.
“Right! Get in close. Are we missing anyone? How many—”
“Sixteen, including Mr. Cochrane,” said Nick, who was a lightning calculator. Cochrane glared at him but was silent, ducking his head back down as he tried to get his breath back. “Everyone’s here.”
“How long have we got, sir?” the sergeant asked Sam, as they both looked back down into the trees. It was hard to see anything. Visibility was reduced by both the increasingly heavy rain and the onset of night.
“The first two or three will be on us in a few minutes,” said Sameth grimly. “The rain will slow them a little. We’ll have to knock them down and run stumps through them, to try to keep them pinned. Nick, organize everyone into groups of three. Two batsmen and someone to hold the stumps ready. No, Hood—go with Asmer. When they come, I’ll distract them with a . . . I’ll distract them. Then the batsman must hit as hard as they can straight off, in the legs, and then hammer a stump through each arm and leg.”
Sameth paused as he saw one of the boys eyeing the two-and-a-half-foot-long wooden stump with its metal spike on the end. From the expression on the boy’s face, it was clear he couldn’t imagine hammering it through anything.
“These are not people!” Sam shouted. “They’re already Dead. If you don’t fight them, they will kill us. Think of them as wild animals, and remember, we’re fighting for our lives!”
One of the boys started crying, without making a noise, the tears falling silently down his face. At first Sam thought it was the rain, till he noticed the despairing stare that signified complete and utter terror.
He was about to try some more encouraging words when Nick pointed downhill and shouted, “Here they come!”
Three Dead Hands were coming out from the treeline, shambling like drunks, their arms and legs clearly not fully under control. The bodies had been too broken up in the crash, Sam thought, gauging their strength. That was good. It would make them slower and more uncoordinated.
“Nick, your team can take the one on the left,” he commanded, speaking quickly. “Ted, yours the middle, and Jack’s the right. Go for their knees and hammer the stumps home as soon as you get them down. Don’t let them get a grip on you—they’re much stronger than they look. Everyone else—including you, please, Sergeant, and Mr. Cochrane—hold back and help any team that gets in trouble.”
“Yes, sir!” replied the sergeant. Cochrane merely nodded dumbly, staring at the approaching Dead Hands. For the first time in Sam’s memory, the man’s face was not flushed red. It was white, almost as white as the sickeningly pallid flesh of the approaching Dead.
“Wait for my order,” shouted Sam. At the same time, he reached into the Charter. It was impossible to reach in most of Ancelstierre, but this close to the Wall, it was merely difficult, rather like trying to swim down to the bottom of a deep river.
Sameth found the Charter and took a moment’s comfort from the familiar touch of it, its permanence and its totality linking him to everything in existence. Then he summoned the marks he wanted, holding them in his mind while he formed their names in his throat. When he had everything ready, he punched out his right hand, three fingers splayed, each finger indicating one of the approaching Dead creatures.
“Anet! Calew! Ferhan!” he spat, and the marks flew from his fingers as shining silver blades, whistling through the air quicker than any eye could follow. Each one struck a Dead Hand, blowing a fist-sized hole straight through decaying flesh. All three staggered back, and one fell down, waving its arms and legs like a beetle thrown on its back.
“Bloody hell!” exclaimed one of the boys next to Sam.
“Now!” shouted Sam, and the schoolboys rushed forward with a roar, waving their mak
eshift weapons. Sam and the sergeant went with them, but Cochrane struck out on his own, running down the hill at a right angle to everyone else.
Then there was a blur of screaming, bats rising and falling, the dull thud of stumps being driven through Dead flesh and into the sodden ground.
Sam experienced it all in a strange frenzy, such a tangled mess of sound, images, and emotion that he was never really sure what happened. He seemed to come out of this concentrated fury to find himself helping Druitt Minor hammer a stump through the forearm of a writhing creature. Even with a stump through each limb, it still struggled, breaking one stump and almost getting free, before some of the boys in reserve cleverly rolled a boulder over the loose arm.