AQREEN SAW THE CAPTAIN of the militia’s eyes when he heard the lookouts yelling and the same cry repeated across the width and length of the camp.
The dead.
He looked like a horse about to bolt.
“Captain!”
She clapped her palm onto his chest, hard enough to make him stumble back.
He stared at her, as if seeing her for the first time and wondering who she was.
“You have to give the order. Before it’s too late.”
His mouth fell open. He stared at her dumbly.
“Tell them to open fire!” she said sharply, ready to slap him if he didn’t respond.
His mouth closed.
A look passed through his eyes.
He nodded once.
Then he turned back to the militia reserve.
They were all milling about in confusion and fear, wanting to do nothing more than to run, but not sure where to go. The sergeant, bless his brave soul, was doing his best to try to hold them together, shouting orders and threatening disciplinary action, but equally scared and confused himself.
The captain strode forward, clapping his hands together sharply.
It sounded like a whip being snapped across the haunches of a dromad.
“Sergeant, give the order to line up for defensive fire. Do it now!”
The sergeant stared at his caption wildly, then snapped to attention. “Sir!”
He turned to the soldiers. “You heard the captain, you sorry lot. Fall in!”
A brief moment of uncertainty.
“What are you waiting for,” the sergeant barked, “your mothers to hold your hands? Get to it, militia!”
That got through. Falling back on habit and training in the face of madness, they regained their senses and surged forward, resuming the lines that they had stood in earlier.
Aqreen remained where she was, at the front of the line, letting the other soldiers take their positions to either side of her.
She had no intention of being pushed back to the rear again.
She wanted to see what was happening out there.
Stone Father.
She needed to see.
The sergeant continued to bark orders.
Aqreen had trained with the militia on several occasions. Every able person in the train had to do so. It was compulsory. On the trail, learning to fight and follow orders under battle conditions wasn’t a choice, it was vital to survival. One’s own as well as that of the entire train. Everyone depended on everyone,as Bulan liked to say. All matter, or none matter.
At the command, she raised her loaded crossbow.
She set it on the interlocked tongue of the two wagons, using the level surface to steady her weapon and aim through the two sights at the front and back.
The cloud dust resolved to a mass of rushing bodies.
Then to a smaller group of rushing bodies.
Then to an individual body, sprinting madly at her.
The enemy soldier, if he could be called that, was a nightmare made visible.
He had clearly died several days ago. The flesh on his face, arms, torso and legs was mottled blue, black, and purple. It was the swollen, bloated look of a body that had filled with gases and would burst at any moment. He might have looked like a man once, but right now, he looked like an overripe man-shaped fruit that had been badly handled by a vendor and left in a ditch for vermin to gnaw on.
There were chunks of flesh missing from here and there, strips of skin hanging and flapping.
His teeth were yellow, blackened lips parted in a rictus of insane hate.
His eyes were red with white speckles, open wide and pupils reduced to pinpoints. The only thing in them was stark, mindless insanity. Nothing rational resided behind them anymore.
He was approaching in a loping, jerking stride. Like someone who had been running for days and was far beyond exhaustion but could not bring himself to stop. His mouth hung open, a purple tongue hanging out to one side. It had been bitten more than once by his own jaws as they opened and closed from time to time, in a parody of what had once been the intake and outtake of breath. It hung ragged and blistered.
She heard the captain instruct the sergeant to fire at will.
The sergeant snapped out the order.
She aimed at the oncoming enemy soldier and squeezed the trigger of the crossbow.
The stock kicked back against her shoulder, a shockingly hard recoil, even though she had fired the weapon a thousand times before. The jolt brought her back even further into her own rational mind, back from the edge of the abyss she had almost peered over only moments earlier.
She saw her arrow strike the dead soldier’s belly, though she had aimed higher, and watched in disgust as the swollen body exploded wetly, spilling a mass of putrefied, worm-riddled organs and flesh out onto the red sand.
The dead man’s headlong rush carried him a yard or so further toward the camp and Aqreen, then his legs gave way and he collapsed face-first. A puff of sand rose, marking his fall.
Other deadwalkers—it was as good a term as any—were falling, shot by arrows from the company. The main militia companies were shooting too now, and she could hear the sharp crack of crossbows being fired and the whicker of arrows flying to their targets.
Aqreen had stepped away the instant she had fired, just as she had been trained. The second line stepped forward, aimed, and fired, then stepped back as well, letting the third line take their shots. She reloaded in the time it took two lines to fire their weapons, then had to wait as the fourth and final line fired.
In the brief moment of respite, she watched as the main militia forces fired. They lay flat on top of the wagons as well as under them. The top and bottom lines alternated fire, giving the other time to reload. Their aim was much sharper, bringing down an enemy, and even more than one, with every single shot.
Some of the deadwalkers were so badly decomposed that an arrow passed through two or even three of them in a row. Aqreen watched entire groups tumble backward, their soft parts exploding in little dark bursts.
It was her turn again, and she was steadying, sighting, aiming, and firing. Her target was struck in the face—she had overcompensated for the last shot—and flung back, disappearing in the melee.
Step back again, reload, then watch as the other lines fire.
Step forward, steady, sight, aim, fire. Another deadwalker down, this one spinning to knock two others off their scrawny feet as well. Nice!
She repeated this more times than she could count, falling into the rhythmic pattern of stepping forward, firing, then stepping back, reloading, until it became second nature, even though as a princess and a queen she had mostly trained with close weapons and was far better adapted to the sword and shield rather than distance weapons. Royalty fought only royalty or nobility in Aqron tradition, and archery was a legacy tradition in her homeland. But the weapon now felt as if she had always used it, a part of her own arm and body.
She was surprised when she reached for her quiver and found it was empty. She couldn’t possibly have exhausted all one hundred arrows! Yet apparently she had. She had lost track of time and place, of everything but the simple, repetitive act of moving and firing.
“Arrows!” she called sharply. The shout was being repeated all around the circle and across the camp. How many arrows had been fired already? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Possibly.
Yet the enemy kept on coming.
Even now, as she waited for resupply, she could see the mad hordes rushing pell-mell at the camp. For every frontline felled by a volley, a second replaced it in the time it took them to fire again. That was not good. Sooner or later, their strength would flag or—Stone Gods—run out of ammunition. When that happened, the deadwalkers would cover the gap and be on the camp. She tried to imagine what it would be like to fight soldiers as dead and putrid as those out there and couldn’t quite picture it. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Stone Father. There couldn’t be many more of them left, could there?
The dust cloud from the enemy attack was high enough to be seen over the wagon tops now.
She couldn’t see the back of it from down here and couldn’t recall hearing the lookouts say anything about it either. That might not mean anything. The dust cloud itself would obscure vision beyond a few hundred yards.
But Stone Father, they had already shot one entire quiver load into the attackers, and they were still coming. If every arrow had taken down one deadwalker, then that was already a staggeringly high number. Would they never stop? Where were they coming from?
In the few minutes it took for the resupply to reach her, she found her head swimming with panic.
Then a fresh batch of arrows was deposited before her, and she snatched it up at once, cutting the thin band with her knife and dumping the arrows into her quiver. The shooting hadn’t paused yet—the captains and sergeants had made sure resupplies were ready ahead of time, and the other lines had already begun firing their second batches.
She stepped forward at her turn, went through the whole ritual again, and had the minor satisfaction of seeing two go down with one well-placed shot.
Her shoulder and her trigger finger creaked after the brief respite, and she suspected they would be barking with pain for days afterward. That was no matter. All that counted now was stopping those disgusting things from reaching the camp.
The arrows burned through her crossbow.
Deadwalkers fell left, right, and center.
Step forward, step back.
Steady, sight, aim.
Fire, fire, fire.
Another quiver’s worth depleted.
“Arrows!”
Resupply, then resupply once more.
Four times. Or was it five?
Finally, as she was taking aim wearily with an aching eye, bracing with a sore shoulder and firing with a numb trigger finger, she heard the sergeant call out, “Last arrows! Use them well!”
She loosed the arrow and watched yet another deadwalker pitch down, the one immediately behind him tripping over him and diving into the sand. She had long since lost count of how many she had shot down. If she was finishing her fourth quiver, it was at least four hundred. If it was her fifth . . .
Stone Father.
How many of those cursed things were there?
She heard other militia around her echoing the same question.
The captain called up to the lookout. “Report!”
The lookout replied shakily, “Still coming.”
Still coming.
Mother of Gods.
She did a quick estimate in her tired brain, checking it twice to be sure she had her figures right.
As many as two million?
Maybe more?
No army in all Arthaloka had those kind of numbers.
Well, perhaps Hastinaga did. They certainly did, in fact. And if you counted the entire armed forces of the whole Burnt Empire, then it would be many, many times that number.
But these were not Burnt Empire forces!
They couldn’t possibly be.
Besides, the Burnt Empire wouldn’t waste an entire army on a mere wagon train out in the middle of the Red Desert.
And Hastinaga had no army composed entirely of deadwalkers.
Nobody did.
Not even Aqron.
She knew Jarsun was behind this attack. It bore his distinctive mark. The use of supernatural creatures out of myth and legend. The relentless attack. The sheer scale of the assault—not an attempt at conquering or subduing, but simply intended to wipe out. Eliminate. Slaughter. Yes, this was her husband’s work for certain.
No other force in all Arthaloka hated her with so much passion. For that matter, no one else, politically motivated or otherwise, hated her at all. Her father had been well loved, not a feudal tyrant but a benign overseer of his kingdom’s resources and a democratic dispenser of justice. Her family had ruled at the people’s pleasure and with their full support for an eon. Aqron might not have been a utopia, but it was certainly not the dystopia that it was rumored to have become under Jarsun.
And Jarsun’s vengeance was epic. Insatiable.
But where was he getting all these deadwalkers from, and how many more could there be?
And what would happen when they ran out of arrows in a few minutes?
Aqreen continued firing the last of her precious missiles as these queries swarmed through her mind.