Erik raced from his tent, barely dressed, holding his sword. Battle-hardened soldiers were fleeing in terror, while others struggled at the front. He grabbed one man, and shouted, “What is it?”
The man’s eyes were wide with horror and he could only point to the front of the line as he pulled free of Erik’s grasp and ran. Erik hurried to the front of the line, and for a moment he couldn’t understand what he saw.
His men were fighting a vicious action against the invader, and he leaped forward, shouting, “All units to the line!”
Then he saw one of the men locked in struggle with a Kingdom soldier who wore the tunic of a different Kingdom unit. For a second he wondered if they had been infiltrated. Then he saw the man’s face, and the hair on Erik’s neck and arms stood up. He felt revulsion unlike anything he had known in his short life.
The soldier trying to kill his former companion was dead. His lifeless eyes were still rolled up in his head and the flesh of his face was pallid and slack. But his movements were deliberate as he swung his sword.
Erik jumped forward and severed the thing’s head from its body with a single blow. The head rolled away, but the body kept swinging the sword. Erik hacked again and severed the creature’s arm, yet the creature pressed forward.
Jadow Shati leaped past Erik and cut the creature’s leg out from under it. The corpse toppled over.
“Man, they won’t stop.”
Erik recognized the danger. Beyond the horror of facing men already dead, which had caused one man in four to run in fear, the dead were unrelenting. They could not be stopped unless they were hacked to pieces. And while one was being butchered, another would strike and kill a Kingdom soldier.
Then Erik saw a freshly killed Kingdom soldier rise up, his eyes rolled up in his head, and turn to attack his former companions.
“How do we fight them?” shouted Jadow.
“Fire!” said Erik. He turned and shouted, “Hold them here!” and ran to the rear. Men were running forward to answer the alarm, and Erik held up his hands, halting a score of them. “Go to the rear and get all the hay the cavalry left.” He pointed to where the road narrowed. “Lay it from there, to there.” He indicated another point opposite it across the road. Then he ran to another squad who were about to run to the front, and shouted, “Strip the tents! Get everything that will burn and pile it on the hay.”
“What hay, Captain?” asked one soldier.
“When you get back with the tents, you’ll see the hay.”
Erik hurried to the rear, where the engineers had been sleeping under their partially completed catapults. They were up and buckling on weapons, ready to defend their war engines if necessary. “Are any of these finished?” asked Erik.
The Captain of Engineers, a stocky man with a grey beard, said, “This one is ready, Captain, and that other over there is just about ready to go. What is going on?”
Erik grasped the man’s arm. “Go to the front. See where our forward positions are. Return here and aim your catapult at that location.”
The Captain of Engineers ran off, while Erik turned to the rest of his crew. “How many of you will it take to finish that other catapult?”
One of the engineers said, “Just two of us, Captain. All we have to do is install the locking clamps on the arm. We could have finished last night, but we wanted to get supper.”
“Go finish it. The rest of you, come with me.”
He led them to the baggage train and shouted to the soldiers guarding it, “Get to the front and hold!”
They ran off, and Erik pointed to a pair of wagons sitting on the side of the road. He asked the engineers, “Can any of you hitch up those horses?”
All of them answered they could, so Erik said, “Get half that oil to the front, where you’ll see them building a barricade, and the other half to the catapults.”
He ran back to the front. The plan would only work if they could keep the dead soldiers outside the barricade. And until that task was finished, Erik could serve his cause best by using his power to hack apart each dead soldier trying to get past the diamonds.
Miranda said, “We must get Pug and Tomas!”
They watched from a vantage point among the trees upon the hillside, as the Kingdom forces rallied to repulse the first wave of undead soldiers. Then Nakor heard horns blowing at the rear of Fadawah’s army. Men under arms gathered and formed up behind the struggle taking place at the diamonds. “Yes,” said Nakor. “Get Pug and Tomas, and Ryana if she’s there.”
Miranda vanished.
Nakor heard a trumpet sound, and the Kingdom forces at the diamonds retreated to a barrier wall that had been building rapidly behind them. They leaped over it and those who were wounded were dragged up and over it by their comrades. No man wished to die and turn against his comrades.