Gardan, who had been taking reports from his men, said, “Highness, there were full thirty and five assassins in this basement and the rooms above. All either fought so our men had no choice but to kill or turned and slew one another, then threw themselves upon their own weapons.” Gardan held out something to the Prince. “They all wore these, Highness.” In his hand was an ebony hawk on a gold chain.
Then there was an abrupt silence, not as if the men had stopped their movements, but rather as if something had been heard and all had instantly halted to listen, yet there was no sound. An odd dampening of sound occurred, as if a heavy, oppressive presence had entered the room, and an eerieness descended upon Arutha and his men for a brief moment. Then a chill fell over the room. Arutha felt his neck hair rise, as some primordial dread filled him. Something alien had entered the room, an unseen but palpable evil. As Arutha turned to say something to Gardan and the others, a soldier shouted, “Highness, I think this one is alive. He moved!” He sounded eager to please his Prince. Then a second soldier said, “This one, too!” Arutha saw the two soldiers lean over the fallen assassins.
All in the basement gasped in horror as one of the corpses moved, his hand shooting upward to seize the kneeling soldier by the throat. The corpse sat up, forcing the soldier upward. The terrible wet cracking sound of the soldiers throat being crushed echoed in the room. The other corpse sprang upward, sinking his teeth in the neck of the second guard, ripping open his throat while Arutha and his men were rooted in shocked silence. The first dead assassin tossed away the choking soldier and turned. Fixing milk-white eyes upon the Prince, the dead man smiled. As if from a great distance, a voice sounded from the grinning maw. “Again we meet, Lord of the West. Now shall my servants have you, for you have not brought your meddling priests. Rise! Rise, O my children! Rise, and kill!”
Around the room the corpses began to twitch and move and soldiers gasped and offered prayers to Tith, the soldiers’ god. One, thinking quickly, hacked the head off the second corpse as it started to rise. The headless corpse shuddered and fell, but began to rise once more while the rolling head mouthed silent curses. Like grotesque marionettes manipulated by a demented puppeteer, the bodies rose, in jerks and spasms. Jimmy, his voice almost quavering, said, “I think we should have waited on the temples’ pleasure.”
Gardan shouted, “Protect the Prince!” and men leaped at the animated corpses. Like crazed butchers in a cattle pen, soldiers began madly chopping in all directions. Gore spattered the walls and all who stood in the room, but the bodies continued to rise.
Soldiers slipped in the blood and found themselves overwhelmed by cold, slimy hands that gripped arms and legs. Some managed throttled cries as dead fingers closed around their throats or teeth bit hard into their flesh.
Soldiers of the Prince of Krondor hacked and slashed, sending limbs flying through the air, but the hands and arms only flopped madly about the floor like bleeding fish out of water. Arutha felt a tugging at his leg and looked down to see a severed hand gripping at his ankle. A frantic kick sent the hand flying across the room to strike the opposite wall.
Arutha shouted, “Get out and hold closed those doors!” Soldiers swore as they cut and kicked their way through the blood and pulped flesh before them. Many of the soldiers, hardened veterans, were coming close to panic. Nothing in their experience had prepared them for the horror they faced in that basement. Each time a body was knocked down, it would but try to rise once more. And each time a comrade fell, he stayed down.
Arutha led the way toward the door leading upstairs, the closest exit. Jimmy and Laurie followed. Arutha paused to cut apart another rising corpse and Jimmy dashed past the Prince. Jimmy reached the door first and swore as he looked up. Stumbling down the stairs toward them came the corpse of a beautiful woman, wearing a diaphanous gown, torn half way, with a spreading bloodstain at the waist. Her blank white eyes fastened on Arutha at the bottom of the stairs and she shrieked in delight. Jimmy ducked under a clumsy slash and drove his shoulder into her bloody stomach, shouting, “Ware the stairs!” They both went down and he was first to his feet, scrambling past her.
Arutha looked back into the basement and saw his men being pulled down. Gardan and several other soldiers had reached the safety of the far doors and were attempting to close them, while stragglers who were frantically attempting to reach them were being pulled down. A few valiant men were pulling closed the doors from inside, ignoring a sure sentence of death. The floor was a sea of gore, wet and treacherous, and many soldiers slipped and fell, never to rise again. Detached body parts seemed somehow to gather together and corpses would stand once more. Remembering the creature in the palace and how it had gained in strength as time passed, Arutha shouted, “Bar the doors!”