Baldwin looked down and favored his prey with a grim smile.

  Private Ismail had just stooped down and was trying to shift the rock that had Baldwin’s friend Dickon trapped. Dickon’s left arm looked to be crushed underneath a roughly three hundred pound piece of mountain, and his face had noticeably paled in the couple of minutes he’d been pinned there.

  Ismail turned his head to look back in the revenant’s direction, speaking as he moved.

  “Hey, I think we could shift this if we work togeth—”

  Baldwin stepped in and slashed cleanly through Dickon’s throat with his dagger, a smooth cut that he knew would lead to a swift death.

  Sorry, buddy, he thought. Hopefully the master will raise you as an intelligent undead, and we can be on the same team again. Until then. Rest in peace.

  Ismail reacted in a startled rush, speaking and half-rising at the same moment.

  “Bal—”

  The revenant choke-slammed Ismail into the cliffside, shoving a rough elbow into his throat. Baldwin heard a gagging sound as he compressed the Private’s neck with the weight he was putting behind his elbow.

  Ismail’s hands flailed, searching his waist for a weapon. But Baldwin’s own dagger was already in motion. He stabbed deep into Ismail’s guts, twisted the blade, and pulled to the side.

  The Private let out a long, pained whimper.

  His eyes pleaded with Baldwin, and the Private’s hands went from searching for his weapon to trying to stanch the bleeding coming from the line Baldwin had cut across his belly.

  Baldwin continued sawing in and out, up and down, side to side, with the dagger, drawing little pained noises from Ismail with each motion. It was exquisite. Before his victim could pass out from pain and blood loss, the revenant leaned in close to whisper in his ear.

  “Tybalt says that this is for all those young girls…”

  Ismail let out a shocked, unsteady breath, but it was impossible to tell if it was from the words or the sheer physical trauma. His body was failing rapidly at this point, his movements weak and jerky.

  After a few more seconds, the dying man’s bowels released. He shuddered once more, and then Baldwin felt Ismail go limp. The revenant immediately released the pressure his elbow was applying to the man’s throat, and Ismail tumbled to the ground, guts spilling in mangled chunks from the new orifice Baldwin had carved him.

  As for you, I don’t care if the beastfolk eat you, Baldwin thought cheerily. I don’t think Tybalt would go to the effort of making you into an intelligent undead, and it’s not as if it would be much of an upgrade over a regular zombie anyway. Rest in pieces.

  Then he heard the sound of footsteps landing on rocks behind him.

  Baldwin spun around and faced the noise. As he turned and faced the beastfolk, two arrows flew. Before Baldwin could move—assuming he had wanted to—he took arrows to the shoulder and the abdomen. He dropped to the ground, deliberately going limp, and a third arrow struck him in the neck.

  The punctures hurt him a little, but it was wonderfully weird that the pain was so much less than similar wounds he had received back when he was alive.

  As Tybalt had pointed out once, being undead had some fairly significant perks.

  I won’t give him the satisfaction of telling him he was right, Baldwin thought.

  He clapped a hand to his neck, adopted an expression of horror, then pretended to gradually weaken. His hand dropped back down to his side. Then the revenant lay still, head tilted back, eyes wide open and unblinking, as the beastfolk withdrew from his line of sight.

  “—killed their own?” he heard one of them say, a scrap of an exchange that was partly carried away by the wind.

  That could be a problem, if Volusia managed to capture and torture the beastfolk to gain information. It could theoretically be inconvenient if they started spinning tales of having attacked Baldwin right after he finished killing Private Ismail. But Baldwin was dead to the world now, so it shouldn’t matter.

  You took too much time enjoying it, he silently reproached himself.

  Tybalt hadn’t given Baldwin any specific orders on what to do with Private Ismail. But Baldwin had known that Tybalt didn’t like him, and Baldwin himself had always found Ismail to be a creep. Whether in brothels or in carrying out attacks on villages, the dead man had preferred girls as young as Baldwin’s own daughter.

  It was despicable, on an instinctive level.

  Baldwin darted his eyes from side to side, scoping out what was going on with as little motion as possible.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone within sight.

  He lifted his head slightly and looked around.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Nope. No one’s watching. I can’t see anything from here.

  With the rockslide, large chunks of stone had fallen so as to separate the squad into a few groups. Baldwin was the only moving thing in his section now, but he knew that wouldn’t last. Either the squad would come to recover their dead, or the beastfolk would come back and loot the bodies.

  The revenant took a minute to smear blood over his body. The arrow wounds weren’t bleeding noticeably, so he doused all those areas in borrowed blood from Dickon, who had bled like a stuck pig since his arm was crushed.

  Baldwin also switched his own, blood-soaked dagger with Ismail’s clean one, placing his weapon in the dead man’s hand as if he had gone down fighting instead of crying and whimpering. There was no sense in making people wonder what Baldwin had been doing before he died, or more specifically why he was holding such a gory blade.

  There was shouting from over the mound of stones that separated Baldwin from the largest of the groups of soldiers.

  “Hold fast, men!” Volusia was yelling.

  Baldwin guessed from the roar in response and the clanging of projectiles on solid wood that the men were in turtle formation, staying strong and secure behind their shield wall. Even if the beastfolk had laid a remarkable trap, they could not compete with the discipline and training of real soldiers.

  “Loose!” It was the Commander’s voice again, though the squad had not brought bows and arrows into this deployment. But some men always carried makeshift slings, and there would certainly be no shortage of stones to hurl.

  There was the sound of scattered projectiles being thrown up in the beastfolk’s direction. There weren’t many, and most of them loudly thudded against the sheer stone cliff. But Baldwin heard cries of pain from up the mountainside. Some of those stones had landed.

  There was a strong, clear male voice from up the mountainside.

  “Retreat!” it ordered.

  Baldwin lay as still as death, but he felt the urge to roll his eyes.

  So weak. They can’t take even a few casualties? They’ll never beat the Army fighting like that.

  And the call for retreat was apparently sincere. Baldwin heard the sound of the beastfolk clambering back up the mountainside. There were thuds and cries from occasional stones slung striking bare flesh, but Baldwin didn’t hear any loud noises of falling bodies or breaking bones. He guessed the beastfolk attackers had managed to escape more or less intact.

  It had undoubtedly helped that the squad was in terrible disorder, and the beastfolk commander was seemingly a weakling unwilling to take even small risks to secure the victory.

  Baldwin heard nothing for a while. He lay patiently in his place, still and waiting. Time was on his side. The longer he was on his own, supposedly dead, the less likely there would be much examination of his condition. The squad wouldn’t waste energy trying to resuscitate an obviously dead man. Not when there were sure to be wounded.

  He was just beginning to think of reporting back to Tybalt again when he heard the sound of men grunting to his side. There was the main body of the squad. A moment later, Baldwin heard shifting stones.

  It took several minutes of this before the soldiers had excavated a path through the stone wall that led from them to Baldwin. He was impressed that they bothered to do it at all, but the Nietian Army was very good at overcoming physical obstacles. With the varied biomes of Niet, they had to be skilled and persistent when faced with such a barrier.

  “Commander, we’re in!”

  Men shuffled through the gap to get out of their Commander’s way. Then Baldwin heard the sound of Volusia’s assured steps approaching.

  The Commander’s shadow fell over Baldwin. The revenant ordered every part of his body to stay still. He didn’t know how his pupil dilation worked or didn’t work now that he was undead, but he silently prayed to Tybalt’s dark god that there were no more such obvious reactions.

  “Specialist Curtis!” Volusia called.

  “Right away, sir!” a harried voice called.

  He’s calling Curtis? The Specialist was the squad’s only medic.

  Curtis rushed through the gap in the stone wall. The man was visible only in the edge of Baldwin’s peripheral vision, but he could see how unsteady the Specialist was. The situation probably had him stretched to his limits.

  “Yes, sir?” Curtis said.

  “Examine him!” Volusia ordered.

  Specialist Curtis bent down, leaning in front of Baldwin’s line of sight. He touched Baldwin’s chest over his heart.

  “There’s no pulse at all,” Specialist Curtis said. Baldwin could hear him trying to be patient, trying not to ask, Can I get back to the patients I can actually save?

  “Gods damn it!” Volusia shouted. “Fuck!”

  He let out a low, helpless growl, then a long exhale.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Curtis said.

  “Leave me alone for just a minute, Specialist,” Volusia said quietly.

  Curtis bowed his head slightly and moved back around the stones until he was outside of Baldwin’s sight range at least. Probably back to the other wounded in the squad, of whom Baldwin guessed there were at least a few.

  Perhaps the Specialist had moved out of hearing range, too, because after a minute, Volusia began talking to himself.

  “I made so many mistakes this time,” the Commander said. He paced back and forth in front of the revenant as he spoke. “Fuck. So many mistakes. I made so many mistakes. Didn’t even request ranged weapons. After years of doing this, I’m getting damn sloppy… I underestimated the enemy, and you paid the ultimate price for it.” He looked down into Baldwin’s cold, dead eyes. “You gave it all for us, and I wasn’t even totally sure I trusted you by the end. Those killed by falling rubble make a hefty loss, but the rockslide was outside of what I could have predicted. I can take that to the gods when they judge me. But if you’d just been armed for a ranged fight, maybe you would have stood a chance. I’m sorry, Baldy. I failed you.”

  The Commander bit his lip, and an expression of genuine remorse spread over his face.

  “I—I’ll make sure that your body gets back to your family. And we’ll kill all of these gods damned beastfolk this time. Do the whole fucking mountain, and the next mountain over, and the mountain after that, if that’s what it takes. This infestation has taken root for too long. They’ve started to become formidable. Militant. I… I wish I’d brought more men. Damn. Yeah. That was another mistake. But I’ll do what I can with what we have. One of ours is still worth ten of theirs. I swear, you and our other brothers in arms will be avenged a hundredfold.”

  It was a speech that might have moved Baldwin to tears, once. The sort of thing men who had stood together against enemies like these for years would naturally say when one of their brothers in arms had died.

  Instead of getting weepy, Baldwin naturally focused on having no reaction at all. He was dead to the world.

  Volusia stopped talking, let out a long sigh, then stooped, took Baldwin in his arms, and began to walk.