Apparently the other assault groups had enjoyed about the same quality of luck as the one I was tied to. That made me happy, if only because it meant more of the stupid bastards who marched me in here had spent the last half-hour terrified and screaming.

  That was of little consolation, however, because the idiotic stubbornness that had driven them all into the fort at first was still present now, and once the three of our groups reunited I was struck with the news that we’d be delving deeper still. It could, I supposed, have been worse. If they’d spontaneously ordered a mass suicide instead.

  Well things weren’t quite that bad. We’d regathered our numbers and, despite the losses, still assembled a full eighty men to continue in our scouring of the fort. If another group as big as any we’d faced already showed up, it would be taken apart easily.

  The worry, of course, was that one far bigger would appear.

  My worry, not anyone else’s. If the idiots in charge were actually capable of thinking that far ahead, they certainly weren’t able to draw any rational conclusions from the exercise. No, there wasn’t such thing as a good reason not to die as far as they were concerned.

  I fucking hate soldiers.

  Well, looking at the silver lining of things, I’d get to see a lot of those hated soldiers die, so that was something. We continued through the fort, this time watching our surroundings rather more cautiously for obvious reasons.

  Entirely by accident, this meant that the great crowd of lumbering idiots I was stuck working with actually observed a few things about the interior of the place. Namely that it had been far more recently occupied than its exterior would’ve shown.

  Most attributed this to the shamblers and ghuls, but I wasn’t so sure. Neither was Gruin.

  “Ghuls don’t give a toss about living,” the Grynkori spat with disgust, “they’d sooner see your life end than make sure theirs doesn’t. No, I say something else is pulling their strings. Something that ordered that retreat purely to conserve its forces.”

  “If it’s conserving forces, it’ll be for something, right?” I didn’t want to think that, but the logic wasn’t hard to piece together.

  “Silence!” one of the officers snapped, a younger man who I imagined was only in the army because his father couldn’t find something better for him to do. I hid my grin as Gruin rounded on him, speaking with a low voice.

  “If you speak to me like that again, I’m going to smash your pretty head in so hard it’ll sink down into that scrawny neck and pop back up out of your arsehole.”

  Normally a threat like that would’ve gotten him flogged, at best, or hanged at worst. But this was far from a confident officer, and seeing his authority dismissed so openly left him without any bite remaining. He just paled at the threat and forced his eyes forwards as we continued speaking.

  “Aye, if it’s conserving forces then it has a plan for those forces,” Gruin finally replied. I just shivered. I’d seen undead scrambling around and killing at random, and the closest thing to a plan I’d ever seen from them involved hunting specifically me across the country.

  Oh God, were these ones going to start doing that? I suddenly realised there might be some connection between the creatures in this fort and the monsters I’d been fleeing from for so long. That thought alone kept me from concentrating fully as Gruin continued speaking.

  “Oi, pay attention,” he hissed. The thought of being bludgeoned with a hammer suddenly reorganised my priorities, and I did.

  “When whatever is doing this makes its move, we’ll need to move against it. Even if our orders contradict that.”

  Another jolt of fear.

  “You’re describing desertion,” I told the Grynkori, and found him nodding without a scrap of hesitancy.

  “And we might be hanged for it, but if so then it just needs doing. I won’t sit by and watch an undead powerful enough to control forces like this as it lives on to do as it pleases.”

  There was, I realised, some scrap of nobility to the Grynkori’s conviction there. Easy to consider him randomly violent but here he was willing to pay the ultimate price for the sake of destroying a true evil.

  That didn’t strike me as a good thing of course, merely another obstacle between myself and my eventual goal of death by old age. I kept that irritated scorn from showing on my face, naturally, and forced it to smile.

  “Just another afternoon’s work then,” I quipped. Gruin seemed to approve more than I’d have expected, grinning and slapping me on the back hard enough to sever a lesser man’s spine. We weren’t left to continue discussing tactics, or whatever passed for them in our heads, much longer than that. New discoveries were made.

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  Among the most terrifying was the presence of other cultures in the fort.

  Undead are one thing, but the Anglysh really cannot abide people from an almost identical culture who live a handful of miles away and speak slightly differently. At the time of course, I was as culturally Anglysh as they came. My exemption from the resounding disgust about the room as they saw the pots and carvings we moved past was purely due to my already being an outsider to this particular region of the country.

  Oddly engraved iron made up most of the things we moved past, statues and sheet-metal worked by hands not known to us. I didn’t miss that there seemed a few plates and other such things, features of human life rather than undead, though I dared not point it out for fear of pissing off the officers and finding myself flogged.

  All of us remained on edge as we moved past the points of interest, naturally, left wired and twitchy by our consecutive ambushes already.

  The officers, oddly enough, seemed the most at ease. At the time I considered that a manifestation of our species’ natural hierarchy, the wheat distinguishing itself from chaff.

  Absolute toss of course, they weren’t scared because if everything went tits-up they’d be at the back of the fighting, or, at worst, doing the same thing all the rest of us did but with full plate armour instead of a helm, breastplate and chainmail only.

  Which really said more about their intelligence than their courage, because taking reassurance from a little thing like armour when we were marching towards…Well, anyway, you’ll see what we were marching towards.

  The corridors yawned ahead of us like some great maw, chipped walls made jagged enough to be its teeth at parts, and I heard a hundred scrapes of steel shuffling through the air as our forces continued. Not a big place, this fort, but big enough to instill fear. Big enough that there were corners to hide behind and ambushes to set.

  I’d spent enough time getting attacked by surprise in tight conditions that I was more than a little sensitive to our situation, and though I tried to keep it from happening, my grin emerged once more. I saw a few of the men around me staring sidelong, muttering between themselves. There was no time to hear what they were saying.

  Deeper we went, and eventually our march ran out of fort ahead of us.

  “Halt!” one of the officers called. Devyne stood right beside him and actually stumbled for a second as he forcibly obeyed, apparently too preoccupied with the danger all around us to react quickly.

  The men at their backs did much better, perhaps only to find an excuse not to head on farther into the dark.

  “This is the central chamber,” one of the officers called out, “enter it in formation, ranks and shields up, blades ready.”

  The orders were muddled and near-incoherent, rearranged by their speaker’s panic, but serjeants interpreted them and soldiers obeyed. We approached the thick, dark wood of the double doors leading to the fort’s centre and headed into it.

  A charnel stink greeted us as we forced our way through, air thicker with iron than a smithy. But it was not forged metal we smelled. Blood was the source.

  My eyes watered as I looked around at it and trembled.

  On all sides a stone chamber extended from us, opening wide and with a high ceiling. It looked like it had once been a throne room, but now the only regal things about it were the heights of savagery displayed by what remained within. Gore crusting walls, puddling on floors, entrails strewn over torch sconces and swarmed by flies. The putrefaction hit like a sledgehammer, actually sent a ripple through our formation as men recoiled instinctively.

  And none of it was half so terrible as the beings awaiting us at the back.

  Ghuls and shamblers of course, by the looks of things there were all the ones we’d left alive and more. Heading them, though, was a being that looked altogether more human. Too human. Tall and pale, dark-haired, almost aristocratic with their sharp features and sharper eyes. They gazed out at the four score men crowding into the chamber as if we were of no more concern than a gnat upon their knee.

  This man, whoever he was, did not move like a person did. Uncoiling from his seat in the throne and seeming to glide ahead.

  “Welcome, gentlemen,” he—it—called out. I felt a shiver run down my spine at the sound of its voice. Too clear, too piercing, too cold. The distance between his lips and my ears, at least twenty yards, seemed to be no distance at all. I felt as if he were whispering his words to me from inches away.

  My officers, I could only imagine, found the effect similarly uncanny. They didn’t hesitate even a second to scream out the order to charge.

  Unfortunately, their men hesitated to obey it. Someone once said you should never give an order that won’t be listened to. Well, I saw why at that moment. Already hesitating to do as they were told, all the thoughts of desertion and flight bubbled up to the forefront of their minds with far less resistance than they normally would have faced.

  I’ll admit, I was considering much the same thing of course. But I realised how much faster ghuls were than men in a dead sprint, and how tireless a shambler was.

  Once again, I was forced to pick between the easy choice of scarpering like a frightened animal and the more painful option that helped with long-term survival. I was practical enough to make the right choice again, if nothing else, and my voice soon boomed out.

  “Let’s fucking get them!” I cried, probably not the most creative or original battle-cry I could’ve coined but, if nothing else, one I thought would resonate with the baser violence of the average soldier. It did, and more than I’d have expected it to. More by far.

  To this day I have no idea why, but the violent idiots around me started whooping and screaming as they raised their weapons and rushed on ahead to meet the enemy face-first. Fortunately, they were close enough that we remained in a roughly defensive formation purely from not having the space to break it over our jog.

  We’d have died in seconds if that weren’t the case, because with one ghul for every half-dozen of us and ten times as many shamblers the fight was more skewed than any other. I estimated half the maximum capacity of this fort was stuck fighting and dying in its throne room.

  Of that, perhaps a third of it was made up by our own numbers alone. The bodies came in like a crushing jaw, their protruded weapons its teeth, and a tremble of realisation ran through our formation as the combat unravelled.

  Most of us would die here.

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