Роберт Асприн - Forever After

“Are they attacking us because we’re from Faltane?” Jancy asked. “ I’m not from Faltane.”

“I’m certainly not from Faltane!” agreed Calk Mallanik. The elf had nocked an arrow, but he wasn’t poised to shoot. Targets were in embarrassing oversupply, and it seemed unlikely that an arrow was going to do more damage than three centuries of burial had already accomplished.

“Anyway, we weren’t even born when the trouble started,” Jancy said.

“Look, every member of the Voroshek dynasty was named ‘the Ill-Tempered!” the hermit shouted. “What possible excuse do you have for thinking that the last distillation of the line would need a reason for feeding us all our entrails?”

Since the boundary the dust devils swept was the end of the danger area — if there were soldiers buried beyond that point, that was fine: they were buried —Jancy thought her party ought to be able to win free. The mummies moved with slow deliberation, and the slope of the salt-compacted ridge was as sheer as a castle wall now that the vortices had excavated the soil from alongside it.

On the other hand, the mummies were trained soldiers. Already troops were forming tortoise formations by squatting with their broad, rectangular shields sloped across their backs. Further squads scrambled up the layer of their fellows and formed a second step for yet more mummies to mount.

And there was Hel’s own plenty of mummies, that there was.

Jancy pulled Sombrisio from her right hand and gave the ring to Calla. “Here you go,” she said. “I’m going to be busy.”

She untied her buckler and drew the great ax Castrator from its belt loops. Her party was almost going to reach the edge of the danger zone before Voroshek’s soldiers climbed to the top of the ridge.

Almost.

A pair of mummies stood on the backs of their fellows, clambering the rest of the way onto the ridge. They thrust pole arms toward Jancy’s legs. These leaders weren’t a danger to her; she could have jumped the halberds and raced ahead to safety. By the time the last of the party jounced along with the packhorses, however, the two would have become a platoon.

Castrator swept the heads from both mummies. Their necks were tinder dry. The flesh splintered despite the keenness of the ax edge.

The bodies continued to climb the ridge. Jancy kicked them sideways, tumbling the doubly dead backward. Their fall upset the stepped array of their fellows like a house of cards. Corpses spilled like jackstraws. When they crashed into the ground, some of the bodies broke apart in a litter of limbs and powdered flesh. Even these twitched feebly as they attempted to execute Voroshek’s unheard commands.

Like a tongue of water driven through a dike by the storm surge, another force of mummified soldiers climbed the ridge in front of the party. Squill and the hermit stopped short of the lethal obstruction.

A pair of retainers had thundered past Jancy while she was occupied. They rushed the mummies at the side of the‘ Calla Mallanik.

Calla aimed his beringed fist. “Thou art dead!” he shouted.

Voroshek’s soldiers needed a lot of convincing, as Jancy knew, but Sombrisio was up to the job. A mummy took the force of the ring’s displeasure in the chest and folded up, disintegrating within its armor as it fell.

The only problem with Sombrisio — as a weapon, that is — was that she had an individual focus. If you wanted to blot out an army — and Jancy wanted very much to blot out an army — you had to do it one soldier at a time. That wasn’t going to be fast enough.

A human retainer hurled himself against the forest of mummy-borne pole arms. This band was equipped primarily with short-bladed pikes. Groaning, “Death and glory!” the retainer managed to gather half a dozen of the points into his torso, immobilizing the weapons until they could be pulled clear.

An elven retainer leaped into the gap the human had opened, wielding a curved saber in either hand. Even before he struck his first blow, a mummy sliced through the elf s armor of grasses beaten hard by the feet of elvish maidens dancing to the Goddess on Samhain.‘

The mummy’s guisarme stabbed deep into the retainer’s belly. The blade’s hook came out with a coil of intestine.

The mummy yanked back with all the supernal strength of its preserved muscles. The elf lifted his left toe to his right knee, went up on point, and pirouetted. His sabers whickered as they spun down across a broad circle of Voroshek’s army like the blades of a food processor. Edges of elf-cast dendritic steel lowered the height of nearby mummies in a sequence of delicate slices.

His solo maneuver completed, the retainer bowed gracefully and fell. He made a very flat corpse.

Calla Mallanik collapsed the ramp up which reinforcements clambered by blasting mummies at the edge of the bottom layer with Sombrisio. Boy, once a mummy was killed, he was dead . There wasn’t so much as a bone or a patch of mold remaining within the ragged armor and accouterments.

There were still mummies standing between Jancy’s party and safety, though. Jancy strode forward, shrieking, “Princess!” her war chant, to end the problem.

Three pikemen lunged toward Jancy’s chest, and a fourth mummified soldier swung his guisarme down at her horned helmet. Jancy griped her buckler’s two close-set handles in her left fist.

She swept the pikes aside with her chattering shield rim. One point ripped muscles-deep along eight inches of her left triceps, but in this state Jancy didn’t notice the contact. She stepped inside the arc of the guisarme, swinging her bearded ax.

Castrator combined the weight and shock effect of an ax with the long cutting edge of a sword. Jancy’s stroke carried the blade through the neck and shoulder of the mummy wielding the guisarme. The soldier wore a shirt of high-quality chain mail. Most of the welded, double-wired linlcs held, but the dried flesh within exploded out the neck and armholes as powder.

The mummy continued to march forward. His guisarme fell, still in the grip of the severed arm. Because the decapitated soldier had no eyes to guide him, he plunged into the swamp a few strides on. Something swallowed him, then burped happily.

Jancy stabbed a mummy through the face with her spiked shield boss. The creature stolidly shortened itsgrip on its pike in order to pierce the shield-maiden since she was too close for a normal pike thrust.

Castrator crunched through the mummy’s left knee. Jancy flexed her shield arm, hurling the unbalanced semi-corpse back down the desert side of the ridge. He’d probably climb back up despite his one leg, but nis presence wouldn’t matter by the time he arrived.

Jancy stepped forward. There were mummies allaround her. Voroshek’s soldiers were clumsy and their pole arms were the wrong weapons for a close-in fight, but there were still a lot of them.

Too many of them, if she’d let herself think about it, but reflexes and bloodlust ruled Jancy Gaine in a fight.

She swung Castrator to the right and the edge of her buckler left in counterbalanced blows. The boss spike wasn’t as useful as it would have been against living — fully living — opponents. She smashed the steel rim across a mummy’s eyes instead, crushing the sunken orbs and the bones of their sockets. The tactic must have worked, because the soldier stopped where he was and prodded the air hesitantly with his halberd.

An elf retainer fought in a circle of the enemy on the other side of the ridge from Jancy. A guisarme blow lopped off both his feet.

“Death and glory!” the elf cried, striding forward on his ankles. He left circular pools of golden ichor behind him. His ripple-bladed kris decapitated a pair of mummies with a single stroke.