Frank Tuttle - The Banshee's walk

Evis pointed. I found the man he meant. He was on his back, a pair of longbow arrows lodged deep in his chest.

As I watched, the man sat up, snapped off both arrows with no apparent hesitation or pain, and then rose to his feet and picked up a sword before calmly and methodically beginning to slaughter any injured soldiers stirring in the yard.

“That’s not considered good sportsmanship,” whispered Evis. “Dead man or not.”

I shuddered. Because the red-scarfed man was certainly dead. As he was joined by a dozen of his brethren, and then more and more and more staggered to their feet, I realized why they all seemed so familiar.

They were dressed in rags. Some were barely dressed at all. All were filthy. Many were barefoot. But even in their disarray, there was something familiar about them all.

They were familiar because I knew them. They were the Broken-the beggars, the weed-heads, the drunkards, the addicts. The men who’d survived the War in word only. The ones who’d returned with limbs intact, but their spirits slain or mortally, incurably wounded.

And then I knew they hadn’t survived. They hadn’t returned. Not as the living.

They belonged to the Corpsemaster. They always had. They walked among us, begging, lying still and silent in rags in alleys, haunting the docks, scrambling under porches and stoops-among us, but not living.

They’d just been waiting. Waiting for Hisvin’s call.

My heart sank. We knew. We knew the Corpsemaster’s dark secret, knew the source of his secret, private army-they were our dead. Harvested during the War, when there had been so many. He’d raised them up and he’d kept them walking and he’d brought them home, all so he could keep them against a day such as today.

Evis turned away from the carnage. His dead white eyes held the same realization.

Darla joined us. I pulled her away before she saw too much.

“Who won?” she asked. “Is it over?”

“Can’t say. Catapults are gone, though. They won’t be building any new ones tonight, either.”

Darla frowned. “Then why do you look like you’ve seen your own ghost?”

Evis spoke before I could answer.

“Damn,” he said. “Damn damn damn.”

I whirled. Evis had already turned from the window, and was heading for the door.

“Time to go, ladies and banshees,” he said. “Right now.”

Before I could speak, he laid hands to the makeshift barricade against the door and simply tore it away.

Another casual heave pulled the bar from its mounts. He didn’t bother with the locks. He just shoved the door right out of its frame.

I did risk a glance out the window. I did see soldiers ride out of the woods. They cleared a section of yard of Hisvin’s dead by riding them down, or pinning them to the ground with lances.

Behind the mounted soldiers were more horses. They carried wheeled things behind them, things I’d never seen-fat black iron cylinders, each as long as a man was tall, and open and flared at one end. Each of the contrivances was riding on a pair of sturdy iron wheels and accompanied by four men on foot.

The men quickly unhitched the things from their teams and wheeled them around so that the open ends pointed toward us. Then they gathered at the front of each contraption and busied themselves with bags and boxes.

Evis grabbed me.

“No time,” he said. “Go!”

Darla grabbed my hand as I was propelled through the door. “I need an answer,” she said.

We ran. Evis scooped a cussing Mama up and carried her while she kicked and scratched.

“To what?”

“You know what. Are we, or aren’t we?”

Sara and Victor joined our charge. Victor took the fore, while Sara guarded the rear.

We got down to the second floor before the mob ascending the stairs collided with Victor.

Shouts turned to screams. I saw a couple of bodies go flying over the banister, arms flapping all the way down. I shouldered my way to the front and knocked a hatchet out of some terrified kid’s hand and pushed Victor’s blade aside as it flashed toward the throat of poor Scatter.

They kept coming. Their faces told me Scatter and his brethren at the front of the charge would’ve run rather than face a trio of halfdead, but the mob behind them pushed them on.

Victor snarled at me. I shoved my way in front of him, lashed out with a vicious toe-kick in some unfortunate’s groin, and just as Scatter flung his dagger at Victor and dived headlong over the rail there was a new blast and something struck the House below us with enough force to send us to our knees.

Victor dropped his blade and simply grabbed and threw. I used knees and elbows and together we cleared the stairs.

Smoke billowed, rising up. Another thunderous blast rang out, and another bone-jarring explosion sounded deep inside the House. There was a crash like a landslide and the wall beside us buckled so badly the shattered ends of timbers protruded suddenly through the cracked plaster.

Evis joined the fray, surging ahead with such abandon he outpaced us all and was quickly surrounded by the men we’d just been fighting. All fled down the stairs, fight forgotten. They scarcely acknowledged each other as another blast and explosion added to the smoke and the panic.

Darla’s hand slipped into mine.

The House shook. Somewhere very close, parts of it collapsed with the sound of mountains breaking.

“Well?”

“We will,” I said. “If we get out of here.”

“Promise? No delaying, no excuses, no years and years of waiting?”

Another blast. The stairs tilted. I grabbed Mama, who nearly went off.

“No waiting. Promise.”

We ran. The stairs buckled and the walls leaned. Shafts of bright light sliced through the dark, here and there, and when I remembered there was no daylight I knew they must be from fires.

We reached the foot of the stairs. The room was mostly buried in debris. The hall that led to the kitchen was choked nearly shut by the remains of the collapsed second floor.

An arrow zipped through a gap in the wall and went skittering by my feet.

A dozen of the staff were trying to open a path through the wreckage. Scatter was among them. He turned to me, his bloody face imploring.

“All of you,” I said. “Follow us. If you so much as spit, Victor here will gut you. Got it?”

Another blast, another sudden fall of stone and wood.

Nods all around. Those with weapons dropped them.

“Good. The rest?”

“Either in the tunnels or dead,” said Scatter. “Seen Lank head down when the first catapult threw.”

“The Lady?”

“Down there, I reckon.”

Shouts sounded outside. I could hear them plain through the many gaps in the walls.

Evis came charging up, trailing smoke and ashes. “We can still reach the other tunnel,” he said, coughing. I’d never seen a halfdead cough before. “Need to go now, though, while they reload.”

Darla’s grip on my hand tightened.

“Forget the tunnels. They’d just dig us out. Got thirty artists in there too. Can’t just leave them there.”

“Finder, listen to me. We need to get underground. Right now.”

“Take your people and go,” I said. “I wish you luck. But we’re not taking to the tunnels.”

“You’d go where the Corpsemaster won’t dare?”

“Can you think of a better hiding place?”

Evis snarled, muttered something to Victor and Sara, and stalked off toward the gallery. He did not take the door that led to the second tunnel. He did give it a damned good kick as he passed.

Darla found me a sooty half-smile. “Please tell me you’ve thought this out.”

“In detail,” I lied. I grabbed her briefly, held her close. “Trust me,” I whispered. Forty pairs of eyes looked to me for salvation.