Paul Finch - Stronghold

Ranulf ran on down the hill, striking on all sides with sword and dagger. The others were already much further ahead. Even Red Guthric, personally bonded to Garbofasse, scrambled down the slope without looking back — until he too fell. A corpse had dropped on him from a tree. It was a naked stick figure, its skin hanging in empty folds, but it had sufficient strength to knock him to his knees, whereupon it clamped its teeth on the nape of his neck. Ranulf galloped alongside and drove his dagger so deeply between its ribs that its blade was wedged there. The spindly monster dropped Red Guthric and rounded on Ranulf. He slammed his curved sword through the middle of its chest, entirely transfixing it, but still it tried to grapple with him. Leaving both his weapons behind, Ranulf stepped away, stumbling on downhill. Red Guthric was back on his feet and came as well, but on wobbling legs. When another form blundered into his path — this one a bloated mass of swollen, purple flesh — and wrapped him in a bear-hug, he was unable to resist. Helpless, barely able to scream, Guthric was raised and broken across the monster's knee like a plank.

Ranulf ran on. FitzUrz and Tallebois were just ahead but, as the moon slipped behind clouds, they found themselves fleeing through complete darkness. When FitzUrz turned his ankle, it snapped like a stick. He howled as he fell. Ranulf swerved towards him, but before he could reach him another dead thing, gargling black filth but armed with a massive club, ghosted around the trunk of the nearest tree. Ranulf veered away as it commenced to land blow after blow on FitzUrz's unprotected skull.

Ranulf and Tallebois were now the only two left. Both were fleeing neck-and-neck when they skidded out from the trees onto the open bluff to the west of the castle. Vast numbers of the dead were already gathered there and now — as one — turned slowly to face them.

Tallebois slid to a halt, his mouth locking open, his eyes bulging. Ranulf grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him southwards rather than straight down the slope.

"There are too many!" the squire gibbered.

"Towards the river! Fast as you can!"

Ranulf buffeted more corpses out of their way as they ran. Claws slashed at them; he had to duck a mighty stroke from a long-handled Dane-axe. But the slope was at last dropping towards the Tefeidiad, the moonlit surface of which glittered just below them.

The last fifty yards were perhaps the worst.

"Use your strength, your weight… anything you've got!" Ranulf panted, as the dead closed in again.

Tallebois still had his dagger. When a woman, whose severed head hung down her back on a few sinews, reached out and caught him, he smote her hand off at the wrist.

"That's the way!" Ranulf shouted. He himself had managed to pick up a war-hammer. A corpse stumbled towards him and he swung the mighty cudgel, crushing its cranium. Another came towards him and he smashed its forehead — with such force that a soup of liquid brain matter spurted from its eye sockets.

The river was now tantalisingly close. Though a great mob of the dead were descending from behind, only a relative handful — three at the most — were in front.

"We can make it!" Ranulf shouted.

Tallebois was so racked with terror and fatigue that his voice squeaked. "We'll drown!"

"If you can't swim, just stay afloat. The current will carry us past the castle. We might be able to get ashore on its east side!"

" Might be able to?"

"Now you see why we aren't wearing mail!"

The final few feet of slope were steep, muddy and strewn with loose stones. They skidded and tripped their way to the bottom, blundering headlong into the final clutch of corpses. Ranulf hit the first one head-on, barrelling into its chest, catapulting it backward into the river. Tallebois wasn't so lucky. The other two caught hold of him, one wrapping its arms around his waist and burying its teeth into his naked left thigh, the other looping a skeletal arm around his neck, trying to throttle him. With gurgling bleats, Tallebois hacked with his dagger, but it had no effect. The would-be throttler bought its leering visage close to his tear-stained face. He slashed it back and forth, mangling it, chopping it away in chunks, exposing the grinning skull beneath, but not slowing its attack in the least. Its pendulous green tongue quivered as it hung from the chasm where its lower jaw had once been. It raked its bony claws across his chest and belly, drawing five crimson trails through the sooty grease.

And then Ranulf took its legs from under it.

He swept in with a two-handed blow so fierce that both the creature's knee joints were shattered, and the lower portions of its limbs sent spinning into the darkness. It fell thrashing to the ground. The other monster ceased its gnawing on Tallebois's thigh and swung around to face Ranulf. Its nose was missing, along with its upper lip, but its ivory teeth were fully intact and coated with blood. Taking possession of the sobbing squire's dagger, it came hard at Ranulf, aiming a blow that would have skewered him through the heart. He dodged it, spun around and brought the hammer full circle, catching the creature at the base of its backbone, breaking it clean through.

"Into the water!" he shouted, grabbing Tallebois, yanking him to his feet and hurling him over the last few feet of ground into the river.

Before Ranulf followed, he turned just once.

The rest of the revenants were only yards away, looking for all the world like some vast assembly of reeking remains ploughed from a plague pit, yet tottering down through the darkness towards him. The one whose spine he'd just broken was still on its feet, but now the upper part of its body had folded over until it hung upside down — as though it was made of paper.

Shaking his head at the sheer perversity of what he was witnessing, Ranulf threw the war-hammer into the midst of them, turned and dived into the Tefeidiad.

"I saw great heaps of munitions, my lord. Nails, chains, piles of pebbles from the river shore. Ahhh…"

Squire Tallebois gasped as Zacharius inserted another suture through his ripped-open thigh, using a needle that looked like a fishhook. Having washed the filth off with buckets of water from the well, both the squire and Ranulf were now warming themselves at a brazier inside the main stable block. Earl Corotocus, Navarre, du Guesculin and several other senior household knights stood around them, listening to their report. Fiery shadows played on their attentive faces as Tallebois spoke.

Ranulf, who had pointedly said nothing so far, climbed tiredly into his mail leggings. He and Tallebois had managed to scramble out of the river on the east side of the castle, but only with great difficulty. Having met no more of the dead there, they'd needed to clamber back down into the moat and squeeze themselves along the drain. Thankfully, the earl's men had pulled them up the garderobe chute, but by this time they'd been completely exhausted and the last thing Ranulf had wanted was a face-to-face interrogation.

"They were restocking the scoop-thrower, as we feared," the squire jabbered, a vague light of madness in his eyes. "By cockcrow tomorrow, I fancy we'd have been facing the iron hail again. All over again! The iron-"

"But you destroyed the blasted machine?" Corotocus asked.

"Absolutely, my lord. It can't be used any more, ahhh…" Tallebois gasped again as a particularly gruesome gash was closed with a single tight thread. "But there is something else. They had also piled up colossal blocks of stone, which looked as if they'd been freshly quarried. The sort a mason might use to lay foundations with."

"And?"

The squire shrugged. "The dead don't build, my lord… do they? Captain Garbofasse thought they were projectiles. He said this meant they were bringing the mangonels to the western bluff. That'd they'd be ready either later today or maybe tomorrow."