“The trucks have stalled,” reported Sam. “Though the wind’s practically a westerly. I think we’re getting too close to the hemispheres. We’ll have to walk from here.”
“Where are we?” Lirael asked. She stood up too quickly, and her head hit the canvas canopy, just missing one of the steel struts. There was a lot of noise outside now—shouting and the crash of hobnailed boots on the road—but behind all that there was also a constant dull booming. In her half-asleep state, it took a moment for her to understand it wasn’t thunder, which she half-expected, but something else.
The Dog jumped out over the tailgate, and Lirael followed, somewhat more sedately. They were still on the Perimeter road, she saw, and it looked like early morning. The moon was up, a slim crescent rather than the nearly full moon of the Old Kingdom. It was subtly different in shape and color, too, Lirael noted. Less silver, and more a pale buttercup yellow.
The booming noise was coming from farther south, and there was a faint whistling with it. Lirael could see bright flashes on the horizon there, but it was not lightning. There was thunder as well, to the west, and the flashes from that direction were definitely lightning. As she looked, Lirael thought she caught the faintest whiff of Free Magic, though the wind was indeed a southerly. And she could sense Dead somewhere up ahead. Not more than a mile away.
“What is that noise, and the lights?” she asked Sam, pointing south. He turned to look but had to step back before he could answer, as soldiers started to trot past the trucks.
“Artillery,” he said after a moment. “Big guns. They must be far enough back, so they aren’t affected by the Old Kingdom or the hemispheres and can still fire. Um, they’re sort of like catapults that throw an exploding device several miles, which hits the ground or blows up in the air and kills people.”
“A total waste of time,” interrupted Major Greene, who had come puffing up. “You can’t hear any shells exploding, can you? So all they’re doing is lobbing what might be as well be big rocks over, and even a direct hit with an unexploded shell won’t do anything to the Dead. It’ll just be a big mess for the ordnance people to clear up. Thousands of UXBs, and most of them white phosphorus. Nasty stuff! Come on!”
The Major puffed on past, with Lirael, the Dog, and Sam following. They left their packs in the trucks, and for a moment Lirael thought Mogget was still asleep in Sam’s. Then she saw the little white cat up ahead behind the first double-timing platoon, dashing along the roadside as if he were chasing a mouse. As he pounced, she recognized that was exactly what he was doing. Hunting something to eat.
“Where are we?” asked Lirael as she easily caught up to Major Greene. He looked at her, took a coughing breath, and nodded his head at Lieutenant Tindall, who was up ahead. Lirael got the hint. She ran forward to the younger officer and repeated her question.
“About three miles from the Perimeter’s Western Strongpoint,” replied Tindall. “Forwin Mill is about sixteen miles south of there, but hopefully we’ll be able to stop this Hedge at the Wall—First Platoon, halt!”
The sudden order surprised Lirael, and she ran on a few steps before she saw the soldiers in front had stopped. Lieutenant Tindall barked out some more orders, repeated by a sergeant at the front, and the soldiers ran off to either side of the road, readying their rifles.
“Cavalry, ma’am!” snapped Tindall, taking her arm and urging her to the side of the road. “We don’t know whose.”
Lirael rejoined Sam and drew her sword. They stared down the road, listening to the beat of hooves on the metaled road. The Dog stared, too, but Mogget played with the mouse he’d caught. It was still alive, and he kept letting it go, only to snap it up after it had run a few feet, holding it frantic and terrified in his partly open mouth.
“Not Dead,” pronounced Lirael.
“Or Free Magic,” said the Disreputable Dog with a loud sniff. “But very afraid.”
They saw the horse and rider a moment later. He was an Ancelstierran soldier, a mounted infantryman, though he had lost his carbine and saber. He shouted as he saw the soldiers.
“Get out of the way! Get out of here!”
He tried to ride on, but the horse shied as soldiers spilled out on the road. Someone grabbed the bridle and brought the horse to a halt. Others dragged the man roughly from the saddle as he tried to slap the horse on with his hands.
“What’s going on, man?” asked Major Greene roughly. “What’s your name and unit?”
“Trooper 732769 Maculler, sir,” replied the man automatically, but his teeth chattered as he spoke, and sweat was pouring down his face. “Fourteenth Light Horse, with the Perimeter Flying Detachment.”
“Good. Now tell me what’s going on,” said the Major.
“Dead, all dead,” whispered the man. “We rode in from due south, through the fog. Strange, twisty fog . . . We caught them with these big silver . . . like half oranges, but huge . . . They were putting them on carts, but the draft horses were dead. Only they weren’t dead, they moved. The horses were pulling the carts even though they were dead. Everyone dead . . .”
Major Greene shook him, very hard. Lirael put her hand forward as if to stop him, but Sam held her back.
“Report, Trooper Maculler! The situation!”
“They’re all dead but me, sir,” said Maculler simply. “Me and Dusty fell in the charge. By the time we got up, it was all over. Something made us sick. Maybe there was gas in the fog. Everyone in the reconaissance troop went down, the horses, too, or running free. Then there were these things lying all around the carts. Bodies, we thought, dead Southerlings, but they got up as we fell. I saw them, swarming over my mates . . . thousands of monsters, horrible monsters. They’re coming this way, sir.”
“The silver hemispheres,” interrupted Lirael urgently. “Which way did the carts go?”
“I don’t know,” mumbled the man. “They were headed south, straight at us, when we ran into them. I don’t know after that.”
“Hedge is across and the hemispheres are already on their way to the Lightning Farm,” said Lirael to the others. “We have to get there before they do! It’s our last chance!”
“How?” asked Sam, his face white. “If they’re already across the Wall . . .”
Lieutenant Tindall had the map out and was trying the switch on a small electric flashlight, which failed to work. Suppressing a curse with an apologetic glance at Lirael, he held the map to the moonlight.
As he did, Lirael felt her Death sense twitch, and she looked up. She couldn’t see anything down the road ahead, but she knew what was coming. Dead Hands. A very large number of Dead Hands. And there was something else, too. A familiar cold presence. One of the Greater Dead, not a necromancer. It had to be Chlorr.
“They’re coming,” she said urgently. “Two groups of Hands. About a hundred in front, and a lot more farther back.”
The Major barked out orders and soldiers ran in all directions, mostly forward, carrying tripods, machine-guns, and other gear. A medical orderly led Trooper Maculler away, his horse following obediently behind. Lieutenant Tindall shook the map and squinted at it.
“Always on the bloody folds, or where a map joins!” he cursed. “It looks like we could head southeast from the crossroads back there, then cut southwest and loop up to Forwin Mill from the south. The trucks might work if we do it that way. We’ll have to push them back to start with.”
“Get to it then!” roared Major Greene. “Take your platoon to push. We’ll hold out here as long as we can.”
“Chlorr leads them,” said Lirael to Sam and the Dog. “What should we do?”
“We cannot reach the Lightning Farm before Hedge on foot,” said Sam quickly. “We could take that man’s horse, but only the two of us could ride, and it is sixteen miles in the dark—”
“The horse is done in,” interrupted Mogget. He was chewing, and the words weren’t very clear. “Couldn’t carry two if it wanted to. Which it doesn’t.”
“So we’ll have to
go with the soldiers,” said Lirael. “Which means holding off Chlorr and the first wave of the Dead long enough to get the trucks pushed back to where they’ll work.”
She looked down the road past the soldiers, who were kneeling behind a tripod-mounted machine-gun. There was just enough moon- and starlight to make out the road and the stunted bushes on either side, though they were stark and colorless. As she watched, darker shapes blotted out the lighter parts of the landscape. The Dead, shambling close together in an unplanned and unorganized mob. A larger, darker shape was at the fore, and even from several hundred yards away, Lirael could see the fire that burned inside the shadow.
It was Chlorr.
Major Greene saw the Dead, too, and suddenly shouted right near Lirael’s ear.
“Company! Two hundred yards at twelve o’clock, Dead things en masse in the road, fire! Fire! Fire!”
His shouts were followed by the mass clicking of triggers, loud even after the shouts. But nothing else happened. There was no sudden assault of sound, no crack of gunfire. Just clicks and muttered exclamations.
“I don’t understand,” said Greene. “The wind’s westerly, and the guns usually work long after the engines stop!”
“The hemispheres,” said Sam, with a glance at the Dog, who nodded. “They are a source of Free Magic on their own, and we are close to them. Hedge has probably also worked the wind. We might as well still be in the Old Kingdom, as far as your technology goes.”