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The other shadowy shape roared and rushed to intercept people trying to escape into a passageway. The two big men couldn’t control everyone, though, and when they turned away a few people managed to slip away into the dark opening. A few others sprang suddenly, ducking under the outstretched arms as the big men tried to snatch them. The lucky ones managed to dash into a corridor or over the edge and down the treacherous trail that came up the side of the mountain.
Not everyone was was lucky enough to escape, though. Richard saw several broken bodies sprawled in a way that suggested that they had been killed and then thrown to the side. The floor of the cave glistened not only with rainwater but with pools of blood.
Even as Richard was racing across the room toward the dark shapes, one of them lunged and took a sudden swipe, catching a woman pressed back against a wall. With that one powerful blow, his clawlike hand ripped open her soft middle, splattering blood across the wall. Frozen in panic, the woman seemed unable to believe what had just happened. Richard knew that she did not yet feel the full pain of it. Stunned, eyes wide, she let out only small, panting cries as the realization of what had just happened began to sink in.
In that moment of frozen shock, the big man who had done the damage leaned in and snatched the stunned woman’s wrist. With frightening speed, the other dove in and grabbed the cornered woman’s ankle, pulling her feet out from under her. She hit the floor hard, letting out a grunt on impact.
As Richard charged across the cavern toward the two attackers, several cats leaped out of the darkness and onto the man holding the woman’s leg. He swiped one cat off his shoulder. The other clawed at his face. The man held on to the woman’s ankle, not seeming to be hurt by the cat’s claws. He swatted at the cat, trying to get it off his face, as if it were merely an annoyance.
At the same time, the other man twisted the woman’s arm around, ripping it away from her shoulder. With her remaining arm, she struggled weakly, clawing at the ground, trying to escape a fate past changing. The other man still had a firm grip on her ankle, keeping her from squirming away. Her screams lost their power as she mercifully lost consciousness.
As Richard charged in, screaming in rage, his sword flashed through the dim night air, coming down with lightning speed to sever the arm of the big man holding the woman’s disembodied arm. With a cracking sound, the bone splintered. Both disembodied arms, that of the woman and the other holding it in a death grip, tumbled to the floor.
Unconcerned with Richard, the man clutching the woman’s ankle turned toward the cave opening, swinging the woman around and up into the air. She sailed in an arc out into the rainy night, streaming blood and viscera behind her as she silently sailed out over the side of the cliff and down toward the rocks below.
Richard saw the point of a sword blade sticking out from between the man’s shoulder blades. He spun back toward Richard after throwing the woman out of the opening, ready to attack. It seemed impossible, but the man looked unaffected by the broken blade that had impaled him through the chest.
It was then, in the weak light from the fire pit off to the side, that Richard got his first good look at the killer.
Three knives were buried up to their brass cross guards in the man’s chest. Only the handles were showing. Richard saw, too, the broken end of a sword blade jutting out from the center of the man’s chest. The point of that same blade stuck out from the man’s back.
Richard recognized the knife handles. All three were the style carried by the men of the First File.
He looked from those blades that should have killed the big man, up into his face.
That was when he realized the true horror of the situation, and the reason for the unbearable stench of death.
CHAPTER
16
Richard found himself staring into the face of a corpse.
But it wasn’t the broken sword blade or the knives buried in his chest that had killed him.
It was all too obvious that the man had been dead long before he had ever been stabbed.
The man standing before him looked like a corpse that had been freshly dug up from a grave. The repulsive stink of death was as singular as it was overpowering. The smell alone was enough to drive Richard back a step.
The man’s outfit was so moldered and filthy that it was unrecognizable as to what it might once have looked like. In places the dark tatters of cloth were stained and discolored by bodily fluids that had oozed out during decay. As it had eventually dried, the cloth had stuck to the rotting flesh so that it became almost one with the body.
The lips had shriveled back to reveal the skull’s death grin of broken, blackened teeth. A thin veneer of dark, blotchy skin with a few sparse patches of pale hair covered the crown of the skull. The taut hide had rotted and parted in a few places—on one cheek, on the forehead, and in a long split over the top of the skull—allowing the stained bone beneath to show through.
Although he clearly looked cadaverous, the eyes were something altogether different. The man’s eyes momentarily stopped Richard cold in his tracks.
Richard had seen the indistinct but unmistakable glow of inherent power in the eyes of gifted people before, a glow that he had learned most others didn’t see. Such a light had always seemed to him to be too ethereal to be real, something he saw only through the eyes of his own gift. This man’s eyes also clearly carried a glow fired by the gift, yet that inner light was unlike any light of the gift he had ever seen before, and he didn’t need his own gift to see it. Rather than the transcendent light he had seen in the gifted, this was a fiery luminosity that everyone could see, an announcement to all of the evil lurking behind those eyes.
It was at once dead and empty, but at the same time alive with menace.
In the near darkness, the penetrating reddish glow of those eyes sent ripples of goose bumps up Richard’s arms.
Although he wasn’t an expert on the gift, he had read a great many historical documents on those ancient times when both sides of the gift were common. From what he had learned from the gifted he knew, and from those historical accounts, he had never heard of the gift being able to reanimate the dead.
He knew that those glowing eyes betrayed what animated this man—not life, not the gift, but some kind of occult sorcery.
Even though the dead condition of the man, the stench, and the glow in his eyes had stopped Richard in his tracks for an instant, there had never been any doubt of the man’s malevolent intent. Already Richard’s sword, in full fury, was arcing around toward the threat.
It was apparent from the three knives and the sword broken off in the man’s chest that he didn’t bleed any more than any long-dead, desiccated corpse could bleed, but that didn’t stop the anger storming through Richard from wanting to destroy this killer among them.
With lightning speed the blade came around and with one stroke cleanly beheaded the man before he could take another step toward Richard.
When the tumbling head hit the ground with a heavy thud, Richard saw that the glow was still there in the eyes. Before the rest of the body could fall he crushed in the face with a quick strike from his sword and then kicked the head out of the cave opening. Richard saw the reddish glow in the eyes fade away as the head sailed out into the rainy night.
But the headless body didn’t collapse. It took a step forward. As it took another step and kept coming, the arms reached out for Richard. Hands clawed, one arm swung at him. Richard lopped off the arm before it could be withdrawn. With two more quick slices from the razor-sharp blade he took off the other hand and then the arm it belonged to at the shoulder.
The armless, headless body kept coming, as if unaware that it was missing anything. With a scream of rage Richard brought his sword around again, slicing through the middle of the body. The blade shattered bone and crusted, dried skin. Bits of flesh with shredded cloth stuck to it and jagged bony pieces flew across the broad cavern.
As the disintegrating body was finally falling, the other
man, the one with only one arm left, stalked resolutely toward Richard to continue the attack, roaring as he came. He looked to be fresher dead than the first man, and the stink of death and rotting flesh from him was even worse. Although he was clearly a walking corpse as well, he was not dried and shriveled like the other. Instead, the second man glistened with slimy decay. Places on the flesh of his bloated body had split open and oozed liquid. His swollen tongue protruded partway from his mouth, to an extent muffling his angry growls. Like the first man’s, his joints occasionally cracked and popped as he moved, yet it didn’t much hinder or slow him.
Richard instinctively thrust his sword through the killer’s chest. Much like the sword that had been run through the first man and then broke off, Richard’s sword didn’t appear to do any harm with this man, either. As he yanked his sword back out of the man’s chest, Richard took a step back. The man kept coming.
This second corpse had the same reddish glow to his dead eyes, like a window into the inferno of black art burning within him and powering his movements.
One of the men off to the side rushed up and in an attempt to help rammed a knife through the attacker’s neck. It did no more good than Richard’s sword had. The dead man staggered to a stop and with his one remaining arm backhanded the man who had come to Richard’s aid. The man cried out as he tumbled back across the cavern floor.
In that opening, Richard’s blade came around again. This time, Richard didn’t want to merely decapitate him like the first man. As the dead man turned back he was just in time to see the blade right as it met the side of his head. With an awful sound, the sword shattered the killer’s skull. Gooey chunks smacked the rock walls and stuck while bits of bone bounced off. Unlike the first man, this time there was nothing left of the head.
Without waiting to see if it would stop or slow the man, in quick succession Richard rained more blows down on the invader, taking off his other arm, then swiftly hacking his body into several pieces, finally taking the legs that were still standing before him down at the knees.
The roars of both attackers were finally ended. Injured people around the cavernous room screamed or moaned in pain. Others wept in terror. Many of those not hurt rushed out of hiding places to help those who were.
