Clenched together, the five soldiers labored through yards that felt like miles. The thudding vibrations of battle became commonplace. They’d push, they’d bash, they’d strain, they’d holler and hoot, and then, without warning, the mass would loosen around them, allowing the opportunity to travel unmolested for short periods of time.
In the pauses, there were matters of martial hygiene to attend to. Adam had been disemboweled again, and his guts needed trimming; various sharp weapons were extracted from stomachs and buttocks and thighs; and an arrow that had been wielded as a dagger had to be pulled from the stone-thrower’s eye socket, where it was lodged with uncommon tenacity.
The struggle kindled a sense of camaraderie, and each time they pressed forward, exchanging blows with Confederate soldiers, Mongols, and Crusaders (or warriors who’d inherited their equipment), they’d trade their opinions on the efficacy of various techniques. Jacob and Leopold would debate the efficacy of various two-handed attacks, Remington would pester Eve to hold her shield arm higher, and everyone would praise the stone-thrower’s sling, which pitched many a weapon to the ground. (The little man spoke little, but always gave a flattered titter after a compliment.)
Ankles and ribs were strewn about, hands scuttled like crabs between their feet, and heads that were giggling, sobbing, and telling tall tales to no one at all littered the ground. The company grew used to these sights, as they’d grown used to the rising and falling tides of the scrimmage. Time itself seemed to fray, lending each moment the hazy, predetermined weight of a living dream. An attacker who’d broken their ranks was held down in the dirt, and a blade sawed back and forth through his spine until it snapped—but who’d done the holding, and who the sawing, none of them could say, nor whether it happened many times or just the once.
In a rare moment of clarity, Jacob glimpsed himself in the blade of the broadsword he’d pulled from the meat of his shoulder, recognizing with a queasy thrill that the leather patches that once had distinguished him as a man of wealth had all been torn out of his face, that he was coated in the yellowy grime of the Plains, and that his nose had been smashed into his skull, leaving his visage as grisly, battered, and anonymous as any he faced in the crowd.
“A Plainsman,” he whispered. Turning to survey the damage done to his fellows, he noted with alarm that Eve’s shield arm had been severed below the elbow, and wondered how long ago she’d lost it. Beside her, Leopold loosed a long, wordless scream and lashed a barbarian in the face with his chain, time and again, until his opponent was a heap of shards and skin. Remington screamed and cursed, his voice a low and rasping thing. Who have we become? Jacob wondered, as a noise unlike any he’d heard shook him out of contemplation.
The usual soundtrack of the scrimmage was a chorus of voices raised in triumph and defeat, insult and mania, hilarity and hysteria; a raucous blend, to be sure, but nothing so jarring as the roar that now erupted. It was a pure expression of terror, and as it crested, the scrimmage devolved into a stampede, which at Etienne’s command the ring faced head-on, digging in their heels and bracing their weapons in an attempt to send it around them.
“What spooked them?” said Remington as his companions, stumbling back against his body, held their ground.
“Horde!” shrieked a warrior, shedding his helmet, his basher, even his boots in an attempt to gain speed. The word, once it was recognized, could be heard echoing around the company in every language they knew.
“Why, they look like they’re fleeing a volcano!” said Leopold, lashing a crazed warrior aside with his chain.
“Maybe they know something we don’t,” said Remington. “Should we run?”
“And lose the ground we’ve gained?” said Leopold. “Fie! Whatever evils may fester in these lands, there are no monsters here. This Horde is made of nothing more terrifying than dead men, and I say we’ve proved ourselves fierce enough to face them.”
“There’s no time to talk it over!” said Jacob. “We’ll stand and fight. With all these warriors fleeing, we’ll have a straight shot to White Gate once we’re through. If we win, Remy and I will patch us up in White City, and if we lose, well, there’s always the Medic.”
“Adam, Eve, you’ll sit this one out,” said Etienne, “and carry us to the stitchery if we fall.”
Holding their weapons to their chests, the headless slumped to the ground, feigning hack-shock as the last of the stampede passed by.
“Remington, it’s your turn to fight. Whatever happens, don’t let them get hold of your head!”
“Oh, stop worrying, you old hen!” said Leopold. “The stampede is past, and this Horde has yet to materialize. Perhaps they’ve passed us by entirely.”
The exodus of so many warriors had filled the air with such a massive quantity of dust that it felt like nightfall—and dusk was such a distant memory that even its echo shook them. Soon, the shifting and clattering of armed men in the darkness dispelled Leopold’s hope, and though the company could discern the vague silhouettes of armed corpses, they had no sense of how many there were.
The Horde stood twenty feet before them. With excruciating slowness, forty of the oldest corpses that Jacob had ever seen became visible, standing in a crescent before the company.
In his days as a preservationist, Jacob had come across any number of citizens who, like Leopold or Caesar Augustus, claimed to be superannuated while clinging to the very flesh that revealed their vintage. He had often remarked that giving in to skeletonization would have allowed these blowhards to claim whatever date of death they liked, but the sight of the Horde dispelled this theory in an instant, for it was clear in the presence of these ancient, fleshless creatures that all bone was not the same. The Hordesmen were skeletons, yet nothing about them was blank: every bone was an artifact inscribed with proof of the passage of time. Lavish coats of desert varnish lent a golden-brown sheen to their skulls, shins, and patellae, filling the hashmarks scored by hundreds of thousands of blows with a sticky, dark resin.
They wore tarnished breastplates, cracked jerkins, and tattered robes; many of their joints were lashed together with bands of metal, leather, and rope. The implements of destruction that were, for now, held loosely in their hands induced in Jacob a perverse desire for the fight to begin, simply to see how corpses so slight could wield weapons so massive. Lengthy spears and swords abounded, as well as hammers and axes that brought gods and heroes to mind. From the talons of a tiny black-robed woman sprouted a scythe worthy of the Grim Reaper, and at the back of the crowd, borne by a seven-foot giant, was the great, two-bladed propeller of some antiquated airplane.
As the air cleared, three Hordesmen bearing spears beat them in unison against the rock floor in an intricate rhythm. One warrior strode forward, speaking eloquently in some outmoded rhetorical style as he tossed a great battle-axe from hand to hand.
“What language is that?” said Jacob in wonder, for the idiom was so ancient it was alien to him, but before an answer was offered, the spear-bearers, hearing the language of their opponent, beat out another rhythm, summoning three warriors fluent in their enemies’ tongue.
The little reaper ambled forward, using her scythe as a walking-stick, and from the midst of the Horde two skeletons in chain-mail vaulted forward on a twelve-foot pike, the bands in their joints jangling as they landed on the rock behind her.
“Idle threateners!” cried the reaper, her voice as bright as a bell, while the warriors behind her brandished pike and sword. “You stand accused of banding together, that your combined force might challenge the supremacy of the Horde.”
“Feh!” cried the swordsman, and the pike-bearer tapped out a rhythm on the rock, prompting the Horde to chant their Latin motto, which Etienne translated for the benefit of his fellows: ‘The Last Man Standing shall a Hordesman be.’
“Listen to these spindly blowhards!” scoffed Leopold. “Decayed as they are, I doubt they can even swing those weapons.”
Suddenly, the pike-bearer leapt onto the sword
sman’s shoulders and dipped his weapon into the ring, skewering the stone-thrower. The little reaper, standing under the midpoint of the pike, propped it up with one hand, and as the pike-bearer dropped from his partner’s shoulders to the ground, holding the end of his weapon, the stone-thrower was launched into the air. The pike-bearer yanked his weapon free, the reaper swept her scythe upwards, and the stone-thrower tumbled to the ground with his stones, bisected.
“Then again,” said Leopold.
“Huzzah!” cried the pike-bearer, booting a bit of would-be ammunition at Remington’s head. “The Horde, supreme: and woe to your team!” He seized the stone-thrower’s torso while the swordsman grabbed his legs, and the two warriors launched the two halves in opposite directions, where they were lost in a wasteland of human detritus.
The three Hordesmen advanced, the swordsman reaching his mark first and swinging for Leopold’s neck. Leopold wrapped his chain around the blade, yanking with all his might in the hopes of dislodging it from the swordsman’s grip. Failing this, he swung his own rusty blade at the swordsman’s wrist, snapping the leather band around it, which did not, as he’d hoped, cause the swordsman’s hand to fall off. The little reaper, while Leopold’s hands were occupied, twirled around and swung her scythe through his middle, and with an indignant yap he fell variously to the ground.
Distracted, Jacob stumbled out of range of the pike-bearer’s jabs, steadying himself on his crowbar as he swatted the air with his scimitar. While he searched his mind for a gambit that would bring him close enough to engage, the little reaper danced to his side. Too late, he realized that the pike-bearer had merely been toying with him to allow her to reach him unopposed.
Her crooked blade swept through him, and the snap of his spine resounded like a snare drum struck in his gut. Though years had passed since he’d felt the cold, something like a chill touched him as his legs toppled down beside him, and then his mind ground to a halt, and the world passed through it like river-water.
Remington ambled forward as pike-bearer and swordsman melted into the Horde, leaving the reaper alone to finish him.
“Comprehend me, challenger!” said the reaper. “The Horde suffers no alliances in the Plains: nay, not even a band of four! We have fought for centuries beyond reckoning and have seen tiny threats grown large when some untested urchin rises to command. Such audacity must be answered with swift disassembly, for the role of the Last Man Standing is too important to leave to chance.
“Leave it to the Horde, instead. Once we have cleansed the Plains, we shall elect our King as champions ought: in a civilized tournament, wherein each warrior faces her brothers until all have fallen but one.
“We tell you this that you may spread our message from the ground: the Last Man Standing shall a Hordesman be!”
“Can I hit her now?” said Remington.
“You can certainly try,” said Etienne.
As the crow took wing in fright, the reaper met the signpost’s swing with a flick of her wrist, puncturing the metal with her scythe. Their weapons thus entangled, she and Remington wrangled them to and fro in the air like long-distance arm-wrestlers until the reaper let go with an irritated sigh. The weapons crashed to the earth, and when Remington bent to extricate his, she pulled a cleaver from the folds of her robe and swung it with a butcher’s surety towards the curve of his neck.
In that terrible moment, a quintet of Hordesmen strode forward, eager to scatter the pieces of their defeated opponents; Remington, distracted by a sudden squawk from above, glanced up at the reconstructed crow, who’d been forced to swoop in order to avoid a severed head launched with great, mechanical force from afar; and the head, an airborne blur, howled, “Vengeance!”
Before the cleaver struck, the head pounded the reaper’s back like a cannonball, the collision making it clear why the Hordesmen’s joints were banded together, as all the unsecured bones burst from her frame and skittered across the rocky floor behind her knife. She scurried after them in a panic, fitting the bones into her skeleton before they were lost to her consciousness, and shrieking, “The Collectors! The Collectors approach, from south-southwest!”
A second head struck, pounding a Hordesman full in the chest but failing to scatter his bones.
“Interesting,” said Etienne. “That one expected the blow.”
“Thy doom drops from above, body-robbers!” cried the head, bouncing past Remington’s feet. “Draw near, that I might gnaw thy hated ankles.”
Its fellows were falling like hailstones now, and the Horde, enraged, charged to the south-southwest, toward a distant congregation of wheeled catapults whose operators bore severed heads by the bushel. Before the clash between these mighty battalions could be glimpsed, however, the Horde’s exit drew a dusty curtain over the southern Plains.
“Well, enough gawking,” said Etienne. “Adam, Eve, arise!”
The headless stood, and with Remington’s help divided the halves of Leopold and Jacob between them. Remington put Jacob’s knapsack (thankfully undamaged) over his shoulders and carried his upper half. Eve hefted Leopold’s torso with her good arm, leaving Adam to lift two filthy pairs of legs over his shoulders.
“Should we find the stone-thrower?” said Remington.
“He’s lost,” said Etienne. “At least his arms were attached when they threw him. Maybe he’ll crawl away before the Plainsmen come back.”
The northern Plains were eerily calm. “Where are all the fighters?” said Remington.
“At the Armory, most of them. Sometimes you’ll find thousands milling around those markets, more or less peaceably. Then they’ll all run out and start fighting again, as if someone had struck a bell.”
“And the Armory’s that away, so we should be able to get these two to the Medic before they wake up.”
“I hope so, but it’s too early to celebrate. Although—hold on, is that the Rim?”
“Oh, yeah! Look at that. It wasn’t too far after all.”
“Which means the ground we’ve covered in all this time is negligible.”
“I won’t tell Jake if you don’t.”
As they neared the stitchery, they were startled to see hundreds of warriors standing in an ungainly column before the Medic’s tent, all waiting for attention from within.
“Imagine if the Horde could see this,” said Remington. “All these squadrons in one place! That reaper girl would go ballistic.”
“Remington,” said Etienne in a low voice. “I want you to walk right past this line, like you’ve got a special pass. And while you’re at it, find any spools of thread that might remain in Jacob’s knapsack.”
Just ahead, a chopped-up warrior came noisily to her senses, forcing her squadron to realize that they had no hope of seeing her reassembled. Making hasty apologies, her fellows dropped her, without ceremony, right where they’d been standing. The rest of the queue, in their haste to fill the vacated space, kicked her parts out of the way, half to one side, half to the other. As the poor woman’s head distracted the crowd with screaming, Remington took the opportunity to trot down beside the line, and got about halfway without provoking comment.
But before he reached the end, a rattling voice cried out for the destruction of “them varminty line-cutters,” to which Etienne responded with a startling, nasal cry: “Supplies! Supplies! Thread-and-needle man, make way for supplies!” While the men in line gaped at the equipment in Remington’s hands, which certainly looked more medical than martial, Remington slipped into the stitchery.
Within was a scene of utter chaos: disassembled corpses who’d failed the mallet-test were strewn about the floor, crawling and bemoaning their newfound predicament when they were not attacking one another outright; barrels and cabinets had been overturned in a desperate attempt to find forgotten supplies; and four angry corpses in threadbare Royal Air Force uniforms were thrusting their proffered payment across the table while demanding that Flak-Jacket Josie be sewn up with sinew from the Medic’s own arse if he were in fac
t out of wire.
“There’s a bleeding red cross hanging off your tent,” squawked an aggrieved flyboy. “Now get on with the red-crossing, or we’ll pull the bleeding thing down!”
As fists struck palms with increasing velocity, the RN pretended to search for a spool of thread, using the pantomime as an excuse to fortify a bulwark of empty containers tossed between the operating theater and the front of the tent. Behind her the Medic jiggered open the lid of their strongbox, rapping on its side to let her know the time was ripe to lock themselves inside.
“Supplies!” squawked Etienne as Remington, Adam, and Eve clambered over an overturned filing cabinet. “Here you go, chief: three spools of stitch-grade medical thread, in exchange for the immediate reassembly of these two scrimmage-rats.”
Remington slapped the spools on the operating table. “Here you go, chief!”
“Good timing,” muttered the RN, and the Medic, who had already climbed inside the strongbox, popped out immediately, motioning for the halves of Leopold and Jacob to be laid out on the operating table posthaste.
“Now look here,” shouted a flyboy, “we was here first, and we’ll be served first!”
“With what?” answered Etienne. “We don’t get paid, they don’t get the supplies, and your friend don’t get stitched. Now pipe down and move outside the tent, before I cart this crap to the Armory and sell it for twice the price!”
Cursing, the flyboy dragged his squadron outside, where the news that reinforcements had arrived set off an argument that broke the informal ceasefire, distracting attention from the tent for a few precious moments.
The Medic bowed in thanks, and the RN hopped onto her step stool. “You guys are a godsend,” she said, tossing the mallet into the Medic’s hands and emptying the last handful of double-headed hooks from a jelly jar.
“Problems, boss?” she asked, for the Medic had slapped the table with his open palm in alarm.
For their benefit he repeated himself, striking first Jacob, then Leopold on the noggin: the top halves of the two men jerked, but their bottom halves were still.
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