Yet the whispers of a reckoning

Have kept the spirits beckoning

To look upon my crime

-- Aviators, Godhunter

The terrain on the other side of the river was mostly flat. On the one hand this meant Kitri could see a lot of the surrounding area. On the other this meant she could be seen from a distance. Her legs were sore and stiff after spending the night on the boat. She couldn't run as fast as she wanted to.

In an effort to keep her mind off the situation Kitri went over facts she'd learnt long ago in history class. All of the towns in this part of the planet were what was known in the Gradonian dialect[1] as marekansijanil -- towns surrounded by high and thick walls that could withstand direct blows from everything but the most powerful missile. They had been built millennia ago during the war with the Osnečip Empire, when each town had been more like a large fortress than a place where civilians lived. To protect the food and arms stored in them, a long-ago general had ordered all of the towns to be surrounded by walls stronger than anything that had ever been built before.

It worked in the most literal sense. No town in this area had ever been captured by the enemy. Unfortunately the enemy generals were smart enough to simply camp outside the gates and wait for the food to run out, and many towns had surrendered after long sieges. The Osnečip army moved into the captured towns, and were promptly put on the receiving end of their own tactics by the Saoridhin army. Because of the amount of people who died of starvation in the many sieges, Muirus 9436 had been rumoured to be inhabited by shaberos for centuries afterwards.

She thought of the monsters. Could they be shaberos? Judging by the bite-marks they were certainly cannibals. But shaberos were said to be intelligent and able to mimic voices to lure their victims into a trap. She couldn't remember any myth that said they hunted in packs.

Leave it to Abi to create a whole new type of monster, she thought bitterly.

About a mile from the river Kitri had to stop for a rest. She sat down on the grass so she would be less conspicuous if someone happened to be looking in her direction.

The town gates aren't opened until nine o'clock, she reminded herself. I still have at least two hours.

She got up and resumed walking towards the town. She was too tired to run, so instead she walked as quickly as she could. The pain in her feet, although still present, had mostly faded as she refused to pay attention to it.

A sign placed by the roadside informed passers-by that this was the site of the Battle of Jeod during the same Saoridhlém-Osnečip War that had prompted the building of the walls. In spite of herself Kitri couldn't help remembering her grandmother's stories about how battlefields were haunted, and every night the long-dead soldiers came back to re-enact their deaths. She couldn't suppress a shudder as she hurried past the sign. In light of everything that had happened, she wouldn't have been at all surprised to see the ghosts still fighting even though it was morning.

Everywhere the countryside was silent. The flat land gradually turned into gentle hills. Kitri followed the road but walked beside it, where the grass was softer on her sore feet. In the distance she spotted the first farmhouse on this side of the river. When she reached the lane leading up to it she paused, debating whether to waste time checking it or whether to continue to the town.

In the end she decided to check it. She didn't have to go far. As soon as its front door came into view she knew. The door was wrenched off its hinges and a long streak of red covered the ground.

With a cold, sick feeling she realised, The zombies crossed the river.

Running water was obviously not a deterrent. By now they might be gathered outside the town walls, waiting to the gate to open.

No one will be stupid enough to open the gate when they see those things. Kitri tried to reassure herself. It didn't work. Hard on its heels came another thought: I'm walking towards them.

But where else was she to go? Behind her was nothing by devastation. In front of her there was still a chance that she could find living people who could help her destroy the monsters. Maybe they would have become discouraged and wandered past the town. Maybe they were hopelessly lost in the uninhabited parts of the countryside. Maybe they'd gone back to sleep and wouldn't wake until tomorrow.

Kitri kept repeating those possibilities to herself as the sun rose higher and she drew closer to the town of Luinnakied. She rounded a corner in the road and found herself with a clear view of the town. Her heart sank. None of her optimistic fancies were true.

The crowd of zombies stood silent and motionless outside the city gate.

Mirio had expected that if he was required to back up Abi's ridiculous story, it wouldn't happen for at least a day. Luck was against him. During dinner that evening Jiarlúr took advantage of everyone else being distracted by the orchestra to wish him happiness for his marriage.

"Thank you," Mirio said, while silently cursing Abi's name.

"How did you meet your fiancé?"

Damn it. Mirio realised two things at once. One, she obviously wasn't fooled or she would never have been so inquisitive. Two, if he lied and didn't tell Lian what he'd said, they'd end up contradicting each other.

He settled on telling the truth. "I met him here. We spent a lot of time together while caring for Zi Yao."

He doubted she was convinced, but at least she stopped questioning him.

When Abi next saw Mirio he looked very annoyed with the world in general and her in particular.

"Here," he said abruptly, taking an envelope out of his pocket. "If you think for one minute I'm going to help you get out of this mess, you have another think coming."

He swept away without waiting for an answer, leaving a very confused Abi behind. She opened the envelope. At once all became clear. First was a telegram from Irímé. Then there was a letter from Arafaren. She read it with a sinking feeling in her chest.

I should have known he'd figure it out eventually, she thought.

There was only one good thing. Her parents already knew about the necromancy so it would do him no good to tell them. And she knew so many of Arafaren's secrets that he couldn't tell anyone else.

Irímé's telegram was much more alarming. That made three people who sensed something odd was happening somewhere: Abi herself, Irímé and Ilaran. Four, if she included Lian's comment about her magic.

Speaking of Lian, he was the resident expert on necromancy and certainly knew much more about it than Abi had learnt -- or that she now wanted to know. If anyone could figure out what was wrong it would be him.

Luinnakied had followed a strict schedule for longer than its older relatives had been alive. The gates were closed and locked punctually at ten o'clock in summer and seven o'clock in winter. Anyone who came to the gates after that would just have to wait until morning -- mainly because the gates were very old, very heavy, and the machinery that opened and closed them was very noisy. Opening them more than once a day was simply impractical. Now that there were no invading armies threatening the town, a guesthouse outside the walls provided shelter for people who couldn't get in. But this happened so rarely that the townsfolk couldn't remember the last time someone had stayed at the guesthouse.

A ledge ran along the inside of the wall just behind the parapet. Years ago it had been used by soldiers shooting down at the enemies outside. Now it was used only by the night watchmen who kept an eye out for cattle and horse thieves. Late that night two of them walked silently along the walls, both internally counting down the minutes until their shift ended.

It was an oddly silent night. Usually they could hear owls or bats. Now they couldn't even hear the horses in the stables below. Not so much as a breath of wind disturbed the quiet.

At almost five in the morning one of them stopped and listened.

"What is it, Yireyi?" her companion asked.

"I don't know. It sounds like footsteps."

Both of them listened intently.

"If those are footsteps then there's a big crowd down there," Raunen said.

The lanterns were all on the inside of the walls, meant to give light to the watchmen without shining on the ground outside. Yireyi tried to remove the candle from one. She failed. Raunen went back into the guardhouse and lit a candle at the flame. He held it over the wall. It burned steadily, without even the slightest flicker. But its light was too faint to reach all the way to the ground.

Abruptly a sound pierced the silence. It sounded as loud as if it was right next to them. Both of them jumped. For a minute they couldn't figure out what it was. Then they realised at almost the same time. It was someone -- or something -- scratching at a door. Then they moved onto rattling the handle. Yireyi looked down at the nearby buildings to see if someone had been locked out of their house.

Crash!

The person who had been locked out had apparently decided to break the door down. And there was no doubt about it. The sound had come from the other side of the wall.

"Who's there?" Raunen shouted in his sternest voice.

A chorus of hisses like a nest of angry snakes answered him, accompanied by growls and moans. He held the candle over the parapet. They both leant over to get a good look. This time the light glinted on something below them. Something that turned out to be a mass of eyes and teeth. Weird and inhuman growls rose from whatever was below them.

Someone screamed. It was a scream of terror and agony. Suddenly it was cut off, and silence fell again.

Yireyi and Raunen stared at each other. Their faces were ghastly pale in the lantern-light.

"I think that was the guesthouse owner," Raunen said faintly.

"What the hell is out there?" Old fairy-tales came back to Yireyi, stories of monstrous dogs and hungry ghosts. Faint thuds came from the gate, as if something was trying to shove its way in. "We'd better ring the bell."

The bell was only meant to be rung if a fire broke out. But this was no time to worry about that sort of thing. Raunen climbed up to the bell-tower above the guardhouse and rang the bell as if his life depended on it.

Within minutes most of the town was out in the streets. A dozen voices shouted, "Where's the fire?"

"There's no fire," Yireyi admitted, "but come up here and bring lights. Something weird is down there."

Angry murmurs filled the square, but a few people obligingly brought torches and climbed up the stairs to the walkway. They shone them over the wall. Everyone on the walkway gasped in unison.

People stood below them, people so bloodstained and injured that they shouldn't be able to move. They snarled and recoiled from the light.

The monsters stayed outside the wall for the rest of the night. The telegram operator ran to her office, turned on the machine, and sent an urgent message to every town and city in the area. She got many incredulous replies, and quite a few people asked her what she'd been drinking, but she responded to all these with assurances that it was all absolutely true.

When the sun rose it shone on a grisly scene. The state of the monsters' bodies became horrifically clear. How anything could move when its throat had been ripped open was a mystery. The stories of hungry ghosts came back vividly to everyone.

A trail of blood ran out of the guesthouse door. To everyone's shock they recognised the guesthouse owner among the crowd, missing an ear and with their intestines hanging out.

When the sun rose high enough to shine over the town walls, a sudden change came over the crowd. They staggered back. Then they turned and shambled away. The townsfolk on the walls watched with baited breath for them to come back. But they disappeared over the hills, and there was no sign of them returning.

Kitri's blood ran cold when she saw the monsters leave the walls. With a sick feeling in her stomach she watched them head towards her. She had no weapon to fight them off. There was nowhere to hide unless she ran back to the farmhouse and barricaded herself inside.

Instead of following the road towards her, however, they veered off to the left and were soon out of view behind a hill. Kitri waited for several minutes until she was sure they were gone. Then she got up and sprinted towards the city.