“Of course,” the dead warrior said. “There may be no honor in the combat itself, but there is honor in defending a beautiful city and the thousands of innocents who dwell there.”
“I’m glad we agree. You’ll need to focus on the necks and shoulders and hips. Decapitations and dismemberments.”
“As you wish.”
Ahead, Nadira had stopped at the crest of a small rise to look down on the road and the shuffling mass of dead flesh flowing toward the city. “Are you ready, old timer?”
“I am.” Omar drew his seireiken and the light of its blade illuminated the entire road all the way to the gate. Hundreds of the walking dead all flinched and recoiled from the light, stumbling sideways away from his side of the road. But then they looked up and saw the two living warriors standing just above them. “Remind me why we’re doing this?”
“Because it will be easier to fight them here than inside the city when they’re tearing apart the women and the children with their dead, frozen fingers,” Nadira said as she took her silvery sword off her shoulder and spat on the ground. She wiped her sleeve across her nose and sniffed.
Omar glanced at her with a despairing look. “You were so demure, once.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “You’re starting to sound like Gideon.” And she dashed down the slope to the road.
“Gideon? Have you spoken with Gideon lately?” he called after her. “Damn it.”
Omar charged down the slope after her with his bright seireiken held low and as he plunged into the press of dead bodies, his sword’s light rippled over the faces and hands of the angry corpses. Hissing electric arcs raced up and down the razor-sharp blade, and when he reached the center of the road, he raised his sword.
In that moment, he was no longer Omar Bakhoum. He allowed the spirit of Ito Daisuke to flow over his body, washing over his skin like a cold wind and gently taking control of his hands and feet.
And the dead samurai whispered, “Begin.”
Omar exploded into motion, his blade flying in blazing white arcs high and low on every side as the roaring army of the dead closed in upon him. The burning white blade of the seireiken seared through the necks and shoulders and knees of the mob as Omar lunged left and right, attacking on every side at once, driving back the tide of blue faces again and again.
Severed heads and limbs fell to the ground with rhythmic precision, and the bodies fell a moment later, quickly piling up into rounded walls of flesh and cloth and dirt. Omar tried to relax as much as he could, allowing the motions of Daisuke’s ghost to guide his body, but his body was still very much flesh and bone, and within the first few moments of the battle Omar could feel his arms and back beginning to ache.
But the samurai raged on, butchering the dead with relentless skill and artistry. Every cut was perfect and every flourish brought one more corpse to its knees as the blinding seireiken flashed again and again and again.
The island of motionless bodies around him grew wider with each passing moment, and Omar found himself dashing and lunging around the edge of his abattoir, spiraling slowly outward until the entire width of the road was nothing but dark lumps and mounds from one side to the other.
“Arrows,” the samurai whispered.
“What?” Omar spun around and Daisuke slashed a pair of arrows out of the air before they could pierce the Aegyptian’s back. He blinked. “Oh.”
They returned to the fray but found that the marching dead to the north of him were no longer marching down the road. The stiff-legged corpses were stumbling out into the fields to the east and west, shuffling clumsily through the tall dead grass and the thick snow covered in ice.
Omar cut down his last blue-faced man and turned to look back toward the city. The moaning mass of the dead still pounded on the gate, pressing against the armored doors as the Vlachian arrows poured down from the top of the wall.
“Nadira!” He jogged toward the wall, scanning the crowd. “Nadira!”
“What?”
He looked to his left and saw her sitting on a small stack of pale blue bodies at the side of the road in the shadows of a tree. Omar grinned. “Tired?”
“A little bit.” She nodded at the gate. “Is there any chance you can get your friends up there to stop shooting at us while we’re cleaning up this mess?”
“Probably not.” He slipped his seireiken back into its clay-lined scabbard, instantly plunging the road back into utter darkness. “You mentioned Gideon a moment ago.”
“Did I?” She shrugged. “I run into him every few hundred years. He’s still carrying a torch for me.”
“But you don’t feel the same way?”
She flashed a brief, cold smile. “No, I don’t feel the same way.”
Omar glanced out at the road again, seeing the small hills and ridges of dead bodies as though for the first time. “Good God. And this is what you do now? Haunt the battlefields, year after year, slaughtering men, filling up graveyards? I had such high hopes for you. Noble ambitions. We were going to save mankind, you and me, and Gideon, and the others. We were going to meet God. We were going to find all the answers, the meaning of it all. Life and death, and the immortal soul…”
He gestured helplessly at the dark road full of dismembered corpses. “And look at us now. We’re little more than animals. Killers. We’re destroying the world, not saving it.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.” Nadira stood up and rested her saber on her shoulder. “Tonight we’re saving lives, the lives of the innocents living in this city, and the lives of the soldiers who would be out here dying for their lovely duchess if not for us. And when I haunt my battlefields, I’m saving the lives of my people.”
“For Eran?”
“For Damascus. My home. My people.”
Omar sighed. “That’s a very narrow view of the world. A single city. A few thousand souls. We were meant to serve so much more.”
“Maybe you were, but not me.” Nadira spat in the road and started walking toward the gate. “I keep my city safe, and I keep her sons safe so they can go home to their wives and make babies and keep my city alive, until the next war. That’s what I am.”
“That’s not enough,” he called after her.
“It’s more than enough. Now get your ass moving. We’ve got things to kill.”
Omar nodded and started forward, but he paused to stare up at the eastern end of the black walls. There in the distance, he could see the pale thin fingers of the aether just beginning to slip over the battlements, and he could hear men screaming.
Chapter 14. Pain
Wren stood by the railing and watched the ships burning in the Strait. The screams came from everywhere now, some in the palace, some in the city. The thin wailing sounds skittered up and down her spine, and she shivered as she gripped the edge of the balcony. The maelstrom of aether was now a great flood of mist pouring up the sides of the tower high into the air where it blossomed outward, spilling across the city in thin streamers of palest blue and green.
“I can’t let you do this.” She shook her head slowly, trying to summon up the courage to face the woman beside her. Wren swallowed and turned.
Baba Yaga stood just a few paces away, both of her thin hands clutching the railing as she stared out at the ships beyond the Seraglio Point. “You don’t have children of your own, do you, girl?”
Wren shook her head. “No, but I hope to, one day. I think.”
“Then you don’t know what it means to love someone, to truly love someone, beyond all reason, beyond all sense, beyond life and death,” the old witch said. “Husbands and wives choose each other, falling in and out of love on a whim, blinded by lust or jealousy or greed. It’s nothing like the love you will have for your child.”
Yaga let go of the balcony and turned to face Wren, to tower over her, to take the girl’s shoulders in her bony
