Her first shot killed a man who was already dying. She levered the action and dropped to her knee and a pistolball snapped the air where her head had been. As the dead man slid from his horse she aimed and fired again through the bottle of ether at his hip. The bottle shattered and there was an ephemera of flame twenty feet across as if the air itself had ignited before it was sucked back to a singularity that fell to the earth and burned upon the ground. Outriders threw up their elbows against the flash and the heat and their blinded horses spooked and four or five of them threw their riders who fell heavily and rolled heels over heads and scrambled to stand and get up their swords as if the onset of orcs would pursue them, but the orcs cared not for them.

  She levered home her next shot and saw Robby now hanging two handed off the saddlehorn of the dead man's horse with her outside foot stirruped and her hair on fire, blazing away like a comet as the horse raced off from the bannering ardency that pursued it. Already the orckin were grabbing at the reins of the riderless horses and hazing them out between themselves and the kingsmen. Outriders circled with their clothes singed and smoking and their pistols outheld but they found no clear shot past the horses. One of them kicked to flank around and Mym shot him in the chest. Another was thrown as arrows pincushioned his bay’s hindquarters and shoulder. This was the horse to which Booky ran.

  Blue bodied flies spiraled down from the sky in dense clouds. Zigging about the living, bouncing from the rustled horses, crawling about and probing the wounds of the dead and the dying. The baron’s horn blared again and the outriders held up their pistols and dragged their eyes from the company to stare at the charge of risen. Mym stood and advanced, screening with bookmaker and horse she leaned around the forequarter and shot another kingsman dead from ten yards.

  A clattering of arrows fell again and sunk into the tundra and thudded into saddles and men. Booky was now climbing onto the bay and Mym poked out and shot another man in the back as he wheeled his horse around. He slumped forward but rode on and some of his fellows galloped after him and some others frantically pulled their unhorsed comrades athwart their pommels. One among them had worked a blue fire over his long sword and he alone held it forth at the coming black fester as if lightning might lance from its tip and arc from corpse to corpse to rob them of their dark animus. She could have shot him but to what end? The risen had come. There was nowhere left to run.

  Like tendrils of rot they spread outward and invested themselves into the baron’s camp. A detachment of withered and pallid reavers tumbled out of the mass and surged toward the company. From Orc’s telling she believed she had known what to expect. The gagging fetor wafting ahead of them. The casual brutality of their actions. The disinterestedness in self preservation and all other things except taking that which had been taken from them. There were twoscore of them shambling at a frightened pace across the plain. The outriders rode oblique to them but the dead were faster. The man with the flaming sword did lop the head of one corpsewalker before he was pulled from his horse and his skull stove in. The reavers seemed to roil as they undid the kingsmen and their horses and then continued on to the company.

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  Uhquah was already pressing his mule north. Some of the orckin had clambered onto stolen horses whose eyes rolled at the smell of them. The greenskin was up and away. A brownskin, the cavalier Sterling. The bookmaker now yelled at Mym from the bay. She was bent over the dwarf with the reins wrapped twice around her left hand and her right held out.

  “Leg on up,” she yelled.

  “Where’s Orc?”

  Booky twisted around at the coming risen and her eyes widened. “Ogre,” she shouted. She turned the other way. “Ogre get yourself off and ain’t you wait up for nothing.”

  Mym slapped the bookmaker’s leg. “Where’s Orc?”

  Booky goggled at her. “Gone off. Him and that sow.” The woman grasped her by her hair and began to pull her up.

  She swatted at the arm, the bay. The bookmaker bridged the reins and leaned forward and the horse took off. The ground fell out from under Mym’s feet and she was dragged fifty yards before she caught onto the billet and the cantle and she held on for her life with the strap of the carbine hanging off her elbow. She looked back and saw the reavers amble over the dead outriders without slowing and in the distance behind them arose a wall of flame so hot it warped the air around and threw no smoke aloft. A great battle was happening there.

  The horse slowed slightly. “Get yourself up here,” called the bookmaker.

  She clambered up and straddled the back of the beast and wedged herself into the seat behind the woman. The horse sped up again and she threw her hands back on the cantle and housing and she about bounced right off.

  “Put your arms around me.”

  She grasped the bookmaker’s coat and pulled herself forward and bearhugged her hands around and clasped them at the woman’s waist.

  “Now just hold you on.”

  She pressed her cheek into the small of Booky’s back as the bookmaker pushed that bay. She pushed it hard and Mym heard its wheezing and she saw the ogre running alongside and then falling behind. Next they came up on a great cloud of dust with the longhorn at its source, him being shuttled upon the chest of a slain outrider lost of all clothes but his boots and whose each ankle was shortroped to the saddlehorn of a quarterhorse. The longhorn stood upright upon the corpse as if it was a chariot parading through a triumph in his honor and he held his head high and his eyes locked on the horizon. Finally they drew even with a grayback hunched over the neck of a galloping paint. It was the sow Tulula and there was blood all down her back and a dark and shining stain upon the horse’s coat. Her eyes were half closed and the paint was bracing hard against her weight on its neck and had begun to flag.

  “That’s not Orc,” said Mym.

  “No it ain’t,” said the bookmaker.

  She tried to look around the woman but she couldn’t without loosening her grip.

  “Can ye see him?” she said.

  “That I can’t.”

  “Did we leave him?”

  She felt the bookmaker twist to survey the land behind.

  “Goddamn,” she heard her say. “Goddamn.”

  From there came the bellow of an ogre.