Chapter 66 — The Dullahan II
Then the Dullahan killed Kessler.
He had a corpse coming at him from the front, one of the ones that still remembered how to fight, and he took it on the shield properly and turned it out.
And while his shield was over there, the horse came in on the other side.
I did not see the weapon land. I saw him standing, and then I saw the weapon coming back out, and he was already going down by then with his shield still up in the wrong direction.
That was the whole of it. Less than a second.
The healer was eleven metres away with her hands inside somebody else.
There was a shape in the formation where he had been and the shape stayed open for about two seconds, which is a very long time, and then the man beside him stepped across and closed it and did not look down.
---
Then Kessler’s fingers moved.
I was fourteen metres away and I saw them close around the grip of his weapon on the floor beside him.
His body came up.
Not the way a hurt man gets up. The middle of him was open and it stayed open, and he did not use his arms, and he came off that stone in one continuous motion that started at the hips.
> **[Deathbound conversion detected.]**
>
> **[Player corpse placed under Dullahan control.]**
He turned toward the line.
The man who had stepped across to close the gap was standing a metre and a half from him, and his weapon came halfway up and stopped there.
I watched his face and it went completely blank.
"Ide—"
Kessler hit him first.
---
It was Renard who ended it.
He came off the command position, put two people between the healers and that thing, and killed what was left of his own frontliner with three strikes and no expression on his face whatsoever.
Then he turned around while it was still falling.
"Anybody who cannot run goes behind the healers. Now. If somebody drops inside the rider’s reach, you drag them out before you do anything else."
Nobody said anything.
"And if one of ours gets up, you put it down. You do not wait to see whose face it is. It is not his face any more."
He said it exactly like a man reading a loading schedule, and I have thought since about what it must have cost to say it that way, thirty seconds after killing a man he had commanded for years.
Ide got up off the stone with blood coming out of his mouth and got back in the line.
---
After that the fight changed, because the dead were nearly gone and the thing on the horse was eighty metres from any of them.
Renard brought the whole raid round onto it.
Not all at once and not in a rush.
He rolled the shield line across the floor in sections while the ranged worked the horse, and the four who had been holding the rider stopped holding and started hitting, and the chamber filled up with noise.
I opened Androphagos on the second charge, because it has saved me every time somebody has come at me from a side I could not see.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[No living targets detected within range.]**
Nothing.
Not a reduced field, not a weak signal. Nothing at all, in a six-metre radius, in the middle of a fight, with something the size of a horse eleven metres away and closing.
I shut it down before it could waste the minute.
Of course. Of course it is nothing. It finds living creatures and there is not one living creature in that half of the chamber, and the Ability description says exactly that, and I have read it more than once.
And then I spent the next four minutes looking over my own right shoulder every eight or nine seconds like a man checking a door he has already locked.
I have had that field for three weeks and it turns out I had already handed it my whole blind side.
---
Which is why the charge got me.
I was in the second rank waiting for a hole and I was watching the horse’s head, and the horse’s head was pointed at Ide.
The rider’s arm was not.
The weapon came round with the turn and I got most of me out of the line of it, and most is not all, and the flat of it took me across the shoulder and the top of the chest.
> **[Health: 340/340 → 218/340.]**
The chamber changed places with itself.
I came down on my side about six metres away and slid, and stone dust went into my mouth and mixed with the blood that was already there from somewhere, and I could feel the grit of it between my teeth.
My whole left arm had gone.
Not painful. Gone, from the shoulder down, hanging off me like something I was carrying.
I got my head up and the horse was turning.
Then Gideon was between us.
He did not shout anything at me. He put himself in front of the animal’s line and made it choose, and it chose him, and the two of them went past me in a noise I felt in the floor.
Somebody got a hand under my arm and hauled.
"Up. Come on. Back behind the wall."
It was the swordsman with the grey at his temples, the one from the crystal seam, and he had me by the harness with one fist and his sword still out in the other hand.
He put me down four metres behind the shield line and let go.
"Breathe. Three of them. Then come back."
I got two before the feeling came back into my arm all at once, in a hot wave from the shoulder to the fingers, and I made a noise I am not proud of.
Third one worked.
---
Then the head started doing something.
I saw the light before I saw what was making it. A dirty blue going into black, coming up around the fist that held it, thin at first and then thickening until it was moving on its own like something in water.
The men closest to it came off it first.
One of the shield line went backward two steps without being told, and Renard did not correct him.
Because his face had started to go.
The skin along his cheekbone above the line of his helmet had come up red.
Then in about eight seconds it was not red any more, it was blistered and going grey at the edges, and he got a hand up over it and pulled out of the line.
The healer took one look and put him at the back.
And the cold came off it as well.
I was eleven metres away and I felt it arrive against the side of my face through sweat that had been on me for hours, and the corpse smell that had been all over this chamber tripled inside about four seconds.
Two other men had it on their hands.
Renard rotated everybody who was in close, and the men he pulled out stood at the back with their arms held away from their bodies, looking at their own skin.
---
"THE HEAD." Renard’s voice went across the whole floor. "That arm. Everything on that arm. Rook, hold the body."
"Holding."
What happened after that took about ninety seconds and I was one part of it.
Gideon and Voss went into the horse and the front of the rider and made it work for every single movement it wanted to make, and it stopped being able to turn freely, and that was the whole foundation of it.
Then the ranged started on the arm.
Not the armour. The gauntlet and the wrist, over and over, and I could hear the impacts even in that noise, and after about thirty seconds the arm stopped hanging loose and started being held.
It was protecting it. It had begun protecting it.
The gap came when the wrist came forward.
"NOW—"
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 208/230 → 190/230.]**
I got in under the horse’s shoulder on the side Gideon had jammed and I put everything I had into the inside of that wrist, where the gauntlet articulates and the plate has to be thin to let the hand close.
The cold was appalling. It went through the gauntlet and into my knuckles like putting a hand into a freezer, and the fire fought it and won by about half.
Metal went orange and then dull and then something in the joint gave.
The fingers opened maybe four centimetres.
That was all anybody needed.
The woman who had been baiting the horse for the last ten minutes came off the floor at an angle nobody was covering, took the hair out of that opened fist on the way past, and kept running.
The Dullahan turned its whole body after her.
It did not get there. Gideon put the horse’s line out to the left again and eleven people were already moving.
---
They destroyed the head about six metres from the wall.
Ranged first, then the two nearest melee, and it came apart on the stone and the blue-black light went out of the air like a switch.
The cold stopped.
That is the part I felt personally. The air came back to ordinary cold instead of the other thing, and the smell dropped to something I could stand, and my hands started hurting properly instead of just being numb.
The men who had it on their skin did not get better. Their skin stayed where it had got to.
But nobody else got it after that.