Chapter 65 — The Dullahan I
**POV: Jace**
---
The first thing that came out of the dark was a hoof.
Iron on stone, one strike, and the sound went the whole length of that chamber and came back off both walls before the second one landed.
Then the leg above it, and there was no meat on it. Bone, dark and dry, with something holding it together where the joints met, and it came down again and the chamber rang again.
Then the chest of the thing it belonged to, and I could see straight through the ribs to the far wall.
The rider came into our light after the horse did.
Black plate, scratched to grey along the edges, two metres of it sitting in a saddle with the reins in the crook of one arm. A long dark weapon resting across the other side, tip down, the point dragging faintly on the stone.
And above the gorget there was nothing.
I kept looking at that space, at the collar of the armour with the empty air over it, because my eyes wanted a head to be there and would not stop trying.
Then the hand came up.
It had the head in it, held by the hair, hanging at about knee height. Grey skin pulled tight across the bone underneath, mouth slightly open, and the eyes were moving.
Not moving the way a head moves. The head hung still.
The eyes went across the chamber on their own, over one group and then the next, and they were doing it slowly and carefully, and the body they had come off was facing entirely the other way.
Something in my throat closed.
> **[Dullahan — Level 35.]**
>
> **[Boss Monster.]**
>
> **[Type: Undead.]**
And then, behind it and to both sides, the rest of them stood up.
I had thought the shapes at the base of the far wall were more rubble. They were not.
They came out of the dark in ones and twos and then in dozens, and the first thing I registered was not their faces.
It was a Bureau-registered chest plate with a guild sigil still visible on the shoulder, faded down to a grey outline, hanging off a body that was too thin to fill it any more.
Then a second one, older gear, a design I have only seen in reconstruction footage.
Then a woman in a healer’s harness with the pouches still on it and her arms hanging down past where her hands should have been.
There must have been forty of them.
Some had weapons in their hands and some had weapons still strapped to their backs where nobody had ever taken them off, and there were bandages on two of them that somebody had tied.
Somebody tied those.
Somebody knelt down in this dungeon and dressed that man’s arm and then died somewhere else in it.
The smell came across the floor about two seconds behind them, and it was not the Giant’s smell.
It was drier than that and much worse, old flesh and rust and the inside of a sealed room, and it went into the back of my nose and sat there.
Nothing in that entire crowd was breathing.
That is what finally got into me. Eighteen of us were standing in a cold stone chamber pulling air in and out through open mouths after nine hours in a forest, and forty metres away forty bodies were moving toward us in complete silence.
---
"FORM UP. NOW."
Renard did not give anybody four seconds to feel anything.
"Rook, Kessler, Ide, Voss, you have the rider. You do not kill it. You keep it off this formation and you keep it turning."
Gideon was already walking.
"Shields, arc left, the dead come through that side first, hold the line at the crack in the floor and do not step past it. Ranged, above the line, do not shoot into backs."
He turned.
"Healers into the middle. Barre, Idris, on the healers, nobody reaches them."
Somebody was still fitting a strap. Somebody else pulled the man with the wrapped forearm two metres inward by his harness and he did not argue about it.
"The wounded go behind the healers, not beside them. If you cannot run, you do not hold a wall."
Then he found me without appearing to look.
"Nolan. Damage group, second rank, you go in when the line makes a hole and you come back out. You are not standing in that wall."
"Understood."
That was correct and I knew it was correct, and it still went through me sideways for about half a second before I put it away.
Eighteen of us. There had been twenty this morning.
> **[Level: 8.]**
>
> **[EXP: 770/800.]**
>
> **[Health: 330/330.]**
>
> **[Mana: 220/220.]**
>
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 9.]**
Thirty.
Thirty EXP short of Level Nine and I had been carrying that number around since the Giant went down, and it came up again now, uninvited, standing in front of forty dead Players.
I put it away too.
I came here to get better. I did not come here to die usefully.
---
The dead moved first.
Not fast. Nothing about them was fast, and that made it worse, because they came across a hundred metres of open stone at a walk and we had to stand there and watch it happen.
Boots dragged. Metal scraped. Something in the middle of that crowd had a broken ankle and the foot turned over on every step and it kept coming anyway.
Then the first one reached our shield line and I stopped being able to think about any of that.
Because it *set its feet*.
It came into the shield in front of it and it did not just walk forward.
It dropped its weight, turned its hip, and drove up under the rim the way you do when you want a shield out of your way, and the Tank behind it swore out loud.
"THEY REMEMBER. WATCH THE HANDS."
"I noticed, Renard."
Some of them were like that. Most of them just came on. But maybe one in five did something with its body that a corpse should not know how to do, and every time one did, somebody in our line made a noise.
---
I went in on the fourth call.
The shield line opened about a metre where a Tank had turned a body sideways, and a Meridian fighter with a polearm went through ahead of me and hooked the dead Player’s shield arm at the elbow and pulled it wide.
That was not for him. He could not reach past it.
That was for me.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 220/220 → 214/220.]**
I went through the gap he made and put my fist under the arm he had opened, into the seam where the plating stops and the padding starts.
*FWOOM.*
The padding went up and the body came apart around it and I got the smell of what happens when something that old catches fire, and I turned my face out of it and pulled back through the line before the next one arrived.
> **[Zombie Player — Level 14.]**
>
> **[Contribution threshold met.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 70.]**
>
> **[EXP: 770/800 → 840/800.]**
>
> **[Level increased: 8 → 9.]**
>
> **[Excess experience carried forward.]**
>
> **[EXP: 40/900.]**
>
> **[All Attributes increased by 1.]**
>
> **[Maximum Health: 330 → 340.]**
>
> **[Maximum Mana: 220 → 230.]**
>
> **[Three Attribute Points acquired.]**
>
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 9 → 12.]**
It went through me like standing up too fast in reverse.
My legs stopped being heavy. The place under my ribs where nine hours of forest had been sitting simply let go.
I got a breath all the way down for the first time since the Giant, and the ache in my shoulders went from something I was managing to something I could ignore.
I stood in the second rank with my hands opening and closing and it felt like somebody had given me an hour of sleep in about two seconds.
Twelve points. Sitting there. Unspent.
Later. You do not stop and rebuild yourself in the middle of a boss fight, and I have been told that by a man who has cleared four hundred Gates.
"NOLAN. Left, they are coming round the crack."
Right.
---
The rider had not moved.
That is what I kept checking, every time I came out of the line, because forty dead Players are a problem you can solve and the thing on the horse is a different category entirely.
It sat there behind them with the head hanging from its fist and let its army walk into us.
Then Renard did the thing that won this fight, and I did not understand what I was watching until it was most of the way done.
One of his people broke out of the formation.
Small, fast, no shield, and she went out at an angle across the open floor to the Dullahan’s left, and she put something into the horse’s flank from about fifteen metres.
The head came round.
Both eyes, at once, on her, and the body turned in the saddle to follow the eyes rather than the other way about.
Then the hooves started and my stomach dropped, because I had been counting them as a slow ring across the chamber.
Now they came in a burst, four or five inside a single second, getting louder, and the cold air moved past my face from thirty metres away.
She did not try to fight it.
She let it come to about four metres and then she was gone sideways and running, and the Dullahan went past where she had been and the wind of it knocked a man in our third rank off balance.
Then she did it again, further out.
And again.
Every time she pulled it, it went to her, and every time it went to her it ended up further from the dead. The corpses could not follow.
They came on at the same walk they had started with, and the gap behind the rider opened out from twenty metres to forty to eighty.
It is not clever if you say it out loud. Take the fast thing away from the slow things.
Doing it is standing in front of a mounted boss on your own with nothing in your hands, four separate times, and getting the distance exactly right on all four.
---
Gideon and the other three met every charge she could not finish.
> **[Adamant — S activated.]**
The first one I actually watched, he took the horse’s shoulder rather than the rider, angled, the same way he took the Giant’s wrist.
It moved him three metres.
His boots did not slide. They tore, and the stone came up in flakes under his heels.
At the end of it he was still on his feet and turning the horse’s line out to the left, and the Dullahan went past on a curve instead of straight through him.
He shook his hand out afterward.
I saw that. He got clear and he opened and closed the hand twice and rolled the wrist, and nobody who was not looking for it would have noticed.
Whatever that horse weighs, he felt it.
---
We ground the dead down over the next few minutes and it cost us.
A man in the shield wall took a blade through the front of the thigh from underneath, from a corpse that had gone down on one knee and thrust up.
He made a sound and went sideways, and two people had him out by the harness inside three seconds.
Another one lost the whole shoulder section of his armour to something with a hook on it, and the skin came with the armour.
The healers worked and I watched what it was doing to them.
The one with the shaved head had gone from standing to kneeling by the second casualty, and her hands were shaking when she took them off him.
She had to press them flat against her own thighs for a second before she went to the next.
She looked at a third man, and then at the man in front of her, and then back, and she chose.
She did not say anything about it. She just chose, and went to the one bleeding faster, and the other one sat with his hand over a hole in himself and waited.
---
I got another one about four minutes later, and it was the same shape as the first, because I have learned to stop trying to be the whole answer.
A Tank got a corpse’s shield locked out and turned it. Another Player put a spear through the back of its knee and it went down.
I came in through the gap and put Aten into the base of its skull where the helmet had been broken in whatever fight killed it originally.
> **[Mana: 214/230 → 208/230.]**
> **[Zombie Player — Level 16.]**
>
> **[Contribution threshold met.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 80.]**
>
> **[EXP: 40/900 → 120/900.]**
I did not look at the face on the way past.
I had already made that mistake with the second one and I was not doing it again.