Forest Kingdom Trilogy 3 - Down Among the Dead Men

his sword tightly and wondered vaguely why he was crying. The tears ran jerkily down his face, cutting furrows in the drying blood. He tried to stop crying and couldn’t. He was cold and tired and hurt so badly he could hardly stand up straight, and still he had to fight. It wasn’t fair. They had no right to expect so much of him. He’d done his best for as long as he could, but he just couldn’t do it anymore. Not anymore.
    Demons came boiling out of the darkness, throwing themselves at the barricades in a silent, murderous frenzy. MacNeil stood his ground and swung his sword double-handed, the long blade biting deep into demon flesh. Foul-smelling blood flew thickly through the air, and his footing grew slippery. His arm and back muscles screamed in agony, but still he fought, his sword rising and falling again and again. He started to whimper, and bit his lips until the blood came to keep from crying out. The demons burst through the barricades, and he was forced to retreat. He fell back, fighting every step of the way, and all around him the town’s defenders were pulled down and slaughtered. Their screams lasted a long time. MacNeil swung his sword with failing arms, and the demons came at him from all sides.
    No. No,
this isn’t how it was. The long night broke, the dawn came, and the demons and the darkness retreated. King’s Deep was saved, and I survived. I remember! I was there! This isn’t how it was!
    The demons swarmed over him and pulled him down, and there was only the blood and the darkness.
    A low wind murmured across the deserted moor, and moonlight shone silver on the early morning mists. The sun would be up in less than an hour, and still Jessica Flint stood alone in the old graveyard. She pulled her cloak tightly about her, and vowed that once she got back to her nice warm barracks nothing short of a declaration of war would get her out on night duty again. She also vowed to do something extremely unpleasant to the sergeant who’d volunteered her for this duty.
    Flint looked about her, but apart from the graveyard the open moor stretched away in every direction, all silver and shadows in the half moon’s light. Half a mile away, over the down-curving horizon, lay the small village of Castle Mills, to whom the graveyard belonged. It was on the villagers’ behalf that Flint was freezing her butt off on the moor at this unearthly hour of the morning. Six months before, they’d caught a rapist and murderer attacking his latest victim. The villagers dragged him out onto the street and hanged him on the spot, amid general celebration. Rather than pollute their graveyard, they threw the body into a peat bog out on the moor. One month later the dead man dug his way out of the mire and made his way back to the village. He killed four women with his bare hands before the villagers banded together and drove him off with flaring torches. He returned to the peat bog and disappeared beneath the mud. But the next month he rose again, and every month after that. The villagers learned to patrol their streets as soon as the sun went down, and the lich turned his attentions to the local graveyard, which comfort he’d been denied. He dug up graves, smashed coffins, and violated the bodies. The villagers sent to the guards for help, and Flint was the unlucky one.
    She glanced at the oil-soaked torch standing unlit beside a tombstone. She didn’t dare light it before the lich appeared, for fear of frightening him off. In order for it to be effective, she’d have to use the torch at very close range.
    Flint frowned and rested her hand on the pommel of the sword at her side. She’d never fought a lich before. Fire was the usual defense, but by all accounts the lich had proved too elusive for that, so far. Maybe if she hacked him into small pieces first… . She shrugged and looked around her.
    It wasn’t much of a graveyard. Just a wide patch of uneven earth, with a dozen weatherbeaten headstones and a scattering of sagging wooden crosses. It smelled pretty bad too. Flint doubted if the people of Castle Mills had even heard of embalming.
    A faint noise caught her attention, and she spun around, sword in hand. The peat bog where the murderer’s body had been dumped lay less than a hundred yards away, its dark, wet surface gleaming coldly in the moonlight. Flint licked her dry lips, and then froze where she stood as a claw-like hand thrust up through the mire. Mud dripped from the bony fingers as they