Forest Kingdom Trilogy 3 - Down Among the Dead Men

forms, and it no longer affected him on an emotional level. It was just a part of the world. And then something very disturbing occurred to him, and he crouched to study the floor of the cave.
    MacNeil tore his gaze away from the great mound of bodies, and tried to think with his mind instead of his gut. There was something about both the gold and the bodies that worried him. How did they get down here? Somebody must have brought them. Perhaps the crawling giants … MacNeil frowned and shook his head. The giants were little more than animals. Besides, they were too large to have managed the ledge on the cavern wall, never mind the last tunnel.
    “Bring your lantern over here,” said Jack suddenly. “I’ve found something interesting.”
    MacNeil moved back and crouched down beside him, and looked at the cave floor that Jack was studying so intently. It was bare rock, with a faint pattern of dust. There were a few vague traces that might have been tracks, but they were too faint for MacNeil to read them.
    “Well?” he said after a while. “What do you see, Jack?”
    “Footprints,” said the outlaw quietly. “Human footprints. Men, women, and children—so many they overlap each other again and again. There’s no other tracks at all. Nobody brought these bodies down here, Sergeant. They walked here.”
    MacNeil gaped at him, and then snapped his head around as something stirred on the edge of his vision. One of the corpses opened its eyes and looked at him. Another drew back its blackened lips in something that might have been a smile. Jack and MacNeil straightened up from their crouch, and the dead eyes followed them. There was a slow stirring in the mound of bodies, and all the hundreds of corpses opened their eyes and turned their blood-smeared faces to look at the living interlopers who had stumbled upon them. MacNeil felt a cold hand clutch his heart as his imagination showed him how it must have been: an endless line of walking dead, making their way through the dark tunnels and along the narrow ledge, and finally filing into this cave to drop and lie still. And then more coming, to fall on top of the first, and on and on until the mound of bodies was complete. The last few would have had to climb the mound to reach the top… . MacNeil swore dazedly and backed away. Jack moved with him. The corpses followed them with their unblinking eyes.
    “Bait,” said MacNeil hoarsely. “The gold and the missing bodies … just bait, to lure us down here and destroy us.”
    “But why go to so much trouble?” said Jack. “What makes us so important? Why didn’t the Beast just drive us mad as it did the others?”
    “I don’t know!” said MacNeil. “There must be something the Beast wants from us; maybe we’ve got something that could harm it… .” His eyes widened suddenly. “Of course! The Infernal Device! It doesn’t want all of us, just Hammer and his damned sword!”
    “Wait a minute,” said Jack, glancing nervously at the watching liches. “This can’t be the Beast’s doing; it’s still asleep, remember?”
    “It’s not human,” said MacNeil shortly. “Its mind doesn’t work like ours. It must have recognized Wolfsbane when Hammer first came to the border fort to deliver the gold. The Beast knew how powerful the sword was, and saw it as a threat. So it sent its dreams out to destroy the people in the fort, to gather some bait that would lure the Device back … so that the Beast could destroy it.
    “Get into the tunnel, Jack. We’ve got to collect Hammer and then get the hell out of here. If the Device is the key, we can’t risk losing it to these creatures. Go on, move it! I’ll be right behind you with the lantern!”
    Jack nodded quickly and divided into the narrow tunnel. MacNeil gave him a count of five and then hurried after him, scrambling along the tunnel as fast as he could on hands and knees. But even as he struggled through the tunnel in his little pool of light, his imagination replayed the last thing he’d seen as he turned to the tunnel mouth: the great pile of bodies shifting and stirring like so many seething maggots. The dead were rising to walk again. Jack and MacNeil scrambled desperately through the tunnel. It seemed much longer than it had on the first trip through, and they’d barely reached the halfway stage when they heard something else enter the tunnel behind them. Somehow they found a little more strength and speed, and a few moments later the tunnel