They followed the sidewinder ruts of a caravan. From his place beside the hussar he saw a cloud of dust rising darkly across the skyline. He stamped on the frozen ground and looked back above the relief's track and saw only clear blue sky there. He walked on, watching the dust until it was so near he had to tilt his head to see its crown. The marshal signaled to halt and conferred with the squire beside him. The squire trotted his horse back along the column and out of Orc's sight.

"You reckon that's smoke we're lookin at?" said the hussar.

"Looks to me like earth thrown skyward," said Orc.

"Like one of them dust bowls?"

"Yeah." He stamped the frozen ground again but could make no dust rise from it. He reached for some sense of the wilder community around him but it was as barren and cold as it had been these past ten or twelve days.

The squire rode back to the van with the relief's scout riding behind him, collapsed brass telescope in hand. They came up to the marshal and the scout passed over the telescope. The marshal uncoupled it and squinted into its aperture as he glassed the horizon and the cloud and the horizon again. He lowered the telescope and frowned and then he raised it and peered through again.

"Sir?" said the squire.

The marshal half turned in the saddle. "Which of you have worked land?" he said.

Orc watched the soldiers of the relief look at each other and up at the darkening cloud.

"Orc has," said the hussar.

The marshal turned to Orc and motioned him forward. He came alongside and the marshal handed him the telescope. "What do you see?"

Orc shut an eye and scoped up with the other. The cloud seemed to rise directly out of the country ahead. It seemed to boil up out of nothing in strange billows that spiraled skyward and sideways, and in places it seemed to dive back upon itself. He directed the telescope at where the horizon should be and he saw only the opaqueness of it, too thick even for sunlight to slip through, black as an eclipse of the sun.

Orc handed the telescope back to the marshal. "It’s a plague."

The marshal nodded. He collapsed the tube against his knee and passed it back to the scout. "There any homesteads out this way?" he said.

"No sir," said the scout.

The marshal sat resting his hands on the horn of his saddle and regarded the sky. He nodded again to himself. He raised his hand and the relief went on.

A mile out and they saw the beastly shapes beneath the now overhanging cloud. They were elk, reindeer, bison. Several thousand of them and they were moving diagonally to cross the caravan's track. By five hundred yards their drivers were visible to Orc afoot. A handful of pale skinned northmen managing the leeward edges of the herd with tenfoot lances tied up with colorful flags that bannered out in the wind.

The squire looked back at Orc. "Weren't no plague after all," he said with a grin.

Orc watched the marshal. The marshal watched the lancers.

"How many do you make?" said the squire.

The scout raised the telescope. "A dozen or two."

"Think they've seen us?"

"They have," said the marshal.

"They don't seem too worried bout us sir."

"They do not."

"Is this one of them spoils of war scenarios you were talkin bout?"

Orc saw the marshal smirk in the same way Booky used to whenever she smelled an easy mark. "I would say so. Ready the men."

The squire turned to the column and gestured with his arm and from the rear Orc heard orders barked and the column reformed as a double row with the marshal and squire and scout at its center and Orc and the hussar in the second row behind them.

The swirling and rising cloud now occluded half of the sky and its shadow fell across the double row of the relief. The drone of it came to Orc's ears and the horses noticed it next and he watched the dread of it spread through them.

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"What's wrong with the stock?" said the hussar.

The herd had begun to swing past the formed up relief and now they could see the discolorations and malformations of the beasts. Mangy elk with their hides half-flayed and the sinews of their muscles and their yellowish fascia bare to the elements and then keg chested chargers heavily muscled with open puncture wounds speckling their sides like the bosun's appaloosa and branded with the mark of the king's cavalry and then several head of bison with no eyes to speak of and finally the first of the herdsmen who themselves had strange bluetones in their hands and faces. They drove the herd between themselves and the relief. Behind them came a mass of several hundred but by then the cloud had begun to descend around the relief and the first grotesquely fattened flies bounced upon the soldiers' pauldrons and got lost in their hair and fell down their shirts and the marshal and his men had begun to comprehend what was happening, what was about to happen.

Already Orc could see through the plague and the once dead beasts where the masked device of the queen painted in blood and ichor flapped from the standards of the herders and now he could hear over the pounding of unshod hooves the chittering insectual roar, millions of filmlike wings clapping against carapace, and some among the relief had begun to slap at their own faces and some drew whatever weapons they bore when from the far side of the herd’s screening and out of the rushing swarming living mass of carrionflies there emerged the nightmare horde of recurred men and women bearing lances and shields and bows and maggoty burlap sackfuls of the breathing plague that each expelled ten thousand black bodied horrors against the eyes of their enemies. Her eldest legion numbering in the thousands, clad in tattered funerary clothing or else the garb in which she had found them, motley costumes of shredded uniforms and the boiled skins of animals and spoiled silk fineries still fragranced with the odors of their last rites, mail cuirasses with links seized from blood rust, cloaks of cavalrymen holed by passing arrows, one in a tophat and one with a gentleman's cane and one in a white child's bonnet and some wore bison horns affixed to leather straps about their temples and some were horned like bulls and one in steeltoed boots and smelter's gloves and otherwise naked and one in the spiked armor of an orcish champion, the helmet and breastplate rent open by old blows of halberds done in some bygone era by enemies long vanished from the world and many with their eyes glassed over and with the hair and fur of others woven onto their scalps and the rawhide of beasts sewn over their cleavages in rude patchwork and one whose whole body was burned cinder black and all of their faces were hollow and hungry and teeming with potbellied flies, all sprinting down upon them like a hellspawned horde, soundless beneath the noise of the plague.

"Oh god," said the hussar.

A flight of arrows rattled through the double rows and riders toppled from their horses. Mounts sawed back and reared and the risen charged straight into them with all manner of arms.

The relief was now fighting back and the marshal's repeater was clanging away and the gray pistolsmoke spurted forth and rolled off through the swarm as a risen staggered and reached for his legs. The hussar cracked his rifle once and tottered and peeled off of his saddle. Orc had already fired his pistol and now he knelt behind the limply lying hussar and grappled with his satchel for the next cartridge. The squire sat near him with scrub jay fletching coming out of his open mouth, hands on his knees, twin knives still in their sheaths across his breast. Orc would have reached for the shaft and pushed it through but then he saw the second arrowpoint emerging between the ribs. All around him horses were down and soldiers were prone and firing and rising and falling again and he saw the marshal parry a lance with his saber and he saw men kneeling on the ground pouring ether from unstoppered bottles onto their blades and he saw a man bleeding from his stomach strike flint to his dripping longsword and the whole of him went up in a great shrieking flame and he saw men still dying lifted up by their hair and scalped and between the murk of the flies he saw the form of a longhorn and then it was gone. Among the dying some called out the names of women and some were silently holding their sides and chests with clenched fingers as if to dam up their flowing blood. The risen now turned the relief's flanks driving impetuously with knives clenched between gaptoothed jaws and flies scattering off of their pumping arms and on the far side of the double rows the sounding of a horn of bone and a man there being lanced up once twice thrice like the peak of a pavilion and dragged from his saddle with a foot caught in the stirrup and the dry eyes shifting and rigored legs grossly jerking as if on spindles and wires until the risen had encircled the relief and left no shape of blue sky between the omnipresent plague. Out of that darkness they came with tongues hanging out of garrotted throats and fresh gunshot sizzling in their chests, rising up and skewering and clubbing the men and pulling them from their mounts and stripping the weapons and passing hooked knives over the skulls of the dead and over the skulls of the living and pressing the handfuls of hair against their own empty scalps, trading them amongst themselves, making the awful choking noise of the joyful undead. Now their herdsmen circled round and gathered up the relief's horses and the animals' eyes were white-rounded and rolling and their haunches feathered. The herdsmen leapt forward to cut through billet straps and tie downs and leapt away again before the animals kicked in their rotting teeth. They drove away their take and the risen moved from man to man covered in drying gore that was itself a kind of paint slathered over cavernous chests and clawlike hands already wearing the blood and viscera of past victims like the inksoaked leaves of a chronicle of their conquests bound on their tightwarped skin. They took what had been taken from them and they knew in what was left of their soulless selves that the men they left gibbering and groaning and bleeding to death would some day rise and join their ranks, would some day perpetuate the violence first begun by kingsmen a generation ago of which some of their number yet remembered and of which some of their number were those first offenders.

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> +1 [Awareness] He knew as I did there’s not much difference between the living lands and the dead one. Not when it comes to dying anyhow.