Dawn was still two hours into the future when Storm heard the soft chime and opened his eyes. The chrono said fifteen thirty, but it was still on Greenwich Mean Time since it couldn’t find a satellite anywhere above the second world from which to get a correction fix. He almost didn’t see displayed time anymore anyway. The correction to local time had become rote.

Sandahl snorted irritably when the dirt clod bounced off his shoulder. “An awful heavy sleeper,” Storm laughed, following in the wake of the dirt clod and moving to look at the burn. Not too bad, considering. He still wanted a vet to see it, and it would leave a magnificent scar, but it didn’t look to be infected, and he could see no muscle damage.

Sandahl burbled inquisitively.

“I want to have a look over there,” Storm told him.

The horse tossed his head angrily, gouging a chunk of turf from beneath a forehoof.

“Well, yes, I suppose if I were running a debating society that would be a valid point,” the man replied evenly. “But I’m not. I’m the loud noise in this herd and we go where I say. Got it?”

Another snort, followed by a tail switch. He got it, but he wasn’t happy about it.

Smoke still lifted lazily from the ashes of what might have been a stable when Storm poked his head cautiously over the final rise. He was still a good quarter stad from the ruined fortress, but already the stench of blood, guts, and uninterred dead was a physical force beating at his senses.

Sandahl he’d left a full stad back along the trail, balancing the danger of somebody finding and taking him with the danger of trying to sneak around dragging a five hundred kilo back seat driver. He needn’t have worried. From his position atop the rise, he could see several horses standing or wandering unmolested, heads down, reins trailing. What he couldn’t see was a conquering army.

The few upright bodies he saw wore a variation of the red and yellow Turaleean infantry uniform he was familiar with. They didn’t act much like a conquering force. They wandered dispiritedly, stooping here and there— graves registration!

He peered southward into the darkness. The main force, then, had moved on immediately after the battle. These poor bastards had gotten left behind, stuck with the worst duty a soldier can pull. They’d be spending the next day or so sorting the dead and, since he saw no evidence of a field hospital, dispatching the wounded. It was grisly duty that nobody wanted but that had to be done in any wartime army. He almost felt sorry for them.

Turning his attention away from the living, Storm scanned the slopes for someone not so mobile. He couldn’t explain why, but he wanted —needed— to see the inside of that fortress. There, about halfway down the slope, somebody had tried to crawl clear with an axe in his back. If he was careful, Storm figured he could reach the body and have it on this side of the slope without being seen.

The helmet was a painfully tight fit, and the breastplate stank of sweat and stale blood, and the shirt was even worse. He wasn’t about to try anything else on. The axe was a pretty nice example of the form, though, so he stuffed it behind his belt. Nobody else on the field seemed to notice one missing body among thousands or one extra gravedigger among dozens, so he simply ambled over the crest of the ridge and slouched along toward the crumbled walls.

The story of the long day was written all around him, and he wished he could decipher the whole of it. Some signs were clear, others he doubted he’d ever figure out. Dead Turaleeans lay everywhere along the banks of the river that had almost killed him, and the graves registration detail was having a rough time of it gathering them up.

As Storm watched out the corner of an eye, a pair of them tried to lift one of the bodies onto a blanket for movement. It fell apart. Storm stopped and stared. He couldn’t help it. He watched, appalled, as the weary soldiers gingerly sort of swept the pieces onto the tattered cloth and hoisted the mess between them. He forced himself to move before somebody noticed his strange behavior.

That poor bastard had fallen apart like a chicken wing that had spent too long in the soup pot. Looking around, Storm made out hundreds, maybe thousands more just like him. Not so one-sided a battle as he’d thought.

He was passing through a gap in the ruined wall before he got his first look at one of the defenders. He stooped to get a good look at what was left. They’d hacked the guy up pretty good, and it was difficult to guess what he’d looked like before he’d met up with the swords or whatever.

That he was a distinctly different genotype went without saying. The Turaleeans he’d seen were uniformly dark skinned and raven haired. Even the little birds boasted tresses of absolute jet. But this guy had sandy brown hair and a sandy beard, both cropped short.

There wasn’t much left of the face between forehead and mouth but a gaping crevasse, so there wasn’t any way to know eye color or facial structure, but the skin of his neck and arms was nearly as dark as his hair.

He was well set up, and looked to have been taller than the run of Turaleeans, although Storm hadn’t really met enough of them yet to judge.

The uniform had been blue once. A pale kind of blue. The breast and back bore some curlicues, but not so many it couldn’t be called plain. It had the look of a well worn and well maintained piece of equipment, but had been dented and gouged more than once before today, though all the damage seemed recent. There was an empty sword scabbard on his belt, but no sign of a sword or shield.

He was looking around for either when something about the wall caught his eye. Reaching out a hand, he tugged a clot of dirt free of the wall. Moist. Grass, still green, grew from it. Storm narrowed his eye and glanced thoughtfully from the raw wall to the bright orange of the fresh rust on the dead man’s armor.

“So you guys were running,” he told the corpse. “You ran ‘til you couldn’t run any more, then forted up here to make them pay for it.”

There were surprisingly few southern bodies along the wall, though Turaleeans lay almost in windrows. With frequent glances north at the real graves registration detail, Storm wandered slowly eastward along the ruined wall, poking here and there with a spear he’d picked up.

Something was tugging at the back of his neck and he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. The wall cleared, he moved to the smoldering remains of the stable.

The roof had collapsed and the fire had burned hot. Nothing inside. But behind it he found the bodies he’d been missing. They’d been pulling their dead from the line and bringing them here. Almost too many to count.

He dropped to one knee and pulled the cros Cheilteach from beneath his shirt, whispering a quick prayer for them before he turned away.

The remains of the sod building were almost unrecognizable as such. It had been a fairly substantial structure once, but had been mashed about flat. This was where they’d made their final stand, though. A couple hundred of them, it looked like. And they hadn’t taken the road into night alone, either. Turaleeans lay in a thick carpet all around, awaiting their comrades’ attention.

The stench was almost too much to bear, but he gritted his teeth and pulled his shirt up over his nose. Here was the thing. Something was telling him— no, something was calling him.

The outer layer of bodies was hacked to bits. He’d seen high explosives leave bigger pieces. He literally waded through the gore, pushing the larger pieces aside with the spear shaft. It took all of his willpower to wade through the dead to the center of the main room.

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The call was stronger here, but he still couldn’t make out its message. The bodies wore different kit, but were equally dead. This was what he’d spent three hours risking his life for? He prodded the pile with the butt of the spear and froze.

He pressed again with the spear and the groan was repeated. Flinging the weapon away, he started moving bodies until he encountered one still moving on its own. Four layers down and barely breathing, a boy of about fourteen regarded him from the one blue eye that hadn’t quite swollen shut.

The boy bore a spectacularly bloody wound across his forehead, its crimson legacy painting his face and jacket. He groaned again and tried with his bloody right hand to bring a long, narrow sword to bear on this new enemy, but couldn’t manage to grasp the hilt because three of the fingers of that hand lay somewhere at the bottom of the corpse pile. He wouldn’t know about them for some time yet.

Storm tried to calm him in his horrible Turaleean, but, accent or no, the words only served to turn the boy’s groans to growls. So Storm tried the only other language that seemed to work on the second world.

At the first spoken word in Hopi, the boy’s eye grew wide and his breath caught. He tried to respond, but couldn’t make his thick tongue form the words, nor his bruised lungs force the air out.

Storm was already digging him clear of the bodyguards who’d shielded him throughout life and beyond death. He prodded and probed with gentle hands, trying to determine if there were any wounds he’d missed that might kill the boy were he moved. He found none. With a final word of reassurance, he lifted the boy free, carrying him to the lee of a fallen wall.

A quick glance northward to assure that the soldiers hadn’t yet evinced interest on this side of the river, and he ducked back inside to retrieve the boy’s sword, placing it in a clawed left hand.

“Sh—” the boy managed to gasp

Storm, who’d been studying the lay of the land between the wall and the river, turned back to the young southerner.

“Sha—”

“What is it?” Storm crouched beside him, straining to make out the tortured word.

“Shad—” the ruined right hand stabbed out in the direction of the ruined stable.

“I don’t understand.”

The ruined hand fell back as the boy gathered strength. “Shad...Shadra,” he gasped painfully.

Shadra. Okay, what was that? “Shadra is what, a place?”

The boy shook his head, setting himself coughing, bringing up blood.

“A person?”

A nod, still coughing.

Storm held the boy’s shoulders to keep him from falling over until the coughing fit subsided. He wished there were something he could do beyond that. “They’re all dead,” he told the youngster. “I’ve been all through the place.

Another negative shake. “Un—,” a racking cough, “under... Dirt.”

Buried? But not dead. “How do I find this Shadra, then?”

The ruined hand came up again, the index finger shakily pointing at the boy’s own chest, then shifting palm up and lifting.

Storm was about done in and didn’t relish the idea of carrying the kid around like a mangled dowsing rod looking for living graves. But the eye was imploring, and he was who he was. Taking a pull at his canteen, he passed the vessel to the boy’s lips, letting him drink only a bit before pulling it away.

“Slowly. I don’t want you puking all over the place, God only knows what’ll come up with the water.” He gave the boy another short drink before slinging the canteen back over his shoulder and shifting it around behind his back

Taking a couple of deep breaths to marshal his own flagging strength, Storm crouched and slid his arms beneath the wounded youth, grunting with the effort. Muscles popped as he straightened his legs. The last couple of days had taken more out of him than he’d believed. But he was upright and the boy was pointing. He staggered in the direction of the stable.

Behind the stable, the boy pointed at the first row of bodies and made a sweeping motion with the ruined hand.

Storm noticed that blood had begun seeping from the stubs of the missing fingers, but pretended he hadn’t. There wasn’t anything he could do about it just now, and he figured they both knew it.

He lay the boy down as gently as he could and half crawled over to the indicated bodies. He set his back against one and pushed the other clear with his legs. Then he turned over, half laying on the dead man, and heaved.

The boy had passed out, but how many reasons could there be to move bodies aside? It took him five minutes of labored scooping before he’d moved enough of the loose dirt to scrape a knuckle against wood. Another ten minutes and he’d cleared the storm cellar door enough to open it. The boy was still out, but Storm could see his chest moving, albeit shallowly. Pausing to close his eyes and gather strength, he hauled the trap door open.

“Shit,” the word barely stirred the air.

She looked like she was a thousand! An impossibly frail old woman— hell, an ancient crone, lay at the bottom of the stairs on a pile of blankets. Her eyes were closed, her brittle white hair spread out about her wizened prune of a face. A thousand? She looked two thousand. Two thousand very hard years at that. He half climbed half fell down the steep ladder and put a hand against her neck. Shit reprised, she was breathing.

Outside, the sun peeked coyly above the rim of the eastern plain, sending its questing shadows out as an advanced party to warn away the night. Time was a’wastin’. Storm’s rudimentary disguise wouldn’t stand up under daylight, even from a distance, and the logistics of his predicament had just gotten dicier by a quantum factor.

Clawing his way out of the hole in the ground, the first thing he noticed was that the graves detail was on this side of the river. Naturally. He scanned the battlefield for any of the horses he’d seen, and speaking of horses....

Can you hear me, knothead? he ventured softly.

Far off and faint, he seemed to hear the ghost of an inquisitive whicker.

Sonofagun, it worked. Go back to where we left the coyote, he thought. I’ll join you there later.

The questioning whicker was repeated.

No, I’m alright. Just go. It’s getting complicated here and I don’t want to have to worry about you too.

A derisive snort, but a feeling of acceptance.

The sun was climbing fast, already half its diameter above the horizon. He had about five or ten minutes before anybody who cared to look was going to see that he wasn’t any Turaleean grave digger.

He picked out half a dozen horses and mentally mapped his route to them before he stood and set off, striding resolutely for the nearest, a roan of about sixteen hands, with one white stocking and a round shield hanging from the saddle.

The horse thought about shying from the approaching man, but didn’t get around to it in time. Storm caught the trailing reins and turned for his next target. He didn’t mount, he didn’t hurry. If anything, he forced himself to slow. He was the reluctant grunt on the shittiest of shit details, and he wasn’t in any hurry at all at all.

The second horse was a short-coupled grulla with a barrel chest and about half a hammer head. It was the ugliest piece of horseflesh he’d seen in twenty years, but the legs looked sound. The mouse colored gelding tried giving him a hard time as he gathered it up, but he side-stepped the stomp and gave it an elbow when it tried to bite. He never gave thought to the moves, and responded nonchalantly, the dance as old as the partnership of horse and man.

He was tying the grulla’s reins to the saddle of the roan when he spied the mounted soldier at the river’s edge. An instant’s panic, quickly quelled, and he resumed his plodding trek, aiming for a great black gelding bearing an officer’s kit and saddle. The rider, he kept in the corner of his eye, sweating blood, his stomach churning. But the rider had apparently been satisfied with the unknown wrangler’s behavior, and had turned to watch the real graves detail trying to determine the identities of a row of officers they’d gathered.

The officer’s black was different stuff than the other two, and Storm didn’t even attempt to gather him up with them in tow. It took him more time than he had to get the squirrely brute in hand. The sun was fully up by the time he’d gotten the other horses tied to the black’s saddle.

There were three more horses within reach, but did he dare try for them? Could he keep the big black between himself and the soldiers? Pausing, he pretended to check the black’s off forehoof, taking the chance to look under the animal’s belly at the Turaleeans. So far they were ignoring him. They’d continue to do so as long as he didn’t do anything unusual. Like taking off in the wrong direction with a pair of half dead enemy survivors in broad assed daylight for instance.

He had to surreptitiously peg stones at the last horse to get it to drift past the stable before he reached it, but he managed to keep from catching it until he could follow it around behind the husk of the building. Looking back, he saw that the last couple of his little string of mounts would still be visible to the north. That was fine. Let the soldiers think he’d left the string behind while he caught up the wanderer.

The boy was awake, more or less, and his hand had stopped bleeding again. Storm, half goofy with fatigue, took two tries getting him into the saddle of a medium sized bay gelding whose gate looked pretty smooth.

“Lay along his neck,” Storm instructed the boy. “But hold on. I don’t have any idea where a real wrangler would be taking these animals, and I’m not sure any of those Turaleeans do either. But just in case, be ready if we have to run for it.”

The ancient crone would have been pure torture to retrieve if she’d weighed more than fifteen kilos. As it was, Storm had the silly notion that if he didn’t hold her down, she’d almost float up the stairs. She hadn’t stirred at all in the whole time he’d been gone, and only the thready pulse in her neck affirmed that she was still alive at all.

He lay her softly in the dirt beside the stable wall and returned for the blankets. The officer’s black had a gate like a ten fan Royce/Daimler touring sedan, so Storm built the old woman a nest of blankets in the broad saddle. He hoisted her aboard and lashed her in. He recognized that he was probably killing her with the act but couldn’t come up with anything better.