“You don’t normally look for chats with me,” I observed as I took my seat. I had a pint poured for myself, which hadn’t been on the house despite all the whinging and wheedling I’d tried to do about my supposed heroics in the Dungeon. Vara did not have a pint, and refused one when I offered.

  “I don’t, do I?” Her reply came snipped and cool, it gave me some food for thought.

  “Reckon you just use me as a bauble, to show off, to get what you want from people, right?”

  It was the sort of insight that I’d find myself not expecting a man that age to have, these days. Cutting right to the bone of things. Of course, I was somewhat advantaged by Vara getting the very same thing from me that I hoped to gain from her.

  She didn’t blink at having it mentioned of course, didn’t look the slightest bit surprised. Just shrugged.

  “Reckon you use me the same way.”

  I did blink, and was a bit offended. I had no right to be, and even less right to respond the way I did.

  “I don’t just want that!”

  She eyed me in the way a slab of beef might see, were it to look up at the butcher.

  “Right, you also want to root me. Because that would do even more for your reputation.”

  I quietened down at that, and the two of us sat without saying anything for a few seconds more.

  “You’re being awfully…Bitchy,” I grumbled. Vara actually snorted.

  “I might die tonight, maybe I can regret this in a week. Maybe not.”

  The mood darkened from there.

  “My father doesn’t reckon there’ll be a shambler attack.”

  Vara snorted as I said it, shocking me with a show of greater contempt even than I’d seen her aim my way.

  “Your father doesn’t reckon on lots of things. We saw what we saw, you and I, Laryck and Will. Or…Well…”

  “They saw something at least,” I noted. I found myself shifting uncomfortably, acutely aware that this woman was among the few who knew for a fact how extensive my fraud was. She said nothing of it though.

  “I think that whatever chased us out of the Dungeon, whatever…” Vara’s eyes came up to meet mine, and I saw a sudden fragility to her, “whatever none of us wanted to tell anyone else about, I reckon that considers our business unfinished. I reckon this is far from over.” Chilling, but not just because it was a scary thought. Somehow, I knew she was right.

  Paranoia doesn’t exist, not when you’re a hero. It’s just realism.

  It was evening when I left the tavern, and Vara left it along with me. Uncharacteristically, the hour or so spent drinking next to the prettiest girl in town left me feeling worse rather than better. Jeeves was still at my back, quiet as the grave, and I was finding him more reassuring by the second. The skies were darkening, the air was cooling. Normally, people would be retreating to their homes around now.

  They weren’t. Instead, the walls were being manned by those young and fit enough to do so, while those who weren’t packed themselves into the town hall—it was almost like the Blackmists were coming.

  Ordinarily, in the defence of a properly built wall, you want your only some of your men dispersed across the battlements. A sizable fraction of your forces ought to be tucked away in reserve, ready to rush in and reinforce a section that’s threatening to give. This wasn’t a properly built wall though, and certainly wasn’t a properly defended one.

  Everyone was on the battlements, essentially at once, and we were all looking out around Sheppleberry as if we thought attack would come from all sides at once. Among the town, more than half the men had volunteered for the fighting—using the term “volunteered” loosely—and that left about two hundred for the walls.

  Problem was, the walls were quite wide. Not tall, not really, but wide. Though each of us was only about five yards above the ground, the full stretch of our shitty little fortifications spanned about a thousand yards. There was about ten shoulder-spans between each defender and the man to either side of him.

  That’s more than it sounds, in the dark. With eyes that didn’t have a noble’s night sight or a Thaumaturge’s spellwork. We dared not illuminate ourselves, either, because we knew that would only make us stand out more and the dangers beyond less. So there we stood, isolated, scared, trembling, alone. Those few of us who had been soldiers before had their wisdom drowned out by sheer numbers during the arrangement of this, and the waiting that followed gnawed on everyone well enough.

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  An hour passed, restlessness grew. Then the shamblers came.

  All at once, they came. As a horde, as a flood, as a scythe come to cut our necks like a farmer’s tool would the crops. They stumbled—shambled—and were picked out only by the dull glow of necromantic magics about them. I recognised instantly that they were armed in much the same way as those from the Dungeon, and it sent a shiver to my core.

  Voices rang out from the walls as men called warnings, and the defenders got to work quickly.

  From my place, I didn’t actually have the chance to see much, I wasn’t an archer, wasn’t a slinger, and was far too much a bloody coward to be at all proactive in attacking the damned things. I stood there and trembled for the most part, waiting until something came close enough that it became my problem. When that finally happened, I started hauling up the large stones piled next to me and tossing them down.

  There was none of the mad certainty I’d felt the day before, while staving off several of the things with a flashing sword and blurring limbs. Perhaps the danger was just far enough that my useful madness left me abandoned, or maybe I’d just used it all up already. Either way, my contributions now were a great deal simpler, smaller and weaker. Fortunately, I was far from the only one contributing.

  It didn’t take long for us all to work out that the shamblers were coming only from a particular direction, and lo and behold it was the same direction as the Dungon lay in. Orders rang out, and people started swarming around to concentrate out forces in holding that same direction.

  Except we hadn’t drilled properly, and so the act of actually moving came slow and tediously. People got in each other’s ways, tangled limbs and almost forced one another off the fucking wall where they tried squeezing past the too-narrow battlements. It was my bad luck that I was right where the shamblers already were, and thus denied such a perfect excuse to be delayed in reaching the action.

  On the other hand, if you have to get dragged into a deadly combat it was always nice to be in a similar position to mine. The first shambler to get anything close to near me, still a good fifteen feet down below, found its brains dashed out across the dirt when I pelted its head with a rock. I couldn’t help but grin at that—this was a far nicer method of fighting them than on my own feet and with my sword. Nice and fair, this.

  More shamblers came, and then more still. The fight started to look a good deal less fair and a lot more dangerous. My yellow streak reared its ugly head, and I’d have bolted then and there if I could get my legs to work. As things were, they seemed to lock up. My stupid, terrified grin sprouted back onto my face and I just kept tossing down rocks.

  That was all well and good, until rocks started coming back at me. Arrows too. I noticed the first one when it stuck fast in a post just beside me, and before my brain had even registered the rest I was already shrieking and ducking back. More projectiles started coming for the defenders after that, and our undead-slaughter became a great deal less enthusiastic.

  It got worse from there. Shamblers were one thing, they were almost mundane, but behind the lumbering, oafish lessers we saw a few other undead—larger ones. These seemed swollen in dimensions, standing eight feet or taller and covered in heavy metal plates rather than the more common armours of their inferior kin. They moved better too. Not exactly more gracefully, but more easily. Their armour didn’t seem to weigh anything at all, and though I could see the mass of them clear as day they approached like lunging wolves.

  Right for the gates, and it was only when they were almost at them that I saw their battering rams.

  Big fucking things, tree trunks by the looks of it. They didn’t have the wooden shields atop them that I’d expect of proper battering rams—once I was old enough to have seen a few—and this lack was not unnoticed by the defenders. We screamed, and started hurling down stones bigger than a small man’s head. They didn’t do more than hail. I saw rocks glance off metal plates, one or two connected cleanly but just rebound from their targets with barely a stumble left to show they’d even struck home at all. Then the towering undead were at the gates, and the rams were slamming against wood.

  I felt as if every impact was hitting my own body, and found my limbs paralyzed as I watched. Once, twice, a dozen times the heavy logs smashed into the wood.

  Sheppleberry’s gate was a big thing, maybe a half-foot thick and, tonight of all nights, reinforced by a thick lumber bar. It put up a fight, make no mistake. Short of a cannon there wasn’t much at all which would have blown it down in one go, and a few oversized shamblers certainly didn’t make the mark.

  But they had time, with their ability to ignore all the townsfolk’s attacks. Even as the minor wounds littered them and multiplied, they kept at it.

  Cracks started to appear in the door, groaning rents that widened and elongated with every impact. Soon enough people were scrambling away, all seeing as clear as anything that the enemy would be bursting in through those doors and not willing to be beside them when they did.

  I was naturally the most eager of all to leave. This was what ended up fucking me.

  Already, everyone had started bunching around for the defence. Bunching too tightly, in fact, and so as I turned to try and flee, I found a great mass of bodies already in my way along the tight wall and halting my movement.

  “Out of the—AH!” My rage fizzled out as one of my feet slipped off the platform, and I found myself struggling for balance. Before I could win that struggle, something bashed into me from the side and I fell off the wall entirely.

  Five yards, fifteen feet. Far from the longest fall a man could take—especially a young man—but not one I’d have wanted. It got worse, too. Though the ground below was soft earth, and I managed to spread my weight on impact to avoid breaking anything, I came up out of my role mere paces from the gates…

  …Just as they were forced apart, revealing the two eight-foot shamblers as they stumbled into the town of Sheppleberry. Their eyes were aglow, bodies reeking of death, and without missing a step both of them dropped their heavily-chipped battering rams to draw jagged blades. They came for me as one, wordless and staring all the while.

  I had, I thought, redefined the meaning of the phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire”.