pale lids that covered them, crying out to him in their horror.
She would need comforting. The teeming dead - the Great Majority - would have tried, but they didn't always get it right. Their voices were often mournful, ghostly, frightening, to anyone who didn't know them. In the darkness of death they could seem like night visitants, nightmares, like wailing banshees come to steal a soul. She might think she was dreaming, might even suspect that she was dying, but not that she was already dead. That took time to sink in, and the freshly dead were usually the last to know. That was because they were the least able to accept it. Especially the very young, whose young minds had not yet properly considered it.
But on the other hand, if she had actually seen death coming - if she had read it in the eyes of her destroyer, felt the numbing blow, or the hands on her throat, closing off the air, or the cutting edge of the instrument of her destruction, slicing into her flesh - then she would know. And she'd be cold and afraid and tearful. Tearful, yes, for no one knew better than Harry how the dead could cry.
He hesitated, wasn't sure how best to approach her, not even sure if he should approach her, not now. For Harry knew that she'd been pure, and that he was impure. True, her flesh was heading for corruption even now, but there's corruption and there's corruption...
Angrily, he thrust the thought aside. No, he wasn't a defiler. Not yet. He was a friend. He was the only friend. He was the Necroscope.
Be that as it may, when he put his hand on her clay-cold brow she recoiled as from a serpent! Not physically, for she was dead, but her mind cringed, shrank down, withdrew into itself like the feathery fronds of some strange sea anemone brushed by a swimmer. Harry felt his blood turn to ice and for a moment stood in horror of himself. The last thing he'd wanted was to frighten her still more.
He wrapped her in his thoughts, in what had once been the warmth of his deadspeak: It's all right! Don't be afraid! I won't hurt you! No one can ever hurt you again! It was as easy as that. Without even trying, he'd told her that she was dead.
But in the next moment he knew that she had already known: KEEP OFF! Her deadspeak was a sobbing shriek of torment in Harry's mind. GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU FILTHY... THING!
As if someone had touched him with naked electric wires, Harry jerked where he stood beside her, jerked and shuddered as he relived, with her, the girl's last moments. Her last living, breathing moments, but not the last things she had known. For in certain mercifully rare circumstances - and at the command of certain monstrous men - even dead flesh can be made to feel again.
In a nightmarishly subliminal sequence, a series of flickering, kaleidoscopic, vividly ghastly pictures flashed on the screen of the Necroscope's metaphysical mind and then were gone. But after-images remained, and Harry knew that these wouldn't go away so easily; indeed, that they would probably remain for a long time. He knew it as surely as he now knew what he was dealing with, because he'd dealt with such a thing before.
That one's name had been... Dragosani!
This one, this poor girl's murderer, had been like that -like Dragosani, a necromancer - but in one especially hideous respect he'd been still worse than that. For not even Dragosani had raped his corpse victims!
But it's over now, he told the girl. He can't come back. You're safe now.
He felt the shuddering of her thoughts receding, replaced by the natural curiosity of her incorporeal mind. She wanted to know him, but for the moment felt afraid to know anything. She wanted, too, to know her condition, except that was probably the most frightening thing of all. But in her own small way she was brave, and she had to know for sure.
Am I... (her deadspeak voice was no longer a shriek but a shivery tremor) am I really...?
Yes, you are, Harry nodded, and knew that she'd sense the movement even as all the teeming dead sensed his every mood and motion. But... (he stumbled), I mean... it could be worse!
He'd been through all of this before, too often, and it never got any easier. How do you convince someone recently dead that