They look very dead to me,” said Sorak. The rotting corpses stumbled toward them.
“Guards!” shouted Krysta, running for the stairs.
All three corpses ignored her and came straight for Sorak.
“Tigra!” Sorak said.
The tigone roared and took a running leap, bringing the first corpse down. It jerked convulsively as Tigra tore it apart, and the scattered parts continued to twitch and writhe upon the floor.
Sorak swung his sword as the second corpse came stumbling toward him, its rotting fingers, with bones poking through, reaching for him. Galdra whistled through the air and cleaved the zombie completely in two, and where the magic blade had passed, acrid smoke issued from the twitching flesh and bones.
The third zombie lurched toward him, its burial clothes in rotting tatters, its feet nothing but bones, its face little more than a grinning skull. Sorak swung his sword again, knocking the head clean off the shoulders. Smoke issued from the zombie’s neck, or what was left of its neck, but still the body came lurching forward, arms stretched out, skeletal fingers grasping. Sorak swung his sword again, chopping off one arm. It fell to the floor, smoking and twitching, but still the corpse came on. Then it fell as Tigra leapt upon its back, daws and teeth rending it apart.
Sorak heard the sound of running footsteps, guards on the stairs. He was about to tell them that it was all over when he saw two more zombies stumble through the doorway, followed by a third, and yet a fourth.
And as he watched, the scattered remnants of the first corpse Tigra had torn apart writhed toward one another across the floor and began to join themselves together once again.
“Gith’s blood!” said the guard captain, as the walking dead lurched and swayed toward Sorak across the gaming hall. And two more were coining in.
Sorak lunged to meet them, and the guards drew their weapons and joined the fray. The zombies were unarmed, and they did not move quickly, but as each one fell, hacked to pieces by Sorak or one of the guards, another came in to take its place. And, moments later, the ones that fell came up again, their rotting body parts joined back together. The guards and Sorak laid about them with their blades, and Tigra leaped from one walking corpse to the other, savaging them and rending them to pieces.
Sorak noticed that the ones he had dismembered and struck down twitched for a short while, then grew still, nothing but rotting flesh and bones on the floor. The others, torn apart without Galdra, always reshaped and attacked again. A severed arm lay twitching, then began to drag itself across the floor to rejoin itself to its torso. A skull that had been split apart became magically fused back together. One of the guards ran a zombie straight through the chest with his sword, but the blade passed through the corpse’s ribs with no apparent effect, and the zombie kept on coming, impaling itself on the sword until its bony fingers closed around the guard’s throat and started squeezing. The half-elf screamed, but the others could spare no time to save him, and he went down beneath the corpse’s weight.
Krysta came running back downstairs, having quickly grabbed her blade. Several more zombies came lurching through the doorway and Sorak charged them, chopping his way through, swinging Galdra like a scythe. As they fell, he encountered three more in the garden just outside the door. They went down before his blade and became nothing more than rotting bones and body parts upon the ground, but another was coming down the path toward him.
Krysta’s voice cried out behind him, “Sorak, look out!”
He swung around and chopped out with Galdra just as another zombie came stumbling back out of the gaming hall toward him. The corpse was cut in two by the elvish steel, and the smoking, severed halves of its body collapsed to the ground.
Sorak saw Krysta cut her way through several of them and come running up to his side. Three more of the zombies followed her out the door. Together, she and Sorak cut them down, but only the ones that Galdra struck remained dismembered on the ground. The others, it seemed, could not be stopped.
“Running them through does not do any good,” said Krysta, gasping for breath. “You can cut them to pieces, but the pieces keep coming back together. Five of my guards are already dead, and the others are hard pressed. But it’s you