The moss-light came up gray overhead, and the dead were already climbing.

Kael stood on the eastern parapet and watched them come — not up ladders, not with siege engines, but up the piles. The drift of bodies against the wall had frozen overnight into a grisly ramp, and the dead were walking up their own fallen as calmly as mourners climbing a hill. A farmer with a pitchfork. A baker's wife. A boy with a woodcutter's axe. Their green eyes didn't blink.

"Oil!" Kael roared. "Burn the piles!"

They tried. The oil went down in sheets, the torches followed, and the ramp caught — for a while, the base of the wall was a curtain of flame, and the climbing dead burned as they walked, green eyes glowing through the fire. But there were always more bodies. The dead fed their own burning into the pile, and the ramp grew through the flames, and by mid-morning the first ones were coming over the parapet.

Kael met them with his broadsword. He took the farmer first — a mercy, he told himself, a mercy — and then the baker's wife, and then he stopped telling himself things and just fought.

"They're over the east wall!" someone screamed. "They're over the—"

"Fall back to the gatehouse!" Kael bellowed, parrying a rusted blade, driving his sword through a dead soldier's ribs. "Controlled retreat! Move!"

It wasn't controlled. It was a rout wearing a uniform. The defenders poured back through the fortress — soldiers, archers, the baker's apprentice with his empty quiver, the old blacksmith swinging a hammer that had shod a thousand horses. Behind them, the dead came over the walls like a green-eyed tide.

Maelik found Kael at the gatehouse stairs, blood running from a cut above his eye. "The great doors," he gasped. "We can't hold the fortress. We fall back through the doors, into the city—"

"And lead them straight to the civilians?" Kael seized Maelik's shoulder. "No. We hold here. We buy them time to barricade the palace."

"Kael—"

"That's an order, Commander." Kael's voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "Get the people inside. Bar the palace. I'll hold the gate."

Maelik stared at him. Twenty years of service, of battles shared, of trust built stone by stone. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Saluted — the old salute, fist to heart.

"Princess would be proud of you," he said roughly.

"Go," Kael said.

He held the gatehouse for an hour. He would never know it was an hour — time does that, in the last fight, stretching and compressing like hot glass. He remembered fragments: the dead coming up the stairs, their green eyes floating in the smoke. His sword breaking a spear, taking a head. Tomm — the boy from the wall — dragging a wounded archer past him toward the doors, and Kael shouting "Go, son, run," and the boy running.

A dead blacksmith came at him with a hammer — the irony of it, a smith's hammer turned against the city the smiths had built — and Kael took him down with a mercy he didn't have time to feel. A farmer's wife with a kitchen knife. A boy with a woodcutter's axe, no older than Tomm. Kael's sword rose and fell, rose and fell, and each one had been someone's child, someone's love, and there was no time to grieve them, there was only the gate, the doors, the people streaming through behind him.

The great iron doors of Veyloria stood open, the descent yawning down into lantern-light. Through them streamed the last of the fortress guard, the last civilians — the baker's apprentice, his bow gone, carrying a child; the old woman with the water buckets, herded along by a Vanguard soldier. Kael stood in the gateway, his broadsword in both hands, and he was the cork in the bottle.

They came at him in a wave. He met it.

He fought the way he'd always fought — no flourish, no wasted motion, just the brutal economy of a man who'd survived twenty years by refusing to die. He took three of them in as many breaths. A fourth got inside his guard and opened his left side from ribs to hip. Kael didn't make a sound. He took the thing's head on the backswing.

The pain was distant. That was bad. Pain going distant meant the body was giving up.

Not yet, he told his body. Not yet.

More came. He killed them. He didn't know how many. His arms were lead. His vision swam. Somewhere behind him, he heard the great doors beginning to swing shut — the civilians, the guard, getting inside. Getting safe.

Good, he thought. Good.

A dead soldier in rusted plate came at him with a spear. Kael parried, slipped — his boot found blood, went out from under him — and the spear took him through the thigh. He went down to one knee. The dead pressed in.

He got back up. He didn't know how. He got up, roaring, and took two more with him.

And then the captain was there.

The dead parted for him — actually parted, like water around a stone. The captain in blackened plate, on foot now, his dead horse left somewhere in the fortress above. At his hip hung the black sword. He drew it. The blade didn't reflect the lantern-light. It ate it.

Kael looked at him. Nodded, once — the acknowledgment of one warrior to another, even across the gulf of death.

"Come on, then," Kael said.

The captain came on. He was fast — horribly fast, the speed of the dead who don't tire, don't hesitate, don't feel. Kael met him blade to blade, and the black sword sang — a high, hungry note that set Kael's teeth on edge.

They exchanged three blows. On the fourth, the black blade slid inside Kael's guard like water finding a crack, and took him through the chest.

Kael looked down at the sword in his chest. He felt... cold. A spreading cold, like ink in water.

He swung anyway. His broadsword took the captain's helm clean off — there was nothing underneath but green fire — and the captain stepped back, regarding him with those burning eyes. Almost... respectful.

Kael fell. He caught himself on his sword, kneeling in the gateway, the black blade sliding free of his chest with a sound like a sigh.

The great doors were closing. Through the narrowing gap, he could see the descent — the lantern-lit ramp spiraling down into the cavern, into the city, into home. He could see Tomm, the boy, holding the door mechanism, tears on his face.

"Close them," Kael whispered. "Close the doors, son."

Tomm stared at him. Shook his head.

"That's an order." Blood on Kael's lips. "Close them."

The boy wept, and pushed, and the great iron doors of Veyloria swung shut with a boom that Kael felt in his bones. The seals engaged. The city was sealed.

Safe. For now.

Kael smiled. He toppled sideways, his broadsword clattering on the stone. The cold was everywhere now. Above him, through the gateway arch, he could see the vault — the moss-light gray, going gold at the edges.

Footsteps. Someone kneeling beside him. Not the captain — a soldier, living, one of the last. A girl, barely eighteen, her face streaked with soot and tears.

"Commander," she whispered. "Commander, hold on—"

"No," Kael said gently. "No time, soldier." He reached up — his gauntlet felt like it weighed a hundred pounds — and caught her wrist. "Listen to me."

She leaned close.

"When she returns..." Blood on his lips. He smiled through it. "Tell the Queen... tell her we held."

"You did," the girl wept. "You did, Commander."

"And tell her..." His voice was fading, going thin as paper. "Tell her... she is a good queen."

"She is," the girl whispered. "She is."

Kael Draven closed his eyes. His hand went limp on the cold stone.

The girl bowed her head and wept. Around her, the gateway was silent — the dead had stopped, waiting, the way wolves wait.

Boots on stone. The captain approached. He stopped beside Kael's body. Looked down at the fallen commander for a long moment.

Then he reached down, his rotting fingers closing around the hilt of Kael's chipped, honorable broadsword.

He lifted it. Studied it. And set its point against Kael's chest — over the heart.

The black blade drank the last warmth from the body.

Kael Draven's eyes opened.

They were green.

He rose — smoothly, without effort, without pain — and took up his sword. He looked down at the girl, who had stopped weeping and started screaming, and he felt nothing. The cold was gone. There was only the will — the vast, patient will behind the green fire — and its single command.

He turned toward the sealed doors of Veyloria. Raised his sword.

"Form ranks," said the dead commander, in a voice like grinding stone.

Behind him, the legion stirred.

"Advance."