Touchstone could see the Dead now, and had no difficulty hearing them. They were ting and clapping, decayed hands meeting together in a steady, slow rhythm that put all the hair on the back of his head on edge.
A ghastly noise, hard sounds of bone on bone, or the liquid thumpings of deposed, jellying flesh. The ting was even worse, for very few of them had funing mouths.
Touchstone had never seen or heard a shipwreow he khe sound of a thousand sailors drowning, all at once, in a quiet sea.
The lines of the Dead had marched out close to where Touchstoood, f a great mass of shifting shadow, spread like a choking fungus around the ns. Touchstone couldn』t make out what they were doing, till Mogget, with his night-sight, explained.
「They』re f up into two lio make a corridor,」 the little cat whispered, though the need for silence was long gone. 「A corridor of Dead Hands, reag from the northern stair to us.」
「 you see the doorway of the stair?」
Touchstone asked. He was no longer afraid, now he could see and smell the putrest, stinking corpses lined up in mockery of a parade. I should have died in this reservoir long ago, he thought.
There has just been a delay of two hundred years . . .
「Yes, I ,」 tinued Mogget, his eyes green with sparkling fire. 「A tall beast has e, its flesh boiling with dirty flames. A Mordit. It』s croug ier, looking bad up like a dog to its master. Fog is rolling dowairs behind it—a Free Magic trick, that one. I wonder why he has su urge to impress?」
「Rogir always was flamboyant,」 Touchstoated, as if he might be enting on someo a dinner party. 「He liked everyoo be looking at him. He』s no different as Kerrigor, no different Dead.」
「Oh, but he is,」 said Mogget. 「Very different.
He knows you』re here, and the fog』s for vanity.
He must have been terribly rushed making the body he wears now. A vain man—even a Dead one—would not like this body looked at.」
Touchstone swallowed, trying not to think about that. He wondered if he could charge out of the diamond, flèche with his swords into that fog, a mad attack—but even if he got there, would his swords, Charter-spelled though they were, have any effe the magical flesh Kerrigor now wore? Something moved ier, at the limits of his vision, and the Hands increased the tempo of their drumming, the frenzied gurgle-ting rising in volume.
Touchstone squinted, firming what he thought he』d seen—tendrils of fog, lazily drifting across the water between the lines of the Dead, keeping to the corridor they』d made.
「He』s playing with us,」 gasped Touchstone, surprised by his own lack of breath for speech. He felt like he』d already sprinted a mile, his heart going thump-thump-thump-thump . . .
A terrible howl suddenly rose above the Dead drumming, and Touchsto baearly dislodging Mogget. The howl rose and rose, being unbearable, and then a huge shape broke out of the fog and darkness, stampeding towards them with fearful preat swaths of spray exploding around it as it ran.
Touchstone shouted, or screamed—he wasn』t sure—threw away his dle, drew his left sword and thrust both blades out, croug to receive the charge, knees so bent he was chestdeep ier.
「The Mordit!」 yelled Mogget, then he was gone, leaping from Touchstoo the still-frosted Sabriel.
Touchstone barely had time to absorb this information, and a split-sed image of something like an enormous, flame-shrouded bear, howling lik