Sabriel forced herself to walk back to the main doors, rather than break into a screaming run. Lots of soldiers could see her— they were still plag lanterns out in lines, radiating out from the steps, and several soldiers were holding a coil of certina wire, waiting to bou out. They looked anxiously at her as she passed.
The sarcophagus was just slipping off the ramp into the corridor ahead of her. Sabriel could easily have pushed past it, but she waited outside, looking out. After a moment, she became aware that Horyse was standio her, his face half-lit by the lanterns, half in shadow.
「The fog . . . the fog is almost at the gates,」
she said, too quickly to be calm.
「I know,」 replied Horyse, steadily. 「That firing icket. Six men and a corporal.」
Sabriel nodded. She had felt their deaths, like slight punches iomach. Already she was hardening herself not to notice, to wilfully dull her sehere would be many more deaths that night.
Suddenly, she felt something that wasn』t a death, but things already dead. She stood bolt upright, and exclaimed, 「el! The sun is truly down—and something』s ing, ing ahead of the fog!」
She drew her sword as she spoke, the el』s blade flickering out a sed later. The wiring party looked around, startled, then bolted for the steps and the corridor. Oher side of the door, two-man teams cocked the heavy, tripodmounted mae-guns, and laid their swords across the newly made sandbag walls.
「Sed floor, stand ready!」 Horyse shouted, and above her head, Sabriel heard the bolts of fifty rifles w. Out of the er of her eye, she saw two of the Scouts step back outside, and take up position behind her, arrows nocked, bows ready. She khey were ready to snatch her inside, if it came to that . . .
In the expet quiet, there were only the usual sounds of the night. Wind in the big trees out past the school wall, starting to rise as the sky darkened. Crickets beginning to chirp. Then Sabriel heard it—the massed grinding of Dead joints, no longer joined by gristle; the padding of Dead feet, bones like hobnails clig through ic flesh.
「Hands,」 she said, nervously. 「Hundreds of Hands.」
Even as she spoke, a solid wall of Dead flesh hit the iron gates, throwing them over in a split sed』s crash. Then vaguely human forms were everywhere, rushing towards them, Dead mouths gulping and hissing in a ghastly parody of a war cry.
「Fire!」
In the instant』s delay after this and, Sabriel felt the terrible fear that the guns wouldn』t work. Then rifles cracked, and the mae-gu out a terrible, barking roar, red tracer rounds flinging out, ricocheting from the paving in a crazy embroidery of terrible violence. Bullets tore Dead flesh, splintered bone, khe Hands down and over—but still they came, till they were literally torn apart, broken into pieces, hung up on the wire.
The firing slowed, but before it could entirely cease, another wave of Hands came stumbling, crawling, running through the gateway, slipping, tumbling over the wall. Hundreds of them, so densely packed they crushed the wire and came on, till the last of them were mown down by the guns at the very foot of the front steps. Some, still with a slight vestige of human intelligence, retreated, only to be caught i gouts of flame from white phosphrehrown out from the sed floor.
「Sabriel—get inside!」 Horyse ordered, as the last of the Hands flopped and crawled in crazy circles, till more bullets thudded in