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sound across the sand.
    Salamander gasped with effort, leaning forward in her determination, her open hands thrust wide. Through gritted teeth, she panted, “Too many of them. I can’t…hold the shadows back.”
    As if a giant pressed against Salamander’s palms, her elbows folded. She could fall back no further: with every step she gave, the shadows took two. They loomed close enough now that Bijou could see the gaunt shapes within, the yellow eyes gleaming with gathered moonlight. In the shadows, she couldn’t make out individuals: just a black silhouette of pricked ears and clawed hands, yearning.
    Bijou made the dead horse whirl and kick, but it was slow and clumsy. In such things, she was a puppeteer at best, and these were not moves she had practiced.
    “Let me,” Kaulas called.
    Normally, she’d hesitate to encourage him to raise up the shade of something so far decayed, but this was war. She released the wizardry with which she bound the horse-corpse, and felt Kaulas effortlessly pick up the threads before it could fall. Now the undead steed came alive, dry neck arching, hooves thumping the earth in a manner that could only be interpreted as a gesture of war. It threw up its head and shook out the sad, strawtick remnants of its mane. From its motion, Bijou imagined the fierce war-whistle of an angry stallion, but only the rattle of sinew and bone reached her ears.
    The arrogant prance and kick of long, clean legs weathered down to brown bone broke her heart as no puppet-mastered corpse ever could.
    The ghuls were not afraid of dead things. But even they must respect the flashing hooves of an angry horse—two, when the second corpse joined the first. A mare, Bijou thought, watching this one standing stolid and low-headed, sand blown from the jagged cavities where its nostrils once had flared. The shadows still stretched to encompass the defiant horses, though, and Bijou saw the undead mare twist her bony neck around and snap at a ghul-hand that clawed her shoulder.
    Bijou reached out and grasped Salamander’s shoulder, her fingers bunching cloth and sliding over the firm muscle beneath. Bijou saw Ambrosias’s ferret-skulled head snap forward and rattle back, muzzle stained darker now, and wished—not for the last time—that she had thought to give it venom. As if Bijou’s touch gave her strength, Salamander incrementally managed to straighten her arms again. Bijou leaned forward, heart hammering, willing the other woman strength.
    The pressure did not push the shadows back. But it pushed Salamander away from them, into Bijou’s arms. With that grip and the rear-guard of the horses and Ambrosias, Bijou managed to pull Salamander in retreat before the rising shadows. Shoes scuffling, sand sifting down over the tops of their boots, the women regained the circle of their allies.
    As soon as Bijou and Salamander were clear, Ambrosias turned like a twisted ribbon and came back, legs wearing a rippled track in the sand. As Bijou released her grip on Salamander, Ambrosias swarmed up its mistress’ leg and spine until it hooded her head, knocking her hat on its strings down her back and rearing up like a pharaoh’s cobra crown.
    The shadows lapped higher. Salamander, fumbling in her pocket, pulled out the torch. But before her thumb found the switch, Maledysaunte stepped into the gap in the circle, up to the edge of the ringing dark, and with her hands fisted at her sides cried out in a voice and a tongue that curled Bijou’s soul like a dry leaf and made her hot blood as ash in her veins.
    The words were ancient and oily, liquid and barbed. Bijou’s stomach tightened against them. She could not get a breath. It was as if all life and light died within her, scraped from her body like nectar from a flower, leaving only the husk behind.
    The shadows broke like waves on stone. Then they began to heap, climbing impossibly, as if piled against a wall of glass. They rose quickly as water running into a cistern when