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he thought, and then he was on his feet.
    Odd had a sword of sorts. It didn’t look like a very good one; it was crusted with thick rust. Coming up behind the man, the Saxon ripped it out of his hand.
    Odd spun around, surprised.
    The Saxon swung the sword one-handed.
Gods of my people, it’s good to have a sword in my hand. It’s been so long
, he thought as his downstroke tore through Odd’s shoulder, sliced through his ribs, and finished slicing his torso in half just above the hip.
    Not such a bad sword, after all,
the Saxon thought. It must once have belonged to a true warrior.
Wherever you are
, he spoke to the warrior’s spirit,
I will avenge you
. So saying, he sliced the abbot into four pieces.
    To his horror, they lay on the floor, wiggling, trying to draw together, rather the way a sundered snake thrashes and coils long after it is dead. Blood bubbled in the dead man’s throat, pouring out on the stone floor. Blood, more blood than could have been in a man’s body, came spurting from the hacked corpse, spraying in every direction.
    Regeane saw the terror in the Saxon’s face. She had her scramasax out. Heedless of the thing’s value, she wrapped the white brocade mantle around her left arm. The man whose head hung at a strange angle struck at her with a spear. She parried with her mantle-wrapped arm, facing the spearhead up while she jabbed with the knife at his abdomen. She succeeded better than she’d hoped. A second later, he was tripping over his guts.
    The Saxon seemed paralyzed with horror.
    “The torch,” she screamed. “Use fire. They are afraid of fire.”
    She was remembering Rome, black wasps on a woman’s face, and a tomb that was there and then not there. She’d fought this thing before.
    The Saxon lunged forward, snatched up the torch, and flung it at the wooden rood screen in front of the altar. The wood was old, brittle, and must have been tinder dry, and matters were helped by the fact that there were linen curtains on the bottom of the screen. They roared into flames, and, in a few seconds, the chapel was lit like day. What Regeane and the Saxon both saw was horrific.
    The Saxon decided these must be the abbot’s trophies. The choir stalls were lined with corpses. Some recognizable, dead possibly only a few months; others were only garments and dried skin, teeth, hollow eye sockets, and brown bone. What was very clear was that they had all died horribly. One recent corpse seemed unmarked, but from the expression of insane fear on his face and the position into which his hands had stiffened, it was clear he had been buried alive.
    Regeane looked. Next to him was a woman. She was naked. She was nailed to the wooden chair by a dozen spears, none through a vital spot. She might, Regeane thought, have lived for days.
    The remaining members of the corpse gang fled toward the altar.
    Not a wise thing to do.
    It
reared up ahead of the corpse gang from the defiled altar, visible only because the flame racing over the rood screen outlined and defined it. A bear, but the biggest bear Regeane or the Saxon had ever seen. A bear with a pelt of flame. It roared and the walls seemed to shake. The corpse gang fell to the floor and groveled at its feet.
    “Killed,” it roared. “You have killed my votary, my worshiper, my priest. I have kept him and his creatures living for a hundred winters while I dwelt here.”
    “Yes,” Regeane shouted. “He was a stench in the nostrils of all that is good.”
    “What care I how my creatures entertain themselves?”
    The pleas from the corpse gang only seemed to annoy the bear creature. “Die,” he said, and they did, collapsing to the floor in a heap. “I found you on the gallows. Go back.”
    They vanished.
    “Pity I cannot make you do the same,” it shouted, “but perhaps my minions can.”
    Both Regeane and the Saxon watched in terror as all around them the corpses in the choir stalls began to move.
    It took the gray wolf almost an hour to free