QUICKSILVER DID SOMETHING then that I'd never seen or heard him do so impressively before.
He sat on his flanks, aimed his nose at the distant cavern ceiling as if it was a midnight sky, and howled long and mournfully, the hair of his hackles lifting thick from his shoulders.
That primal wolfish cry gave me goose bumps all over.
Beneath his warning aria of soulful animal passion, like the low growl of a snare drum, came the onrushing clatter of another faraway wave of attackers, that rolling of a million marbles along every inch of stone in the forest of pillars between us and escape.
The way I figured it, we were just the antipasto, a tasty display of tidbits between the oncoming vampires and their habitual prey beyond the pit behind us.
Ric moved to my right side and Shez to my left with Bez beside him.
Quicksilver finished his spine-chilling howl by staring straight into my eyes. His expression had never seemed so human. I read anguish there as if it mirrored my own feelings. The wolf-dog looked as if his instincts were being torn in two, between his canine loyalty to me and the ancient demands of his lupine breed.
Spinning away, he ran flat out for the first line of massive stone pillars, directly into the oncoming clatter.
I couldn't imagine what form of mummified zombies would overrun us next. Then a thick, dark shadow filled the gaps between the pillars, an oozing wall of flooding sludge eight feet high with a glint of gold near the top, froth atop the water.
Quicksilver leaped up against the first charging wall, six feet high, catching a golden lasso in his jaws and pulling the darkness down.
I gasped to see a massive mummified bull body crash sideways, pulling its harness mate with it. The sound of their terrified and angry bawling rang off the pillars.
Quicksilver had vanished under the black, rising dust of their fall. As the wooden-wheeled light chariot the bulls had pulled crashed into its fallen coursers, the wooden chariot shaft attached to the yoke between the bulls' horns broke loose, splintering into a massive rough-pointed spear.
The Egyptian charioteer, a mere extra in the royal scheme of things, catapulted onto that ghastly weapon, transfixing his chest as his head and limbs thrashed.
I winced at this bug-on-a-pin sight. The driver had been no cannon-fodder mummy, but a true man, a living version of the ruddy-skinned, black-wigged men immortalized on tomb walls. His wrist- and armbands of turquoise and carnelian reflected the light as he wriggled.
I spied another flash of flying gray fur. Quicksilver was bringing down another ponderous pair of mummified bullocks. Zombies were driven beings, not always controllable. Time after time a lead chariot fell between the stone pillars as others piled up behind them, causing chaos if not death.
Rich male laughter drew my eyes to Shezmou. The Lord of the Slaughter must be enjoying the rout, and the carnage.
But when I turned, the laughing man was Ric.
"Zombie chariot draft teams," he was saying, his hands spread with triumph. "These bulls I can handle, O Great Royal Vampire Fools!"
And he strode forward as the mouth between every pair of pillars became clogged with falling bulls and tangling chariots.