"Everything is lost. Those creatures heard us," he said in a hunted whisper. "Now they have come for our souls, to make us sacrifices for the Necromancer."
A long arm with long black nails burst into the room, grabbed the man by the throat, and dragged him outside. He grabbed at it, bracing his feet against the floor, and screaming. The long limb reached in through the window and pulled him toward it.
The Cursed caught up with the long arm and cut it off with his sword. A hissing, inhuman shriek came from outside, and the severed limb quickly disappeared beyond the window.
The Cursed flung the door open and stepped outside. He saw, farther down the street, several vampires dragged three struggling victims. The people's resistance was weak, as if they were under the influence of hostile magic or hypnosis.
The Cursed went after them.
Terrible things were happening in the city. From all sides, vampires were converging across the streets, dragging half-conscious inhabitants behind them.
The creatures hauled them toward strange mechanisms—iron railways along which capsules rose upward. The vampires threw the inhabitants into the capsules, where they were bound inside by spiked straps that moved like living things and tightly wrapped around the victim.
The capsules rose along the iron railways, each on its own track, reached the top of the city's stone wall, then flipped over under the control of special mechanisms, the spiked straps opened, and the victims fell down from the city walls.
Below, they were smashed to death after falling from a height of about 120 feet. After that, the Necromancer's terrible magic raised them again, and they marched as obedient puppets into battle against other dead puppets.
The Cursed became an unwilling witness to all of this. He climbed the wall via stone stairways and saw the capsules sliding ominously along their doomed routes against the backdrop of a moon emerging through dark clouds. How they reached the top of the wall and dropped still-living people down, and those screamed, flailing their limbs, and fell silent far below.
He saw the ominous tall dark figure of the Necromancer as he coldly and mercilessly assessed what was happening. A bald head, black markings on his face, a dark mass of feathers across the back and shoulders of his dark mantle.
He raised his hand, and the army of the dead around the city walls came to life. They rose, looked at each other with malice, and then threw themselves into unimaginable brutality and hunger, biting and tearing into dead flesh with teeth and nails, ripping it out in large chunks.
In the terrible, horrifying atmosphere of the battle of the dead, whirlwinds of otherworldly energy were born. Around them, mysterious objects and artifacts appeared, which all present saw for the first time on this earth and whose nature could not be explained.
The dead fought for about an hour. After that, all of them fell to the ground and no one rose again. Only separate parts of bodies still crawled across the freezing soil.
The Necromancer raised his hands, and all the artifacts flew to him. He placed them into a black sack.
Then he suddenly, as if sensing a foreign presence, turned sharply and noticed the Cursed.
They were separated by a distance of about 150 feet.
For a moment he fixed him with a cold stare, then flew through the air straight toward the grim palace rising in the center of the city.
The Cursed understood that this was his main target for the night. He descended and headed toward the palace through the city streets.