Death - Distant hands

“We are not just going to leave them out there to be cut down from behind!” Ezgati retorted.
“We need to—”
“Both of you shut up!” Death hissed. No, they couldn’t launch an overt attack without giving away their presence—but he might just have another option.
The elder Horseman dropped to one knee and plunged his fingers into the rotten, flaky soil, already whispering. Doing this at such a distance was taxing, but not impossible. If he could just …
There!
Just ahead of the advancing myrmidons, skeletal hands bristled from the ground, already grabbing at the enemy. Death knew from experience that the rapid spindles would grind those bones to powder, but perhaps if he focused them all on a single construct, they might slow it for at least an instant—and, more important, ought to make sufficient noise to warn the scouts of the approaching attackers.
At the Horseman’s command, nearly a dozen of those hands converged on the construct in the center of the advancing line, reaching over and around one another so that they might all grab the rotating stalk at once.
Bone snapped, dust flew … And then the necromantic strength of so many hands dragged the spindle to a sudden halt.
The upper half of the construct instantly began whirling uncontrollably in the opposite direction, metal screeching under the sudden stress. Like the mad project of some drunken toymaker, part child’s top and part marionette, it wobbled as it spun. Its arms flailed wildly, and with them the killing blades into which the construct had already formed its hands. The two myrmidons to either side, as well as one standing a bit too close behind, were instantly hurled aside to land in heaps of shredded metal. Faster and faster the runaway automaton spun, leaning ever farther as it began to topple, until finally one of those arms dug deep into the earth and ripped itself free of the rotating torso in a spray of metal filings, dust, and something that might have been a mix of blood and groundwater. At that point the construct, now completely unbalanced, crashed to the dirt where it flipped a few times, denting itself grotesquely out of shape, before finally going still.
War, Ezgati, and Azrael stared, their jaws comically slack—first at the wreckage, then at Death.
Who, in response, could offer up little more than a halfhearted, “Huh.”
Still, while the attempt might not have gone precisely (or at all) as Death had expected, it worked. The small scouting party, alerted by the sensational cacophony, took to the air and vanished into the swirling haze long before the surviving members of that ill-fated ambush could reach them. And while the larger force of constructs clearly knew, now, that something was amiss—they couldn’t possibly have missed the clamor, either—they could only respond by converging on the fallen myrmidon, given that the attack lacked any more obvious origin.
Death shrugged, allowed the hands to fade back into the earth, and gestured for War to order the attack.

***

Chapter 21