Gerant’s presence vanished from Darya’s mind, and so, she knew, did the shield around her. Quickly she sheathed her sword again and grabbed the spear with both hands. It would come to blows very soon.
* * *
Death made up all the world.
No orders remained to be given. The vats of oil had spilled over the attackers; while more was heating, it would take time. Archery did little good now, with the twistedmen at such short range. The mages, the priests, and the Sentinels knew their business and were carrying it out with no need of Amris.
Now there was only the weight and motion of the sword in his hands, the backward swing to gather momentum and then the thrust or the slice, the wet, yielding squelch of flesh and the jarring scrape of bone, the withdrawal and the next assault. Twistedmen came up like grim children’s toys, met Amris’s blade, and fell back screaming, when he left them a head to scream with. Claws raked along his armor, and the air was too full of noise for him to notice the shriek of sharp chitin on metal.
The man next to him fell back, his throat opening red down his chest. Amris turned and gutted the twistedman as it came up over the wall, then spun backward to shear half the skull off another. He knew the hole in the line next to him, and held it while that was needed, but saw no more of his replacement than a human figure with a spear; just so must the man in his turn have seen Amris earlier, when he’d come to relieve a wounded soldier.
Faces and names were no longer important. There were arms with weapons, and there were bodies that took blows so that the arms vanished and had to be replaced, flesh that fought and flesh that absorbed.
Ichor ran down the blade and over his gauntleted hands and arms. The stink of it was one with the smells of smoke and human blood, and the whole of it was familiar. Amris had been fighting the battle for a hundred years; he would be fighting it for a hundred more; there was nothing outside of the patch of wall he defended and the creatures swarming up to try and take it from him. Even his own body was remote in a fashion, the senses he needed focused on their targets and no others intruding into his awareness.
In such a state, he could have gone on shouting until the very cords of his throat snapped and not have felt the pain of it, any more than he felt the straining muscles in his arms and back, or the bruises and cuts where his armor had pressed through the padding and into his skin under some onslaught. He couldn’t have thought of many words—maybe his own name—but he could have kept shouting.
But there was no longer anything to be said.
* * *
Darya yanked her blade up and out of her opponent. Avoiding the rib cage was always the trick—that, and not letting the creatures run up the blade and bite you, as a few tried. She let her weight fall backward, shook an oncoming cramp out of her arm, and then saw the man on her right.
He’d lowered his spear. That wasn’t good. She didn’t turn, because the next twistedman would get into range soon, but she called to him out of the corner of her mouth. “Guard up, there!” It might be time to get a replacement up, if they had any.
The man stepped forward. The spear dropped.
“Shit,” said Darya.
A large clawed hand shot over the top of the wall and grabbed the soldier around his ankle. He didn’t even scream when the twistedman started to drag him toward it.
Darya hurled her boot knife at the forehead of the twistedman climbing up toward her. Sword in one hand, she flung herself over across the blood-slick top of the wall in a barely controlled leap, bringing the blade down on the twistedman’s arm as she landed. At the same time, she planted her free hand in the man’s chest and shoved him backward.
He yelled then. So did the twistedman. It clawed its way up with its remaining hand, the stump of the other arm gushing ichor, and its head shot forward on its too-long, too-bendy neck, oversize jaws open and aiming for her face. Darya raised her blade to meet it.
One of the bird-things, clinging to the handholds the twistedmen had gouged in the wood, raised its own head and opened its beak. Rows of yellowed teeth looked like ivory spearheads. Between them a cloudy gray shape…danced? Twisted? Pulsed? It moved, and the movement suggested that if you watched long enough, you might be able to figure out what it was, and what the shape was, and any number of other things. Stare long enough, and you’d learn anything you wanted to know.
A sudden chill shot up Darya’s back and into her mind. She wrenched her head away and around, and the twistedman’s jagged black fangs snapped together just short of her cheek.
Instantly, rage took over. A stab and a slice sent the son of a bitch’s head falling to the wall, where she stamped a booted foot onto it just to be sure, reveling in the crunch. She wished it had still been alive and suffering—that thing that had almost hurt her, and all through its comrade’s trickery.
Well, she could put an end to that too.
She grabbed the soldier’s fallen spear. The recruits on the walls had been told not to bother throwing them—the chance of hitting anything was too slim—but Darya was a Sentinel, muscles and vision alike forged by the gods, and if she hadn’t cut her teeth on a sword like rumors said, she’d had her hands on weapons since not long after she’d learned to walk.
Aiming without looking fully at the beaked horror was a new wrinkle, but she’d overcome worse, and fury fed her will. She lifted the spear, flexed, and threw.
The point took the beaked creature through the neck. Its teeth gnashed together, obscuring the bewitching pattern between them, and then opened too wide, as its grip loosened in death and the spear bore it backward and down to smear itself on the ground below.
Farther down the wall, another of its comrades burst into sudden, howling flame. Emeth had probably just used her blessing.
“Don’t look at the bird ones!” the cry went up from one of the lieutenants. “They’ll bewitch you! Shoot ’em if you can!”
“You don’t say,” said Darya.
Then there were more twistedmen coming up, pressing toward Darya’s spot on the line. They saw one woman guarding a range that used to have two people. She’d been a good hand with a spear, but now she only had a sword, and they’d have her at shorter range. They saw, she knew, a weakness.
Darya brought her sword up and smiled, once, before going out to greet them.
Chapter 36
Toothed beaks gaped wide, and even forewarned, soldiers fell prey to the dancing patterns within. When a chance look could entrap a person’s mind, and when the monsters had closed so that there was one every few feet, warnings only did so much good.
Strong-willed Isen stepped to the edge of the wall. Amris saw him and cried out a warning while he kicked away the reaching claw of a twistedman and brought his sword down to hack away at another attacker. The woman at Isen’s side called to him too and reached, but a claw swiped at her face. By the time she’d fended it off, the head groom was gone, dragged down the wall under a mass of writhing claws and fangs.
To note that it had happened, and to save up the mourning for later, was almost itself too much. That was nothing new to Amris. He kept slicing through the ranks in front of him, his mind leaden with a weariness he couldn’t let his body feel. Around him, the troops he’d trained and joked with barely pulled one another back from disaster, or went down bleeding and screaming, the lucky ones back to their own side of the wall to heal or die among humans.
He saw events elsewhere, background to the rictus grins and claws in front of him. Branwyn’s arms and face shone pure metal, and the twistedmen struck at her in vain, while behind her wounded soldiers crawled back to safety and her sword spun deadly arcs in the air. On his other side, Olvir leaned forward, looking with neither fear nor entrancement at a beaked monster, and then took its head. Old Gleda paced her section of wall behind the soldiers, hands moving in constant gestures, and the troops near her shook themselves out of their bewitchment.
&
nbsp; They struck and struck again, aiming at the beaked creatures when they could—with arrows from the side, with spears, with fire and sword from those who could manage it, moving through the sea of flesh that the twistedmen made on the wall. More hot oil came up, and though the pots weren’t as full as they had been, men too wounded to hold a sword lugged them the more easily, and poured them over the places where the mesmerizing things were. Some got out of the way. Not all.
In time, the creatures faltered. There was a pause between the one that fell to Amris’s blade and the one that came after. In it, he gazed out across the battlefield and saw two of the squirming faces, as Darya had called them, step forward, robes shining in the sunset. They raised spatulate hands and, without a sound from them, the monsters on the walls began to pull back.
It was no situation for quarter. A rain of arrows and even rocks followed, as the wall’s defenders struck with anything they had, and more than one retreating twistedman found a blade in the top of its head as it started the journey down.
They did go, nonetheless. Amris didn’t lower his blade until those on the wall were too far out of range to surge back up. Then he shot, though without Darya’s expertise, until the retreating forces were out of arrow’s range.
Only then did he let his vision expand, taking in the walls and the troops on them: bloody, exhausted, but still standing.
“Third guard!” Hallis yelled. “All others, food, water, and rest!”
Amris repeated the order, then made for the stairs with legs he’d almost forgotten still worked for walking.
* * *
Bodies burned with a thick, choking smoke and a smell like bad pork beneath the sweet spiciness of incense. There was no time for individual rites, no space for individual pyres—just a pile of twenty soldiers, laid out as well as the priests and their assistants could manage. Isen wasn’t among them. Darya, who’d heard about his death—hopefully quick, probably not—thought of him as she watched the fire, and whispered a prayer, though she didn’t expect it’d do much good. The Dark Lady was doing what she could. They all were.
Amris’s hand was warm on the back of her shoulder, even through the armor. Neither of them spoke for a while, not until the flames had reduced the bodies to facelessness.
“How are we doing?” asked one of the people who stood near them. Darya recognized the girl who’d been helping Isen when they’d come to the fort. A bandage covered one of her eyes, and her lips were split. When she spoke, Darya saw the gap where a few of her front teeth had been.
“For where and when we are,” Amris replied slowly, “well. That’s not to say our losses don’t exist, or that we don’t feel them, but”—he spread his hands—“Thyran’s forces have come against us twice, in large part, perhaps three times. Each time we’ve beaten them back. We hold, and we keep holding.”
“Your mages and I are thinking of a way to guard against that trance,” said Dale, the Mourner. His gray-streaked blond hair stood out in untidy spikes, and his hands were bloody to the elbow. “Likely it’ll be unpleasant.”
“What isn’t?” Darya asked.
“Just so.”
Gerant’s emerald flickered, and she felt his presence in the back of her mind. He wasn’t entirely back yet, not enough to talk, but clearly the conversation had caught his attention. “If there’s time,” she said to Dale quietly, “I’d want in on that discussion. Or he would,” she added with a gesture to her sword.
“I’ll find you,” said the Mourner, unperturbed by the mention of Gerant as few outside the Sentinels and Letar’s service were. Amris was another exception, Darya thought, and leaned her head against his chest for a second in silent gratitude.
“It’s been two days,” said Aldrich, who’d met them at the gate. His eyes were redder than the smoke could explain: maybe for Isen, maybe for another friend—or friends—in the pyre or elsewhere, maybe only for the situation. “And another two since we heard. Criwath is sending men, yes?”
“The men will be their answer,” said Darya.
“But,” added Amris, “they will. Hallis is certain of them—and if the map holds true, they’ll be another day or two away, and with them will come mages and knights.”
“Mourners too, perhaps even a Blade,” said Dale, “and another two or three of your order, Sentinel, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Amris nodded respectfully, talking as if he had no idea that the grieving crowd had gathered around him, as if he were only conversing with friends. “We have only to stay standing, and with the walls more or less intact, until they arrive.”
“And you think we can,” said the former stable hand.
“We’d best,” Aldrich replied, “or it’ll all be for nothing.”
“We can,” said Amris in slow, measured tones. “And it won’t.”
The courtyard wasn’t silent. Soldiers some distance out talked. Those in the square with the healers groaned, and some screamed. People carried supplies to the wall, and beyond the wall, the twistedmen growled and slavered and taunted the defenders. Closer at hand, the fire kept crackling. Bones popped from time to time.
But around Amris, a hush seemed to fall. When he spoke, the words weren’t louder than normal, but bolder, heavier, written with thicker lines or set into metal rather than wood.
“How do you mean?” asked another soldier, not challenging but inviting: Tell us more. Please.
“We have allies fighting with us here already,” Amris said, and gestured to either side of them. “The mountains and the forest that funnel Thyran’s army into one spot. The walls that give us cover and height. All of these mean that we can do a great deal, even a hundred-odd against a few thousand—and all of this I’ve said before. But—”
Overhead, a cloud darkened the sky, throwing the light of burning bodies into greater contrast over all of them. Amris went on. “What I hadn’t said, save to myself, is that those beyond us, those with perhaps more troops and more mages, yet lack the advantages we have now, and that the twistedmen are not infinite. You’ve seen it yourselves; when they die, they stay dead, and while they can reproduce themselves, they can’t do so endlessly, or without wearying.”
He paused and looked around at the crowd, at faces that were bruised or sunburned or pale with loss of blood. Darya saw him meet each of their eyes in turn. She knew that he knew he spoke to those who might die within a few hours or less, and who’d likely already lost friends under his command. The tension in the hand he’d returned to her back gave her some idea of what that cost him, but his voice stayed low and calm, and his face was serene.
We’re right here with you, said Gerant. Darya didn’t want to interrupt by speaking aloud, but she took Amris’s free hand in hers. Fresh strength went through Amris at both. Darya knew that he could endure better because the two of them were there, drawing strength from them to lend the others, and the sense of it left her honored.
“I’ll tell nobody what they should feel,” Amris continued, “nor why they should fight. But what I tell myself is that even if we fall here, even if I lie unburned for the Twisted to find, I will have killed more of those corrupted things than they can make from my body. Each of them that dies before our walls is one that won’t go on to prey on a village, or to face Criwath’s troops on better ground. I will die knowing that my death means my enemy has less to work with, and that our friends without the advantages of this place have less to face. I speak for myself, and I speak as a general, and for me, no action is for naught if it leaves our foes weaker, even if that weakness comes with victory.”
The faces around the fire lightened, and the shoulders beneath them straightened. Isen’s stable hand smiled, and even Aldrich nodded, though grimly.
“And,” Darya added, slipping back into a cooler, less immediate version of what she’d felt as the oil flowed down the wall and those below it screamed, “we’re hurting the scum, and we’re probabl
y pissing off Thyran and his commanders pretty well.”
“Oh, yes,” said Amris. “He never was prone to being philosophical about failure.”
Darya grinned, with the hot joy of a wild predator twisting inside her. “That right there is enough for me,” she said. The Mourner, unarmed as he was, smiled back with the same hatred that sustained her as she went on: Letar was the lady of vengeance as well as healing, after all. “They’re not getting through here without paying.”
Two appealing arguments, Gerant said, still faint. I’d be interested to see who picks which—though, of course, they’re eminently compatible.
Chapter 37
A hand on her shoulder woke Darya from a doze. She wasn’t sure where she was at first, but there were fewer people screaming than there’d been in her dreams, and the face in front of her was whole and not in pain, though the brows were furrowed in concern. “Olvir?” she asked.
“Sentinel,” he replied. “They’ve not yet picked up their attack, but there’s action afoot. Your Emeth had it from a crow.”
“Katrine’s Emeth, if she’ll admit to being anybody’s.” Darya unfolded herself from where she’d been sitting, back propped against a building. Her arms hurt. Her feet had gone numb. She shook life back into both. “Any specifics?”
“They’ve been killing their own wounded for the last hour,” Olvir said. He offered her a hand and she took it. After three days of fighting and scarce rest, pride was long gone, and getting to her feet a fair-sized chore.
Darkness had fallen again while she slept, punctuated by the glow of fires in the courtyard and under the cauldrons on the wall. Soldiers moved through it like she did, vague shapes on vaguer errands. The wounded had been taken to one of the buildings once Dale and his assistants had treated the worst of their injuries, and their moaning had diminished either naturally or with painkillers.
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