by Morgan Rice
Down by the docks, he could see the other men were just as nervous, staring at the fleet ahead, touching their armaments for comfort or checking objects that were obviously reminders of loved ones. Thanos knew how easily those nerves could turn to panic, so he stood on a section of low wall, making sure the others there could see him.
“Listen to me,” he called out. “Listen. I know how you feel right now. I know you’re scared. You’re worried about what might happen in the hours to come, and the days after that. You’re worried for your families and your friends, for the people you love.”
He looked around, knowing that it was the truth.
“That’s normal. It’s natural. I’ll tell you this, though, you’re not half as scared as the men on those ships should be. Because they have to face you.”
Some of the men laughed nervously at that, but Thanos shook his head.
“You think I’m not serious? You’re men fighting for the people you love, for the place you love. You’re men who have had everything taken from you. I would rather fight a hundred mercenaries intent on plunder than a man like that.”
He pointed to one of the barricades they’d put together. “Look at some of the things you’ve built,” he said. “You’ve taken an island that was designed to be a fortress, and you’ve turned it into more. Do you think the men on those boats truly know what’s about to hit them? When they charge onto these docks, they’re coming to their deaths.”
He shook his head.
“You’ve built more than that, though. There are men here who were rebels, who were Empire soldiers. There are Bone Folk standing beside you, and Northern warriors. You’ve built friendships that are as strong as any wall. We will stand together, and we will push them back!”
That got a cheer from the men, and Thanos knew that they were ready. That was good, because there was no more time left.
Out on the water, he saw it begin. The few ships the island had were rushing in toward the attacking fleet, not trying to engage the troop ships, just skimming past the boats that held siege engines, firing as they went. Enemy boats swung to try to fight back, and in that moment, the battle was joined.
Catapults fired from the shore, flinging stones that punched through hulls and jars of oil that turned the surface of the water into sheets of flame. Arrows filled the sky as the ships got closer, and now stones started to strike the buildings on the harbor side, reducing the nearest to rubble. Thanos heard a man scream as an arrow took him through the chest, and ducked as more passed too close for comfort.
The first of the enemy ships came up against the docks, throwing grappling hooks so that they couldn’t be pushed away. It was like an assault on a castle wall, only horizontal. Thanos watched for a moment as the first of the landing craft disgorged its troops, and knew that if the defenders attacked too soon, the enemy would just shift their landing spot. Too late, though, and their beachhead would already be in place.
“Wait for it,” he ordered. “Wait… now! Attack!”
He drew his sword and charged, slamming into his first opponent as the two waves of the armies came together. He thrust through a man’s throat, took a blow on the shield, and cut another man down. Around him, men cut and parried, screamed and died.
It had begun.
***
On the beach he and his men had picked to defend, Sir Justin charged into the mass of landing craft. He knew that there had to be more, that a dozen other beaches had to be the same, but in that moment, it seemed that the world narrowed until there was only him, his men, and the foes who wanted to kill them all.
He deflected a spear aimed at the man beside him and pulled the wielder close as he stabbed with his sword. Another man slammed into him from the side, and briefly, the two of them went down in the sand. Justin tasted the grit of it, and felt the sand go up in a cloud of dust. Then one of his men stabbed the attacker and he scrambled back to his feet.
The fight was chaos. Swords came in from all angles, so that survival seemed to be as much a question of luck as of skill. Justin saw one of the largest of his men brought down by a stray arrow, saw another trip in a patch of wet sand and die as an enemy thrust into the gap that gave him.
Justin cut and blocked, shoved enemies back with his shield and thrust, not even seeing his foes as separate entities anymore. They were just a wall of flesh now, armed with a thousand sharp edges.
“Lock together!” Justin ordered, and his men did it with such smoothness that Justin felt a flash of pride. They’d trained for this, they were the finest warriors any man could hope to command, and they knew what to do. Their shields locked into formation, tight as a real wall, far more powerful than the men could have been individually.
They pushed forward then, pace after pace. The hardest part was believing that it would work. Each man was trained to protect, not himself, but the man next to him, each man trusting that the man to his right would protect him from harm while he thrust at the foes who came to them. That took more than skill. It meant trusting your friends with your life.
It was step after step of violence, thrusting and cutting, taking blows on his round shield and moving to close the line every time one of his men fell. The formation couldn’t last forever. Eventually, it would break up into a hundred smaller fights, but for now, it held. They cut down the enemies coming to them on the beach, pressing them back toward the water.
They kept coming, and right then it seemed as though it would take a lifetime to kill them all. They poured onto the beach, and it was all Justin could do to keep striking them down. He wasn’t the greatest of swordsmen, but there was no swordplay to this, only the relentless butchery that came with battle. He cut down another, and another, and still there seemed to be more. Justin was already exhausted, but he kept going.
They had to keep going, because the only other option was to die.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Irrien loved the beauty of the violence. He could appreciate it the way another man might have appreciated the lines of a painting, or the flow of a piece of music. It felt like the only thing that could soothe the pain he was feeling. Wine hadn’t. Food hadn’t. The girl who had been sent to him currently lay dead, sacrificed to the death gods for good luck the moment she had angered him.
The battle, though, was a thing of dark perfection. Men flooded onto the island’s beaches, catapult stones rained down, and blood flowed. Irrien saw knots of men form on the beaches, attacking all of them at once so that there was no way the defenders could hope to defend them all.
Irrien waited with more of his troops, seeing which would succeed and which would die. The moment one group opened a crack, the rest would flow into it the way they might through a breach in a castle wall.
“There,” he said, pointing. “More men there. A hundred gold to the first man to break through!”
Around him, men roared their approval and started forward in landing boats. They charged forward to the spot he had decided on, some dying before they even left the boat, more coming out onto the beach and striking down their enemies. The catapults on Irrien’s flagship fired over them to strike the defenders, not caring for now if they hit his men as well.
This would be the spot where his enemies broke. Irrien could feel it as surely as he could feel the beating of his own heart rise in anticipation. He stepped along the length of his flagship, seeing the men who were eager for the order to push forward and land, and the expectation there.
“Hold here,” he commanded. He would not commit to the battle until he was certain of victory. The world had taken enough from him. A sensible man did not risk his life when there were other lives to spend in his place. A leader did not charge in blindly, when that might risk being caught in a trap.
Instead, he started to strap a steel buckler to the ruins of his left arm, watching the rest of the fight as he did so. It was hard work, and Irrien found himself wishing that he had simply commanded one of his servants to do it for him. Now that he had begun, thou
gh, he could not give up. He could not be seen to be weak.
“Might I assist, First Stone?” N’cho asked, coming up beside him. Damn him, the assassin moved quietly.
“I have it,” Irrien insisted, fastening it with a combination of fingers and teeth. He glared at the other man, daring him to risk a comment.
“You have more than that,” N’cho said. “It seems that the island is all but yours.”
It was the curse of weaker men that they thought in terms of things nearly being done. A battle was all but won. A girl’s heart was all but theirs. They were all but rich, thanks to a caravan or a clutch of jewels. Then their caravan was raided, their lover carried off by another, their battle snatched from them. A strong man made sure.
“It will be mine or it won’t,” Irrien said. “Until it is, we keep fighting.”
“Of course, First Stone,” the assassin said, as if he truly intended to fight. Irrien doubted that. He would not risk himself if he could avoid it.
He shouldn’t need to, though. Already, Irrien’s men were forming a beachhead, digging in on the sand and pushing back the defenders. It was hard fighting, and Irrien saw some of them fall into pits that had been dug to slow them, but that didn’t matter. No man charged a beach in the expectation that it would be easy.
Then the girl arrived, and it got harder.
Irrien had heard about Ceres, of course. A wise man learned about his enemies. He had heard what she could do. He had heard about her losing and gaining strength, about the enemies she had defeated. She had survived Stephania, survived the Empire, survived so many other things that Irrien could barely begin to comprehend what it had taken.
He’d thought that she would be a worthy opponent even before he’d seen her. Now that she was there in front of him, Irrien knew it to be true.
She scythed through his beachhead, arriving in a blur of cloud and smoke that carried her in through the air. She moved so fast that she was hard to follow from a distance, cutting through men as easily as touching them, throwing them back through the air with the force of a hurricane. Irrien saw her cut a man almost in half, then send out a wave of power that left more men standing there motionless, and it took him a moment to realize that they had been turned into stone.
She continued to cut and kill, and now the defenders on the beach rallied with her, joining in an assault that pushed his men back like the tide going out. Before, it had seemed as though they might be able to take the beach easily. Now, there were hardly any of them left.
Ceres moved on, and Irrien watched her as she leapt into the fight on the docks. Again, it seemed as though no man could even touch her. A big man with an axe ran at her, and in a matter of moments, he had lost his head. Two more men came at her, attacking from both sides at once, and a second later they went flying.
“Target her with the catapults,” Irrien said, hoping to slow her down if nothing else. He heard the creak of the winding handles as the men drew the arms back, then the rush of air as they sent their stones flying toward the part of the dock where Ceres fought.
She dodged the first easily, then sent a blast of destructive force into the second, shattering it into pieces. Even as fragments of stone rained down, she killed more of his men, rushing into the gap they left and hacking at more opponents. Soon, there was an open space around her, and the defenders were able to rush into that gap, holding it against the tide of his men.
Irrien could see the danger now. This one young woman might not be able to take on his whole army, but she could kill enough men to make gaps. She could turn the tide at points where Irrien expected his men to win. A thin thread of worry started to worm its way through him. If Ceres was allowed to continue like this, then the momentum of the assault might stall, forcing his fleet to regroup.
Or worse, the defenders might be able to destroy them.
Irrien couldn’t allow that to happen. His plan for taking the island depended on total, overwhelming force. It relied on catching the defenders in a place where they couldn’t just run back to their hills and turn this into the kind of slow, hidden war that Irrien couldn’t afford with enemies still behind him in Delos. He needed to win swiftly here, not drag the fight out while Ulren and Stephania consolidated their position behind him.
It was just as well, then, that he had a tool with which to deal with this problem. Irrien turned, watching the progress of the large hulk at the back of his fleet, pulled along by banks of oars as it wallowed in the water, barely keeping up with the rest of the vessels there. Stones fell around it, but the smaller vessels of the islanders didn’t harass it, because it looked innocuous compared to the barges that held siege weapons, or even the warships that tried to hunt them.
Irrien turned to N’cho. “Is everything ready to deploy the beast?”
“Release it, and its hunger will do the rest,” N’cho said. “My spells will guide it, but the truth is that it needs violence and destruction the way we need water.”
That was a need that Irrien could understand. All his life, he’d felt the same thing. He hadn’t felt alive unless it was at the heart of a conflict.
“Then do it,” Irrien ordered. He turned to his signalers. “Order the creature’s ship forward.”
Horns blared, giving the signals. They echoed out over the water, and slowly, ponderously, the great hulk started to move through the water toward the land. As if sensing the danger, some of the islanders’ ships moved to attack it, but it was too close now, and they were too caught up in their battles against his warships.
On its deck, the beast that N’cho had summoned reared up, letting the world see it. It was a thing of nightmares, and as it roared, Irrien could hear the screams of the men driven mad with terror just at the sight of it. He smiled at that, watching the bulk of the thing set against the sun. Nothing would stop it. Nothing would even hold it back.
Soon, the child of the Ancient Ones would die, and the island would be theirs for the taking.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Ceres fought at the heart of the battle, trying to find the spots where she could make the most difference, and save the most defenders. She saw a knot of them ahead, entangled in combat with three groups of invaders, and she ran to help.
She leapt up to the level of the rooftops, running along them and hopping across the gaps between buildings. She came to the spot she’d chosen and dropped down, power rippling out from her to knock men back.
An enemy came at her and Ceres swayed aside to punch a sword through his breastplate. She ducked under another attack on instinct and then struck back with a blast of power that left a statue in her wake.
She kept going, mixing powers with blade work. The men who stood against her died beneath her sword, while her speed let her dodge and parry, jump and keep out of their reach, even in the midst of the battle’s chaos.
That didn’t mean that she avoided all the attacks, though. Already, Ceres’s armor had scrapes and dents where swords had skimmed off her, simply because there had been too many of them to avoid. She had a shallow gash on her arm, and couldn’t even remember who had managed to cut her.
Compared to the number of attackers she’d already killed, though, it was nothing. Already, the cluster of enemies she’d picked out were falling back, trying to find safety while the islanders chased them. It left a gap, and in that gap, Ceres found herself looking for another clutch of enemies to fight.
She started toward one, and they pulled back in fear before she even got to them. Ceres let them go. She wasn’t about to cut men down as they ran. It meant that she found herself standing in empty space. It gave her a moment to pause.
In that moment, she saw the giant hulk approaching the docks, gliding in with oar strokes to the beat of heavy drums. One look at it told her that something was coming, and for the first time since the battle had started, Ceres felt a flicker of fear for no reason that she could understand.
Then a ramp came down from the ship and she saw what was coming.
&nb
sp; The monster had only one eye, but that eye seemed to hold a total hatred of the world within it. It was as tall as many of the ships there, with papery skin and a huge, scaled head. It had spines and claws that looked as though they could punch through armor, and as it came down the ramp, it roared in a way that seemed to promise death to anything that came near it. It looked as though it should have been a lumbering thing, but it moved with a spider quickness that belied that.
It ran down into the city, and brave defenders tried to fight it. Ceres saw a whole flight of arrows strike it, but they made no difference to the creature. Men ran in with swords and spears, thrusting at it the way they might have with a bear on a hunt. The monster swatted at them in return, and its brutal strength tore men in half with ease.
It swiped with one clawed hand, and men sprawled, dying as those claws punched through their armor. One would be hero leapt at its back, but the creature shifted, and spines were suddenly in the path of his jump. The man fell, screaming.
It wasn’t just that the creature was large, although the size of it meant that it matched most of the houses there. It wasn’t just that it was a thing with razor claws and spear-like protrusions, although those killed everything they touched. It wasn’t even that it seemed to shrug off attacks that would have brought down even some of the creatures Ceres had faced in the Stade.
There was something else about this creature. There was something about it that said it was a thing of death, every line of it inimical to life. Ceres could feel it too as it struck, seeing it in ways that she wouldn’t have been able to before what had happened in the fortress of the sorcerers. She could feel the way it drew in life from those it killed, pulling it into a vast emptiness within it.
Slowly, crushing bodies beneath its feet as it moved, it turned toward Ceres, staring at her. It opened its crocodilian mouth wide in a roar that echoed around the buildings there, showing teeth already red with blood. It started to lumber toward her, and it clearly didn’t care who got in the way, because it ran over Felldust’s warriors and Haylon’s rebel soldiers alike, cutting off their screams with the impact of its clawed feet.
