by Jim Butcher
The Marat grew closer, the eerie droning of their horns growing louder, more unnerving. A restless shuffle went down the line of shieldmen.
“Steady,” Giraldi commanded. He glanced at the young holder in borrowed armor beside him. “You sure you lads can shoot that far?”
The holder peeked around the edge of the shield of the burly legionare in front of him. “Yes. They’re in range.”
Giraldi nodded. “Archers!” he growled. “Fire at will!”
All up and down the line, archers set arrows to their bows, their tips pointing up at the sky, standing close to their shield man. Amara watched the nearest young man half draw his bow, then bump his partner with his hip. The legionare knelt, lowering the shield, and the archer drew as he lowered the bow, took quick aim, and loosed at the oncomingMarat. His partner stood up again swiftly, bringing his shield back into position.
All along the wall, the archers began shooting. Each man loosed an arrow every five or six breaths, or even faster. Amara stood beside Giraldi in the one crenellation not occupied by a shieldman and watched the arrows slither through the air and into the oncoming Marat ranks. The deadly aim of the Aleran holders dropped Marat and beast alike with equal ferocity, littering the ground with fresh corpses, making the eager crows swoop and dive in a swarm over the charging horde.
But still the horde came on.
The archers had begun shooting at close to six hundred yards—an incredible distance, Amara knew. They had to have been woodcrafters of nearly a Knight’s skill to manage such a feat. For perhaps a minute, there was no sound but the grunt of archers drawing bows, legionares kneeling and standing again, the droning blare of Marat horns, and the rumbling of thousands of feet.
But when the Marat closed to charging range of the walls, the entire horde erupted in a sudden shout that hit Amara like a wall of cold water—chilling, terrifying in its sheer intensity. At the same moment, the war birds let out a shrill, piercing shriek, terrifying from one such beast, but from the thousands below, the sound almost seemed a living thing all its own. At the same moment, the sun broke the horizon across the distant plains, a sudden harsh light that swept over the top of the battlements first, and made archers flinch and squint as they attempted their next shot.
“Steady!” Giraldi bellowed, voice barely carrying over the din. “Spears!”
The shield-bearing centurions gripped their spears, faces set in a fighting grimace.
Below, the Marat charge hit the first razor-edged defensive spikes the holders had crafted out of the earth itself. Amara watched closely, her heart in her throat. The leaders in the Marat charge began to leap and skip among the spikes, looking for all the world like children playing at hopping games. Behind them leapt their animals. Amara saw some of the Marat, with heavy, knotted cudgels, begin to strike the spikes from the sides, shattering them.
“The ones with clubs,” Amara said. “Tell the archers to aim for them. The longer we can keep the spikes in place, the harder it will be for them to pressure the gate.”
Giraldi grunted and relayed her order up and down the walls, and the archers, instead of firing into the enemy at random, began to pick their targets.
Scaling poles and ropes with hooks fashioned of some kind of antlers or bone began to lift toward the wall. Legionares thrust at the poles with the crossguards of their spears, pushing them away, and some drew their swords to hack at ropes as they came up, while the archers continued to fire on the enemy. Arrows began to flicker up from the horde below, short, heavy arrows launched from oddly shaped bows. One of the archers beside Amara lingered in aiming his shot for too long, and an arrow struck him through both cheeks in a sudden welter of blood. The holder choked, dropping.
“Surgeon!” Amara yelled, and a pair of men on the wall moved quickly to the fallen man, dragging him down before going to work on removing the arrow.
Amara stepped back to the battlements. She swept her gaze over the enemy below, but she couldn’t see anything beyond a horde of Marat and their beasts, so many thousands of them that it was difficult to tell where one left off and the other began.
Giraldi abruptly seized her shoulder and dragged her back from the edge. “Not without a helmet,” he growled.
“I can’t tell what’s happening,” Amara panted. She had to shout to make herself heard. “There are too many of them.”
Giraldi squinted out at the enemy, then drew his head prudently back. “About half of their force is here. They’re holding the rest back, ready to bring them in when they get an opening.”
“Are we holding them?”
“The walls are doing all right,” Giraldi called back, “but the gate is our weak point. They attack the walls only to keep most of our men busy up here. There are too few men at the gate. They’ll force the barricade sooner or later.”
“Why didn’t they craft the gate closed?”
“Can’t,” Giraldi reported. “Engineer told me. No foundation under it for extra wall, and the interior surface is lined with metal.”
From below them there came a crunching sound and a sudden chorus of mixed Aleran war cries of, “Riva for Alera!” and “Calderon for Alera!”
Giraldi glanced out over the field again. “They must have gotten part of the barricade down. The hordemaster has ordered the rest of his troops in, and they’re on the move. They’ll try to put pressure on the gate until the defense breaks.” Giraldi grimaced. “If they don’t repel this first thrust, we’re done for.”
Amara nodded to him. “All right. Almost time, then. I’ll be back up as soon as I can.” She leaned out to look down into the courtyard below. She could just make out the forms of a couple of legionares standing their ground almost within the gate itself, spears thrusting. There were shrieks and cries from below, and Amara’s eyes caught a flash of motion, a dark blade seen for only a second as its wielder spun it out behind him. Pirellus was holding the gate once more.
Amara hurried to the nearest stairs and pelted down them to the courtyard, looking around wildly. Hay from the bales she had crashed through earlier that morning lay scattered everywhere over the courtyard. All but a few of the wounded had been pulled back to the west courtyard, and the last of them were being loaded onto stretchers. She started across the courtyard toward the stables. As she did, she saw Pluvus Pentius emerge from one of the barracks, white-faced and nervous, one hand wrapped around the hand of a little boy, whose hand stretched back behind to another child, and so on, until the truthfinder was leading half a dozen children across the courtyard.
Amara hurried to him. “Pluvus! What are these children still doing here?”
“H-hiding,” Pluvus stuttered. “I found them hiding under their fathers’ bunks in the barracks.”
“Crows,” Amara spat. “Get them to the west courtyard with the wounded. They’re supposed to be fortifying one of the barracks to hold them. And hurry.”
“Yes, right,” Pluvus said, his skinny shoulders tightening. “Come on, children. Hold hands, and stay together.”
Amara dashed to the stables and found Bernard sitting with his back to the wall just inside one of the doors, his eyes half-closed. “Bernard,” she called. “The gate is under attack. They’ll be coming.”
“We’re ready,” Bernard mumbled. “Just say when.”
Amara nodded to him and turned, focusing her attention on Cirrus, then sent him up and out into the sky, feeling for the windcrafters she knew would be carrying Fidelias’s rogue Knights toward the fortress.
She felt it a moment later, a tension in the air that spoke of a coming stream of wind. Amara called Cirrus back and worked another sightcrafting, sweeping the sky, searching for the incoming troops.
She spotted them while they were still half a mile from the fortress, dark shapes against the morning sky. “There,” she shouted. “They’re coming in from the west. Half a minute at the most.”
“All right,” Bernard murmured.
Amara stepped out into the open, as the Knights Ae
ris with their transport litters swept down from the skies, diving for the fortress. A wedge of Knights Aeris flew before the litters, weapons ready, and the sun gleamed on the metal of their armor. They headed toward the gate in a steep dive.
“Ready!” Amara shouted, and drew her sword. “Ready!” She waited a pair of heartbeats more, until the enemy reached the valley-side wall and passed over the western courtyard then the garrison commander’s building. She took a breath, willing her hands to stop shaking. “Loose!”
All around her in the courtyard, hummocks and lumps of scattered hay shook and shimmered, and a full fifty holder bowmen, covered with handfuls of hay and by the woodcrafting Bernard had worked over them, became vaguely visible. As one, they lifted their great bows and opened fire directly up at the underside of the incoming Knights.
The holders’ aim proved deadly, and their attack had taken the mercenaries completely by surprise. Knights Aeris in their armor cried out in sudden shock and pain, and men began to plummet from the skies like living hailstones. The archers stood their ground, shooting, even as the stunned mercenaries began to recover. One of the Knights Aeris who had not been hit began to weave the air into a shield of turbulence, and arrows began to abruptly veer and miss. Amara focused on the man and sent Cirrus toward his windstream. The Knight let out a cry of surprise and fell like a stone.
The second and third litters listed and began to spin out of control toward the ground, while injured and surprised bearers struggled to keep them from simply dropping. The first litter, though one of its bearers had taken an arrow through the thigh, made it through the withering cloud of arrow fire, though it had to veer to one side, and dropped onto the roof of one of the barracks on the opposite side of the courtyard.
Knights Aeris began to swoop and dive toward the courtyard, attacking, and though the holders’ archery had done well when the Knights had not been prepared to face it, the air shortly became a howling cloud of shrieking furies, rendering the holders’ arrows all but useless.
“Fall back!” Amara shouted, and the holders began to withdraw, harried by the airborne Knights, toward the stables. The Knights gathered together for a charge, their intention evidently to take the courtyard and hold it, and rushed at the retreating archers in a swift and deadly dive. Amara hurled Cirrus at the opposing furies, and though she was able to do little more than disrupt the formation of the Knights Aeris, they broke off the charge, swooping back up into the sky above the fortress, enabling the archers to retreat into the carrion-stink of the stables.
Amara herself turned and pelted toward the legionares stationed outside the gate. She caught a glimpse of the Knight Commander standing beside the makeshift wooden barricade. The Marat had managed to find two or three ways to crawl through it, and Pirellus danced from one spot to the next, his blade, and the spears of the two men backing him up, keeping the Marat at bay. “Pirellus!” she shouted. “Pirellus!”
“A moment, Lady,” he called, and whipped his sword out in a blinding thrust. The Marat who received it died without so much as a struggle, simply collapsing in the gap among the various wooden objects. Pirellus took a pair of steps back and nodded to the spearmen and to a few of the other legionares standing by. The men moved forward to hold the barricade, and Pirellus turned to Amara. “I heard you calling. The mercenaries attacked?”
“Two of their litters went down outside the walls,” she said, and pointed, “But a third landed on the roof of that barracks.”
Pirellus nodded once. “Very well. Stay here and— Countess!” The black blade swept out and something shattered with a brittle sound. Amara, who had begun to turn, felt splinters of wood flickering against her cheek, and the broken fletching of an arrow rebounded from her mail. She lifted her eyes to the barracks and saw Fidelias there, calmly drawing another arrow to his stout, short bow and taking aim, even as behind him, several men began to clamber down from the roof. The former Cursor’s thin hair blew in the cold wind, and though he stood in the shadow of the newly risen walls, Amara could see his eyes on hers, calm and cool, even as he drew back the second shaft, aimed, and loosed.
Pirellus stepped in the way of the shot, cutting it from the air with a contemptuous slap of his blade, and called to the men behind him. Fidelias’s soldiers were joined by the Knights Aeris who circled back above the fortress and then dove toward the gates.
Pirellus dragged Amara back to the stables and growled, “Stay down.” Even as he did, Amara could see the legionares form into a ragged rank that met the oncoming troops and the Knights above with an uncertain tenacity. Fidelias, on the barracks roof, climbed down to the ground, his eyes flickering over the hay scattered there. He knelt into it. There came a blurring in the air, and then he simply vanished, covered by a woodcrafting of his own.
“There!” Amara cried, grabbing at Pirellus’s arm. “The one who shot me! He’s covered with a woodcrafting and headed for the gates.” She pointed at a flickering over at one side of the courtyard, hardly visible behind the struggling legionares with their backs to the gate.
“I see him,” Pirellus replied. He glanced down at Amara and said, “The Steadholder exhausted himself with that woodcrafting. Good luck.” Then he rose and stalked out into din and whirl and scream of the fight in the courtyard.
Amara looked behind her to find Bernard sitting where she had left him, his eyes open but not focused, his chest heaving with labored breaths. She went to his side and took her canteen from her belt, pressing it against his hands. “Here, Bernard. Drink.”
He obeyed, numbly, and she remained beside him, turning to watch the fight. The legionares were having a hard time of it. Even as she watched, a giant of a swordsman, Aldrick ex Gladius, closed in on the shieldwall, swept one blade aside, danced past another, and killed a man in the center of the line with a sweeping cut that sheered through his helmet and skull, dropping him to the ground on immediately senseless legs. Without pausing, he engaged the two men on either side of the first. One of the men moved quickly and got away with no more than a crippling thrust to his biceps. The other lifted his shield too high in a parry, and Aldrick spun, sweeping his leg off at the knee. The man screamed and toppled, and the mercenaries surged forward hard against the shields.
Pirellus appeared among the Legion ranks, his black blade flickering. One of the Knights Aeris, his dive too low, clutched at his belly with a sudden scream, and tumbled to the courtyard. One of the mercenaries on the ground, wielding a forty-pound maul in one hand as though it weighed no more than a willow switch, swung his huge weapon at Pirellus. The Knight commander slipped to one side with a deceptively lazy motion, and his return blow struck off the man’s hand at the wrist. The maul fell heavily to the ground. A third mercenary darted his blade at Pirellus, only to be parried and almost casually disarmed, the sword tumbling end over end to rattle against the wall of the stable not far from Amara.
“Fall back to the gate!” came Aldrick’s bellow. “Fall back!” The mercenaries retreated, quickly, dragging their wounded with them, but a similar shout from Pirellus caused the Legion troops to halt their advance as well. Neither Aldrick nor Pirellus retreated, leaving the two men standing a pair of long steps apart.
Pirellus extended his blade toward Aldrick and then swept it up before his face in a gliding salute, which Aldrick mirrored. Then the two men dropped into a relaxed on guard position.
“Aldrick ex Gladius,” Pirellus said. “I’ve heard about you. The Crown has a pretty bounty on your head.”
“I’ll be sure to check the wanted posters next time I go through a town,” Aldrick responded. “Do you want to settle this, or do you need me to go through another few dozen of your legionares?”
“My name is Pirellus of the Black Blade,” Pirellus said. “And I’m the man who will end your career.”
Aldrick shrugged. “Never heard of you, kid. You’re not Araris.”
Pirellus scowled and moved, a sudden liquid blur of muscle and steel. Aldrick parried the Parcian’s first th
rust in a sudden shower of silver sparks, countered with one of his own that proved to be a feint, and whirled in circle, blade lashing out. Pirellus ducked under it, though the blow struck sparks from his helmet and clove away part of its crest, to lie glowing and smoldering on the straw-strewn ground.
The two men faced one another again, and Pirellus smiled. “Fast for an old man,” he said. “But you missed.”
Aldrick said nothing. A heartbeat later, a slow trickle of blood dribbled down from beneath the rim of Pirellus’s helmet, and toward his eye.
The swordsman must have driven the helmet’s rim into the cut Pirellus had taken earlier, Amara reasoned, opening it again.
Now Aldrick smiled. Pirellus’s face had gone sallow beneath his brown skin. He lifted his lips at Aldrick and came forward, sword lashing out in swift blows, high, low, high again, Aldrick parried him in showers of silver sparks. The swordsman shifted onto the offensive himself, blade sweeping in short, hard cuts at the smaller warrior. Pirellus’s black blade intercepted each blow, sparks of a purple so dark as to hardly be visible exploding at each point of impact. The blows drove the Parcian back a number of steps, and Aldrick pressed forward ruthlessly.
As Amara watched, Pirellus almost took down the swordsman. He slipped beneath a cut, slammed the swordsman’s arm aside with his open hand, and drove his blade at Aldrick’s belly. Aldrick twisted aside, and the Parcian’s blade struck more dark sparks from Aldrick’s armor, cutting through it like paper. The thrust missed, though it drew blood in a long scarlet line across Aldrick’s belly. Aldrick recovered, parrying another thrust, and another, while Pirellus followed him up with determined strokes.
The swordsman seemed, to Amara, to be waiting for something. It became apparent what, in the next few seconds. Blood, running over Pirellus’s eye, forced him to blink it closed, and he snapped his head to one side in an effort to clear it.
