by Bobby Adair
William's demons screeched excitedly as row after disorderly row of their brethren walked by, noticing William in the trees, but none of them stopped or broke from the mob.
William wasn't directing them, but they were all going the same way.
Staring at one of the moving demons, William noticed a piece of fabric snagged on one of its bulbous warts. He didn't need to think any harder to determine where they were going.
They were going to Brighton.
But of course they were.
They were going after Winthrop's army.
Revenge.
William stepped out of the forest and looked back at his demons, ordering them to follow him to the edge of the road, and then waited until the last fringes of the enormous demon army were passing by. When the line had reached its end, William and his new brothers fell in line behind it.
Walking with a horde of demons thousands strong, William couldn't stop envisioning the look on Winthrop's face when he saw them coming. Winthrop, his priests, and his priestesses would die at the hands of the horde. They'd get a death just as painful as Phillip and Jasmine had gotten.
And they deserved it.
Chapter 72: Oliver
Oliver was exhausted. Just as Jingo had promised, they'd made camp early the evening before, and Oliver had a full night of sleep, but all the walking, including the trudge up to the mountain pass through that whole first night away from the settlement, left Oliver with a fatigue in his bones that was going to take several nights of sleep and days of rest from which to recover.
Ivory was in the lead again as they walked through the forest. Melora was with him, both twenty or thirty yards ahead. Oliver was walking beside Jingo, who was pulling the cart, and Beck was lagging behind, struggling to keep his feet moving forward. Of all of them, Beck was having the most trouble. His stamina was running low.
But they were close to Brighton.
Ivory said they'd be there before midday.
They were driven to reach the goal, though they'd not talked about what exactly they'd do once they arrived. Sure, they were going to contact the Academy somehow, but no one had mentioned exactly how. They couldn't all walk through the gate with wart-covered Jingo and their strange weapons, while they pulled a priceless treasure of Tech Magic on a cart made of solid aluminum that itself would be the envy of every rich merchant in Brighton.
They'd figure it out when they got there. At least, that was Oliver's hope.
For the moment, they had bigger problems. Nearly as soon as they'd started walking that morning, they heard demons howling in the forest, faint and very far away, at first, but the sound grew nearer as the day progressed. More troublesome, there seemed to be thousands of them.
Oliver knew the sound too well, and every time he looked back at Beck, it was obvious the sound had made a permanent impression on him too. The sound was louder than any they'd heard on the journey so far. Every night on the march from Brighton to the Ancient City had been filled with screeches, but nothing to match what they heard now.
Oliver glanced in the direction of the distant horde.
"How close do you suppose they are?" Jingo asked.
Embarrassed for having gotten caught looking into the trees and showing his worry, Oliver said, "Far away, I think."
"A mile?" Jingo asked. "Two?"
Oliver thought about his answer as he looked over his shoulder at Beck, who was listening to the conversation. "Maybe a mile, probably more."
"Not close enough to be a danger." Jingo smiled. "Not in the next few minutes. Do you agree?"
"If they come this way—"
"Do you think they are?" Jingo asked. "Coming this way, right now?"
Oliver looked to his left though he could see nothing but trees and shrubs. "Either they're getting closer to us, or we're getting closer to them, but I don't think they're coming this way." Maybe there was hope.
That's when Oliver realized Jingo was asking him questions that would lead Oliver to logical answers that would soothe his growing fear. Jingo was teaching him how to think, rather than react emotionally.
Jingo glanced over his shoulder at Beck. "How many, do you think?"
Beck grimaced. "More than I've ever seen at one time."
Oliver noticed an edge of panic in Beck's voice and he went to great effort to moderate his tone of voice when he added, "We've seen a lot of them, many, many thousands in the battle on that hill by the river."
Jingo appraised Oliver and nodded with a bit of a smile as he said, "There are many thousands out there."
Oliver felt like he'd passed a test, and was pleased to earn Jingo's approval.
Ivory and Melora came walking back. Ivory pointed. "You hear?"
Jingo nodded.
"What does it mean?" asked Beck.
"We're headed directly west, toward Brighton." Ivory pointed in the direction of the township. "The road from Brighton's southern gate runs southeast for miles. It sounds to me like the demons are following that road toward the town."
"Are they going to attack Brighton?" Beck asked.
Melora looked to the south as a roar, suddenly louder, rose from the horde. For what reason, no one could guess.
"I believe they're going to attack Brighton," said Jingo, with a grim look that showed it was more than a suspicion. Looking around at each of them, he said, "A wise man might take this opportunity to change his direction." Jingo looked north. "That is probably the safest way to go." Glancing at Beck, he said, "With your city's army slaughtered back near the Ancient City, Brighton is defenseless, and may not yet be aware an attack is coming."
"They'll be wiped out," Beck concluded in a distant voice.
Jingo patted the pile of ammunition on the cart. "When I was a young man, I saw my people, the Ancients, fight hordes of the infected with more men and more guns than this. Some battles we won. Some we lost. But in the end, we lost the war." Jingo raised one of his hands and looked at the spore warts that encircled his wrist. "I suppose I was on the winning side." He sighed. "We saw the slaughter back at Kirby's settlement. Her people killed thousands and thousands, but in the end, they died. That is the way of it when the numbers are so unevenly matched."
"What are you getting at?" asked Beck.
Looking back at Beck with a sad, but determined face, Jingo, said, "You brought us back here to save Brighton from itself. We followed you because we believed in your vision for a future better than Brighton's past. As we talked, that was my vision, too." Jingo sighed again. "I don't think that choice is available to us now. With the horde coming, I think our fight is going to be for Brighton's survival." Jingo's face slipped into the comfortable, deep sadness that all his years had ingrained there. "I'd hoped for more, but it's going to be a war similar to so many I've seen."
"We can win," said Ivory, encouraging them with the kind of enthusiasm that comes easily to someone so young. "I know we can, if we hurry."
Jingo looked at Ivory, Melora, and Oliver. "The three of you should take what you can carry and go north. You are all at the beginnings of your lives. Take your hopes elsewhere. The world is bigger than you can imagine. Perhaps there is a place where you can make a life better than the one here."
"Where are you going to go?" Ivory asked.
"I'm an old man," said Jingo. "I've lived long enough. I'm going to take my gun and all the ammunition I can carry, and I'm going to go to Brighton and help them fight. I will probably die." He looked at Beck. "Are you still planning on going to Brighton?"
Beck gulped, but nodded. "I'm going to do what I set out to do."
"I hoped that would be your answer," Jingo said.
"If both of you are going to make a stand for Brighton," Ivory said, "so am I."
"Don't waste your life on this thin hope," Jingo told him. "You and the others should leave."
"It's not just hope," Ivory shot back. "Thousands of defenseless women and children are in Brighton. I can't run into the woods, knowing they're going to get massacred.
They're my people."
Melora stepped in front of Ivory, facing Jingo. "I know what it looks like to see everybody you ever met dead in the street. That's what happened to my family, to my neighbors in Davenport. I'm coming, too." She swung her rifle off her shoulder. "I killed forty-seven demons at Kirby's camp while learning to shoot. I can kill a lot more."
"You're both fools," said Jingo, but Oliver saw a look of admiration on his face.
"I'm staying with all of you," Oliver told them.
Jingo looked at his feet for a moment, clearly thinking of a way to dissuade everyone, even though he seemed proud of their decisions.
"You had to expect that we'd go with you," said Ivory.
"I hoped you'd leave." Jingo patted Ivory on the back. "Of all my students through the years, you showed the most promise, Ivory. I thought you might even take on students of your own and help me drag this world out of the Dark Age into which it descended."
"We can't do that if everyone in Brighton is dead," argued Ivory.
Nodding reluctantly, Jingo said, "If we're going to go, then it'll be best if we can get all of you inside the wall before the battle starts. We need to get there while there's still a Brighton to get to. We need to hurry."
Chapter 73: Fitz
"They're here."
The words carried such a weight it was hard for Fitz to move from step to step.
Or maybe it was the fatigue of a long night without sleep, preparing the staircases outside the wall, reviewing the battle plans, checking and double checking, doubting every decision, imagining a hundred things they might still do if only they had the time, worrying over hundreds more things she should have done differently.
The lives of every person in Brighton would continue or end because of her choices.
A command structure was in place, much like that of the militia and the cavalry, with Fitz at the top, the women of the New Council below, lieutenants and sergeants under them, and every woman and man in Brighton who was able to fight at the bottom of the hierarchy, ready to do as Fitz commanded.
Ginger was mounted on a chestnut stallion, waiting near the stables behind Blackthorn's former house. A handful of women armed with swords, mounted on intimidating horses, waited with Ginger. They were Fitz's personal guard, an affront to Fitz's dream of an egalitarian Brighton, where everyone worked together for the benefit of all. She told the New Council she wanted no guards, nothing to set her apart, but the New Council insisted. They'd lost one leader they loved, Franklin. They weren't going to lose another.
Without Fitz, they told her, Brighton would tear itself apart.
Blackthorn had held Brighton together through the strength of his sword.
Tenbrook failed because he was an unconstrained psychopath.
Franklin pointed down the path of a hope for a better Brighton, one that burned in every heart, because it recognized that everyone—even women—had value. But he'd been martyred for his belief in that dream.
Now, only Fitz could carry Franklin's dream forward.
Fitz put a foot in the stirrup and pulled herself onto a huge black horse, one of the few left in Blackthorn's stable, one that would have been his war horse, had he outlived his favorite.
With a determined face, Ginger said, "Victory."
"Victory," Fitz answered.
They rode around Blackthorn's old house and into the empty square, empty because every person had a place to be.
No one slacked. No slacker would have been tolerated. Fitz made sure everyone in Brighton understood what would happen this day. The women of Brighton, and the thousand men who were left, along with the children old enough to fill a productive role, would fight and win, or they'd all be murdered by the demons.
When the sun rose again tomorrow, Brighton would exist, or it would be another ruin, another Ancient City, with walls slowly crumbling to bury the skeletons of people unequal to the task.
Fitz led her personal guard out of the square and down Brighton's widest street, heading toward the edge of town and the road to the main gate.
The small children were all barricaded into a section of town with a few hundred well-armed mothers guarding them. They were Brighton's hope for a future, the last of what had to be defended if all else fell.
Three cohorts, five hundred fighters each, were stationed across the three minor gates, fifteen hundred women responsible for defending the entire circle wall, not counting the main gate. Women were in every tower, but the towers were so widely separated that they were of little use for defense, and served only as lookout posts.
Each gate and each tower had a rider assigned who would wait, ready to gallop with a message to Fitz if demons were spotted outside that part of the wall.
Fitz had nearly two hundred mounted warriors. She wished she could call them cavalry, but she'd seen Blackthorn's cavalry all her life. They were a disciplined lot of hard-eyed killers, invincible on their horses. In their time, they'd butchered more demons than Fitz could imagine. She knew her mounted warriors were not their equal, but they were brave, nonetheless.
In any case, if the demons came at the wall from anywhere besides the main gate, Fitz's mounted warriors would be the first to respond. They'd have to defend Brighton until reinforcements got there on foot.
But with twenty thousand demons coming, Fitz knew they could split into two, three, or even four forces, any of which would be strong enough to breach the walls and turn the tide of the battle.
Brighton's only hope lay in keeping the horde invested in the battle at the main gate.
Once past the edge of town and into the fields, Fitz galloped through thousands of women, men, and older children streaming across the fields, heading out to form up with the thousands who were already lined in their ranks, slings in one hand, spears, swords, clubs, or knives in the other.
Cheers rose up as Fitz and her guard rode past.
The people of Brighton believed in her, and they believed they were ready.
The cheers spread as everyone in the field turned to look. And the sound of nearly nine thousand voices sounded like sweet, powerful thunder to Fitz's ears, and filled her with all the confidence that the morning's second-guessing had chipped away.
Fitz clenched her teeth and steeled herself as tears of happiness threatened to spill from her eyes.
Her people might not win the day; they might all die. But if death came for them all, it would not take them without a dreadful fight. Her people had only a little training, but they had heart. They were committed to standing shoulder to shoulder. They were committed to one another and to Brighton.
It didn't matter if they lived.
They'd already won.
No, it did matter. They would fight and they wouldn't consider failure.
Fitz drew her sword and raised it to the clouds.
The confident cries of her army drowned everything.
Victory.
Chapter 74: Fitz
Every woman on the New Council was mounted and waiting when Fitz rode up behind the catapults. Even Kreuz, in charge of the giant contraptions, was on a horse.
Fitz asked if each of them knew what to do, or had any questions.
They'd been over their plans dozens of times. Everyone knew.
Only one question was unanswered, and it was the only one asked.
"We see a few demons trickling from the forest. But what about Winthrop's army?"
Fitz glanced toward the partially open gate.
Kreuz said, "They're marching out of the forest and forming up… well, mobbing up, really. They'll come this way soon."
"Everyone hopes their husband or son is out there," said one woman.
"Some of them are in range of the catapults," said Kreuz, pushing for the choice he thought Fitz should make. "They've passed the black flags."
"Are we going to fight our kin?" asked another woman, a challenge hiding in her words.
"No," Fitz told her. "Not if we can help it. I'm going out to talk with them."
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"Not by yourself." Ginger didn't bother to make it sound like anything but an order from a mother to a child.
"You're coming with me," said Fitz. "We're taking the mounted warriors with us. We'll convince the remnants of Blackthorn's army to fight for Brighton and their families."
"Are you sure you can?" asked someone.
Fitz nodded, even though she wasn't certain. She turned to Ginger, "Fetch our two squadrons." Turning back to the other women she said, "We all know our places. We all know what to do. Stand together to save your children and each other."
Fitz wheeled her big, black horse around and trotted toward the gate.
Chapter 75: Oliver
Panting from the fast pace, the weight of his rifle, and his load of ammunition, Oliver stopped walking. "Do you hear that?"
Up ahead, Ivory had come to a stop, and so had Melora.
Jingo stopped pulling the wagon. His heavy breathing was nearly as loud as the sound the wheels made rolling across the leaves and twigs on the forest floor.
"What is it?" Jingo asked, standing up straight to listen.
"The demons," said Oliver. "They've gone quiet."
Beck looked around quickly, concern on his face.
Ivory jogged back to the group.
"We hear it," Jingo told him.
"What does it mean?" asked Beck.
"Wait," said Oliver. "Do you hear that?" he strained to listen, but the new sound wasn't nearly as loud as the massive horde of demons had been.
"Men," said Ivory. "They're chanting."
"Tear down the wall?" Melora asked. "Is that what they're saying?"
"Yes," Oliver confirmed. "I hear it."
"Tear down the wall?" Beck asked. "Why would they say that?"
"Those are Winthrop's men," Jingo guessed, looking at the others for their thoughts.
"Winthrop?" Oliver felt a surge of anger and shame for what he still believed was a mistake. He regretted not killing the Bishop when he had the chance. "If Winthrop is here, nothing good will come of it."
"Have they allied with the demons?" asked Beck. "Is that possible?"
