“Fuck me,” Slick said. “Thought I’d gotten away from this shit years ago.”
Slick wasn’t a particularly stealthy assassin. He’d gotten captured more than eighteen times since joining the Black Rot, but that’s precisely how he got his name. He managed to slip out of any confine, slick as oil and crafty as a fox.
“You never leave war,” Rimeria said. “It follows you around like a hound fly.”
“’Least you can kill a hound fly,” Slick retorted.
I smacked him lightly on the cheek. “Cheer up, Slick. You’re not a feeder for indispensable knights like you were for your uncle’s militia. You’re the indispensable one now.”
“Yeah,” Rimeria said, “who else could we bet on getting roped up and thrown into a stockade every time he has a job to do?”
The Rots chuckled and had some more fun at Slick’s expense, but the jokes soon ended as Dercy returned.
Dercy’s steed huffed a steamy wisp of rotten horse breath into the air and lowered its face of menacing plate. A warhorse in every sense of the word.
Its rider didn’t look too bad himself. The short and squat King of Watchmen’s Bay was dressed in a suit of plate that glistened from his boots to his gorget. No helmet, though — somehow that made him all the more intimidating. After all, it’s not often you see a little man in plate armor with a balding head, sitting atop a horse fit for a mountain of a man. It’s disconcerting.
Dercy side-eyed Tylik. “Let us hope you are not being misled, hmm?”
“Been around for a long time,” Tylik said. “Got me a good eye for insincerity, promise you that.”
“I would never question it,” Dercy said. “I have a healthy distrust of all things northern, that’s all. When you’re raised in a place like this”—he looked around, judging the gray sky and the bitter air with contempt—“it does things to a man. Have to fight for your food when you’re little, or you’ll starve. Only the most cunning make it out alive.”
The snow crackled under the heavy hooves of Vayle’s horse, who appeared from the thicket of archers.
“Ram’s ready,” she said.
The steel plates protecting Dercy’s fingers clinked as he fastened a tighter grip around his steed’s reins. He drew in a deep breath, held it, and then let it pass slowly through his flared nostrils.
He regarded the officers and the Rots with a quick nod. “Men… women… today we bear a great responsibility. Take a look now at the vastness of life before you and behind you. There are twenty thousand beating hearts standing on this field today. There are soldiers, savants, tailors, tanners, blacksmiths, servants, prisoners, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers. Twenty thousand who have entrusted you with the safety and fortitude of their world. You cannot consider a single one of their lives, or indeed twenty thousand of them, more valuable than the survival of this good world we’ve come to know, but you will not dare let one of them go to waste. Today you lead so that tomorrow you can rebuild.”
Dercy unsheathed an ebon blade — a gift from yours truly. He jerked the reins of his warhorse, and it trotted to the outer edge of the infantry. He held the silver eye of his blade high in the air, clicked his heels and galloped down the ranks.
“Go!” he screamed. “Now! Tear down their walls! Go!”
A chill skittered up my spine as the swarm pressed forward. The wind was drowned out by thousands of pieces of clanging armor, fifteen thousand boots rumbling through the ossified sea of snow and ice, crunching and splintering the frozen earth.
A carnal cry of bravery and honor billowed up like chimney smoke from the marching footmen.
I watched the Edenvaile parapet in equal parts anticipation and dread. “Come on, you bastards,” I whispered to myself.
Vayle said something, but I ignored her. The wall was more important. The archers had their elbows cocked, ready to unleash pure hell on the unlucky soldiers at the very front.
A couple stray arrows whizzed down from the Edenvaile wall, the mark of nervous men — their intended targets were still too far away. Wouldn’t be long, though. Wouldn’t be long before the barbed tips would needle their way into flesh, or if our men were lucky, deflect harmlessly off their armor.
A bit of chaos would be good right about now. Some unexpected fun along the battlements, a few surprises gift-wrapped in steel. That was my contribution to the first part of the siege: to deliver agents of chaos.
But where were they? Where were my little agents?
Right there.
A speck trailed up to the parapet, and then another. And another, and another. It was a blur now, a pod of stars streaking across the sky, flashing pinpoints of black light as they raced onward.
Some of the archers turned alertly. Others toppled over the crenellations, somersaulting slowly with the wind beneath them, till their bodies fell below the horizon of soldiers that marched upon their walls. I knew when they struck the unforgiving sheets of ice because the taunts and cheers and hollers from the footmen flared up like a fire being fed fresh needles.
I smiled. Chaos had been born. My sellswords cut through the clumps of archers effortlessly. The bowmen may have had swords at their hips, but they were caught off guard and too closely packed together. By the time they realized the threat was on them, they were dropping over the wall like sick baby birds from a nest. And they couldn’t well shoot at their attackers without sending iron tips through the backs and necks of their fellow archers.
But good things never last. Reinforcements were sent in, and the mercenaries were mercilessly beaten down. I’d told them our footmen would storm the wall with ladders they could use to slide down in case of danger, but that was a lie. A lie I knew would cost them their lives and one that I would tell again. This was war. There are no promises of safety in war.
There is no mercy in war. The footmen knew that well enough when they came upon the gate. They stepped over the corpses of their friends. They found the man they walked shoulder to shoulder with writhing in pain as an arrow gouged the gap between his shoulder and breastplate.
This was war. There is no humanity in war. If it existed, I wouldn’t have heard the high-pitched wails of agony as cauldrons of boiling water poured over the wall, sizzling the cold air in a bath of steam and splashing on the men below.
Flesh was melted on this day. Scalps were scalded and skin fused together, topped with blisters like cherries on a pie.
This was war. There is no time to brood. You make decisions quickly and live with them. Vayle understood that. There was no hesitation in her voice when she called the cavalry to action.
They swooped in from behind us, the soles of my feet rattling as two thousand horses stampeded out in a U shape, quick to greet the mix of cavalry and infantry who bounded out from behind Edenvaile. They all wore the jagged C of the conjurers, the devious eye embroidered within the letter. Five hundred of ours wielded ebon blades, giving them the distinct advantage.
My mouth felt like cotton. Had it been open this entire time? Maybe. My eyes were dry too. Probably would have helped to blink. Didn’t have time, though. A crack of thunder stole my attention.
The double-leaf gate of Edenvaile trembled.
Another bellow of thunder.
And the gate trembled once more. Amielle and the other conjurers on the balcony crossed their arms, as if they were waiting impatiently.
I took my horse closer to the action. The action was nothing but terror: clashing steel and spurts of blood. Screams that could curdle milk fresh from a cow’s teat.
I imagined myself at the forefront, fighting off the cavalry and rushing guardsmen. What would I do? What they all did, probably: kill and move.
Swords clang, shields splinter, and you move.
Blood spatters your face, tinges your tongue with the taste of burning iron.
And you move.
You see the eyes of your friends roll back, the whites flash at you like a lake of pale milk under the moon. Sometimes you don’t see eyes at all, only emp
ty sockets with red spongy cords dangling, misplaced, strewn.
And you move.
You move because it’s the only thing you can do. Till you come upon the enemy. Then you kill.
Man looks like you, walks like you, talks like you, probably has a family like you. Problem is, he’s holding a pike and dressed in different clothes. You don’t think about his wife, or his children. Or his problems or the fact he’s out there to pocket a bit of gold to afford some salted fish for his next dinner. If you don’t parry his blow, sidestep him and shove your blade deep into his belly, twisting the steel up around his ribs, ripping and tearing at his flesh… he’ll do it to you.
And so you kill.
And you move.
If these men survived, most of them would slip away into madness. But for now? They needed to live, and living meant killing.
A loud cheer erupted from the front lines.
The gate was splintered. And like the rotting foundation of a house, it collapsed inward.
This was where the real war began. And if Tylik was right, where it would end.
A battery of conjurer and city guard cavalry stormed out of the gate, trampling over the footmen who stood in their way as fodder. That’s all they were, a distraction for those behind them who hurried to the wall with wooden ladders to augment the men and women who rushed through the gate.
One of Dercy’s officers shouted out orders to his archers, and Vayle barked at her cavalry, deploying the remaining three thousand on the wings.
Suddenly the mix of conjurer soldiers and city guardsmen reared around and fled deep within the castle walls, as if a horn bellowed a retreating boom.
I turned to the Rots. “Should I embark on a speech like Dercy? Or should we just go in there and kill the cunts?”
Expecting smiles, I was disappointed to see what could only be described as unadulterated horror on their faces.
Then I heard it. And I turned, and I saw it.
Half of the godforsaken wall uprooted itself and flung its tons of stone frame outward, crushing cavalry and footmen alike. A bloated geyser vomited dust and snow into the air, obscuring my vision.
Warhorses raced out of the fog, heads down, hooves exploding through the snow. Some were painted in splotches of bright pink from where their flesh had been sawed off. Others collapsed in a heap, as if the snow had wiry tendrils that coiled around their thick legs, yanking them down. Most either had no rider or were dragging the man who used to sit atop them.
Thousands of heartbeats gone, just like that. Thousands of voices chanting courage and bravery silenced. It felt like the world had idled, as if everything out there — the wind, the cold, the stars, the sun, the moon, the sky, the great unknown — had stopped to witness what we were capable of.
And then like cows in a field resuming their consumption of grass and roughage after deep reflection, they all went back to work. The wind whipped, the cold stung, and I was sure the stars glittered and the sun continued on its arc below the mountains.
The second portion of the front wall wrenched itself out of the iced-over dirt, spilling reverberations across the field that rippled through the white powder like the wake of a boat on the ocean.
And then… boom. It leaped outward, every square stone falling in perfect harmony with one another. More dust, more fog. More silence, more death.
My eyes swiveled back and forth across the field, mindlessly sweeping along the debris of collapsed stone. And then squinting at the effervescent white smoke concealing the horde of corpses. Thousands more remained alive — if you stretch the definition — frantically searching for some semblance of hope.
This was all part of the plan. We knew the freaks wearing the jagged C would use their demented minds to wreak havoc on the battlefield, although evulsing an entire wall and shattering it on the skulls of our men… well, that was a bit more than expected.
“Round up the cavalry!” Vayle shouted. With a quick pull of the reins, her steed pivoted and began galloping toward the right wing of the battlefield.
The officers behind me pulled off to the left. I could hear them shouting as they drove their horses hard through the snow. “Back, back, back, back! Back, back, back, back!”
“I feel as useless as a blind man’s eyes,” a Rot said.
“You won’t for long,” I told him.
A few battlements of our archers advanced ahead. I clicked my heels, spurring my horse onward after them. I circled around in front of them.
“Get your asses back there,” I yelled.
One of the archers pointed ahead. Looked no older than a baby-faced eighteen-year-old. “If we got the cavalry and infantry comin’ back toward us, northernmen’ll be on ’em like hungry hounds. We’re their only defense.”
Pointing the tip toward the back line, I lowered my eyes into a glowing glare and said very slowly, “Get back, now.”
He held my stare for a few seconds. Then, “You heard him. Pull back.”
I met back up with the Rots, shaking my head. “Thought I was going to take an arrow to the throat there for a moment.”
“We woulda fucked ’em up for ya,” Klon said.
Vayle and the other officers soon returned, and behind them trudged a much smaller company of warhorses than were sent out to meet the conjurer and city guard cavalry. The footmen followed in short order. Many of them were dashed with specks of blood, and some of them were mortally wounded. Their helmets were askew, their faces streaked with sweat and powder from crushed stone.
From behind them, like a beam of moonlight thinning through a black forest, ambled Dercy on his mighty warhorse. When he got to us, his breathing was labored. He sat hunched over in the saddle.
“A wall, huh?” he coughed out. He wiped his arm across his mouth. “Never told me they were capable of doing that, Astul.”
“To be fair,” I said, “I did tell you Amielle crumbled a shelf of rock that I was standing on.”
“Couldn’t pick her out of the crowd up there,” Dercy said, pointing his tiny dimpled chin toward the balcony, which was hazed over still with dust. “But I saw at least five hurling their guts over the banister after the first wall fell. One collapsed, and then the dust came up and I couldn’t see a thing.”
Interesting. It took five to uproot one wall, which meant it probably took ten in total. There weren’t many more than ten conjurers on that balcony, so unless more were in reserve… they may well have blown their load. Although Amielle and Sybil surely had a few surprises remaining.
Everyone watched in silence as the sheet of white soot hanging over Edenvaile began to methodically settle back into the snow. Still couldn’t see a thing.
Dercy sat back in his saddle. “Hear that?”
“Hooves,” Vayle answered.
“I was going to suggest steel,” I said.
“You’re both right,” Dercy said. He turned to Tylik. “Let’s hope you are as well.”
Like serrated daggers of lightning piercing a gray sky, pikes and swords charged through the obfuscating cloud. It was something out of an occult nightmare, the muscular frames of horses peeling back and climbing through the dust as a demon might propel himself from a portal of the underworld.
I felt the storm brew in my legs and then my thighs, swirling up my arms and echoing in my skull.
“Steady, now!” Dercy advised his men. Most of them probably couldn’t hear over the steady growl of thunder.
There were enough horses coming through the fog to level every man in Dercy’s army, continue on to splinter his wagons and stamp the slaves into the snow without ever circling back around. You’d be hard pressed to find one city guardsman within the group. The thousands of cavalry all wore the jagged C of the conjurers. It was as if Amielle and Sybil had forced Vileoux to hold his men back just to show us the full power of the conjurer army.
But first, they’d have to reach us. The uneven terrain that boots and warm blood had turned to slush wouldn’t prevent that, and neither would a bunch o
f brave soldiers who wore faces flushed with anger. Nothing would prevent them from turning us into ink on the pages of history except Tylik’s promise.
And what a promise it was.
The promise was a fleet of warhorses.
It was the charging banners of an ominous mountain upon which Icerun had been built.
It was a faction of disgruntled vassals who Vileoux Verdan had never sought to mollify.
It was a testament to just how easy the North is to fracture.
It was a blizzard winding through the snow, thrusting out from the rear of Edenvaile.
The armies of Patrick Verdan and all the northern bannermen he’d gathered galloped and ran and roared with a singular voice. They poured out around the walls. There were tens of thousands of them, a mix of cavalry and footmen. There were slingers, swordsmen and pikemen. Knights, lancers and some good old-fashioned grunts clad in quilted armor.
The brigade of conjurers charging us peered back. Their advance slowed, and then utterly stopped as they learned a rather well-known secret among the inhabitants of Mizridahl: trust does not exist, and the truth is as capricious as the wind.
The initial push of the northern armies drove into the middle of the conjurer cavalry, halving them and forcing the two sides to split off, where the remaining northernmen rounded them up and cut them down.
I glanced at the Rots. “Now we have some fun.”
With a few kicks, my mare whinnied and plotted a course down the middle of the battlefield. She dashed through the snow, shoveling clumps of it behind her. Most of the fighting was a good two hundred feet away, to either side. There were some leftover conjurers wandering through the middle, but they paid a small band like us little attention. We had to be a bit wary of the northernmen who pursued them, though — in war, everything and everyone looks the same. You swing first, apologize later.
We arrived at the corner of the Edenvaile wall. Well, where the corner of the Edenvaile wall used to be. The Rots and I climbed down from our horses, smacked them on the butts and sent them off.
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