Fire and Sword

by Dylan Doose

  “Know this, knight of rats. The only time I’d ever consider serving beneath your queen is if I were to be giving her a good plowing from the bottom, but the Emerald Whore already has enough vermin cocks to see that done.”

  Well done, Theron Ward. Well done. Ken could not see the fury on the man’s face from the distance, but he knew it was there.

  “You will dearly regret those words, Theron Ward. I will spit on your gore after the swarm shreds you apart.”

  “Spit on your own, you rotten bastard.” Chayse’s words were given a bit more punch by the arrow she shot into the rider’s exposed mouth. He fell from his horse and twitched for a bit on the ground, spurting blood up the arrow shaft and onto the grass around him, and then he died.

  “Under parlay?” His Grace asked, eyes wide.

  “I don’t parlay with rats,” Chayse said. “Besides, he was offering parlay for Theron alone. There was no mention of letting anyone else live.”

  “A fine shot,” the duke replied, and Ken took that to mean they would see no opposition from him.

  The other riders said nothing, but they did not retreat right away. They waited for a few moments, until the men on the battlements shifted with unease, the menace of the black iron knights amplified by their very stillness. Then they lit torches, turned, and trotted some distance before taking to gallop. As they went, they set fire to the fields and houses they passed.

  * * *

  “There is only conflict, sweet child. That is the force beneath everything, the struggle for control, for power. That is all there is; that is why I teach you how to fight,” the mother said to her golden-haired boy.

  “Not everything, I am sure,” said the boy.

  “Everything,” said his mother, her voice cold. “Raise your sword.”

  “Even love is conflict?” asked the boy.

  “Especially love.”

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Hunters’ Battle

  It was night and it was chill. The clouds remained. The burning homes and fields were all but ash.

  They heard them before they saw them. The squealing rats came with no torches, no siege engines, no lanterns. They did not light fire arrows and release a volley; they just tramped through the shadows, a black tide under a moonless sky. They squealed and shrieked; they gagged and retched; they snapped their jaws and dragged their claws.

  “Not a man fires until my say-so,” Theron yelled. “I know you are all afraid. Use that fear, use your animal desire to live, to slaughter these beasts at your door. When we win, and when they all die, every man who fights will be etched into legend as the ones who crushed the plague of Brynth.” Theron clanged his pike on the battlements. The archers on the battlements roared and did the same. It was his first full-scale battle, and Theron Ward was afraid. And he was angry. And he accepted that his life, the life he had chosen, had led to this.

  Ken was on the southern side of the outer wall, whereas Theron stood on the northern. He heard Ken shout, “Most of you lads are farmers?”

  “Aye!” came the farmers’ cry.

  “Then none of you are strangers to killing fucking rats! The only difference is their size and the guts you’ll be spilling from them as they squeal!”

  “Rah!” cried the farmers, and they hammered their pikes ever harder on the walls.

  “This fight will be fast, and it will be savage,” Theron said, voice ringing down the walls. “They will not strike in waves and they will not tire; they will come as a single great tide of meat! Give them the grinder!” Spittle flew from his mouth, and he could feel the muscles in his neck strain as he formed words to rally the men before they stared into horror, before they made the devils of hell bleed.

  “Aldous, give us light!” Theron called up past the courtyard to the keep, where Aldous, Chayse, and the archers were at the ready on the higher position. They would fire over the walls past the pikemen and weaken the further ranks of rats.

  A moment passed. Aldous did not produce light.

  A second, longer moment passed. Still nothing.

  “Aldous?” Ken called up.

  “I’m trying to focus!” the wizard cried back, his voice cracking.

  Theron could see them now, the rats. The first of them were close enough to be visible in the dark. They entered the trench and crawled out the other side.

  “Chayse, give him a rub that will get his fire lit!” Ken yelled, followed by a deep, bestial laugh.

  Whether Chayse took Ken’s order or not, Theron could not know, but Aldous sent a mass of fire the size of a burning keg into the swarm. It hit them just under a hundred feet away from the trench, and it burst on impact.

  “Fire!” Theron yelled, and a susurrus carried as arrow after arrow arced through the night, hidden by the darkness. The creatures started screaming as they were taken by arrow or fire, and the ones that were caught on fire ran wildly, creating greater visibility on the field. Theron’s blood ran cold as he set eyes upon the sheer number of them. When he had said days past that there would be over a thousand, he had been hoping that number was a thousand and one at most. Over two thousand would have been more accurate.

  On the wall, whispers passed from man to man: “Sorcerer… demon…”

  The smell hit them first, rotting, putrid, like a dead sheep left under the sun. And then the first rat came over the palisade.

  “Eyes front, you bastards, and be thankful such a demon is now standing with you!” Theron bellowed as he drove his pike into the rat’s throat. It fell into the crevice between the palisades and the wall.

  And the escalade began. With immense speed and force, the swarm rushed through the trench, crawling over each other, and ripping themselves apart on the palisades. It did not slow them. They did not care about pain. They did not fear. They did not reason. They were hungry for death and slaughter.

  “Oil! Pour the oil!” Ken cried.

  The men on the walls tipped the great cauldrons that were heated above small fires. The oil poured into the fissure between the palisades and the wall first, and the shriek of the downed rats could split glass as the smoldering black liquid set their bodies to a bubbling boil. Men close by vomited off the wall as the scent rose to them. From the fissure, the oil ran past the logs of the palisades and seared the feet of those rodent devils in the trench. They squeaked and squealed, but they kept driving forth. Some stuffed their own kin into the hot oil and clambered over the downed bodies to avoid the terrific heat.

  “Light it now!” Theron ordered. A man next to him skewered a rat that was climbing the wall. When he withdrew his pike there was a hissing noise from the gaping wound in the fiend’s lung. Theron drove his own pike down the throat of a snapping beast closer to himself, and sent it tumbling down.

  The torches dropped and lines of fire burst from the base of the wall and ran into the circle of the trench, which burst into flame entirely. The magnitude of what the people of Dentin faced became visible. From all sides they came; the purple and black pustulant carbuncles writhed and glowed on their flesh. Some were naked of fur, wrinkled and pale; others had tufts; more had long, mangled fur like that of an unkempt dog. They all had claws, though, claws and grinding maws. Some hulked, while others were frail and decrepit, but all came forth, the tide of obsidian sick wading up the hill.

  Some of the men on the south wall jumped down from their places. They tried to run and hide in the keep.

  “Hold! Hold, you scum! Back on this wall, back on the fire step, or I shall drag you back up here myself and throw you over to the horror below!” Theron heard Ken from down the wall and turned just as Ken caught one man by the back of his shirt and threw him back to his place. The others turned, some shaking so hard they could barely walk, and returned to their places at the wall.

  Theron caught Ken’s eye and nodded, and Ken nodded back.

  The circle of fire that surrounded the trench did not slow the rats, but it hurt them. One in three came through fully ablaze and
screaming, mostly the shaggy ones. The others popped and steamed, their naked flesh blistering from the heat, but they did not fall and turn and smolder. They kept on. So many impaled themselves on the palisades that some of the spikes splintered and snapped under the weight of the squirming things skewered on them.

  More keg-sized balls of fire came hurling from the keep and into the mass beyond the wall. Chunks of meat and limbs flew into the air, ablaze as they did, and Theron silently thanked Aldous, and he silently thanked his mother for the catalyst the boy now used to bring great suffering upon the rats.

  * * *

  “Stab them, gut them, burn them!” Ken held a pike at its center in each hand above his head, and he impaled and retracted at a steady pace. His part of the wall was beginning to pile so high with corpses that the rats could touch the top by crawling over their own dead and dying. “If we keep up like this the fuckers will never get over the outer wall. Show them we have fangs; show them we are hounds.”

  There was a cheer, and the men on the southern wall were rallied by Ken’s fury as he impaled the fiends.

  Ken stared at four of the knights and a handful of the men-at-arms pushing themselves against the gate as it thudded and buckled from the blows of the vermin beyond. Above on the platform, villagers poured oil and set the things ablaze, but the seemingly endless advance of the rats quickly stomped out the fires on the dead backs.

  It was not enough. The gate would not hold.

  “Kendrick! The gate is going to give!” cried Sir Crowle.

  “If I leave this post, they will come over the wall!” Ken called back as he ran east down the southern wall to slaughter a rat peeking his head over the fire step. For this he threw his pikes into the mass of foes and drew his axe and mace. He splattered five of the men on the step with the creature’s blood and brains. “The bodies, you fool! Drag the corpses over to build a mound!”

  He waited only long enough to see Sir Crowle nod at him before he turned back to the men fighting at his side. All around them the hail of arrows from the archers above continued to fall. And Aldous continued to send fireballs down to light the rats ablaze.

  “Swords and axes!” Ken cried. “We have made an easy escalade for them from their dead. Swords and fucking axes; they are coming up too quickly and too close. Time for a fight!”

  The first man on the wall to die got his gut torn open by a putrid claw, and the lads close by screamed and shouted as they hacked the culprit to bits. A second rat emerged and pulled the wounded man into the abyss of rats by his spilt intestines.

  “Hold! Do not panic—if you panic, they get through! If they get through, we die!” Ken swung his axe into an oncoming claw and split the assailant’s limb apart with a crack of bone and a spray of blood. A mace blow sent it back over the wall and tumbling down its dead kin through the shattered palisade, and into the trench where the rest of its life burned away.

  Another man went down on the wall, then another, and a third in quick succession. Ten paces down from Ken, a good-sized breach was beginning to form and the rats were making it through. Three of them leapt down from the fire step and charged the men-at-arms in the courtyard.

  “Time to wet your blades, lads!” yelled one of them, and he was the first to die. Gullet torn out by the first rat, he hit the ground, hands on his throat trying to cork the leak. It did him no good.

  Ken turned back to the wall and pushed his way to the breach. The stone fire step had become slippery with blood and guts, so he took his time.

  They’re through now, and they’ll keep making holes. No need to rush, not anymore—just keep killing, nice and steady.

  A dying man stumbled into Ken, screaming, “God save us! Luminescent save us all!” as he bumbled wildly, his arm missing, having been chewed and clawed off like it was a piece of jerky. Ken looked him in the eyes a moment; tears rolled down the man’s ash- and blood-stained face. “My wife! My wife!” he croaked, the certainty of death in his eyes. Ken used the axe to slit his throat, a mercy, tossed his body into the courtyard, and moved to the widening leak of rats.

  Sentiment is long gone.

  “Close it up!” he called as he buried the beard of his axe in rodent skull. The rat twitched and Ken smashed the things face apart with his mace. The snout caved in. The jaw ripped off, and then it was just pulverized flesh. On to the next.

  His calm confidence inspired the nearby troops, and they recovered and hacked their swords and axes madly into the tide. Men went down, but others filled their places. They were frenzied, they were wild, and they were hungry for life. They were rat hounds on the rats; they were mad curs in the pit, purpose and humanity all forgotten. All that remained was the animal violence, the fury only heightened by the growing slaughter. Men vomited and pissed their britches, they screamed and sobbed, but most of all they just kept killing, and killing because they needed to.

  “There it is! Fight, you dogs. Fight! Show the devil your spirit. Let him know that his realm is not the only home of demons.” They closed the gap, but just as they did another began to form. Ken looked to the north, where he saw Theron surrounded. All the men around him dead, rats to his sides and front, but the hunter only became more deadly in his solitude, for his great claymore swung freely and severed limb and head from body like a farmer scything through the fields.

  “Aldous! Chayse! Focus your fire to the north wall. It is falling. It is overrun,” Ken called up to the keep.

  Aldous released another fireball, this one bigger and faster than the others. A chunk of wall exploded, and with it over a score of rats. Flaming bits of meat soared into the sky then rained down on the next invaders. Flame arrows poured into the burning breach and the screaming rats died by the dozen, but still they came.

  Ken leapt from the south wall and charged across the courtyard, ignoring the fights between the men-at-arms and the rats that leaked through the south side. The north side was no longer leaking but gushing.

  “Theron! To me!” Ken called to the hunter.

  Theron finished a swing then leapt from the north wall, and came to Ken. The horns on his helm dripped with blood, his mail coat shimmered red and black, and the blood groove in his sword drained into the drenched ground below.

  “Close ranks! Form a shield wall! Chayse, Aldous! We need you down here.”

  * * *

  Aldous braced his shoulder against the wall to stay upright, the staff in his hand heavy and consuming. From far away he heard Ken calling for their aid.

  “Swords, shields, into the fight!” Chayse said to the archers, who had thus far had remained out of the thresher.

  The men roared and followed Chayse from the balconies and battlements back into the keep. Depleted, Aldous forced himself to pick up a shield in his left hand while he kept his staff in his right, leaning his weight on it as he followed the others down the stone steps. They gave a final rallying cry before they burst from the door into the courtyard.

  It was frightening from above, but it was not like this. The vantage point had given Aldous confidence; entering the heart of the melee sapped him of that. But Theron, Chayse, and Ken stood fearless, as would he.

  The remaining villagers, men-at-arms, and knights closed ranks and formed a shield wall. Aldous found himself within the protected formation. They back-stepped toward the door to the keep. A few archers remained above to give suppressive fire.

  A rat took a quarrel and just kept coming unfazed. Aldous squeezed his way to the front of the formation, where a wild Theron pulled the smaller rats one at a time behind the shield wall and then stabbed, and stomped the guts and brains from them. Ken did the same.

  “A warming sight, to see you here with us, Aldous!” Theron said, his voice wavering as he repeatedly drove his boot into the face of a twitching man-sized rat, its eyeballs bursting from the obliterated skull on the last stomp.

  “Perhaps you shall find this more warming,” Aldous said, then he raised his staff over his shield like a spear. Breath deep, relax, focus. S
mall bursts. He visualized a swirling beam of fire, a tight whirlwind of burning death shooting from the staff, and then it was so.

  A thin funnel of flame shot from the raven side of the staff, and set three incoming rats to fire. Spears thrust into them from the shield wall. Chayse pushed her way beside Aldous. Halberd in hand, she got to thrusting and hacking right away.

  Every time a man fell the formation grew tighter, but for every man that died so did five rats.

  “They are thinning!” Ken gave a drubbing blow with his mace. “Keep at it, they are fucking thinning! We shall fight to the last man, for they will fight to the last rat.”

  It was easier said than done. The men were far past the point of exhaustion. Some were mortally wounded but kept fighting, kept fighting on fury and hatred alone. Hatred for being eaten alive by rats to be the end of a hard life. A hard life was only justified by a hard death. So the men of Dentin dug deep, past their hearts, and they found that hatred and spite needed to fuel that hard death.

  When the storm finally began to calm, there were fewer than three score of them left. It began to calm, but it was not over. The grass of the courtyard was covered, every inch and more, hundreds of dead men and over a thousand dead rats. The formation was broken. The survivors walked around freely, butchering the stragglers and the ones too wounded to fight back.

  “We have won! We have repelled the devils! We have won!” roared the old knight, Sir Crowle, thumping Ken on the back. “Well done, my boy. Well done.”

  The remaining survivors took up the cheer.

  “Victory!”

  “Dentin is saved!”

  “Our women and children are safe.”

  “She is here,” Aldous whispered, feeling the presence of the Emerald Witch like the slide of dank mud oozing along skin. He looked to Theron, but the hunter had already stilled, head cocked, expression dark, as if he, too, sensed her.