Azra acknowledged him with a silent nod as he knelt to help lift the barrel. She bore more of the weight than he did—his bad arm couldn’t do much more than steady it while he lifted with the other—but together they got it off the ground, though it swayed precariously between them.
“Where are we taking it?” Josen asked through a clenched jaw.
Azra looked over her shoulder, jutted her chin toward the center-most bonfire, and started shuffling backward in that direction.
As they drew nearer to the fire, a pair of squires in plain grey surcoats noticed Josen struggling, and both hurried over. “Thank you, Your Majesty,” one of them said, a beardless boy who couldn’t have yet been twenty. “The cauldrons are empty. Haven’t had the chance to go for more.”
“Don’t thank me. It was Azra who noticed you needed it.” Josen pointed at her with his chin.
“Oh.” The young man swallowed, and offered Azra a hasty nod, barely meeting her eyes. “Er… thank you.”
“We can help fill them,” Josen said, hoping for the sake of his injured side that the offer would be refused. “If you can’t spare anyone.”
“No need, Your Majesty,” the squire said. Once more his eyes flicked toward Azra. “You stay back where it’s safe. We’ll take it from here.” He motioned for the other lad to help him, and together they took the barrel’s weight, to Josen’s great relief.
They didn’t linger once the barrel was in their hands, but as they carried the pitch away, one of them muttered something that sounded like “dark-eye”. Scowling, Azra flicked out a short, two fingered sign at their backs. Josen didn’t know it, but he could guess at the meaning.
“It will get better,” he said. It didn’t sound very convincing, even to him. “They just aren’t… accustomed to your people yet.”
Azra just glanced at him contemptuously—she reminded him very much of Zerill, just then—and started back toward Verik and Eroh.
Suddenly it mattered a great deal to Josen that she believe him. “Everyone will remember that you and Verik did what you could to help us,” he said, hurrying after her. “And that the last Windwalker is one of you, that he brought the birds to our aid. I won’t let them forget. I told Zerill that I would do everything I could for the Abandoned, and I meant it. It will take time, but things will change.” He glanced over his shoulder, toward the road and the Deeplings pushing forward there. “If they get the chance to. If we’re still here come sunrise.”
Azra paused, turned back to him with a scrunched brow. “Highlander eyes… not see?” She gestured to the sky. “So much light.”
Josen glanced up. It is lighter, isn’t it? “Are you talking about the sun? It’s hard to tell with all this fire and smoke. My eyes aren’t as sensitive as yours. How much longer, do you think?”
Azra shrugged. “Close,” was all she said.
It was enough. God Above, we might survive this. For the first time since Josen had watched the Deeplings emerge from the mist, he actually almost believed it.
For a moment.
And then the horns began to sound.
Josen knew what he was going to see even before he turned to look. He’d forgotten for a while—let himself forget, or maybe made himself forget—but all it took to remind him was that sound. Not the same signal that had announced the coming of the Deeplings, but close enough to it.
Enemies on the road.
Castar.
Josen dashed to the edge of the wall, squeezed in between the men there, and stuck his head out over the crenellations. Down the mountain, past the men still fighting below and the thinning horde of the Deeplings, he saw them: Castar’s men, spreading slowly up the road like a bloodstain in their crimson uniforms. They were just emerging from the pass at the base of the last section of switchbacks. A quarter of an hour would bring them to the Queensgate.
And sunrise isn’t going to stop them.
He stumbled back from the edge of the wall, and the eyes of the men followed him. He could feel them staring. They’d fought all through the night for the scant hope sunrise would bring, and now even that was being taken from them. They needed a reason to believe. A reason to keep fighting.
He didn’t have one.
Then lie, damn it! At least give them that! “Hold fast,” Josen said. It came out hoarse and trembling, barely audible. He sucked in a painful breath, tried again. “Hold fast!” Better. Now make them believe it. “Sunrise is near, and when the Deeplings flee from the Sky God’s light, no amount of swords or spears will break what their claws and teeth couldn’t. The Queensgate has never been taken by siege, nor will it be today! This wall will stand!”
That was when he felt the first tremor pass through the stone beneath his feet.
Josen whirled to find Verik; he still sat near Azra and Eroh at the back of the ramparts, his hands pressed against the stone.
“What was that?” Josen demanded. “Are the Deeplings breaking through?”
Verik didn’t look at him; his dark eyes were fixed on a spot somewhere down the mountain, though he was too far back to see over the edge of the ramparts. “Not Deeplings,” he said. “Him.”
The old man. He’s marching with them. “From so far away?” As if in answer, the wall shook again, and this time it kept shaking. “Can you—”
“Can’t.” Verik barked roughly. “Too strong.” He looked at Josen then, his face drawn and his neck corded with strain. “Run.”
The stone beneath Josen’s feet heaved, and a great grinding creak tore the air. A crack opened at the center of a notch in the battlements nearby and spread rapidly across the wall, crumbling from the edges out. In seconds a fissure several feet across separated him from the swamplings. It was only the first; more cracks were forming now, all along the length of the wall.
“Abandon the ramparts!” Falyn Morne’s voice. “Get the king to safety!”
Suddenly, Josen was surrounded in Storm Knight grey, cutting off his view of the swamplings. “Wait,” he protested weakly, but it went unnoticed as his guardsmen herded him toward the nearest stairs, shoving a path through the crowd fleeing in the same direction. The sound of stone breaking grated against Josen’s eardrums, overpowering the shouts and screams of the men. A new fissure opened beneath him and his foot caught in it, throwing him off balance, but one of the knights yanked him upright. Blindly, he stumbled on.
The circle of knights split when they reached the stairway, half descending ahead of him and half behind. At their center, Josen struggled to keep pace on stairs that shifted and swayed and cracked under his feet. Great sheets of stone flaked and fell all along the wall, shattering against the ground below, crushing what unlucky men were caught beneath and pelting others with heavy chunks of splintered rock.
Josen searched the panicked forms below for anyone he knew, and found no one; above, the angle was too steep to catch a glimpse of whoever was left on the ramparts. There were other stairs along the wall, though. He could only pray that Azra had found a way to safety, and Eroh, and Verik, and Morne, and everyone else. He didn’t imagine a god he’d never much believed in would listen to him now, but it was the only thing left.
So he prayed.
He prayed for the swamplings, and for the men who had stood with him on the ramparts, and for those who had held the road so bravely for so long. He prayed for his brother, far away behind the walls of the Keep. He prayed that Shona was there with Rudol, safe for however long those walls could hold against a power like this. He prayed that she might still find victory in the ruins of defeat. That she might keep the promise he’d made to Zerill, even if he wasn’t there to see it.
He was still praying when the Queensgate exploded beneath him.
* * *
It wasn’t the pain that woke Josen—over the last turns, he’d become more accustomed to pain than he would have thought possible. It was the dust and smoke. A lungful of befouled air sent him coughing, and that jerked him back to consciousness.
And then came the pai
n.
His ruined side seized with every cough, sending surges of agony through his body. His left lung felt like it had been scoured with sand. He lay prone against the ground, his upper body twisted awkwardly to one side; his legs were trapped in a pile of rubble topped by a slab of stone the size of a cartwheel.
When he tried to move his left leg, a spike of pain lanced through his calf and thigh. He couldn’t tell the extent of the wound without seeing it, but he knew it was worse than he wanted it to be. His right leg was pinned like the other, and sore, but not near as much so—battered and bruised, but nothing worse, he thought with some relief. Small victory, but right now I’ll take it. He patted his chest and head, searching for wounds; his fingers grazed a scrape on his scalp and came back bloody, but it didn’t feel very deep. Beyond that, the only unwelcome discovery was that Aryllia’s Crown still sat firmly about his brow, unbroken. Well, maybe next time.
Gathering his thoughts was difficult; they were dull and muddled, half-drowned out by a distracting ringing in his ears. How he’d gotten where he was, he didn’t quite know. He remembered rushing down the stairs, a sudden force from beneath and behind, and then nothing. What happened? Craning his neck, he strained for a better view of his surroundings.
And then he remembered.
The Queensgate was gone.
The wall still stretched across the cliff’s edge for hundreds of yards to either side, but where it met the road—where the gate itself had been—there was only a gaping chasm.
Josen lay perhaps a hundred yards away. He might have been thrown a great distance by the force that had torn the stone asunder, but not this far. A vague memory came to him: rising again and stumbling on, terrified, until something struck him from behind.
It wasn’t hard to guess what that something might have been. Wreckage was strewn all across the mouth of the farming flats, a mess of splintered wood and twisted iron and shattered stone. Here and there, the scattered remnants of bonfires still smouldered; the air was so thick with smoke and dust that Josen could barely see the sky, though there was no mistaking the pre-dawn twilight now. The sun was coming—it just didn’t matter very much anymore.
He wasn’t the only one who’d survived. Through the haze, others were picking themselves up or digging themselves free. But too many weren’t moving at all. Too many lay still, half-buried in wreckage.
Dead men.
And through the ruin of the wall, the Deeplings were coming. They swarmed over the corpses, ripping and tearing, staining the grass red with blood. Knights and soldiers fled before them, falling back into the farming flats. As the ringing in Josen’s ears faded, the sounds of battle returned, shouts and screams and clanging metal—some few men were still trying to hold the monsters back, but there was no coherent defense, no line left to hold. Whether running or fighting, anyone in the path of that feeding frenzy didn’t stand for very long.
It’s over. I’m sorry, Zerill. I tried.
Josen let his head slump back against the grass, and closed his eyes. The Deeplings would reach him soon enough; it seemed pointless to struggle. Without help, he was too weak and too tired to dislodge the stone that pinned his legs. The best he could do was to stay still, and hope they were distracted enough by those still fighting—and by the corpses of the fallen—to somehow pass him by.
It didn’t work.
He felt it first. The primal pull in his belly, the seductive whisper in the back of his head. The sound came next—a wet slithering that nothing human could have made. And then the smell, the thick stench of decay and rotten meat. At first, he kept his eyes clenched shut like a child denying the existence of some imagined nightmare under his bed, but as the sound came closer and the smell intensified, the whispers grew more insistent. The gnawing desire in the pit of his stomach overpowered all fear, all sense.
Josen opened his eyes to see the monster that was going to kill him.
It approached from behind in a serpentine pattern, darting in and out of sight from where he lay trapped on his back. He had to twist his torso and brace himself on his elbow to get a clearer view, stretching his injured side painfully.
Rotborn. But this one wasn’t as chaotically piecemeal as some of the others. The bulk of it was the body of one of the Swamp’s giant snakes, thicker around than Josen’s torso, rotted away in places to reveal dozens of intricate vertebrae. Where the snake’s head should have been was the thorax of a massive ghostspider, so pale that it was nearly translucent, still glowing with faint luminescence. It slithered over the ground, half-dragging itself on long white spider-legs, leaving a trail of dark slime behind it. Above the ghostspider’s gnashing mandibles were eight bulbous eyes in various states of ruin—some simply milky and blind, others long since split, leaving only withered sacs. One seemed to have burst only recently, spilling curdled jelly down the side of the creature’s head.
The sight of it made Josen’s stomach heave, but he hardly noticed the sensation. It was unimportant, far away; it did nothing to silence the whisper in his head, soft and enticing. And now he wasn’t fighting it, wasn’t reciting numbers or rhymes in his head like he’d been taught at the Stormhall. Now he was listening, and he couldn’t think why he’d resisted for so long.
Come to me, that voice said. Come to me, and you can be whole again.
Josen reached out his hand, and surrendered.
One of the eagles swooped down at the rotborn with a piercing cry—Josen thought it might have been Goldeyes, but he didn’t look closely, couldn’t tear his eyes from the source of the whispers. The rotborn flinched at the sound, but only for an instant, and then kept advancing.
It was close now, hardly more than a body-length away. Close enough that Josen could see the blades at the end of its frontmost legs, serrated razors of black chitin that must have come from a beetleback. Blades that he knew, distantly, could open his flesh with the barest touch.
He didn’t care. He stretched out his fingers and scraped his elbow against the ground in a futile effort to pull himself closer, barely aware of the stabbing pain down his left side.
And then, suddenly, the rotborn stopped. Its mandibles spread wide and it reared up, lifting its spider thorax and twisting backward in a sinuous motion. Bladed forelegs slashed the air.
Someone was at Josen’s side a moment later, a big man in Storm Knight grey, lifting aside bits of the rubble that pinned him to the ground. Josen paid him no mind, just kept reaching. His fingers flexed as if to pull the rotborn back toward him, but it didn’t respond. It was still turned away from him, thrashing and struggling with something behind that he couldn’t see.
Josen felt the rubble over his legs shift as the knight strained to lift the cartwheel-sized slab of stone that held the rest in place. It moved, but only very slightly; the weight resettled a moment later.
The big man grunted in frustration. “You have to help me. That thing will be free again soon.”
Josen heard the words, but they were nothing, not beside the beautiful whisper urging him on. Embrace me, it said. Bleed for me, and I will set aside your burden. I will set you free. He strained toward the rotborn with all his might. It didn’t turn. He felt tears beading at the corners of his eyes, and couldn’t tell if they were from the smoke or the denial.
“Josen!” The man grabbed Josen by the shoulder, wrenched his head around, and struck him, hard, across the face.
But even then, it wasn’t pain that brought Josen back to his senses. This pain was no worse than the pain that was always there in his side.
It was recognition.
He knew the face glowering at him from beneath that steel helm. He’d seen that frown too many times to mistake it.
“…Rudol?”
Rudol
Leaning against the haft of a halberd that he couldn’t remember picking up, Rudol stumbled through the wreckage of the Queensgate. Cries of pain and confusion drifted over smoke and dust and fire and rubble, and all around him bodies lay crushed and broken benea
th the debris. Ahead, men were fleeing farther into the farming flats; only a small few stopped to help those trapped or injured. Closer by, too many were turning back toward the Deeplings, drawn by whatever sweet lies they could hear whispering through the air. Dawnlight illuminated the chaos, and to the east, around the peak of the Godspire, the sky brightened toward the pale blue of day. Sunrise was coming.
But it was coming too late.
In a heap of fallen stone, a knight was struggling to free his trapped arm. The sound of the wall breaking still rang in Rudol’s ears, and he was too exhausted to think clearly, but he found himself kneeling to help, shifting and shovelling rocks aside with his bare hands. As he uncovered the man’s arm, he saw that it was twisted back on itself, shattered bone barely attached by ribbons of torn flesh. The man didn’t seem to feel it; he cradled the ruined limb against his chest and fled as soon as he was free.
He didn’t look back, and Rudol didn’t blame him. The Voice of Corruption was growing stronger every moment, uttering promises that could only be paid for in blood, warning of an end that was very near at hand. The Deeplings were coming, and there was nothing to stop them now. Even with sunrise waiting just beyond the horizon, only a fool would linger here.
But Rudol didn’t run. He heard the tearing of flesh behind him as Deeplings fell upon the first of the dead, and the screams of the trapped and injured men who hadn’t struggled free in time, but he only staggered on slowly, supporting himself on his halberd.
That was when the first clear thought he’d had for some time came to him: Why am I still alive?
Josen had been right about everything. Rudol knew that now. How could he not? He’d seen Deeplings climbing the Queensmount, dark magicks tearing down ancient walls of solid stone, and perhaps worst of all, Duke Castar’s army marching up the road as the last of the Plateaus’ defenses failed. Josen had been right, and Rudol had left him in the Swamp to die for a few kind words from a man who sold such things as cheaply as any Cliffside peddler. And now people were dying for that mistake. It was too late now to make up for it, but he’d been willing to die trying. He’d expected to die trying.
The Swampling King (The Windwalker Legacy Book 1) Page 84
