by John Barnes
Sir John and Calliope winced, for this was no way to speak to a prince, but Amatus merely nodded, and turned to close the eyes of the dead witch nearest him. In a moment all of them, except the Twisted Man, were also closing witches' eyes, and composing the sprawled corpses.
Sir John looked at the livid blotchy skin, greasy gray hair, yellow teeth, and stare of horror on the witch's face before him, and saw too that her hands were still bent in the warding sign that had prevented Waldo's evil from entering the circle. He placed his fingers on the dry, rough skin of the eyelids, and pressed them down. "Let me make so good a show when my time comes," he whispered to the hideous corpse.
A cold damp wind was blowing now, and as they stood the wind whipped the cloak of the Twisted Man close to his body, and everyone except Psyche shuddered. She took the Twisted Man's arm, and said, "If I may, I shall ride behind you."
But to ride through the city was no quicker than to walk. At the sounds of the attack, citizens had poured into the streets, some snatching up arms to fight, some possessions to flee, some merely to try to see. Then the clouds had torn, and there had been glad cries that the King's forces must be winning, and that the King himself had ridden by, and they had begun to surge toward the gate, but now that the moon was fully out, black smoke and flames could be seen from the direction of the gate, and those near it had turned away again, only to tangle with those still pressing toward it. No one knew anything, but they all shouted what they did not know to each other at the tops of their lungs.
The little party was often unable to move because of the number of citizens in an alley or street. Some of them cried "Hurrah!" and saluted Amatus, and others turned to spread rumors that the King must be dead already and the Prince riding to take his place, and a few jeered at his half-body because they thought that anything unusual must have had something to do with bringing the catastrophe on them. Children, forgotten by their parents, or perhaps having run out into the street and lost their way, wailed everywhere, and the air was full of anxious cries as people tried to find each other.
"We cannot get through in time to be any use to anyone," Sir John said. Amatus nodded, but they kept trying to find a way through.
When the King, Duke Wassant, Cedric, and their guard had ridden through, not long before, the streets had not yet filled with citizens, and they had gone through swiftly, so that they reached the gate while the fighting still raged there.
There was no grace or finesse to Waldo's attack. The first wave had died in a hail of omnibus balls without ever setting foot on the bridge; the second wave had perished on the bridge; the third had been cut down with steel and pismire.
But none of this mattered, for there was a fourth wave, and a fifth, and approximately the seventh wave was now coming over the wall. Men who stood and fought as bravely as ever still saw that there was no end of the enemy, but they themselves were dwindling, and much as they might force their hearts to go on, and their arms to keep striving, still they saw what must happen, and their blood turned to lead in their veins, and the icicles of fear swelled and bored into their hearts, and they fell despairing, struggling on but no longer believing it was for anything. The torch flames showed only the dark shadows under the helmets of Waldo's men, not enough to say even whether they were living or undead, but they caught the faces of the loyal soldiers of the Kingdom fully, and no hope shone forth there, but only the determination to die well, however little it might mean.
This came to Cedric in a glance, and he had but begun to draw a breath to give some word of advice to his King, but Boniface had already seen enough and took action. He drew his long sword—a ceremonial relic—raised it above his head, reared his great gray war horse, and cried to the mob in the streets and the disorganized soldiers around him, "Once more into the breach—"
Roderick felt the power that was in it, and drew the top pismire from his swash and spurred forward, following his King against the foe, his troop following his motion as one man. A part of his mind tried to remember the speech the King was making, for future use, and as he realized he was thinking of the future, he knew that hope had been born again in him, and this made him stand and lean forward in the stirrups and ride full tilt for a little group of Waldo's minions who were just now breaking from the press. The pismire roared in his fist, and the leader of the invaders went down; around Roderick other pismires barked and rang.
Cedric had rallied the men on foot, and now they began to press the foe back; more of the enemy poured over the wall and through the breaches, but it did not matter, for they were swiftly pressed back and slaughtered against the walls. No quarter was given or asked on either side, and the stones under their feet grew slippery with thick blood, black in the torchlight.
Then a great streak of lightning ripped through the dark, and the clouds peeled back like a torn blanket in a high wind. A mighty shout went up from the King and his men, and Roderick, guessing what had happened, shouted, "Amatus! The Prince has broken their darkness!"
"Amatus!" the men roared, and in moments they had carried the fight back to the wall, and the bodies of Waldo's henchmen were hurled before them, dead or dying. An unnamed vassal raced forward and planted the Hand and Book again on the gate tower, and soldiers swarmed around to defend it.
Duke Wassant, his escree slick with blood, had just the pleasant moment to think that they might yet succeed, when King Boniface staggered and fell.
Cedric was at his side in an instant, lifting Boniface up, and Duke Wassant and Roderick were there a moment later, but there was nothing to be done. A great, ragged hole had been torn in the King's chest, and his white beard was soaked with the blood that spurted from his mouth. He opened his eyes for just a moment, and they thought he might say something—a final charge for them to carry out, words of pride, even just a cry against the injustice of it all—but he did not speak again before, with a long, rasping, bubbling sigh, he died there among his men, the pale moonlight revealing the moment when his face went slack and his chest ceased to move.
The same despair that had fallen on the men before now seized them in earnest, and though they fought on and even advanced, something went out of them. Roderick stood then, not sure of what had taken hold of him, and cried out in bitter rage; the fury seemed to leap from him to catch the hearts of the men, and as the Duke shouted to get them formed up and fighting in good order, they began to lay into the foe with a fury beyond hope or despair, seeking only to slay until nothing remained.
Tears streaming down his face, Wassant gestured for Cedric and two of the soldiers to carry the King's body back toward the castle, then turned again to pull the infantry into formation and pour a red rage of volleys across the bridge and into Waldo's packed troops. He bellowed again and again, order after order, and men worked the culverts and fired the omnibuses until their hands stung and burned and their shoulders drooped, and continued to load and fire long after they felt like falling to the ground, their aim unspoiled by the tears that wrote white tracks through the black sulphurous ash on their faces.
Waldo's first assault fell back, and citizen volunteers could be spared to fight the flames in the houses near the gate. The clouds above split farther to reveal the cold indifferent stars. To see them at all was victory of a kind.
The Duke strode among the men now, touching one on a shoulder, calling encouragement to another, rallying them to keep firing. He hoped desperately that reinforcements might arrive soon, for if he could strike across the bridge now, before Waldo's forces were well prepared, he might even break through and stand some prospect of raising the siege. A thousand factors and matters for his attention whirled through his brain, but still he moved among the men, encouraging and guiding. For a generation afterward, every man who had been at the Bridge of a Thousand Faces on that dark night could remember something the Duke had said to him, or what he had helped the Duke to do, or just the sight of Wassant's heavy, soft body rushing from one place to another. Perhaps more remarkable, almost all of the
memories were true.
Out in the darkness great shapes reared up; some later said they looked like whales coming up out of the earth, some that they heaved up like demon's heads peering over a wall. Duke Wassant saw clearly enough what they were, and he spoke a word, flat and foul, to which his name would always be linked in stories afterwards.
Beside him, Roderick spat. "Those are not aimed at us who fight," he said bitterly.
"Waldo had no business being here in the first place," Duke Wassant said softly, as if it were merely a pleasant debating point over a quiet game of dice in the Gray Weasel. "When he wars on us so unjustly, should we be surprised that he is a wanton brute?"
Roderick nodded, but the main thought that crossed his mind was the hope that Gwyn was watching from the window of their house near the castle, for he knew if she saw what was about to happen she would use the common sense he had married her for and get down into the cellar. He wondered whether he would live through this to look for her.
The first of the great engines belched fire and smoke; there was some enchantment upon it, for what came out of its mouth was not the bright streak of light they had expected, a ball or shell intended to set fire to the city. Rather, a great, glowing ball of something that writhed like worms swelled slowly up into the sky and drifted, slow as a summer cloud, over the city. It floated over the heads of the Duke's men at the gate, and on for some half of a furuncle before with a soft sigh, it resolved itself, and rained down as a mass of corpses, their arms and legs seen in the fire of its dissolution.
The Duke opened his mouth to order the citizen brigades, with their weapons against the undead, to advance to destroy the fresh invasion, but before he could speak he saw that the rotting, decayed figures were standing up, covered with flames, and what they touched burned. In an instant a dozen houses were on fire, and though the undead fell swiftly enough to garlic and to rosewood darts, the fire they had set was more than men and women could fight.
Above them, countless more balls of swirling corpses drifted lazily onto the city, and the Duke saw in the moonlight that the engines that surrounded the city—there must have been a hundred in all—were all belching flame and smoke. "We cannot stop this," he said to Roderick. "The city will burn. We will have to fall back in the best order we can."
Even as he spoke, fires were bursting all over the slopes of the city above them.
When the balls of blazing corpses began to rise above the city, Amatus, his two Companions, and his two friends were hopelessly trapped in a mob that was unsure whether it wanted to flee madly in all directions, rush down to the bridge to join the fight, or loot the shops around it. Amatus had brandished his escree and compelled a certain limited public order nearby, but twenty feet away might as well have been in Hektaria for all the good his authority did. The smell of panic was thick in the air around them, and there was no clear thing they ought to do.
A ball of corpses fell nearby, and though the militia pounced on it—to have a clear task to do was such a relief from anxiety that everywhere the citizens were charging eagerly into battle against the undead invaders—it did not matter, for before they were put back to rest the corpses had set many fires, and it was not possible to put all of them out.
The struggle against the fire did, however, finally pull enough people from around Amatus and his friends to allow them to make a little progress, once they were sure fire fighting was going forward. They advanced almost a dozen houses before they were again penned in by a crowd.
As they tried to advance farther, Psyche gave a glad cry. A moment later she had jumped from the back of the Twisted Man's horse and was embracing someone in the crowd.
Amatus and Sir John exchanged baffled glances, but the Twisted Man seemed to regard it as perfectly normal, and merely brought his huge warhorse over to Psyche's side to ward off any trouble.
Unable to move in any other direction, Amatus, Calliope, and Sir John followed along.
The person whom Psyche had seen, and greeted with such a cry of joy, was Sylvia, whom they had rescued from Goblin Country years before. A few moments' conference settled that Sylvia, for some reason, must come with them; Sir John grumbled, and Amatus seemed disposed to argue, but something about the way the Twisted Man accepted it as natural told them that something unnatural—and therefore important—was about to happen.
In a short time, Sylvia was mounted behind the Twisted Man, and Psyche had climbed up behind Amatus.
"I don't understand anything," Amatus complained, as they worked their way forward again, at a snail's pace. Everywhere the city was going up in flames, but so little movement was possible that it seemed best to just move in whatever direction they could find. "We're nowhere near the fighting, our breaking the spell on the sky seems to have made no difference, and most of all I don't see what Sylvia has to do with anything. There's no reason for her to turn up like this, and even if it's merely coincidence, you're acting as if it were some great stroke of luck, and the Twisted Man seems to agree with you."
"Well," Psyche said, and he could feel mischief in her smile through the back of his neck, "you have to remember that you are a hero, and that this is the Kingdom. Things don't happen without meaning here. And since that's the case, it's a good sign to have someone from so long ago turn up. That speaks of a coming closure, and if the closure should be soon, then, no matter what must be endured along the way, by the nature of things Waldo's days are numbered."
Afterwards, Amatus was fairly sure that he had some question on the tip of his tongue at that moment, but it was never spoken and he never could remember what it had been. Instead there was a great roar from a house across the square from them, and people ran out of it screaming. Without knowing what was happening yet, Amatus and Sir John turned toward the uproar, and the Twisted Man swung with them.
Before they could even hear the panicked shrieks of "Goblins! Goblins! They're eating the children!" the goblins themselves were bursting out of the windows and doors of the big house. At the first sight of them, the few militiamen in the crowd who were carrying their omnibuses and pismires began to shoot, and the gunfire frightened the crowd almost as much as the goblins. In no time at all the square was a screaming melee, with Amatus and his little band trying to get across it to get into the fight with the goblins.
The militia fell in—there seemed to be a sergeant or two to hand—and began to give some account of itself, but then the walls of the house fell outward, and they were forced to back up. As the dust and rubble settled, hundreds of goblins surged forth.
The militia did their best to form a hollow square and keep firing, but it was a poor best, for few of them had drilled together or indeed ever seen each other until that moment. When the crowd at last cleared from in front of him, Sir John rode forward and took command, and got their fire coming in solid volleys, which began to tell on the foul things pouring from the great hole where the house had been, but too little and too late. The militia were forced to fall back, in good order, a few steps at a time.
At that moment, one of the houses behind them went up as well, and dozens of goblins began to leap out of the public well in the square. "They must have undermined the whole city!" Sir John shouted.
They brought the militia about and backed toward the one side of the square that as yet held no goblins, hoping to make their escape that way, but as they neared the entrance to the alley there, with a great roar, both houses came down, and a great, shaggy head, with teeth as long as a tall man's body, heaved up out of the ground.
Cedric's luck had been good enough, for he had little trouble in getting the King's body back through the streets to the castle. He had gone up the street that had the clearest view of the gate, and sure enough, few people had chosen to be in it. For an honor guard he had only two horse soldiers, and the King's body traveled in a simple tumulus they had grabbed from behind a vegetable-seller's stall.
When the first balls of corpses swept in over the city, he was already most of the way t
o the castle, and was getting some time to think. Any ruler like Waldo had an all but endless supply of corpses, and that explained the undead component of his army—and for that matter the goblin component, for goblins love man's flesh above all other, and though they prefer to eat it live and suffering, once it is dead they do not much care whether it is fresh. But where had Waldo found so many living warriors, and why, for that matter, were they so nearly faceless for the most part? There had to be some explanation for this . . .
For that matter, they had been fierce and dangerous opponents at first, but not long after the tide of battle had turned, it had seemed that they became slower and weaker. Of course, in the service of anyone like Waldo, it might be that an army that wasn't about to win and get its hands on loot and women was always on the brink of desertion.
He wished mightily that he could still be talking about all this with Boniface. It had not occurred to him until now that entirely aside from his being a fine monarch for whom Cedric had been delighted to be Prime Minister, the King had been Cedric's best friend. He knew he would need time to weep, and soon, but for the moment there was so much to get done that he could not.
He still found he was choking, and then realized that it was on his beard, for he had begun to chew it, a thing he had not done in many years. It tasted no better than it ever had before; he dragged it out of his mouth and wiped frantically with his sleeve. He knew that when King Boniface had been younger, he had found it disgusting that his dignified, efficient Prime Minister had such a habit, and often reprimanded him about the condition of his beard and sleeves. "Majesty," Cedric whispered to the bundle on the tumulus before him, "you cannot know how much I wish you were scolding me right now." And then, time for it or not, he wept, the sobs filling his chest completely and tears gushing down his face.
