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1388 Words
“Took ship before dawn.” No point lying to the dying. He should have remembered. “Decided their oaths to serve didn’t cover certain death.”
He stops struggling. The peculiar peace of men who realize the game’s been rigged from the start settles over him. He bleeds out against the rubble, still clutching that silk banner.
I turn back to the fight just in time to watch the gatehouse tower implode.
The dwarven sappers had done their work there too. Chunks of worked stone heavy as wagons crash down. They crush friend and foe without discrimination.
Dust rolls thick through the courtyard. Through the haze, shapes emerge. Tower Brutes. Orcling bred or maybe half trolls in crude plate, twelve feet of muscle and malice bred for breaking walls. Their massive frames make the ground shake.
Behind them, a pair of Thrice Dead. The bone knights of the southern wastes, armor fused to flesh by necromantic arts. Even from here I can see the silver threads where battle-clerics stitched them back together after previous fights. Must be nice, being valuable enough to resurrect.
One Brute swings a maul the size of an anvil. I duck. Wind kisses my scalp. I ram my spear up under its breastplate. Black blood fountains as the creature topples backward, nearly taking my weapon with it. I plant a boot on its chest and wrench free.
A Thrice Dead glides forward. Movements too smooth for something wearing that much metal. Its blade, forged from a single piece of star-metal, hisses as it cuts air. We trade a dozen passes in as many heartbeats. My spear shaft cracks while its blade opens a line of fire across my ribs.
I feint high, drop low, and thread the spear point through its knee joint. Ancient bone snaps. As it falls, I drive the broken spear shaft through its eye socket. Whatever animates it gutters out.
My ribs grind together with every breath. Blood soaks through the gambeson. I press my palm against the wound and keep moving. Pressure, hope, and forward momentum are all I’ve got left.
The courtyard has become a charnel house. Bodies stack two deep in places. Blood runs in actual rivers between cobblestones, steaming in the cold air.
Of my seventy-two Wolves, I count maybe thirty still standing. The house guard has ceased to exist as a fighting force.
“Wolves! To me!” My voice cracks from smoke and screaming. “Form square at the keep door!”
They come limping. They drag wounded comrades, faces masked in soot and gore. Fletcher has abandoned his bow for a notched falchion. Jorgen drags himself on a shattered leg, still swinging his axe at anything in reach.
We form a ragged square before the keep’s iron-bound doors. Lord Aveline appears at my elbow, his gold armor somehow still pristine. “Captain, we should fall back.”
“Inside.” I shove him toward the doors. “Bar them. Buy your family time to compose pretty last letters.”
I press a pocket knife into his hand. “When the time comes, do it yourself.”
He starts to protest, sees something in my face, and flees. The doors boom shut behind him with iron bars rattling into place.
Good. One less thing to worry about.
“Right then,” I address my remaining Wolves. “Good news boys! Plenty of them left to kill. Anyone feel like surrendering?”
“To that lot?” Fletcher spits through broken teeth, gesturing at the enemy ranks. “They’ve got healers’ tents. White banners everywhere. You know what they’ll do? Patch up their own and leave us to rot. We’re not worth the prayer work. They’d cut us down just the same.”
“My thought exactly.” I test my cracked spear shaft. It’ll hold for a few more exchanges. “So let’s make them earn their healing.”
The enemy reforms beyond the breach. Fresh troops cycle in for the exhausted first wave. I watch wounded Veterani helped back toward those white pavilions. In an hour they’ll return whole.
Meanwhile, Jorgen’s leg has gone gray-green above the break.
A figure rises above the ranks on a disc of condensed mana. A war witch in robes the color of dried blood. Her staff, carved from a single piece of bone-dark wood, writhes with barely contained power.
“Disperse!” I roar.
There’s nowhere to go.
She sketches a rune that burns itself into reality. The air ignites. A wall of flame thirty feet high races toward us, hot enough to turn sand to glass.
I slam my spear butt down. The old runes along the shaft flare blue-white, taking in the last dregs of my inner reserve. Wind howls up from nowhere. It forms a protective dome around our square just as the firewall hits. My barrier buckles. Cracks appear as reality strains. Men scream.
The heat cooks exposed flesh even through the protection. The smell of burning hair fills my helmet.
When the flames pass, only fifteen Wolves remain. The rest are reduced to shadows burned into stone.
My barrier collapses. Every joint screams protest at once. Blood runs from my nose, ears, the corners of my eyes.
Magic costs the caster. I’ve got nothing left to pay with.
“Captain?” Fletcher’s voice sounds far away.
“Still here.” I spit red and force myself straight. “Still standing.”
They come again. Formations have broken apart, replaced by a tide of steel and hate. We meet them with the fury of the condemned.
I stop thinking. I let the body work through instincts honed by decades of bloodshed. Thrust. Twist. Rip. Step. Parry. Kill. Repeat.
A spear finds the gap in my armor. I break the shaft, leave the head buried, keep fighting. An axe opens my thigh. I take the wielder’s head in trade.
Seconds stretch into hours. Hours compress into heartbeats.
Fletcher dies when a siege bolt thick as a ship’s mast punches through his chest. It pins him upright against the keep door. He tries to speak, manages only blood, and his eyes hold mine for a moment: frustrated, amused, resigned.
Then empty.
The bolt props him there.
Five more die in the minutes that follow. I don’t see all the wounds that take them. I just count, and the number keeps falling.
Ten Wolves become seven. Seven become three. Three becomes one.
Me.
I stand alone in the courtyard’s heart. I’m surrounded by cooling meat that used to be men. My armor hangs in tatters. Muscle shows through gaps, already searing from residual heat.
I’ve lost fingers. Can’t remember when. The spear is more crack than shaft now, held together by will and old leather. The enemy forms a circle, wary. They’ve paid for every approach.
Behind them, that war witch descends toward the killing ground. Burning flames orbit her.
She touches down ten paces away. This close, I see she’s beautiful the way avalanches are beautiful. Terrible. Inevitable. Impossible to stop.
“Kneel.”
I laugh. It comes out wet, chunky with things that should stay inside.
“Come here and help me down, witch.”
She sighs with genuine disappointment. Flame builds between her palms. White-hot this time, the color of stars’ hearts. No barrier will save me. We both know it.
She releases annihilation.
The world turns to ash and agony. My helm fuses to my skull. I tear it free, taking hair and flesh with it.
My left eye boils away. It doesn’t matter because I still have one good eye. Still have the spear. Still have enough hate to keep moving.
I charge.
She actually steps back. The circle of soldiers parts rather than face me. I carve through the brave ones. Each thrust and cut is driven by experience alone, the body moving while the mind drifts elsewhere.
A phantom heat flares between my shoulder blades.
More arrows find my back. An axe severs my arm. I kill with the stump, driving jagged bone through visors.
Then he comes.
Robert Garland, called the Hound of the Lion. Even dying, I can see the gut wound that’ll kill him without healing, but he grins anyway. We could be old friends meeting at a tavern. His flamberge drags sparks from stone.
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