by Karen Chance
“Ha!” I said, grabbing onto Pritkin.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, looking a little dazed.
“I could never . . . get that spell right . . . in practice!”
He just stared at me.
And then the army was coming again.
It was impressive; you had to admit that. The troops in the front few lines had all but been obliterated by their own weapons, but the rest had barely slowed down. Even worse, some of the manlikans that had been destroyed hadn’t been stopped, because the ruin of their vehicles had simply released a squad of Ancient Horrors onto the field.
And if they hadn’t had bodies before, Faerie had just given them some.
Pritkin blanched, watching as something with a thousand tentacles scrambled into the golden netting and flayed it to pieces. The rest of a combined army of fey and demons surged through after it, moving so fast over the field that they churned up a huge cloud of dust all around them. It looked like a sandstorm boiling our way, with an occasional tentacle or wing or proboscis visible at the edges.
It was terrifying.
“Pritkin?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Pritkin!”
“I’m thinking!”
“Think faster, damnit—”
And then they were on us.
But so was something else.
I heard screeching from overhead, and looked up—
To see the underbelly of a giant . . . something. . . whizzing by overhead. It had the wings of a bird, huge expansive things that must have been fifty feet across, but then, they needed to be. Because they were holding up the body of a lion, and the head of a giant, shaggy feathered bird with a lion’s mane.
And then one of them dropped low and scooped me up, and we were soaring.
“Told you I’d taking you flying one day!” someone laughed, and I turned around to see that I was being held in front of a grinning fey king, only it wasn’t Aeslinn.
Long blond hair streamed behind us on the wind, unbound by anything but a golden circlet on his brow. A dark green tunic and leggings ended in green suede boots, which matched the gloves he was using to hold onto the reins of his strange ride. It was a fashionable choice for a war time ensemble, and typical of the creature, who’d go to his grave properly dressed.
“Caedmon!” My voice blew away on the wind, because we were only going about a hundred miles and hour. “What are you doing here?”
“Lending a hand. Hold on!”
I gripped the mane in front of me and gripped it hard, because we were diving again. Along with about a hundred others, because Caedmon hadn’t come alone. And the fey riders weren’t like me; they were standing up in the saddles of their rides, not bothering with reins because they needed both hands for the huge, glowing spears they were holding. And which they launched at the Ancient Horrors who had reached the city.
But they didn’t get in, because the spears not only cut through the bodies, they exploded on contact, causing the advancing host to pause, to stop, and then to turn—
On us.
“That’s the only problem with a successful volley!” Caedmon yelled.
“What is?”
“It gets their attention!”
And it did. It really did. And, unfortunately, we had to keep it or Mircea’s band was screwed.
I glimpsed Pritkin on a nearby ride, and it looked like he’d finally thought of something. Because he extended an arm and the next second, what looked like all the water in the city came roaring out. A tidal wave poured through the breech and washed the remaining Ancient Horrors backward, sending them away from Mircea’s troops.
And right at us.
Caedmon pulled back on the reins and kicked the sides of our ride, and we went skyward—just in time. Some of the others weren’t so lucky, and I saw several of his fey go down. But most made it. Leaving the space below us free—
For Aeslinn’s two forces to crash into each other.
Pritkin’s ride came up alongside mine, and two great sets of wings beat the air for a moment. Allowing us to hover overtop of a slaughter. Because the manlikan forces were getting attacked by their allies; I didn’t know why.
But Pritkin was smiling a vicious little smile, so I assumed he’d something to do with it.
“Disorientation spell,” he yelled, catching my eyes. “But it won’t last long!”
“How long?” Caedmon bellowed.
“Until the water washes away. It’s carried on the tide!”
“Elemental magic,” Caedmon said, his green eyes narrowing. But all he said was: “Then let’s use the time well!”
He and his men swooped down, diving for something I couldn’t see. Until we landed in the middle of a bunch of the Circle’s forces. There were so few, I thought, staring about, as Pritkin hauled me off the great beast’s back.
I stood there, clutching my ribs, among perhaps a few hundred men and women. I remembered the thousands I’d seen at HQ, throwing snowballs at each other and laughing. They weren’t laughing now. They were, however, grimly determined, hauling nets full of potion bombs the size of bowling balls onto Caedmon’s creatures and then taking off with the fey.
Feathers and golden hair glinted in the sunlight for a moment as the great beasts soared skyward again. They were so synchronized that they looked like a single, giant bird taking off from the ground, and casting a rippling shadow over the carnage below. Before adding to it, when they released their payload.
Pritkin pulled me back and integrated his shields with those that the Corps was raising, I didn’t know why.
And they I did, when the bombs exploded and a noxious cloud of what looked like acid rain began beating down on us. It ate into the combined shields dangerously far, but it didn’t get through. Probably largely thanks to Pritkin’s help, judging by the red-faced strain on his features.
But the shield held, if only barely, and when the clouds cleared once more—
There were far fewer enemies on the field.
I didn’t know what was the result of them savaging themselves, and what was the Corps’ doing, but they’d felt that. For once, they damned well had! I was staring at a bunch of huge, acid riddled corpses of creatures I couldn’t even name.
For a moment, I thought it was over.
But then I noticed squads of reinforcements coming at us from all over the battlefield. And weak stirrings coming from maybe half of the “corpses.” Which it seemed, were harder to kill than I’d thought. And then there were the manlikans, who’d barely been harmed at all.
Or no, that wasn’t true: they’d been hurt plenty. But when you’re an unfeeling automaton called up out of the earth, you don’t feel pain—or fear, or panic. You just get on with it. And if you are suddenly missing a limb, or if your torso is half eaten away, or if your body is melting, running with what looked like molten lava as the Corps’ bombs finished expending their magic, it didn’t matter. You just used whatever you had left.
Even worse, the disorientation appeared to have worn off.
As a result, the charge that had been targeting the castle was now targeting us, and we had no time to get out of the way. Our shield, already battered from the fallout of that massive volley, wasn’t going to hold, even with Pritkin’s help, for long. Something had to happen, and soon, and I didn’t think we were going to be getting any more Caedmon ex machina.
He had retreated so high with his fey that I could barely see them as a brown dot against the clouds.
We were on our own.
Chapter Forty-Four
There was no time to think of anything, and no time to retreat. The enemy slammed into us within seconds, a dark wave of them, and it was beyond terrifying. So much so that I froze, not even reacting when the impossible things were suddenly on top of us.
And I mean that literally. The manlikans mostly used spears and boulders as their weapons, although a few had swords as well. But the remaining Ancient Horrors didn’t bother with such things. They
scrambled on top of the straining shield, digging into it with claws and fangs, gouging out great chunks. And casting writhing shadows down onto those of us below, so thick and dark that it may as well have been night.
I suddenly couldn’t see the faces of the war mages around me very well, just an occasional too-wide eye or clenched jaw when some of the bodies up above moved just right, letting in spears of light. But I didn’t need to in order to guess that the shield wouldn’t last. Nothing would for long against that.
Pritkin apparently didn’t think so, either, because he was shaking some old guy and yelling in his face, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying. I’d probably be totally deaf right now if not for Mircea’s healing abilities, but even with perfect hearing, I wouldn’t have been able to make out anything over the pounding, screeching and shrieking coming from outside.
Until Pritkin threw a silence spell around us, and then I still couldn’t hear because my ears were ringing like cathedral bells.
“—call him now!”
“I bloody well won’t!” My ears popped after a minute, and I could finally make out what the older man was yelling. “Bringing them here to die with us won’t help anyone. Look at those things!”
“Bringing who in?” I asked, confused.
“Half of our damned army!” Pritkin said. “The Corps got word of the trap from the first arrivals, in time to pull the rest back, and hung everyone else out to dry!”
“What else were they supposed to do?” the officer demanded. “We’d have evacuated ourselves if we could have got back to the line, but they cut us off. We’re getting killed out there!”
“We were getting killed!” Pritkin said. “We have a chance now—”
“What chance does that look like?” the man gestured savagely upward. “Those damned things were supposed to be on the borders! What the fuck happened?”
Pritkin didn’t answer. Instead, he grabbed what looked like an old-fashioned radio, the kind that came in a backpack with a handset and belonged in a World War II flick, off the guy’s shoulder. The man let him have it without a fight.
“Won’t do you any good without the password, and I’ll die before I give it to you,” he said flatly. “Think, man! We lose any more and we’ll be vulnerable to the damned vamps!”
“The ‘damned vamps’ are inside the city, fighting for us right now,” I told him.
That didn’t get a response. I don’t know that it would have anyway—the man didn’t look nearly as impressed to see the Pythia as Tobias had been—but the shield above us started to buckle, requiring everyone’s full attention. The war mages got it stabilized—somehow—but we had minutes at best. We had to think of something.
I could try to shift us out, but I doubted—sincerely—that it would work with so many, power boost or not. And even if it did, where would we go? The cave and then through the portal back to Earth? Because that would leave Mircea alone in the city, and with nobody left to distract our enemies from his position.
No, that wouldn’t work.
But what else was there?
I didn’t know, but it was up to me to figure it out. Pritkin was straining, the cords standing out on his neck, fully occupied trying to reinforce the shield. Mircea was busy fighting in the city, and Caedmon—who the hell knew where he was? But I honestly didn’t blame him for retreating. He’d had maybe a hundred fey with him.
It wasn’t enough.
So, this was my fight; I knew it was. But I was flat out of ideas. This was when I needed Billy, I thought, feeling a knife turn in my heart. He’d saved me so many times when things were bad, just like he had today, and yet I was letting him down, I was letting them all down.
But grief made it hard to think, and the noise was worse. Pritkin had dropped the silence spell, needing to channel everything he had into the shield, and the cacophony was unbelievable. Not least because the sounds those things were making bent the brain. I’d called them shrieks, but that missed the mark by a lot. The truth was, I didn’t know what to call them, because I’d never heard anything like them.
They were so bad, they were actually disorienting, like an extra offensive weapon—and maybe they were. So bad that, if we stayed here for long, we’d probably all go mad. Of course, we’d be dead long before then—
I realized that I’d wandered away from Pritkin only when I almost ran into the shield. The energy zapped me, even though I was inside and it wasn’t supposed to do that to the people it was protecting. But it looked like it was getting confused, too.
And no wonder. Those damned shrieks felt like ice picks to the eardrums, making me cover my head and hunch down, trying to concentrate past the pain. Trying to think. But that just left me looking at one of the manlikans outside, because he was right next to the edge of the shield.
He wasn’t attacking, however. He’d lost his rider and was just lying there, getting trampled, with the same vacant look on his face that the severed head had had. Like an idling engine with no driver. Like the golem that Billy and I had once hijacked to—
My thoughts stuttered to a halt.
I stared at the creature and it stared back, quietly, passively. I got to my feet—slowly, and staggering a little because of the pain in my ribs and the noise. And then just stood there, like an idiot, until I gave myself a mental slap.
Go find Pritkin!
I finally did, after pushing through the milling crowd, most of which seemed as confused as I had been. But Pitkin was still laser focused, and I guessed he’d gotten that password, after all. Because he was screaming something into the handset.
I tried to get his attention, but there were so many people bumping and jostling around, half of them also trying to tell him something, that it didn’t work. And maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe I should find out if my crazy idea was actually crazy before I dragged him away for nothing.
I went back to the shield. The fallen manlikan was still there, because of course it was. It wasn’t going anywhere without a rider, was it? But the thing I’d never bothered to ask myself was: why not? Why could a fey direct such a thing and so easily, too? I’d never seen them issue any orders, and the manlikans didn’t have visible controls. So how did the damned things work?
I didn’t know, but I had to find out. We desperately needed some new troops on our side, and there they were! I could see them through gaps between the scrabbling bodies outside: fallen manlikans, lying all over the battlefield, just waiting for new riders.
It looked like the Corps had been smart enough to target the fey controlling them rather than the creatures themselves, and they’d hit the mark. We’d taken casualties, but so had they. There were downed fey all over the battlefield, with their abandoned vehicles idling alongside.
I stared at the giant, mossy face in front of me. It had a deep gouge across the forehead, the edges burned black by some spell, with the interior showing a lighter colored rock, like a healing scar. But I didn’t see any animosity in its expression, any hatred. Any more than I had on the severed head.
And I didn’t think I would, even if I hacked it to pieces.
The constructs were like guns or tanks—they were tools, the fey version of machinery, not living beings. They didn’t care who used them; they didn’t care about anything. If I could figure out how they worked—
Well, maybe we’d stand a chance.
And the thing was, I’d done something like this once before, when Billy and I hijacked that golem. The clay warriors that rabbis had once made to protect their communities had been repurposed by modern mages into a combo of servant and pack mule. Only the one we’d found had been abandoned after its demon fled, rendering it a lifeless clay husk with no one home anymore.
We’d needed a tank to absorb some damage on a mission, and knew that it would do perfectly, if we could only figure out how to make it work. In the end, Billy had done the honors, taking the place of the demon, and had driven the golem around like a car. Because that’s all the creatures were: a vehicle for
the spirit trapped inside.
But they hadn’t been the original lifeless servants, had they?
Long before golems were invented, necromancers had been making their own version by binding a bit of their souls into dead bodies to reanimate them. That’s what necromancy was: the ability to use your soul as a conduit for power, allowing you to possesses and then control something else. But Rabbis hadn’t had necromancy, so they’d had to find a workaround, and it looked like the fey had done the same.
But they hadn’t used the same one.
Come on, think, Cassie! It was really hard under the circumstances, but I knew one thing: the fey hadn’t used a soul. The fey didn’t have those, or if they did, they were very different form the Earth variety. They didn’t leave ghosts, and if they could shed their skins and move around, doing possessions and the like, I’d never heard of it. And until recently, after Jonathan gave them the idea, they hadn’t used demon souls in their creatures, either.
So, what the hell was in there?
I peered at the manlikan, who looked placidly back. It gave off a weirdly Zen vibe for something that could hack its way through half an army. Like a giant reclining Buddha, watching the stupid humans and fey savage each other.
And like the enigmatic Buddha, it wasn’t giving anything away.
I reached out with a bit of power, not the Pythian variety, but mine, the necromancy that I rarely used because dead bodies skeeved me out. Not much of it, barely any at all, because I wasn’t trying to animate the thing. I just wanted to see what was inside that shaggy head.
And, suddenly, I was.
The world skewed, my perspective shifted and stayed the same simultaneously, and I suddenly had the very weird experience of looking at myself through two sets of eyes.