Even the ones that weren’t lethal right off did more damage. The herbalists knew plenty of ways to harm as well as heal, and Darya, impervious to poison, had spent a few hours coating arrowheads with the most lethal mixtures they could manage. She noticed a toad-thing fall back, shriek with pain, and begin to tear at its own flesh, and she smiled.
There was little time for joy, even cruel joy. She was nocking another arrow before Amris could give the next order, waiting only to shoot in unison with the others. Gerant was silent in her head, but that didn’t bother Darya; she knew he was directing all of his attention to the magics that would protect her, should the need arise.
The dance had begun. Though there were more partners than usual, still the steps remained.
* * *
As Amris had suspected, the arrows took their toll, but not nearly enough to stop the advance. Across the field they came, filling every inch of space with warped flesh, barbed teeth, and eyes full of malice. When their comrades fell, most of the twistedmen left them, or walked over them. A few, farthest from the scrutiny of their commanders, stopped to wrench off a limb or pluck out an organ; an army marched on its stomach.
He heard a few of the soldiers being sick. Best they do it quickly. Amris didn’t remonstrate, just kept up the pace of draw and loose, draw and loose again, until he saw the ranks of the twistedmen halt and caught motions from those just behind the front.
“Down,” he shouted at the top of his lungs, and suited actions to words as a volley of crude arrows arced up from the ground.
Some flamed as they went. Those didn’t fly as high or hit as hard, but Thyran’s generals doubtless didn’t intend them to. They struck the outer walls, where wood normally would have sparked to deadly life. Instead, most sputtered and died as they struck the fresh animal skins draped over the logs, kept damp by the efforts of mages and young men.
A few places did begin to spark. Tebengri made a quick gesture and, one by one, the bits of light sputtered and died.
Amris heard cries of pain—the scouts were shooting from the ground, and the soldiers had ducked in good time, but an arrow or two almost always seemed to find flesh, no matter what the advantage on one side or another—but the cries sounded like those of pain and surprise, not true danger. He spared a glance, saw a young man with an arrow in the shoulder being helped down by a friend, and nodded.
“Archers ready,” he began again, picking up his own bow and reaching for an arrow. Archery had never been his strong suit, and he was far from a match for Darya, but every set of arms helped.
“Draw—” The timing was almost instinct, save for the need to watch the twistedmen and adjust as needed. The rest of it was instinct by now: the breath came up from deep in the belly, the sound formed in the chest, and the word released on the breath out, just before an inhale to repeat.
A commander kept a steady volume that way, and a steady pace, to keep going without losing breath or voice. In time the throat would feel the pain of such work. When battles went long, Amris had often come back to his tent unable to talk at all.
He watched the arrows strike, and watched the twistedmen advance regardless, some hiding behind shields, some ignoring wounds that weren’t deep enough for the poison to take effect, and some merely coming in fresh to replace the fallen. Amris couldn’t see the ground between the bodies as they squirmed forward.
This was going to be a long fight. He wanted it to be a long one—his throat be damned. Delay was their only chance.
* * *
Bodies made decent walls. Behind them, or atop them, the twistedmen dug in. Korvin cut deep trenches in the earth, swallowing soil and spitting it back out. Troops with hands stacked logs, stones, and flesh, giving themselves cover from arrows while dozens of them got hit and died, screaming.
Darya would have cursed them, but she didn’t want to waste the strength, not even to think it. Besides, they were plenty damned already. She just kept firing, targeting eyes on things with too many and necks on whatever had them. Sitha’s blessing let her edge far out onto the tower, and from there, she tried to target the back ranks, and the creatures that she thought served for officers.
That was hard to tell. Many twistedmen wore jewelry of sorts, mostly bone or organs, some gold and gems. There was no official sign of rank for them. The beaked figures were a clump of their own and stayed at the back. Their arrows carried farther than the others, one or two barely missing Darya as Gerant’s magic deflected them. The scouts likewise stayed back and kept shooting, stymied by the newly cleared ground.
Others weren’t so lucky. There was more screaming on Darya’s side now. She didn’t look to see who, but she smelled blood and the ranker stink of death. That mingled with smoke and oil, then became unnoticeable: just the way things smelled, like darkness and teeth were the way they looked.
An arrow sped from her bow and caught a toad-thing in the side. It started to writhe, and Darya reached back for her quiver, then saw a glint from behind it—the robe of one of the tall figures with the running faces. The shot was clear.
Quickly, not waiting for orders, she nocked, drew, and loosed. It was a good shot. Her aim was true. The arrow went too fast to dodge.
It crumpled.
When the point had almost reached the robed figure, the shaft warped outward into a circle. The point curved around and drove itself through the wood, and the whole thing dropped to the ground.
Fifty feet down and far across ichor-covered, corpse-strewn ground, the creature raised its face toward Darya. Moving white specks glistened there; they looked like maggots, but she thought they were its eyes, and she thought that it saw her. Pain scraped across the tips of all her fingers and under the nails, like splinters shoved deep.
It was gone in an eyeblink.
“Tell the others!” Darya panted.
Done, said Gerant. He had no breath to pant with, but his own mental voice was short and faint.
The spell between the three of them must have let Amris know she’d been in pain. She couldn’t see his reaction, but his orders stayed as consistent as ever, and his voice was loud but calm. “Draw—”
For all Amris seemed to be affected, Darya was just another soldier; neither the soul who helped defend her, the hour or so they’d spent earlier, nor the tentative sentiments they’d exchanged had made any difference to him as far as she could tell.
Darya would have smiled about that too, but she had no time.
Chapter 34
“Shift change, sir,” said the voice at his ear. “Here.” A hand tugged the bow from Amris’s hands and stuck a flask of water in its place. “Go down and sit.”
He nodded. The twistedmen were digging in rather than charging, since the first attempt hadn’t worked. Amris took his eyes off them, looked to the figure taking his place, and saw that it was Byrnart, the man who’d almost come to blows with him—the night before? Two nights ago? The sky was starting to lighten.
Byrnart took his place with no sign of embarrassment or word of apology, which was no surprise; there wasn’t time, and there wasn’t space in either of their minds for such a conversation. “Thank you,” Amris croaked out, and stumbled toward the ladder.
Slowly his vision expanded to take in the space within the walls. At the end nearest the manor gates, four torches had been staked out to mark the square where the Mourner and his helpers tended to the wounded. So far, Amris noticed, there were only three or four men on the pallets, and only one covered shape off to the side: under the circumstances, a decent tally.
Far nearer the wall, unwounded soldiers sat against the walls of buildings, or on chairs and benches that they’d scavenged. Many drank or ate; many more slept.
We’re to your right, said Gerant, and indeed, when Amris focused his attention on the spell, he could feel Darya’s presence by a small house. If you do wish to join us, that is.
“Tha
nk you,” he rasped.
Hallis was as likely as not to be nearby, so there was no conflict with his duty. Having thus rationalized, he made his way toward a small knot of people.
Darya sat a little to the side, slowly interspersing sips from her own water flask with bites of bread and cheese. When Amris cast himself down beside her, caring less about the bruising from his armor than no longer asking his legs to support him, she passed him a ration as well. “General.”
Don’t tax him too much, said Gerant.
“Wasn’t going to,” she said, and then, a little louder for the benefit of those around them, “The inside of his throat’s probably in worse shape than those hides right now.” She indicated the walls with a chunk of bread.
“No bloody wonder,” said Isen. One side of the stablemaster’s face was deep red and starting to blister, as though he’d spent too long in the sun. He was rubbing ointment on it as he spoke.
Darya herself appeared unwounded, which gave Amris what happiness he had energy for. Her face was drawn and paler than usual where it wasn’t smoke-smudged, though, and her eyes were red-rimmed and none too focused. “How are—” he began, and then held up a hand to indicate.
“Same as they ever were,” she said, while Amris sipped water. It had wine mixed in, which stung the inside of his scraped throat, but the pain felt purifying. “Only lasted a second.”
I was able to mitigate the effects, Gerant said. That’s a vicious spell—and fortunate for us it only seems to work when the—
“Blobby sons of bitches,” said Darya.
—are the direct targets.
What of wide-ranged attacks, Amris wondered to himself. Would a stone from a catapult, or a firestorm if a mage could call one, get around that defense, or expand the return stroke to the entire army? He made a note to himself to speak with Tebengri about that, when he saw the mage and when he could talk.
Gerant continued, Repeated attacks might wear down whatever the protection is, just as enough strain would break through my spells, but that’s only a theory.
“And no real way to find out,” Darya added. “Counting the one I took, I think maybe half a dozen of us have had clear shots at the squirming-faces, and nobody’s taken one since we passed the word.”
Amris nodded his approval. If the spell, unshielded, was as bad as Gerant said, there was no point taking risks to find out.
“Katrine says she’ll talk to the Mourner, when he’s got a free minute. If this is Gizath’s work, Letar’s power might fuck it up,” Darya added.
“Good thinking,” Amris said. “Good work, everyone.” Then he fell silent again. His throat was feeling better, but he had no desire to push his luck.
Eat, you fool, said Gerant.
He did. The bread and cheese tasted of blood, whether because of the smell in the air, the damage to his throat, or both. Darya, Isen, and the other soldiers spoke around him.
“No sign of Thyran, huh?” Isen asked.
Darya shook her head. “Biding his time, likely. We don’t have a Blade, and even they probably aren’t good enough assassins to get to him through a couple thousand of his creatures.”
“Where’d they all come from?” asked a young man.
“This lot?” Isen shrugged. “North, or so I hear.” He glanced at Darya and Amris, and when neither of them corrected him, went on. “Originally? Thyran made ’em out of the people who followed him. I don’t know how.”
There are creatures outside the world, Gerant said, and Darya repeated him, with a gesture to indicate the real speaker—though the choice of words would likely have given that away. Parasites, like ticks on the body of a hound. Thyran, and his god, called them up. His most dedicated followers walked into their embrace and came out changed.
A woman sitting nearby coughed on her water. “All of those went over willingly?”
“No,” said Darya, still speaking for Gerant, though she started to use her own words. “The first lot, the strongest, could…split themselves after a certain point. Stick a tooth or a finger or whatever into a human corpse and five or six twistedmen come up the next day, all with the same grudges as their…sire?” She grimaced at the word. “It lessens the big ones to do it, and nobody knows if the parts that split off them grow back, but Thyran and his top creatures made them.”
Amris nodded again. He’d seen such a parody of birth once. It was among the memories he most hoped death would blot out. He had to force himself to swallow his food, and washed it down quickly with the water and wine.
“Well, then,” Isen said, thin-lipped and pale, “we don’t let them get their hands on our dead, no matter what.”
“Another thing to watch out for,” said Darya.
We never knew if the transformation would work on the living, Gerant added, nor what the results would be if it did. It remains, I fear, an unknown and a possibility.
Darya didn’t repeat that, only glanced down at her sword with a sigh. Amris didn’t feel any need to state those facts either. There were plenty of obvious reasons not to let the living fall into the hands of Thyran’s army, not least because the path from hands to mouths was likely to be a short one and might not involve death first.
Where bad ends were concerned, Thyran and his forces provided no shortage of choices.
* * *
“Sleep would be wisest, now,” said Amris. “Until we’re needed in our turn.”
He was lowering himself to the ground as he spoke, though he didn’t start to take off his armor—likely for the same reason none of them had gone into the buildings. When they had to go up on the walls again, every second would count. They had to stay easily found and ready to fight.
Darya understood that, and gods knew she’d slept rougher. It was the thought of sleeping with live enemies so close at hand that made her stare at Amris.
She didn’t ask, though. The man looked ten years older than when he’d left her side and pulled his tunic back on, and he’d spoken through a throat of broken glass, from the sound. If he could manage rest, Darya wasn’t going to bother him with questions.
The soldiers were following his example. A few had gotten there before and were already breathing steadily, either asleep or close to.
“Might as well try,” Darya muttered, and lay back as well.
I’ll wake you if matters grow dire, Gerant promised, but he knows his business.
“Never doubted it.”
“Touched,” said Amris, amused but sincere.
“Stop talking before you start spitting blood.”
And she’s not wrong about that.
“The judge has spoken,” said Darya.
You’re damned right.
Not caring who saw, she moved as close to Amris as his armor allowed. Plate mail, when she tried, proved too uncomfortable to be any sort of pillow. She could imagine how bad it was for him—could feel a trace of it, for that matter—but he was relaxing nonetheless, slipping closer to sleep with every moment.
He’d done this a few times before.
The idea smoothed out the knots in Darya’s spirit. War, this large-scale fight, was new to her, comparatively new even to the soldiers, but familiar to the man at her side. Somebody she trusted knew what he was doing—and Gerant, as he’d always done for her, was keeping watch for danger.
She closed her eyes and felt both of them in her mind. “Wish this wasn’t happening,” she muttered, hearing her own words muddled with sleep, “but couldn’t ask for better people to see it through with.”
Chapter 35
“Climbing!”
And they were. Darya had no time to put a face or a voice to the warning. The twistedmen had reached the base of the walls, where arrows from above couldn’t reach them, and were swarming upward. Their claws dug into the wood, giving them hand- and footholds that a human army would never have had.
; The midday sun was bright. Every hideous feature showed as the monsters came closer, and while they’d cringed and hissed when they first started climbing, they faced the walls and pressed onward.
Darya shot the last of her arrows, taking another twistedman in the side as it made for the wall. Then she dropped her bow and picked up one of the spears close at hand. It was little more than a long stick, sharpened between bouts of training and stockpiling at the same time that she’d been poisoning arrows, and it too was coated with venom.
“Hold!” came Hallis’s voice, steady through the noise, though it was as cracked and ragged as Amris’s had been. “Wait—”
Darya gripped her spear one-handed, drew her sword, and peered downward, watching as the mass of skinless muscle and barbed black teeth grew closer, estimating range as best she could.
“Ready?” she asked Gerant.
Always.
“Now!” Hallis roared.
Soldiers along the walls braced themselves and tipped up huge pots of hot oil. Black and tarry, the stuff slid down along the walls, engulfing the twistedmen who were too far up to retreat. It flowed over the faces of the uppermost, suffocating as it burned, not giving them the breath to cry out. Others, lower down or to the side, shrieked plenty.
Joy, equally hot and dark, flowed up through Darya, and she felt her lips slide back in a grin. “That’s right, you bastards.”
But there was little time for celebration. The oil didn’t cover every patch of the walls. Many of the twistedmen fell, dying, to join the others on the ground, but more followed, and some of the wounded only snarled and kept coming.
After heat came cold. Darya reached out to Gerant as she’d done a hundred times before, joining her focus with his power, and pointed her sword downward along the wall.
The spell wrapped her in an invisible blanket of ice for a heartbeat. Then it concentrated at her heart, ran down along her arm, and howled forth out of the tip of her sword. The twistedmen just below her stopped in place and writhed in pain as the water in their bodies froze. Amris was too far away to lend his strength, so neither died, but Darya saw the eye of one cave in with a spill of black ichor. Those around them flinched, and while they kept coming, they were slower.
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