The huntsman squinted into the shadows of her cowl, as though reluctant to believe her without a glimpse of her namesake red hair, but the steel in her eyes convinced him just as well. “Y-yes, of course.” He tapped out his pipe and went to relay her command to his fellow guards.
Rose urged her mount toward the half circle of cages. There were some three thousand prisoners in total, including the pint-sized cave dwellers chittering excitedly in the pits to either side.
“I’ve been fighting monsters my whole life!” Rose shouted at them. “If you and I had met on an arena floor, I’d have killed you. And if you’d managed to catch me alone in the Wyld? Well, I’d have killed you then, too.”
A pair of hyena-faced gnolls in one of the cages laughed hysterically at that, but none of the others found it particularly funny.
“I never hated your kind,” Rose went on, as the guards pulled the keys off their belts and set out for the cages, “but I was taught to believe we were enemies—just as you were raised to believe I was yours. I thought that killing monsters made the world a better place. I was wrong.”
Her stallion shifted nervously as Brontide laid waste to another section of wall.
“I can’t erase the past. And I can’t promise you a future. Because now, too late, we find ourselves threatened by a common enemy: one whose aim is to exterminate every single one of us.” Rose drew Thorn and aimed its tip at the Courtside Gate. “And she is right there.”
There was a chorus of angry snarls from the cages. The goblins and kobolds and gibberlings yowled in their pits. Tam saw a hunched gorilliath grip the bars of her cell and shriek in fury, while a copse of chain-linked treants shook so violently that their leaves rained down.
“The Winter Queen lied to you!” Rose told her captive audience. “She fed you empty hope and left you starving. She used you! And when she had no more use for you, she betrayed you! And she is right there.”
The men approaching the cages balked as their charges growled and hissed.
“Because of her, Brontide is nothing more than a mindless slave! Because of her, your army was destroyed—your friends and family raised from death and used as fodder! And she is right there!”
The monsters howled and screamed as the guards fumbled keys into locks.
“I promised you freedom!” Rose shouted. “And now you are free!”
Cells and cages clattered open. Planks were lowered into pits. Manacles were broken, discarded in the snow.
“I promised you vengeance!” Rose cried, lifting Thorn overhead. “Come with me now, and take it!”
Heartbreaker turned and took off like the edge of the world was crumbling behind him.
The monsters went roaring after.
Cura nudged Brune with an elbow. “Go,” she said. “And try not to kill Astra before Tam and I catch up.”
The shaman snorted. “You’d better hurry, then.” His leathers shredded as he bounded away.
Tam and Cura found themselves in the midst of the mob by the time they reached the Courtside Gate. All around them were bellowing orcs, barking gnolls, horse-headed ixil tossing their braided manes. Tam nearly tripped over the tail of a saurian screeching like a bat come sunrise.
Behind them, sprinting on stubby legs, were hundreds of gremlins, goblins, kobolds, and scrawny gibberlings in their sealed iron helms. Ahead were the faster creatures: the galloping centaurs, the lumbering ogres, the treants taking one giant stride for every five of Tam’s. The rushing throng tapered to a point tipped by Rose herself, who was charging toward the heart of the Horde with a sword in the air and her red cloak snapping in the gale behind her.
Shame there isn’t a bard here to see this, Tam thought, because it would make for one hell of a song.
Chapter Fifty-three
Birdsong on the Battlefield
What Tam found most revolting about Astra’s host wasn’t their ghoulish appearance. It wasn’t their bloodless pallor, their slackened mouths, or the sorcerous fire blazing in the crow-pecked hollows of their eyes. It wasn’t the axes lodged in cloven skulls, the arrows studding gore-soaked chests, the spear shafts jutting from oozing abdomens. It wasn’t their breathless silence, though this was even more unnerving up close than it had been from her vantage on Chapel Hill.
What really repulsed her, above and beyond any of these vile virtues, was the smell.
She’d experienced something like it on the plain south of Grey Vale, but it had been masked at the time by woodsmoke and the sour tang of fresh blood. Since then, however, the Horde had ripened considerably. Their myriad mortal wounds had festered from neglect. Their flesh had putrefied, so that it sloughed like thick cream when struck, and their clot-strangled limbs bloated like wineskins heavy with septic pus.
The stink, as they closed with the rancid ranks of the Winter Queen’s Horde, turned Tam’s stomach and threatened to buckle her knees. She was grateful for the cold, which went some way toward quelling the reek, and was glad she’d had nothing but a heel of hard bread and a swig of water for breakfast.
Astra’s monsters, it turned out, weren’t quite a match for their living counterparts. They fought without guile, driven only by a senseless desire to kill, while Rose’s rampaging thousands attacked with a ferocity rivalling the mercenary herself. They ripped and tore and slashed their way through the ranks of white-eyed dead, piercing Astra’s depleted centre like a spear, driving straight for the tented palanquin ahead.
Tam fought side by side with Cura, who hadn’t yet summoned one of her inklings to help. The Inkwitch fought with a pair of serrated knives, occasionally clenching one in her teeth so she could hurl a dagger into something’s eye.
Though Tam managed to get a few arrows off before the fighting got thick, it soon seemed a bad idea to press on with nothing but a spar of ashwood to protect herself. Tam was wearing armour—a suit of sleek gorgon-scale—beneath her red leather longcoat, and Moog had furnished her with a sword called Nightbird from the chapel’s armoury, which the wizard claimed was home to all sorts of ancient relics.
Reaching across, she drew the weapon from its scabbard, then swore loudly.
Glass? That daft old bugger gave me a glass fucking sword!?
The blade looked sharp, certainly, and was so light it felt as though she were holding nothing at all, but Tam could see right through its clouded, blue-black blade. She doubted it could survive a fall to the ground, much less a strike against an enemy’s armour. Had Moog even bothered to examine it first? Or had he simply grabbed the first scabbard he saw?
“Tam!” Cura snapped, and she looked up to see a boggart bearing down on her. It resembled a naked fat man with tufts of mould and fungal scales growing all over its body. Someone had opened a gash in its belly from which its innards dangled in shrivelled ropes.
Here goes nothing, she thought, ducking the boggart’s pudgy grasp and chopping at its head with her stupid glass sword.
Her stupid glass sword went right through its skull.
The blow barely jarred her arm, and Tam wondered if this was what it felt like to wield Madrigal. Needless to say, by the time she’d cut a rask in half and sheared through the neck of a zombified sinu, Tam found it in her heart to forgive Moog for giving her what looked like a mantelpiece ornament to fight with.
Later, as she and Cura fought back-to-back amidst a crowd of greasy frogmen, the Inkwitch shot her a wry but weary grin. “Guess those lessons with Rose paid off, huh?”
Tam ducked an incoming tongue-punch and fed Nightbird to the urskin’s open mouth. “I’ve got some moves,” she admitted, and was rewarded with a clipped laugh.
They saw Rose’s red cowl just ahead. Fable’s leader was still on horseback, urging her stallion on as though charging headlong into ocean surf. Thistle and Thorn blazed blue and green as she hacked her way through. When something like a spine-covered stork loomed ahead of her, Rose sent Thistle spinning sideways to hew through one spindly leg. The huge bird fell awkwardly and Heartbreaker threshed it beneath hi
s hooves.
Cura got shouldered by an orc impaled by the haft of a spear. The summoner crashed into Tam, and both of them went down in the slush. From her back, Tam swung the bow in her left hand. Duchess cracked across the orc’s jaw and snapped one of the yellowed tusks jutting from his bottom lip.
“Summon something,” she hissed at Cura.
The Inkwitch threw a dagger instead. It opened a gash in the brute’s throat but didn’t kill him. He carried a tooth-studded club in his remaining hand and raised it to strike.
“Fuck,” Cura swore. She pawed at her sleeve, took a breath with which to scream an inkling’s name.
Brune leapt over them both and slammed into the thrall. Orc and wolf went tumbling through the muck. The shaman recovered first, but one of Rose’s recently liberated treants saved him the trouble of killing the orc by stomping its skull with a gnarled foot.
Tam offered the treant a grateful wave.
It waved back, but then shrieked in panic as a wyvern seized its branches and hauled it into the air.
Looking up, Tam found the sky swarming with fliers, from bare-breasted harpies and bloodshot eyewings to whole packs of wolfbats and flying monkeys (which she hadn’t believed were really a thing until just now). Falling gargoyles pummelled through head and helm, blowing skulls apart like hammer-struck melons. Swooping plague hawks left corrosive clouds in their wake that reminded Tam of the spray thrown off by tidal engines, except an engine’s mist didn’t rust your armour and melt your goddamn face off.
Tam and Cura crouched low as they ran. Brune barged a path ahead of them. With her bandmates to protect her, Tam sheathed her sword and resumed shooting arrows at any target she could find, including the bulging venom sac of a rot sylph. The sac burst, showering a cluster of thralls with a sizzling green ooze that disintegrated them almost instantly.
By the time they caught up to Rose she was almost to the Winter Queen’s litter. The horn-nosed goliaths bearing it set their burden down and started forward. Tam forced herself to look past them, to the figure seated behind the windblown veils of diaphanous black silk.
Can you see us, Astra? Have you realized yet who’s coming for you?
Tam considered launching an arrow at the Winter Queen right now but decided against it. Even if her aim was true—if the wind didn’t blow it astray or a firbolg didn’t lurch into its path—Astra was still a druin, and the prescience would warn her it was coming anyway.
Rose charged the litter bearers without slowing, flanked by Tam, Cura, Brune, and a handful of hearty monsters. A lion-maned raga was among that lot, as was the minotaur who’d refused beef stew last night. His horns were strung with gore, and he howled a colourful litany of obscenities as he trundled alongside them. The pair of gnolls who’d found Rose so amusing back in the square were present as well. Their identical stripes gave Tam the impression they were brothers. One was laying about with a battle-axe, while the other had appropriated something’s femur and was wielding it like a club.
Three of Astra’s firbolgs were down, then four. Tam tried to put an arrow between one’s eyes, but the shaft glanced off its nose-horn. Cura planted a knife in the back of another’s knee. When it dropped, the raga put a fist through its eye and withdrew an apparently necessary part of its brain, since it died almost immediately.
The Winter Queen stood as the last of her bodyguards fell. She stepped to the front of the gilded platform, lifting some bulky apparatus in one hand.
It’s not her, Tam realized, even as the figure—stoop-shouldered beneath a tattered black straw cape—tore the curtain aside and levelled his double-decked crossbow at Rose’s chest.
Hawkshaw wasn’t wearing his snowmask, and though Astra had resurrected him, she’d done nothing to repair his face—which, thanks to being run over by the claw-broker’s wagon, was an obscene mess of torn flesh and fractured bone. His eyes, unlike her lesser thralls, were dull black voids, and his shattered teeth were clenched in a tortured rictus as he pulled the trigger.
The bolt splintered against the gauntlet Rose raised to shield her face.
Tam sent an arrow at the Warden’s head, but the curtain fouled its flight. One of Cura’s knives scraped off his shoulder but didn’t stop him from resetting the deck on his crossbow and taking aim once again. Rose yanked hard on Heartbreaker’s reins, trying to turn him, but the stallion reared instead, and the white-feathered bolt split the barding on his chest. He toppled, throwing her clear.
Cura and Brune rushed the platform, but Rose’s shout brought them both up short.
“He’s mine!”
The Inkwitch swore under her breath, and the wolf snarled, but neither defied her. Hawkshaw (puppet or not) had been responsible for Gabriel’s death, and standing between Rose and revenge was as wise as diving for pearls in plate armour.
Hawkshaw let the crossbow fall and drew the bone sword at his hip. The top third of it had snapped off, but its jagged point looked no less threatening for it.
“If I kill you,” he slurred, “she’ll let me go. I can finally be with Sara.”
Blood sluiced from Rose’s blades as she summoned them to hand. “I don’t know who Sara is,” she remarked, “but if she’s dead, then I promise you’ll see her soon.”
Tam glanced behind them. More and more of Astra’s minions were giving up their pursuit of the Han’s horsemen. “We should get back to the city,” she warned.
“This won’t take long,” Rose promised.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tam argued. “The Queen’s not here! Killing Hawkshaw means nothing!”
“He murdered my father.”
“He’s just a tool! Astra murdered your father. And she’ll do the same to Wren—and everyone else—if we don’t stop her. We need to go, Rose. Now, before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late,” said Cura. “Look.”
The Inkwitch was right. They were surrounded. Astra’s thralls had returned like the evening tide to envelop Rose’s dwindling company. And worse: Every companion they’d lost between here and Conthas was now an enemy. Tam could barely make out the city for the blowing snow, though she could see Brontide marauding through the outer wards, a malevolent child stomping on frogs in shallow water.
They had gambled their lives on being able to reach the Winter Queen and kill her quickly.
Gambled and lost.
Astra played us for fools, Tam thought bleakly. She tricked us, trapped us, and now we’re dead.
Something snagged her eye as it emerged from the Courtside Gate. Many somethings, actually, led by two towering figures swinging massive hammers in devastating arcs. Her mind floundered in confusion. Were they monsters? Had one of Sinkwell’s wizards conjured a clump of earth elementals to help fight?
Her ears picked out a sound amidst the savage noise: a lilting, lyrical hum—as incongruous as birdsong on a battlefield, or bright laughter echoing through the halls of a crypt.
It sounded, to Tam’s beleaguered heart, like hope.
Chapter Fifty-four
The Scabbard and the Sword
Freecloud hadn’t forsaken the people of Conthas. He hadn’t abandoned his bandmates or succumbed to his father’s intractable will. And, most importantly, he hadn’t given up on Rose.
He’d only pretended to, Tam realized. He’d played his part, bided his time, let his father think he was content to remain below while his friends perished and Conthas burned.
But he wasn’t. He was here, and he’d brought a legion of stone sentinels to back him up. Each golem was twice the height of a man, with glowing green eyes and cuffed fists they used to pummel and punch through the hapless dead. Leading them was a pair of giant duramantium knights—great big bastards who waded knee-deep through the Winter Queen’s army. Tam could barely make out the druin in their midst, a speck of sky blue in the grainy grey chaos.
“My hero,” Rose murmured.
Tam glanced over. “You knew?”
“Of course I knew,” she said. “The poor fool
loves me.”
“Come!” bellowed Hawkshaw, beckoning Rose toward the palanquin stage. “Fight me! Kill me, if you can!”
Rose ignored him, addressing her bandmates instead. “We’re going back!”
Heartbreaker lurched to his feet. For a moment Tam feared he might be dead, and that Rose would be forced to fight her own horse, but the stallion simply didn’t know Hawkshaw’s poison would kill him, and wasn’t about to let a single arrow stop him now.
Rose vaulted onto his back and began rallying the monsters around her, shouting and pointing toward the city behind them.
Astra wasn’t going to make it easy. Every eye in the Horde turned upon Rose. Her name gusted from a thousand breathless lips. The fighting on all sides grew more frantic than ever as the Winter Queen’s minions hurled themselves at Fable and their allies.
Hawkshaw’s screams hounded them as well. “Kill me!” he howled at Rose’s back. “KILL ME!”
Tam tried to oblige him, shooting on the run as they started west, but her arrow thudded into the Warden’s shoulder instead. He broke the shaft with his fist, hurled it away, then leapt off the litter and set out after them.
With Astra’s will focused on Rose, Freecloud’s golems were hewing through her army like a battle-axe through sodden wood. His knights, especially, were wreaking havoc among the Winter Queen’s ranks. Their hammers cleared dozens at a time, or crushed condensed enemies to bloody pulp. While mortal foes might have fled from their path, Astra’s thralls attacked without regard for their life, queueing to be slaughtered like bulls at a butcher’s door.
Fable, on the other hand, was forced to fight for every inch of ground. The Horde seethed around them. Rose’s dwindling force was beset on every side, an island of living souls amidst a storm-wracked sea of shambling dead. Everywhere Tam looked were grasping claws, raking talons, gnashing teeth, snapping mandibles, coiling tentacles, and ghastly, ghostfire eyes.
Brune had a snake-woman’s tail in his teeth, while Cura—who still hadn’t summoned a fucking thing for some reason—pulled a hatchet from a saurian’s head and then put it back in, with feeling this time. A gorilliath striped red and gold was wrestling with a skeletal wyvern. The great ape cracked the creature’s neck apart and used its spine to beat one of Astra’s hobgoblins to death.
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