The giant raised his ram’s-head maul, and might have smashed the Old Glory to kindling had the remaining knight not swung its hammer hard against Brontide’s kneecap, shattering it. The juggernaut went down like a bottle-struck drunk, demolishing a dozen neighbourhoods as he crashed to the ground.
Looking back to the Simurg, Tam found Astra’s precious pet monster in equally dire straits. It closed its jaws on Agani, who willingly offered up its burning branches. As Tam had seen it do once before in Ardburg, the tortured treant released its fiery leaves all at once. They went spiralling down the monster’s gullet (she could see the glowing torrent through patches in its plumage) and destroyed whatever desiccated organs remained inside the Simurg’s body.
Kuragen, her slick tentacles straining with effort, tore most of the monster’s lower jaw away. Harradil collapsed its eye socket with a violent hammerblow. The silver-scaled twins called Kinkali looped their chains around the Simurg’s neck and began a spirited tug’o’war that threatened to saw its head off. Yomina withdrew his seventh sword—the one sheathed in his heart—and thrust it to the hilt in the monster’s breast.
The Dragoneater shuddered, sagging beneath the inklings’ onslaught. It tried to rise, but the bone spider’s webbing snared its legs. The Winter Queen—who was out of sight, but obviously still alive—gave vent to her frustration, shrieking through the Simurg’s shattered jaw. As she did, the flame-enshrouded figure of Bloody Rose came streaking like a comet from on high, so hot that every snowflake in the city became a hissing droplet.
It plunged straight into the Dragoneater’s open mouth, down its throat, into the charred cavern of its stomach.
And exploded.
Consumed from within by a mushrooming cloud of indigo fire, the once-mighty Simurg was obliterated in a mile-wide blast of burnt flesh, blackened bones, and burning feathers.
Tam, standing half a block away, was blown from her feet and sent tumbling across the ground. She rolled groggily to her knees, reclaiming her bow and fumbling to collect what few arrows remained to her. By the time she returned her attention to the smoking remains of the Simurg, Cura’s inklings were dissolving one by one into wisps of black cloud.
The apparition of her uncle Yomina was the last to go. The vulture-necked swordsman turned to face his niece. His straw hat tilted—a gesture of farewell, perhaps, or of gratitude—and then he vanished.
By now a keening wail was rising all around them as the Winter Queen raged. The sound was drawing closer, growing louder, circling like a cyclone around a flimsy farmhouse.
“We need to move,” said Rose, looking up from Cura’s ashen face.
“That could be a problem,” said Freecloud. He eyed the torc on his arm. The runes had stopped glowing, and the rod at his waist was no longer giving off light.
Looks like Contha doesn’t like others playing with his toys.
A moment’s glance confirmed Tam’s fears: The golems protecting them were standing still, slack-limbed. The sigils in their eyes had gone dormant. Beyond the sprawl of slouching tenements, she saw that a similar fate had befallen the duramantium knight. It stood frozen in the midst of a hammerblow that might have ended Brontide’s unlife once and for all. Instead, the giant grasped it in two hands and wrenched the knight’s head from its body. Though its armour was impenetrable, whatever comprised the golem’s core was never intended to withstand the tantrum of a pissed-off giant.
“We’ll have to run for it,” Freecloud declared. And indeed, of the few dozen monsters remaining in their escort, most of them were already dashing for the gate to the inner city.
“I think …” Tam squinted west through the slanting snow and the dust thrown up by the giant’s collapse. She was searching for the Old Glory but didn’t see it anywhere.
“You think what?” asked the druin.
“I think Doshi is—”
Her words were drowned out as the skyship went roaring above them, hounded by a cluster of harpies screaming with Astra’s voice. Tam’s hand strayed to her quiver, but the winged women were dropping faster than moths at the mouth of a forge, riddled with arrows streaking from inside the ship. Doshi banked right, turned a slewing circle over the smoking remnants of the Simurg, and brought the Old Glory to a hovering halt beside them.
There was a snarling harpy impaled on one of its forward spikes, and an altogether friendlier face grinning over the rail.
“Y’all need a lift?” hollered Lady Jain.
Despite having tossed her whole plan out the window less than an hour before, Rose’s ill-fated attack on the palanquin managed to serve her strategy perfectly. Incensed that her nemesis had slipped her grasp, and enraged by the Simurg’s demise, the Winter Queen herself led the assault on Conthas.
Which wasn’t to say Astra did so recklessly, cocooned as she was by an unbreachable maelstrom of monstrous dead. She’d seized absolute control of the sky by now. The Barracuda had ventured too close to the ground and was slapped to pieces by the crippled giant, while the Atom Heart was on fire, out of ammunition, and on the run from a clutch of wyverns.
Doshi dropped them off inside the East Gutter Gate. Cura was unconscious, still. Her breathing was shallow, her skin slick with cold sweat. Before leaving the ship, Brune crouched beside the summoner, wincing as the wounds he’d suffered as a wolf oozed blood down the muscled breadth of his back. He swept Cura’s hair aside and kissed her brow. She stirred, grasping weakly at the shaman’s wrist.
“I …” she murmured, “… fight.”
Brune chuckled. Tam saw him sniff and drag the back of one soiled hand across his cheek. “You’ve done enough,” he told her. “Rest, little sister. We’ll take it from here.”
Too exhausted to speak, Cura laid her fingers on the shaman’s arm.
Brune didn’t bother to wipe away the next tear to streak through the grime on his face. “If I don’t see ya,” he whispered, “I’ll see ya.”
“Make sure she gets to the Sanctuary,” Rose called to Doshi.
“I will,” the captain said gravely. “I swear it.”
As the Old Glory went roaring toward Chapel Hill, Lady Jain sidled up between Rose and Tam. “Vail’s Bloody Cock,” she swore. “I reckon I’m in love with that man.”
“Love?” Tam sputtered. “Doshi? You met him, what, yesterday?”
“The day before yesterday.” Jain shrugged. “But the loins want what the loins want, as they say.”
“Nobody says that,” Tam assured her.
“Get ready,” said Rose, eyes hooded by her crimson cowl. Her bracers flared as she squared herself to the eastern gate. “Here she comes.”
Chapter Fifty-six
Fighting Dirty
They fought Astra in the mud-brick blocks of Knight’s Landing, whose baron—the arachnian named K’tuo—went to war flanked by a pair of his six-armed kin. The trio wielded eight swords, seven axes, and three spears between them, and fought as if they were a single entity, a hunter’s hive mind with three separate bodies.
Brune stood guard over Tam while she depleted her restocked quiver, putting shaft after shaft into every abomination in sight. When the shaman was set upon by a scorpion the size of a warhorse, Tam drew Nightbird and kept Astra’s minions at bay until the wolf prevailed.
Rose pitted herself against an ogre encased head to toe in steel plate scrawled with vulgar words in yellow paint. The brute looked like one of Contha’s golems, but though his armour made him almost invulnerable, his clumsy attacks made it obvious he couldn’t see for shit. He didn’t know Rose had climbed him until she put her swords through the slitted visor of his helm.
Their resistance lasted until the massive war-tortoise crashed through the wall beside the gate, burying the insectoid baron and his fellow arachnians beneath a landslide of stone bricks. The castle perched atop the tortoise’s weathered shell—a precarious structure bristling with sharpened wood palisades—was inhabited by reptilian saigs armed with bolas, which the lizardmen used to hurl pointed, poison
-tipped seashells with deadly accuracy.
Rose called the retreat, and the defenders of Knight’s Landing melted westward.
As they withdrew, Tam saw Astra stride beneath the arch of the Gutter Gate. Her blackmetal crown glinted in the ashen light, and the silk strands affixed to her shoulders thrashed in the freezing gale. Straight-backed and imperious, she looked as though she were an empress gracing a hall of admiring courtiers, and not a death-obsessed necromancer bent on eradicating every soul in the city.
“I’m coming for you, Rose,” said her thralls in eerie unison.
“Go fuck yourself!” Rose shouted over her shoulder.
Papery laughter slithered into Tam’s ear, making her squirm.
They fought Astra in the shabby streets of Rockbottom, where Baron Starkwood led a levy of ugly, musclebound thugs by proxy of being the ugliest, most muscular among them. They were reinforced by the city’s stable of pit fighters, who ranged from bearded, battle-scarred northerners to wiry Narmeeri snake-wrestlers—called so not because they wrestled snakes, but because they wrestled like snakes, stunning their opponents with lightning strikes and then subduing them with grapples.
The combined forces ran roughshod over their enemy, and were on the verge of pushing them all the way back to Knight’s Landing before the tables (as tables tend to do in pitched warfare) turned against them.
All the muscles in the world couldn’t protect Tain Starkwood when a slag drake vomited a jet of scalding magma all over him. The baron disintegrated like a snowman under the Summer Lord’s glare, leaving nothing behind but a duramantium belt buckle that read Invincible floating on a pool of gurgling lava.
The resistance crumbled entirely when Brontide, crawling on his elbows since his knee was destroyed, began pummelling the defenders with his fists.
“Back!” Rose bellowed, and the Winter Queen’s susurrant laughter hounded their heels once again.
“Surrender,” said her hundred thousand mouths. “Embrace oblivion.”
Embrace oblivion? Tam scoffed under her breath. Thanks, but no thanks.
They fought Astra among the ramshackle hovels of Riverswell, trapping the dead in blind alleys and pelting them with whiskey-bottle firebombs from the rooftops above.
They fought on the snowy slopes of Blackbarrow, whose residents turned a collection of food carts and rangy mules into two dozen makeshift chariots. The resulting stampede was disastrous for everyone involved, but effective nonetheless.
They fought amidst the plundered crypts of Wightcliffe, baiting thralls into open graves filled with everything from sharpened spikes to a highly acidic slop co-engineered by the city’s tanners and the alchemists’ guild.
Even the Winter Queen’s entourage fell prey to ambush. As it followed the broad boulevard of the Gutter into Saltkettle, a pair of explosive-laden argosies rolled down either side of the bisecting thoroughfare.
Astra’s frustrated snarl tore through the city. She threw a hundred thralls into the path of one, which bounced and tipped sideways, detonating well before it reached the Gutter and setting several buildings on fire. The other rumbled on unhindered, and for a brief moment Tam allowed herself to believe they’d done it—that the sorceress and her puppet army would be undone in one fiery instant—before Brontide, compelled by Astra’s panicked command, dragged himself into its path. The war wagon exploded against the giant’s face. The resulting blast stripped the flesh from his bones. His hair and beard burned like a dry broom fed to a furnace.
He pushed himself up, arms flexing beneath the charred leer of his smouldering skull.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Tam heard Freecloud groan.
But then Brontide’s brittle neck snapped beneath the weight of its burden. His head hit the ground, crushing dozens of risen dead, then rolled like a boulder into the Gutter. His body shuddered violently and went still.
A desultory cheer erupted from the city’s defenders, but the howl of the storm drowned them out and the Horde surged like an ocean intent on drowning the world.
They gave up Saltkettle without a fight, retreating as swiftly as they could toward the base of Chapel Hill. A group of Rockbottom thugs, unfamiliar with the turf of a rival baron, fled down a blind alley and were cornered by the four-headed hydrake.
Tam ran, though the muscles in her legs were screaming for rest. The weather was getting worse by the minute. The snow through which they fled was ankle-deep and piling fast. The wind whipped her hair and tugged at the ragged hem of her longcoat as she hustled to keep up with Rose and Freecloud. Brune loped off to scout the way ahead.
“Vermin.” Astra’s voice haunted their retreat. “You scuttle like rats in your warren. But I will root you out,” she promised, “and exterminate every one of you.”
A dozen dead centaurs came charging from a sloping side street. Rose’s scimitars cut the legs from one, fouling the momentum of those behind it. Freecloud slipped between them, his blade shearing through torsos and lopping off heads.
Tam, who had neither the martial prowess of Bloody Rose, nor the effortless poise of a druin swordmaster, saw one of the horsemen bearing down on her and did the first rational thing that came to mind: She tossed her bow in a snowbank and leapt through the open window of the house beside her.
She spent a moment flailing wildly, tangled in gauzy linen drapes that did their best to strangle her. She gained her feet and started for the door but tripped over a footstool she hadn’t noticed in the gloom and went sprawling across the grimy rushes carpeting the floor.
Suddenly something was on her. It hissed in her face, scratched at the scales of her armour, and sunk fangs into her hand when she tried to push it off.
A kobold, she guessed. Or an imp, maybe? Make that several imps, she thought, as more of the creatures attacked her in the dark. Tam caught one with an elbow, flung another off her foot, and scrambled to her feet. She caught sight of a thrashing tail and hackled fur against the window’s wan light before another of the devils leapt at her face, raking its talons across her cheek and drawing blood.
She raced for the exit, cursed when her hip caught the corner of a wooden table. One of the imps (or kobolds, or whatever the fuck these monsters were) leapt onto her back. Its claws caught in her hair as it struggled for purchase.
Finally, Tam reached the door. She yanked it wide, exposing her assailants to the light. Whirling, she saw them scurrying for cover …
… but not before she realized they were cats.
She clamped her jaw shut on a curse, resolved never to speak of this to anyone, and promptly left, slamming the door behind her. By the time she found the others, they’d cut the centaurs to pieces. It looked as though a whole regiment of cadaverous cavalry had been butchered in the street.
“You’re bleeding,” Rose pointed out.
Tam pressed fingers to her face, wincing as her touch found a searing claw mark beneath her right eye. “I’m fine,” she insisted.
Madrigal hummed as Freecloud returned the blade to its sheath. “Find some trouble, did you?”
Tam patted Nightbird’s pommel. “Nothing I couldn’t handle,” she said, ignoring a muffled yowl from the house behind her.
Rose jogged off, while Freecloud reclaimed Tam’s bow and offered it to her with a smirk. “Vicious things, cats,” he said, then winked and set out after Rose.
Tam wiped blood from her face with the cuff of her coat before following.
They were forced to skirmish twice more before escaping the ward—first against a pack of decaying trollhounds, then with a gang of zombies Tam mistook for allies until they drew close enough for her to see the flames in their eyes. She stood her ground this time, and used Nightbird’s keen edge to cut through the neck of a pale-faced boy hardly older than herself.
The kid’s half-severed head peered into the depths of Rose’s hood. “You disguise yourself?” it asked with Astra’s voice. “You cannot hide from me, Rose. I will find you. I will make you suffer. My son’s death will be av
en—”
Tam finished hacking the boy’s head off, then kicked it down the slope behind them.
“Thanks,” said Rose.
“Anytime,” Tam replied.
Brune joined them at the boundary between Saltkettle and the Paper Court, which was very clearly demarcated by the quality of construction between one ward and the next, as the shabby tenements of Tabano’s domain gave way to two- and three-storey buildings of mortared stone.
The shaman was panting heavily. Gore slathered his jaws and slicked his once-white fur. There were three black-fletched arrows studding his hide, one of which he snapped off with his teeth as they arrived.
“Are you okay?” Rose asked.
The wolf bowed his head, a nod. Tam grimaced as blood speckled the ground beneath his snout.
Rose took the shaman’s face in both hands, speaking words Tam couldn’t hear as Freecloud broke the fletching off the other two arrows. Whatever she said, Brune growled quietly in response.
“All right,” she said. “Lead the way.”
They hurried on, skirting the eastern flank of Chapel Hill, making their way north and west toward the main thoroughfare and another confrontation with Astra’s main force. Stealing glances across the city, Tam could see that nearly all of Blackbarrow was on fire. The flames were spreading fast, already chewing at the blocks of its bordering wards.
The Winter Queen’s Horde moved west through Conthas, threading the valley floor like a pestilent river overflowing its banks. Its vanguard—the roiling knot inside which Astra was ensconced—found itself embattled on two fronts. The sell-swords of the Paper Court (who had sold their swords to Ios in the wake of Alektra’s downfall) charged down the wide avenues of their ward, while the assassins of Telltale struck from the shadowed alleys of theirs.
Fable reached the Gutter in time to see Ios herself take a very literal stab at the Winter Queen. The assassin fought her way through Astra’s vortex of undead defenders, forcing the sorceress to draw her shrieking sword. It became immediately clear, however, that Telltale’s baroness had never tried to kill a druin.
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