The Last Survivors (Book 6): The Last Conquest

by Bobby Adair

  After sling practice was finished, several dozen pushcarts were wheeled through the front gates, each with seven or eight women and children behind or around them. They were headed out to collect all of the stones the slingers had flung over the walls. When they finished that, their task was to scour the outer fields for every rock they could find small enough to hurl over the wall and weighty enough to bust a skull. A hundred women armed with spears followed the carts out, keeping watch on the forest, should any demons be lingering close by.

  "Tell me of your scouting mission," Fitz said.

  "For reference, let's talk of Brighton first," answered Adam-John.

  Ginger turned to Fitz and said, "I'm tired of his snide tone. We have reports from our scouts, who babysat him on the way." Ginger cast a harsh look at Adam-John, then looked back at Fitz. "Let's put him to work on something other than wasting your time."

  "I sent him out," said Fitz. "He took a risk. I'll hear him."

  "By the census numbers, thirty-one thousand people were left in Brighton after Blackthorn marched the army to the Ancient City. Many of those people had come to Brighton on General Blackthorn's orders, to consolidate the population here for our protection."

  "I know this," Fitz confirmed.

  "You are aware that from the moment General Blackthorn marched out with the army, people have been leaving Brighton to go back to their homes. Many left that first night, resentful about having been forced to abandon their homes. That slowed to a trickle over the subsequent days, but many more escaped Brighton during the turmoil of your revolution."

  Fitz didn't respond to that, but she knew it to be true. The rumors of people escaping over the wall had been confirmed too many times to pretend it wasn't happening. In fact, Fitz had ordered the guards at the gates to allow women to leave as they pleased. It was safer for them to travel during the daylight hours, well-provisioned, for their journey home.

  "We at the Academy," continued Adam-John, "estimate a third have left, meaning the current population of Brighton is approximately twenty thousand souls."

  "Before you go on," Fitz interrupted. "I spoke with Hilda, a midwife who lives out near the north wall. Some think she's a witch," Fitz cast a glare at Adam-John to let him know exactly where Fitz believed such rumors were born, "because she's a woman with knowledge. She told me about a time when she was a young woman, and the demons breached the wall. Does the Academy keep a history of such things?"

  "We do," answered Adam-John.

  "She told me nearly every household lost family members. Do you know the numbers? How many people lived in Brighton at the time? How many died?"

  "The census did not exist in those days," said Adam-John, "but our estimate is that nearly twenty thousand people lived in Brighton at the time."

  "And how many died in the battle?"

  "Nearly seven thousand."

  "Seven thousand?" Fitz couldn't believe it. Didn't want to. "So many."

  "It is an estimate," Adam-John said, defensively. "As I said, we had no census."

  "I don't question your number," Fitz told him, to soothe his slightly bruised ego. "I'm shocked by the number of the dead."

  Adam-John raised his chin again, puffing himself up with superiority.

  "Do you know how many demons attacked the town, then?"

  "We have no positive number," answered Adam-John, "but nearly nine thousand carcasses were burned in the aftermath. That number was recorded by a member of the Academy. It was most of the demon horde that came through the breach in the wall. Some were not killed, and escaped."

  "Nine thousand?" Ginger whistled. She nudged Fitz and pointed to the sling women walking back towards town. "That's six thousand, there. We barely have nine thousand capable of fighting."

  "The rest of the population in Brighton now are the children and the very old," said Adam-John, "people incapable of fighting the demons."

  "Tell me," said Fitz, "you saw the horde of demons following Winthrop's marauders back to Brighton. How many demons do you estimate are coming?"

  "Twenty thousand." Adam-John said it like it was a meaningless number, attached to nothing important. "My estimate might be off by as much as five thousand either way, so as few as fifteen thousand, as many as twenty-five thousand."

  "How do you even know what twenty thousand looks like?" Ginger was angry about the number, and she was angry at Adam-John.

  Adam-John pointed to a three-story building across the fields, right at the edge of town. "My brother owns that tall house. I stood with him on the roof and watched on the day General Blackthorn gathered his army in those fields to march to the Ancient City. I know exactly what twenty thousand looks like."

  "Ginger," said Fitz, "speak to your scouts and ask them if they think that number is accurate. Ask them if they think the size of the demon horde matches the size of General Blackthorn's army."

  Ginger nodded.

  "How big is Winthrop's band of misfits?" asked Fitz.

  "Two or three thousand," answered Adam-John.

  "Why hasn't this horde already annihilated them?" asked Fitz.

  Adam-John looked to Ginger, saying, "I have no answer for that. Perhaps her scouts do."

  Looking at Fitz, Ginger said, "I asked them the same questions. It is as I've already told you. Winthrop's followers are as crazy as he is. Perhaps that frightens the demons. I have no other explanation."

  "The situation, as I understand it," said Fitz, looking at Ginger, Kreuz, and Adam-John in turn, "is that we have Winthrop's band of marauders coming to tear down our walls or to seize Brighton, or perhaps to kill us all. No one is certain which. A half-day's march behind him, a horde of demons twice as large as any that has ever attacked Brighton is following, and when they arrive, they will attack us. Does anyone doubt that?"

  Shaking heads all around.

  "And when that horde of ten thousand came all those years ago," continued Fitz, "they killed nearly a third of Brighton's population. Does anyone doubt there are enough demons coming to kill every woman, child, and man in Brighton?"

  More shaking heads.

  Fitz turned to look toward the forest, trying to think of what more could be done. Twenty thousand demons. Could fist-sized stones and ancient catapults be enough to turn the tide in her favor? She wanted to be certain. But she wasn't.

  Chapter 60: Bray

  "They're not here." Bray's mouth opened and closed on more words.

  After riding for most of the day on a trail that Bray realized more and more was not the one he'd thought, they finally reached the other end of the canyon. Bray and Kirby stopped their horses in a cluster of trees just next to the ancient road. Bray surveyed the stretch of path coming out of the canyon. It was empty except for trampled brown grass at the road's shoulder, boot prints, and a few piles of horse dung. He looked back into the canyon, as if he'd find remnants of the army, even though the realization had already sunk in that they'd missed them.

  "It looks like you miscalculated worse than you thought," Kirby said. Realizing her words were too severe, she added, "I'm sorry about your son."

  "Dammit," Bray said.

  With no signs of the army nearby, he trotted his horse closer to the road. Kirby followed.

  "Someone else has been through here," Kirby said, wrinkling her nose. "A shitload of demons, by the smell."

  "You're right." Bray pointed at bare footprints laid over the boot prints.

  "Do you want to check the canyon for bodies?" she asked in a soft tone, looking up the winding road. "Maybe you can bury him."

  "No," said Bray. "Hopefully the men who took William were smart enough to avoid whoever these people were. And hopefully, they avoided the demons." Bray sighed. "If William's dead, I've failed. But if they took him further, I might still have a chance to save him."

  Bray hoped Kirby hadn't put two things together and realized that a group much larger than a few men had taken William. But he knew he didn't want to go back through the canyon. That would be a waste of time
. If William were still alive, Bray would lose even more time backtracking.

  "What do you propose, then?" Kirby looked at her horse, which was clomping its hooves impatiently. It looked like the horse was echoing her mood. Bray couldn't see how he could convince her to stay much longer.

  But he needed those guns…

  "I have a feeling they're heading for Brighton," Bray said, trying to sound uncertain.

  "How do you know?"

  "I don't," Bray said. "It's a hunch."

  Kirby watched Bray, deep in thought. "I have no desire to go to Brighton." Her eyes darted away. "The people I met from Brighton spoke of an ugly battle coming. I have no desire to be a part of it."

  Even though he already suspected, Bray asked, "A battle?"

  "A revolution of some kind. I listened only long enough to know that I wasn't going to be a part of it. I never intended to come this far. And now that I know demons are traveling behind them, it certainly wouldn't be wise to follow."

  Bray was starting to put some things together. He knew Winthrop and his army were headed back to Brighton. He knew demons were following. He wasn't sure what revolution Kirby was talking about—maybe she was talking about Winthrop—but the outcome, whatever it was, wouldn't be good. That made his need to get to William even more urgent. Bray let one hand off his horse's reins and covered his face, shaking his head and pinching his eyes shut, acting as if he might shed a tear.

  "I'm sorry," Kirby said again. "I know you were hoping to find William here. You still might."

  "It's not William I'm thinking about now," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's my daughter." Bray snorted through something that might be a sob. "She'll be so upset if I return home without her brother."

  "You never told me you have a daughter."

  "Why would I tell my robber about all my children? Is that unusual?" Bray peered through his fingers enough to see the bewildered expression on her face. It looked like she was buying into his story. "William's older sister is waiting for us to return. If William doesn't come back, she'll be destroyed. My wife died a few years ago from the plague, and William and I are all she has." Bray kept his face covered long enough to avoid being caught in what he thought was an obvious lie. He uncovered his face to find Kirby looking off into the canyon, a pained expression on her face. He waited quietly for her to answer.

  With a deep sigh, she said, "I'll go as far as the outskirts of Brighton. That's it. Whether we find William or not, I'm leaving after that." She pulled her horse's reins, steering it behind Bray's. She clicked her tongue at the horse. "Come on, Blackthorn."

  Chapter 61: Fitz

  Fitz leaned on the rail, looking down from the tower and at the circle wall curving off into the distance. For three hundred years, it had stood twenty-five feet tall and had protected Brighton. It was made of ancient stone, smooth and strong, and impossible to climb, back when it was new.

  In places, it was still as smooth as the best ancient stone found anywhere: no place to grab, and no way to climb.

  But the wall was old, and its surface was crumbling. That made it scalable. In many places, it had collapsed and had been repaired with stacked stones, providing so many handholds that anyone could get over it.

  "Are you thinking about what to do with our cavalry?" Ginger asked. "We've got nearly two hundred horses and women to ride them."

  "I'm thinking of other things." Fitz still stared at the wall as she thought about the war to come and all the battles in the past—at least the ones she knew about. Brighton's history was rich with stories of heroes who rode their great horses out to meet the demon hordes before they had a chance to reach Brighton's circle wall.

  The only battle at the wall of which she was aware was the one about which Hilda had told her, and that one seemed to have been expunged from Brighton's memory, like an embarrassing family episode that no one talked about.

  Fitz wondered how many embarrassing breaches of the wall had happened through three hundred years of history.

  And that made her wonder if the wall wasn't an impregnable bastion, as she'd grown up believing, but rather, a rickety fence, providing a convincing illusion of security, but doing little more than keeping the livestock from wandering off.

  And corralling Brighton's citizens for easier enslavement.

  Dark thoughts.

  Was Brighton truly such a wicked well of lies?

  But Brighton existed. It was the center of humanity in a wilderness full of monsters.

  Fitz finally asked, "Did you ever climb the wall when you were a child?"

  "Of course," answered Ginger. "Everybody did. That was the game for a time, to climb the wall and touch a foot on the other side." Ginger laughed at the memory. "We were all sure the demons would jump out of the grass and drag us into the forest. I nearly wet myself the first time I did it, I was so scared."

  Fitz glanced at Ginger with a smile. The games Fitz had played with her friends were much the same. "How frequently do you see repairmen working on the wall?"

  Ginger's expression changed as the happy memories slipped away. She looked at the wall, curving away in its unending circle. "Always. Somewhere."

  "Why?"

  "Because it needs to be repaired."

  "Why?" Fitz asked. "There have been no battles at the wall, no army breaking it down."

  "It's old. Everything old needs to be—" Ginger dropped her sentence as she reconsidered it.

  "You see now what I see," said Fitz. "The wall is old. It's falling down on its own."

  Ginger shook her head slowly.

  "That's right," Fitz confirmed, knowing Ginger was still on the same track. "If a demon army twenty thousand strong comes, the weight of all those bodies pushing against this thin old wall will break it through."

  Nodding, even as she tried to argue, Ginger said, "But the wall is strong in many places. Mostly."

  "Mostly," Fitz agreed. "But mostly isn't good enough. And where it doesn't fall, the demons can climb it. We both did it as children. The wall is no obstacle to a horde of hungry monsters."

  Ginger looked across the field at the squads of women with their carts picking up rocks. "The wall will slow the monsters down while our slingers pummel them with stones."

  "Our plan will fail," said Fitz. "All of it is based on the assumption that the demons will come up the road, cross the field to the main gate, and spread out in the grass to wait while we kill them with stones and catapults."

  Nodding and pointing at the gap in the forest where the road entered, Ginger said, "They're coming up the road right now. Out there in the forest, somewhere. They aren't intelligent beasts. They'll come right for the wall."

  "I don't disagree with that," said Fitz. "But what's to stop a few thousand of them or many thousands of them from running this way or that?" Fitz pointed in each direction along the wall. "They might run a half mile or a quarter mile. They might run to the other side of Brighton and climb the wall there. What will we do, Ginger, if we have demons climbing the wall everywhere along its length? I may never have told you, but I heard one time in a conversation with Franklin and Scholar Evan that the wall is over six miles long." Fitz turned and fixed Ginger with an intense gaze. "We don't have enough women in our army to defend six miles of wall. Maybe if our forbearers had the foresight to build towers all along the wall every thirty feet or so, we would have a chance of defending it."

  "Or a platform on this side of the wall," said Ginger, her eyes lighting up. "A walkway on this side, where an army could stand and kill demons as they climbed from the other side. The demons would be defenseless and only able to come one behind the other. A single woman could kill an entire army, as long as she didn't tire from swinging her sword."

  Nodding with near dreamy eyes as she imagined such a thing, Fitz said, "In that old book that Kreuz showed me, that was how the Ancients built their castles, with walkways inside the top edge of the wall. The Scholars told me that in such castles, a few hund
red soldiers could defend it from thousands."

  Ginger looked at the wall again. "We should start—"

  Fitz interrupted, "There's no way we'd have the time. A project of that size would take years."

  "There's got to be something we can do," said Ginger, desperation in her voice, now that she understood how dire their situation was.

  "That chant your scouts heard from Winthrop's ruffians. What was it?"

  "Tear down the wall?" Ginger asked. "That chant?"

  "Perhaps there is wisdom in their madness."

  Chapter 62: William

  After riding on the horse most of another day on the ancient, overgrown road, William's back and thighs were just as sore as on the previous days. He wasn't complaining, though. He knew things could be worse. He could be out in the wild, alone, starving, absent the protection of thousands of men and women that were looking forward to reaching home. He could still see the anticipation in the men's and women's eyes, even though their shoulders were slumped and they talked and chanted less. They'd been marching, fighting, killing, and watching their friends die nearly every day and many nights since leaving Brighton, but they were optimistic.

  William felt badly for the horses, though. They were frothing at the mouth, flaring their nostrils, and moving at a slower pace. Many had white, crusty sweat around their saddles and where the ropes met their hides. They hadn't asked for such a hard journey, or to have men riding on their backs. He looked to his right, watching as Winthrop adjusted on his horse, preparing to ask Phillip a question.

  "How far are we?" Winthrop asked, staring into the horizon, where the sun was beginning its descent.

  "We're only a day's march from Brighton," Phillip answered, pointing at the dusty road in front of them. "I remember this section of road, and that circular patch of trees in the distance."

  "Good," Winthrop said. He made a face as if a nasty insect had bitten him.

  Winthrop had been growing increasingly agitated over the past few days. He often complained that his boots didn't fit his feet, and that his robe wasn't thick enough to protect him from chafing. One time, he ordered the army to stop twice in an hour when he needed a break. More often than not, he was depending on Phillip to make decisions while he tended to his physical needs or his ceremonies. That gave William hope. If Phillip was in the good graces of his god, then William was, too.