The Last Survivors (Book 4): The Last Command

by Bobby Adair

  He'd be in the rear with his followers.

  As Oliver scouted the road, he looked for narrow spots where the trees grew thick on both sides, or the cliffs towered above. He looked for places where he could pounce out and jam his knife through Winthrop's throat before anyone could react. He looked for places from which he could roll down heavy rocks to crush Winthrop. He needed a place that looked promising but had an escape route. As much as Oliver wanted Winthrop dead, he wasn't willing to trade his life for the pleasure, and he certainly didn't want to stand on a pyre to feel the fire burn his flesh away.

  No murder was worth suffering that kind of pain.

  Late in the morning when the army finally marched, Oliver was near the front, having found no good place from which to stage his ambush. He found a gap between the cohorts and walked alone with ranks of militiamen marching in formation thirty paces ahead and another cohort walking similarly thirty paces behind. He was proceeding quietly when a sergeant yelled at him.

  "Get to the side of the road! Wait for the other camp followers!"

  Oliver glanced up, wanting to argue but afraid he'd draw attention to himself. To his relief, one of the soldiers leaned into the sergeant's ear, and in a voice loud enough to overhear, said, "That's not a camp follower. That's Novice Oliver, sir, one of Winthrop's men."

  That quieted the sergeant.

  When the army reached the end of the pass, the ground fell away steeply, and the river ran over a fall that rumbled like thunder and threw a mist in the air that glowed with rainbows in the sun. The army crossed a bridge over a deep ravine and started down a road that zigzagged down the front of the mountain all the way to the coastal plain.

  Oliver climbed on a rock that put him well above the heads of the men marching below. From there he saw the whole of the snaking path back and forth, back and forth. In the curve of the mountain range, he saw the waterfall through a series of pools and cataracts all the way down to the plain where it formed a lake at the bottom before flowing east to spread into a thousand fingers and a marsh. Past the marsh was something Oliver had only heard about in stories. It was the most marvelous sight he'd seen. It was the ocean, blue and endless, stretching across the horizon, merging with the clouds in the distance so far away that Oliver couldn't tell where the ocean stopped, and the sky started.

  Waves lined up to crash the shore, and out there in the endless water, something triangular and stark white left a tiny foamy wake behind. Oliver wondered if it was some kind of bird sitting on the water, or a great fish swimming with its fine thrust above the surface. To see it from so far away, the thing had to be huge.

  He wondered what it would be like to be a man, somehow floating in the middle of that ocean, even though he knew it wasn't possible.

  Looking down the coast far, far in the distance to the south, Oliver saw strange gray, geometric textures at the border between the land and the ocean. He had no way to guess how far away the small gray shapes lay, a day's walk, a week's walk, but he knew what it was: the most magical of all things to a boy from Brighton.

  The Ancient City.

  Chapter 51: Franklin

  Franklin paced the back room of the church, listening to the murmurs of conversation and the scuff of shoes from the other side of the door. The townsfolk were lining up in the pews for mass, sliding down to accommodate one another, engaged in casual conversation as they waited for the clergymen to enter.

  Franklin studied his peers. A few fastened their robes. One or two gave him surreptitious glances. In the back of the room, several novices assisted the elder clergymen, and Franklin had the panicked thought that he'd rather be back there with them, performing a more comfortable role. Despite a novice's tribulations, the pressure was certainly less than he was feeling now.

  "Ready, Father Franklin?" Clergymen Abbot asked. The man's sizeable head glinted in the torchlight. Franklin saw a hint of doubt in the man's eyes.

  Recalling Blackthorn's words and hoping to keep his respect, Franklin simply said, "Yes."

  Novice Joseph scurried to open the door, carrying the same look of hope in his eyes that one day he might be the one wearing the robe and walking out to a roomful of people. Franklin smiled. Suppressing his nervousness, he waited for the others to line up behind them. The door opened. The melodic tones of harps and woodwind instruments floated through the doorway.

  Sucking in a breath, Franklin stepped out into the open.

  His heart thudded. The room was full. All conversation had ceased. The parishioners sat, still and expectant, watching the procession of clergy. Watching him. Franklin didn't need to see the individual faces to know people were sizing him up, waiting for him to falter or fail. He strode across the room with a focused gait, afraid that he might trip. Thankfully, he didn't.

  He didn't realize he was at the pulpit until the music stopped. Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw the other clergymen veer off and take their positions.

  They were waiting. Waiting for him.

  A bead of sweat trickled down his face.

  Franklin looked over the crowd—a blur of expectant men, women, and children. He felt nauseous. He'd prepared for this role in his head so many times that it hardly seemed like it was happening, and yet it was. This time, there was no Fitz to nod and smile. The room was pin-drop quiet. He needed to say something. The silence felt like it had gone on forever. Speak! Franklin sucked in a gulp of air, smiled, and prepared to greet his followers. A few coughs and whispers echoed across the room as he spoke his first words.

  "Good morning, people of Brighton."

  The parishioners murmured a response.

  "We are gathered here today because of our devotion to The Word, our devotion to each other, and our devotion to Brighton. The spirit of faith is strong in each of your hearts."

  "So sayeth The Word," the crowd answered.

  Franklin watched, surprised, as the crowd bowed their heads, listening. They were no longer sizing him up, but staring at the pews. Franklin was surprised to find how loud his voice was. The confidence behind his words grew with each phrase.

  "We gather here as our founders, Lady and Bruce, gathered all those years ago, with strength in our hearts and confidence in our leaders. Ours is to give back to Brighton, to give back to the gods, and to follow the laws of The Word, in order that we might avoid the spore."

  "Our duty is to follow those laws," the crowd responded.

  Franklin nodded at his clergymen, prompting them to sit in unison. The congregation followed suit. In the back of the room, Franklin found Fitz, sitting where she said she would. She was listening intently, her head bowed. Strength he'd been searching for moments earlier leaped inside him, as if it'd been waiting for him all along.

  "The Word tells us we must suffer. We have accepted that suffering. But what happens when our faith is tested? What do we do then?" A hushed silence fell over the crowd. "Do we give up?"

  A few people answered "No," even though it wasn't a required response.

  Franklin looked from one face to the next, suddenly able to discern the nervousness behind those expressions. Perhaps these weren't so different than him, after all.

  "Together we watched Brighton's army march out to defend the townships, to valiantly fight the threats to our people. I watched that army from the square with faith in my stone heart, and I could only think one thing. I saw a crowd of similar faces. Farmers rode next to merchants. Tradesmen rode next to apprentices. Women rode in support of their men. The distinctions that separated them in Brighton unified them as they left into the wild. They will suffer, but they will suffer together. This is the will of The Word. Unity rises above suffering. In so uniting, we protect ourselves from the spore."

  Franklin paused long enough to see several heads nodding vigorously. He saw a few women wiping their faces with tears.

  "And so I've picked a reading for you from Lady, one of our founders, as she addressed the first fifty-seven. This story was recounted to one of the descendants. I'll re
ad it for you now, so we might share in Lady's joy and in her pain. For Lady knew then what we have discovered now: our greatest strength lies together, not apart."

  "All hail Lady!" A man stood, yelling from somewhere in back.

  In the back of the room, someone wept.

  Chapter 52: Blackthorn

  With the two cohorts of his blue shirts leading the way down the winding path, General Blackthorn followed on his horse, with Minister Beck beside him. Two squadrons of cavalry came after. The rest of the militia, the cavalry, and camp followers strung out along the road. Last in line, Winthrop's band of acolytes—now two thousand strong—brought up the rear.

  Two thousand.

  Blackthorn wished he'd let his horse trample Winthrop in the river the night before and brought an end to the problem. Blackthorn hadn't anticipated that Winthrop's hand-printed braggarts would proselytize the lie of their victorious role in the battle in the canyon. Blackthorn underestimated the wanton gullibility of undisciplined farmers hoping for a spiritual lie to soothe their sore feet and alleviate their anxiety.

  But that was Blackthorn the general having those thoughts. Blackthorn the butcher, the pragmatic politician saving Brighton from itself by leading forty percent of its population to their deaths, didn't care that a holy lunatic was undermining discipline. It was a difficult dichotomy to hold simultaneously in his thoughts.

  At least, it wouldn't last.

  At the pace the army was moving, it would be four to five days to the Ancient City. After last night's fighting, Blackthorn didn't have any confidence the army would last more than a couple of days once they reached their destination. If they even made it there.

  The forests and savannahs on the plains between the mountains and the sea were thick with demons. And when the demons started to howl, when they heard the army march, when they saw the fires at night, the twisted men would come from miles and miles around. They would spill out of the Ancient City's vast, rotting, ruins and flow north, maybe by the hundreds of thousands.

  When they did, the army would be engulfed. Winthrop's braggarts would be shredded in the demon's maw. All the cowering militiamen would be murdered. The cavalry and all of their fine horses would fall as a thousand screaming monsters pulled them down. They'd all die like his father did, just as Blackthorn himself would meet his glorious, inevitable end, the end he was always supposed to have.

  Blackthorn recalled from his youth the times he'd been to the Ancient City. He'd led a squadron there on three occasions. He'd had reasons each time, but those reasons were long forgotten. They were lies he told to assuage the worries of the council members at the time. The truth on that first trip was that he wanted to see the Ancient City with his own eyes, to find out if any of the legends were true.

  Some were. Most weren't. But that was the way of it with legends.

  Though there were no treasures buried under every rock and no fairies in the air, neither were there monsters of any sort except the usual warty demons that Blackthorn had been slaying or dreamt of slaying his whole life. The only thing the legends got exactly right were the vast numbers of twisted men living in the crumbling ruins. Beyond number, he'd been told as boy. Beyond number was what he experienced, enough to blood his sword and put him at peace for the months while he waited for the next horde to emerge from the city and venture into Brighton's realm.

  Those days were long gone.

  As Blackthorn tried to stay in his saddle, he felt more and more like an old man with each mile. Each clomp of his horse's hooves on the ground seemed to sap a small measure of his strength. When he'd awoken that morning, he'd needed his mute maid to help him out of bed. His muscles protested with stiffness. His joints ached when he bent them, and his head pounded at every movement. His right arm was useless. Nothing seemed broken. His physician had come to him and moved it all around, and no bones moved about beneath the muscles. In fact, the shoulder didn't feel much different when the doctor moved it than when it hung immobile by his side. It was when Blackthorn tried the move the arm himself that the pain overwhelmed him. The injury made no sense to the doctor though he said he'd seen such on two occasions in the past. Blackthorn asked what became of the men. The answer: they eventually regained use of their arms, but they were always weak, never what they once were, and continually had flares of pain.

  The long-term prognosis did not matter to Blackthorn. He'd only hoped the doctor would do something with the arm to allow for the swinging of a sword for a few more days.

  Now he only hoped to stay on his horse.

  Military matters took his mind off his weakness and aches as he made his plan on a place to camp. Their path would take them near a knoll next to the river. That would be the most defensible place. The wide river was deep enough to protect one flank. Though the hill was covered with copses, most of it was grass, and for a mile in all directions, the vegetation was much the same, leaving room for Blackthorn's cavalry to maneuver. The militia could be set up on the hill in defensible positions, and the cavalry could ride free and slaughter demons at will.

  Blackthorn had no illusions of victory. He intended only to kill as many demons as possible before defeat came. In fact, if he set the militia to building ramparts from behind which they could hack down at demons with little risk of injury, even the inexperienced militia might kill tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand, before they were finally overrun.

  Perhaps the knoll was the place to make their stand.

  Chapter 53: Franklin

  "You were amazing," Fitzgerald said, her face curved into a beautiful smile. "I saw several women in the congregation weeping. And that sermon you gave! I don't think I've ever heard you speak like that."

  Franklin nodded, unable to suppress a grin of his own. "I'm barely able to understand it myself. I think we picked the right passages, Fitz. Especially with what's been happening in Brighton."

  "We did." Fitzgerald reached out to take his robe from his shoulders.

  Franklin stopped her. "You don't have to do that. I'll do it myself." Franklin kissed her hand. The power of the successful sermon coursed through him, a rush of adrenaline that he'd never experienced. And she was part of the reason he'd succeeded.

  "Some of the clergymen were talking in the halls. They called you a natural," Fitz said.

  "A natural." Franklin felt his face flush. "I'm not sure how I feel about that. Who said that?"

  "Deacon Carbone. He said it to one of the others before he retired to his chambers."

  "Wow." Deacon Carbone was one of the oldest members of the clergy. Normally, his demeanor was solemn and irritable. To hear that Deacon Carbone had given Franklin a compliment was unbelievable. "Hopefully, my luck will repeat."

  "It's not luck, Franklin," Fitz said supportively. "It's what you've been working toward all these years."

  "I guess it is."

  "You'll get even better with each one. The congregation will follow you the way they've never followed Winthrop." Fitz smiled.

  The thrill of having completed the mass was tempered by the fact that Franklin had work to do. He'd won over the congregation—perhaps some of the clergy. But he'd need to keep giving sermons like that if he wanted to maintain his position.

  Sitting on the bed, his face turned from proud to worried. Fitzgerald sat next to him, rubbing his shoulders.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "I just have so many ideas, Fitz. So many passages I want to share with everyone."

  "You'll have plenty of time for them," Fitz said. "Don't worry. We'll do it together. I'm here to help you."

  Chapter 54: Oliver

  From atop his rock, Oliver watched camp followers herd pigs and sheep over the wide bridge, proceeding as though it was just another stretch of road coming down the canyon, and not a bridge of ancient stone, hundreds of years old, on cracked columns spanning a chasm so deep and rugged it made Oliver nervous to peer down into.

  Following the animals and the slowest of the women and old men
, Winthrop walked in a flowing white robe covered in bloody red handprints. He was surrounded by thirty or forty fawning women, none of who carried any burden—no packs, no weapons, only the clothes on their backs. Oliver wondered what those women used for blankets and shelter at night. What did they eat?

  Most of the men in Winthrop's disorderly mob looked like militiamen. Some wore the blue shirts of Blackthorn's full-time soldiers. Some were old tradesmen who'd been among the camp followers, who now fancied themselves as soldiers, carrying sharpened sticks tempered in fire with black tips, all with bloody red handprints on their faces and on their clothes. As the mob flowed down across the bridge, some of them dropped to their knees near Winthrop and burst into strange songs. Others in the ranks sang a repetitive dirge that seemed to give them strength. Some hunted in the trees along the road, rabid for anything to kill. Some screamed and seemed to have no direction. The latter were carried along with the flow of the rabble.

  There were thousands.

  Oliver, aspiring novice to Father Winthrop, and with no knowledge of military matters, knew right away that the cancer of Winthrop, formerly benign and living only in a reeking temple, had metastasized. The rabble that had been in their disciplined ranks when they left Brighton didn't look like they could do anything now except stumble over one another and die. They'd fallen under the spell of Winthrop's eloquent lunacy, and it was going to cost them their lives.

  Worse still, that band of forty or fifty from the first night out of Brighton had turned into a thousand or two, a portion of the army that Oliver guessed Blackthorn could not afford to lose. A fist couldn't punch as hard when missing a finger or two. The army was the same. Blackthorn's army was a fist, and Winthrop was stealing the fingers and turning them into demon food.

  If Winthrop wasn't stopped, his caustic stupidity and arrogance would result in the slaughter of the entire army.