by Mike Wild
Fitch turned to stand against Slowhand, his brow darkening and hands dancing in an attempt to weave threads. Slowhand gave him no chance, rapidly loosing two arrows that nicked the tops of Fitch's hands and drew blood, breaking his concentration. Fitch tried again and Slowhand loosed more arrows, deepening the same wounds. The archer's message was clear: he was in absolute control. Any of his arrows could be solidly embedded in Fitch's forehead in an instant, if he so wished.
That, though, would be far too quick.
Slowhand didn't want it to be quick.
The archer sighed and closed on the man responsible for Jenna's death, Suresight now slung casually by his side. As he came, Fitch fell to his knees, tearing away parts of his robe to wrap around his bloodied hands. He stared up at his nemesis, trying and failing to disguise the fearful bobbing of his adam's apple, and was wise enough not to raise his hands again. He studied Slowhand intently, working out his identity through the smears of camouflage the archer still wore.
"The brother," he said, with disdain. "So it was you all this time."
"The brother," Slowhand confirmed. "But isn't that a redundant term?"
Fitch smiled coldly. "From what I've heard, she died at your order, not mine."
Slowhand paused. For Fitch to know that meant there had to have been a survivor of the Makennon and he'd thought all hands had gone down in the battle with the airship above the Crucible. Not that a survivor was necessarily a bad thing. News of the Faith's comprehensive defeat might very well serve to deter them from taking to the skies again anytime soon. In any case, it didn't alter the facts — Jenna would not have even been aboard the Makennon when it crashed in flames, were it not for Querilous Fitch meddling with her very being.
Speaking of which, the bastard was trying it with him, right now.
Slowhand recognised the slight dip of the head and pulsing of the temples that signified Fitch was trying to influence his actions as they spoke, but he wasn't going to be turning his bow on himself today, thank you very much. He tutted and raised Suresight, aiming an arrow directly at the manipulator's head.
"Don't try it, stick-insect. If I feel the slightest scratching in my mind…"
Fitch capitulated but, Slowhand got the impression, not wholly because of the warning he had just received. The man seemed confused, troubled somehow, as if he had been trying to gather the mental reserves to pull off his insidious little trick but had, for some reason, failed.
"Maybe you should try to talk me round, instead," Slowhand suggested. "Though I can't really guarantee that will work."
Fitch glared up at him, but there was an element of desperation in his gaze.
"There's something…" he began, then shook his head, unable to grasp what. His mind was, in any case, on other matters. "So what happens now, brother? Do you plan to execute me in cold blood?"
"Actually it's running a little hot at the moment. But yes, that's the plan."
Fitch began to laugh, softly at first, but then with a volume Slowhand knew was designed to unnerve him. It was exactly the type of tactic he'd have expected — mind games of a more prosaic nature than Fitch usually played, but mind-games nonetheless. And he knew what they were about. Fitch didn't believe that Slowhand had it in him. He saw him as one of the good guys who, when it came to it, wouldn't actually murder someone in revenge.
Fitch didn't know Slowhand at all. Didn't know what had made him not really care.
Slowhand drew the bow tauter still, pressing Fitch's head down with the tip of his arrow. The creaking of the weapon was the only sound in the silent tunnel.
"Say goodbye, Querilous Fitch."
The psychic manipulator began to tremble beneath him, waiting for the arrow that, in all likelihood, he would never feel. And in the eternity that he seemed to wait he became aware that Slowhand could play mind games, too.
"What are you waiting for?" He hissed. "Do it!"
"Get up," Slowhand said.
"What?"
"On your feet, you bastard. Move away from the shield."
Fitch sneered. "What is this, some kind of trick?"
"No trick. Do it."
Dazed and pained, Fitch regarded him with confusion. But Slowhand's attention was fixed above him. Because what had stayed his delivery of the fatal arrow hadn't been sadism on his part. As he'd been about to loose his killing shot something had drawn his gaze. Something beyond the energy barrier.
A horde of people — hundreds of them — were approaching. And each and every one of them appeared to the archer to be dead.
He plucked Fitch up and span him around. "You wanna tell me who they are?"
Fitch gasped, actually staggered back. The apparently dead things, meanwhile, walked into the barrier in a single mass, recoiling from its charge in waves, but otherwise unharmed.
"I think they want to come in," Slowhand said. "Fitch, are these things your doing?"
"No," Fitch said quietly.
From his expression, though, he clearly recognised what he was seeing, and his face was as white as those beyond the barrier. Even when he'd been facing death Slowhand wasn't sure he had looked so afraid.
"So," Fitch continued, "the First Enemy moves at last."
"The First Enemy?"
"We have to get out of here," Fitch declared, pushing past him. "Now."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, tiger," Slowhand persisted, grabbing him by the arm. "Whatever these things are, we're safe behind the barrier, right?"
"It was designed to be impenetrable."
"Then why are you so afraid?"
It was Fitch's turn to rail on Slowhand. "Because the barrier is shutting down."
"What?" Slowhand said, and saw that what Fitch said was true.
The Final Faith's shield was flickering on and off, as if something was interfering with the magic that made it whole. He stared at the figures pushing against it.
"Are they doing this?" He asked. "The First Enemy?"
Despite his evident fear, Fitch began to chuckle. "They are not the First Enemy, archer. They are only his representatives here."
"Fitch, what in the pits of Kerberos is go — "
Slowhand didn't finish his question. The barrier had vanished completely. His nose wrinkled as it was flooded with the stale air of the long unused tunnel, but it was nothing compared to the stench of those who approached them now.
Slowhand could see that his first impression of their health hadn't been entirely accurate, but neither had it been wide of the mark. Grey of flesh and white of eye, with chests that barely rose with breath, they were alive, but not in any usual sense of the term. They seemed suspended, somehow, between life and death, and had an odour about them that reminded him of an outbreak of the tic. An odour that came when bodies ceased to function properly, when things were fundamentally wrong inside. The odd thing was, none of the people seemed wounded or showed any obvious illness. It seemed to Slowhand to be more of a spiritual thing.
That was it, he thought. The clothing these people — men, women, and even a few children — wore was blackened or torn but still recognisable, and it betrayed them as being from the woodcutting villages that bordered the Sardenne. He knew these people, had spent time with their kind, and they were hard-working, rugged individuals. But now, from their empty eyes, to their emotionless expressions and the way they moved as one, they may as well have been the walking corpses he had first taken them for.
They began to move towards himself and Fitch. Each shambling figure brandished an axe, cleaver or scythe.
"What the hells?" Slowhand breathed.
The archer raised Suresight and unleashed an arrow which thudded into the chest of a man at their front. He faltered slightly but continued walking. He hadn't made a sound. Slowhand swallowed and unleashed another into a different target, with the same effect. As the group continued to advance towards them, he backed Fitch along the tunnel and loosed Suresight again and again, into hearts, necks, right between the eyes. The shambling group just kept coming
.
"That will do little good, archer," Fitch said. "As you've seen for yourself, these things are no longer normal flesh and blood."
"What happened to them?"
"They have become puppets. As such, even an arrow into the brain will barely slow them."
"Whose puppets? No, forget it. You wanna tell me what can stop them?"
"I can," Fitch said after a second.
Slowhand shot him a look. The psychic manipulator was displaying his bandaged hands, clearly seeking permission to use his powers without penalty.
"Magic is the only thing that can stop them," Fitch insisted.
"Do it." Slowhand said.
Fitch raised his arms towards the group, his temples pulsing. But moments passed and there was no sign of lightning bolts or fireballs or any offensive magic at all. Not a fizzle.
"Fitch," Slowhand said, "this is no time for projectile dysfunction."
"I–I don't understand," Fitch said.
"What's to understand?" Slowhand countered. "This, Fitch, is the day the magic died."
The stick insect gave him a horrified glance. "What do we do?"
Slowhand glanced towards the approaching figures. The walking pace which they had so far adopted was turning into more of a trot.
"Run maybe?"
"For once, archer, we are in agreement."
The two of them began to pound back along the tunnel, but at the same time the pace of their pursuers increased even more, until it was almost a charge. The eerie thing was that, other than for the sound of their footfalls, they proceeded in absolute silence. There was no need for them to utter a battle cry to chill the blood because the thud, thud, thud of their relentless and accelerating progress was chilling enough. Within seconds, Slowhand and Fitch were near to being overwhelmed, and the archer pushed the manipulator to the side of the tunnel, deciding the only thing to do was to make a last stand.
He wasn't sure whether to be relieved or offended by the fact that, other than an instinctive swing of weapons from those on the group's edge, their supposed attackers passed them by. It made him sure of something else though. These things weren't interested in the two of them, they were merely in the way. The horde's purpose was to reach the cathedral.
"We have to warn them," Slowhand said, and pushed Fitch on.
Paralleling the horde's advance now, he could see the light of the warehouse sublevel and, silhouetted before it, the wagons Fitch had dodged between on his way in. There were now also a number of workers who, guided by some Eminence, were delicately loading boxes onto them, oblivious to the deadly wave heading towards their way.
Slowhand had no love for anyone of the Faith but they were people. "Get out of there!" He shouted. "Get out of there now!"
The workers looked toward the sound of his cry, and tools were instantly dropped. They stared in incomprehension, something for which Slowhand could hardly blame them, but that reaction and their position — right in the path of the horde — cost them their lives. The horde met them and they were reduced to a pile of twitching, dismembered body parts by axe and cleaver and scythe.
The carnage did not last long but it gave Slowhand and Fitch enough time to overtake the horde and burst from the tunnel, the archer shouting warnings. But the distribution centre had already been alerted by the workers' screams, and the cathedral's cloister bells were sounding a security breach.
Guards were pouring from the sublevel's barracks to take up position before the tunnel. Slowhand bundled Fitch behind their lines, amazed that he had started the day intending to kill the man and was now getting him to safety.
"Arrest this man," Fitch ordered, intercepting two of the guards. "He tried to kill me."
The guards stared at Fitch questioningly.
"The First Enemy moves. For all we know he is in league with him."
The guards faces paled at the mention of the name, but they nodded and seized Slowhand by the arms. The archer glared — that was what you got for being the good guy.
"Fitch, don't be a fool," he pleaded. "I don't know what's going on here but let me help."
"Take him," Fitch ordered, and headed for safety.
"Dammit, Fitch! Can't you see this is about more than just saving your skin!"
Slowhand's protests fell on deaf ears as the horde continued to pour from the mouth of the tunnel. The guard commander hesitated for a moment before barking orders to his men. Crossbows were loosed and fifty or more quarrels slammed into the front ranks of the horde, the archers reloading instantly to despatch a second volley. By their sheer weight of numbers the quarrels slowed the horde more than Slowhand's arrows had, but they were as ultimately ineffective at stopping them and, despite a third volley, the horde gained ground into the sublevel itself.
Ordering his crossbow men to continue firing at will, the guard commander turned to a number of robed figures who had hastily shuffled into position at the rear of the line, and with a downward sweep of his arm instructed them to deploy their defences.
Nothing happened, for the figures were shadowmages, and the magic here, too, was gone. A wave of desperation crossed the guard commander's face and, despite his evident fear, he changed tactics, breaking forward from the line and unsheathing his sword, ordering his men to follow and do the same.
It was a mistake and a massacre. Only Slowhand and Fitch had so far witnessed how the horde behaved in close combat, and it hadn't just been the utter lack of mercy with which they had mutilated the tunnel workers, it had been the way they had done so with no regard to mutilation to themselves. They didn't care, didn't feel anything, and the only way to stop them was utter dismemberment.
The cathedral guards didn't get the chance. As they ploughed on, swords raised, into the front of the horde, the grey-fleshed intruders responded in kind, their makeshift weapons all the more deadly because of the suicidal way in which they were wielded. The guard commander and first wave of his men were bloodily felled without claiming a single foe, and even those who miraculously survived the sweeping attacks died horribly moments later, torn apart. More guards joined the fray and the horde began to slaughter these, too, fighting in eerie, absolute silence. The only noise was the wet sound of butchery, and the desperate cries and screams of the dying.
"Stop!" A voice commanded suddenly.
Slowhand glanced towards its source and saw that reinforcements had arrived, summoned from the upper levels by the tolling of the cloister bells. The Anointed Lord herself — Katherine Makennon — stood at their fore.
The archer drew a sharp intake of breath. He hadn't forgotten how striking Katherine Makennon could be, but as the Anointed Lord strode towards the tunnel, shoulder to shoulder with her men, his thoughts were not on the way her shining armour accentuated rather than hid her statuesque form, nor on the feral mane of long red hair that swept behind her like a fiery comet's tail. All he could think was that, for once, she might be biting off more than she could chew.
"Makennon, don't," he implored her as she passed. His words were barely heard above the clanking of her armour. "I don't know what these things are but I'm not sure they can be stopped."
The Anointed Lord halted briefly, her face a mix of recognition and curiosity at the archer's presence, swiftly replaced with cast-iron determination. "I will stop them. This is my cathedral."
Slowhand struggled against the guards as Makennon strode on, but their grip was firm. All he could do was watch as the Anointed Lord marched at the horde, her battleaxe swinging down before her with an audible swoosh. Scholten might well have been her cathedral but for the moment at least she was no longer its Anointed Lord, reincarnated instead as the battle-hardened Vossian general she had once been.
Makennon directed her men to the peripheries of the horde and then, roaring, waded into the heart of them, battleaxe carving a path as the invaders' weapons sparked and clanged on her armour. While it looked as though she was wielding the heavy weapon with as much carelessness as the enemy were wielding theirs, it was in
fact with great precision. Its twin blades bypassed, by hairsbreadths, her own people fighting beside her, cleaving only into the things that flailed about them. The horde might have been unaffected by damage from lesser weapons but the sheer mass of Makennon's axe, to say nothing of the expertise with which it was used, was something they could not withstand. Within seconds she had reduced their numbers by twenty or more. As damaging as Makennon's incursion was, though, the numbers involved were great, and as more guards fell beside her it was clear she faced a war of attrition with an inevitable conclusion. This did not deter Makennon from continuing her impassioned defence of her domain, however, and while she shouted for what few men remained to pull back to a safer position, she herself continued to wade forward until she had carved a sea of body parts that reached almost to the tunnel entrance. There, fatigue at last started to get the better of her, and she was forced to stand her ground. Breathing heavily and slightly bowed, her blood-slicked hands nevertheless levelled her axe before her, ready to swing it in a circle and cut down any or all of the horde who closed in about her.
But the horde did not close in. Instead, as one, they collapsed to the ground.
Slowhand's surprise was as great as the Anointed Lord's, but their interpretations of the unexpected development differed. Obviously concluding her efforts had somehow won the day, Makennon's heavy breaths turned into shuddering gasps of relief, and slowly she raised her gaze to him, displaying flaring and victorious eyes. The archer was considerably more wary. Puppets, Fitch had called these things, and if that was the case their strings had just been cut. But he seriously doubted that, with such an advantage, this First Enemy — whoever he was — would have cut them in defeat.