“I love you guys,” he said, and gods-be-damned if his voice didn’t sell him out at the end and crack like a boy of twelve summers.
Moog nearly choked on a sob himself. “I love you guys, too,” he said, unashamed by the tears rolling over his cheeks.
“Me too,” Matty croaked.
“I love you,” said Gabriel, matching gazes with each of them one by one. “All of you.”
Ganelon remained silent, but when the rest of them looked his way he rolled his eyes and loosed a sympathetic growl. “Okay, fine. You’re the last four people I’d ever kill.”
A smile slipped onto Gabe’s face for the length of a long breath, before it slid like a sickle moon behind a wisp of sombre cloud. “For Rose,” he said.
“For Rose,” they echoed, and by then the first horns of war were blowing, loud and long and clear across the sky.
The battle for Castia was about to begin.
A battle, as relayed by a poet, is a glorious thing, full of heroic stands, daring charges, and valiant sacrifice. But a battlefield, as experienced by some poor bastard mired in the thick of it, is something different altogether.
The word clusterfuck came to mind.
At least it’s clear who the enemy is, thought Clay, using Blackheart to deflect the spear of a charging centaur as Gabriel took its front legs off at the knee. The centaur’s wailing face-plant might have been amusing were there not several hundred more of his kind galloping behind.
Although they hadn’t seen Lastleaf or his wyvern matriarch as of yet, there was clear evidence of a mastermind behind the Horde’s tactics thus far. A detachment of centaurs and mounted wargs had circled to the north in an attempt to flank Grandual’s mercenaries.
Gabriel, exerting what little influence he could over his ragtag army, sent the Sisters in Steel, along with every other rider at his disposal, out to meet them. Their orders had been to break off as soon as possible, while Saga led a few hundred mercs on foot behind. Centaurs could mount a devastating charge, but once engaged, especially in the close-quarters chaos of a battlefield, they were pushovers. Unlike typical cavalry, where if you injured a horse you still had to deal with its rider, the horse-men presented huge targets, and if you hamstrung one it was fairly easy to finish it off.
Once Saga and the others had locked down their foes, the Sisters and their mercenary cavalry rushed back in from the rear. Before long the centaurs were dead or put to rout, while the wargs, enraged by bloodlust, began to turn on friend and foe alike.
A fair start, Clay was forced to admit, but that was the last manoeuvre Gabe could hope to make. By now the two forces—the horde of monsters and the host of mercenaries—had crashed together into a brawling morass that sounded to Clay’s ears like an ocean filled with several hundred thousand drowning people all screaming for help at once.
“This way,” yelled Gabe. He slipped through a knot in the fighting and led Saga toward the centre. Clay followed as close as he could. His left arm was mending but was far from healed. It was still in its sling, leaving him little choice but to stay on Gabe’s heels and weather whatever blows he could on behalf of his friend. Matrick skulked after them like an urchin, slicing open foes like they were purse bottoms in a market square. Ganelon hacked his way alongside them with Syrinx, and Moog, who had strapped a quartet of bandoliers to his chest, was lobbing vial after vial of volatile explosives into the enemy ranks.
Gods forbid anything hit him, Clay worried. One unlucky strike and the wizard would go off like spring fireworks. And us with him, probably.
Gabriel had been spot-on about one thing during his speech back in Kaladar: the Horde was a nightmare made real. Every heinous and hideous thing you could imagine was present. There were goblins and rock-hulks, wild orcs, uncountable thousands of yapping kobolds, and rune-broken golems with glowing green eyes. There were horse-headed ixil and horned hoary murlogs, skeletons rattling in rusted armour, and way more giant spiders than Clay was comfortable with.
There were scorpions the size of horses, lanky trolls with eyes like smouldering pits, firbolgs in soiled loincloths swinging spiked clubs, and ogre-mages hurling bolts of lightning from brandished bone totems. Great shaggy treants roamed the battleground, their twisted boughs home to spriggans firing tiny barbed arrows into the crowd below. There were burrowing wyrms that swallowed men whole, and drakes breathing everything from fire and ice to clouds of noxious gas.
There were battalions of black-scaled lizard-folk carrying wicked billhooks, scores of gibbering grimlocks with clammy white skin and round iron helms pricked with tiny holes to shield their eyes from the light of day. There were direwolves, bloodboars, and plate-armoured death knights on the backs of mammoth bears.
There were witches with curling nails and filed teeth, and warlocks who’d carved runes of vile power into their very flesh. There were great apes like the one he’d seen back in Conthas, striped like tigers in colours so vibrant they looked unreal. These ones were a touch more savage, however; Clay saw one tear a woman into halves like she was a loaf of warm bread.
Which was not to mention the big boys: A pair of giants roamed unchallenged, levelling a dozen warriors with every step. Several cyclopes waded knee-deep among the mercenary ranks, so hideously deformed they’d have made Dane look like Gabriel in his golden prime. They swung flails and broad-bladed axes that cut bloody arcs through anyone in their path. Clay had seen a swarm of scuttling ankheg and known that somewhere in their midst would be a queen, bloated with the next clutch of mindless drones.
The sky belonged almost solely to the enemy. Clouds of giant bats swept down with razor claws, rot sylphs belched streams of acid bile, gargoyles plunged like stones upon unsuspecting heads.
There was another creature—Clay hadn’t even known what to call it—that was some kind of enormous plant. When it wasn’t spewing acid all over the place it was hoisting mercs into the air with its tentacle limbs and dropping them into what looked, disturbingly, to be a mouth inside of its mouth.
But then another monstrosity arrived: An argosy armoured in metal plates and powered by what looked like a pared-down tidal engine came roaring from the Threshold. The plant-thing’s acid splashed harmlessly over its iron-plated carapace, and the massive war wagon responded by blasting liquid fire from a spout at its front before running its adversary down beneath nail-studded treads. The mercenaries rallied around the rolling behemoth as it ploughed into the mob.
Clay saw pale-skinned necromancers hovering above plagues of living dead, their frayed cloaks billowing on deathly currents. Demons wreathed in boiling smoke cackled like madmen as they struck down would-be heroes with blades of blistering fire.
One of them stood out from the rest, and not just because it was several magnitudes larger. Well, mostly because of that, but also because it bore a whip that instantly froze whatever it touched and carried a sword as long as a ship’s mast, which it used to smash frost-rimed mercenaries to bloody fragments. The thing looked like a man-shaped mountain of jagged ice, its limbs encased in scraps of dull black armour. A pair of iron-sheathed, front-facing horns curved from its head above eyes like charnel pits.
Clay knew it for an Infernal the moment he laid eyes on it. He’d never seen one before—not beyond the confines of paintings or tapestries, anyhow—but he recognized it nonetheless.
Clay remembered Shadow, the druin claw-broker, mentioning that Lastleaf had spent years rallying the horde, traveling the breadth of the Heartwyld, rousing the beast-tribes of Endland, brokering pacts with some of the forest’s most corrupted inhabitants. Judging by the size of the force he’d managed to assemble, Clay was surprised there’d been anything left to haunt the Wyld on their way through.
“Look alive!” Gabe called as a clutch of urskin jumped them.
Clay deflected a spear thrust and drove his shield into his attacker’s froglike face. Ganelon plucked one of the things off his back and slammed it onto the ground at his feet. Matrick took a tongue thrust to the face an
d reeled as though punched, but before the creature could finish him Moog tapped it with a wand.
“Kaza!” yelled the wizard. The frogman stopped short, bewildered. Before it could recover Matrick jammed his knives to the hilt in its chest.
“What spell was that?” Clay asked.
“Spell?” Moog brandished the wand. “You mean this? It’s just a stick,” he said, and tossed it away.
The world’s a changing place, Matrick had told him back in Fivecourt, and Clay knew he was seeing the fallout of that change all around him. Because so many bands had sought the artificial glory of the arenas instead of venturing out in search of the real thing, the denizens of the Heartwyld had been granted time to repopulate, to nurse their hatred of human civilization, the whole forest festering like an untended wound gone septic.
And potentially fatal, he thought, as Gabriel led them into the body-strewn wake of the armoured war wagon. The closer they got to the city the more evidence they saw of the Horde’s months-long occupation: bodies impaled on blood-sheathed spears, fire pits and trenches heaped with bones. The enemy had constructed a number of shoddy siege engines, Clay noted. Nothing they could hurl would have done much harm to Castia’s spell-warded walls, but as they passed near to one he saw the bucket was stained with gore, and he shuddered to imagine what these machines had launched in place of stones.
They were nearing the thick of it now: the chaotic centre of the miles-long battlefield. He had been involved in enough petty wars to know that battles like this were won and lost on the wings, but Gabriel seemed dead set on driving like a blade toward the heart of the Horde, and Clay thought he knew why.
If we can find Lastleaf … if we can somehow kill him, then maybe we can end this.
With only a shield to hand, Clay did his best to keep his bandmates from harm. When a gargoyle dive-bombed Matrick, Clay pushed him aside, planting his feet and slanting his shield so the thing didn’t crush him. Thanks to the impenetrable Warskin, Clay shrugged off countless sword and spear thrusts meant for Moog, and Blackheart’s mottled face was spiked with splintered arrows. He hauled Ganelon from the rubble of a vanquished earth elemental, and even found time to step between Red Bob and an ankheg’s gnashing pincers.
The mercenary murmured scant thanks and rushed off, only to be crushed a moment later by a giant’s pounding foot. Bob’s bard turned and fled, wailing and clutching his harp to his chest like a scholar saving a single book from a burning library.
Clay gazed up at the colossus. It hadn’t taken notice of them yet, but a giant hardly needed to see you to kill you, did it? It stalked across the battlefield like a child treading over grass, wreaking unwitting devastation with every step.
Well, perhaps not entirely unwitting, Clay amended, as the giant’s next earth-hammering stomp killed all five of the Skulks at once. But what the hell can we do? Killing a giant was possible, sure, but it took time, and proper planning, the right weapons, and a fair bit of good fortune. You just can’t …
The giant’s throat suddenly bristled with half a dozen shivering crossbow bolts. The brute looked as confused about that as Clay was, but then several more barbs sprouted amidst a spray of misting blood. The giant’s eyes glazed over in death and it sagged thunderously to its knees.
Clay craned his neck to gape at the skyship soaring ponderously overhead, now banking, so that even though they were too far off to read clearly, Clay knew at once the bold white words stamped along the dreadnought’s hull.
Larkspur had come to Castia.
Chapter Fifty-one
The Autumn Son
The mind, Clay had learned long ago, could witness only so much carnage before it ceased to comprehend. You saw it, still. You heard it raging like a rainstorm against a closed window, but it simply did not register. His capacity for slaughter was overflowing, like a cup filled to the brim with wine, or water. Or, more aptly, with blood.
Everywhere Clay looked was pandemonium. He saw Tushino the Wicked deflect a lightning bolt with his sword before cutting an arm off the warlock who’d cast it. The Reavers were chopping at the trunk of a faltering treant as spriggan archers spilled from its eaves. Neil the not-so-Young-anymore hurled a bale of fire into the gaping maw of a great wyrm. The thing exploded, and since half of it was buried, the ground above it ruptured, hurling kobolds like clods of earth behind a galloping horse. Deckart Clearwater pummeled his way through half a hundred undead and broke the skull of the crypt fiend compelling them. The ghost-blue fires in its eyes went out, and the rest of its shambling soldiers crumpled in an instant.
Elsewhere things weren’t going so well. Clay saw Merciless May Drummond trampled by a boar and the Dreamers go down beneath a pile of steel-helmed grimlocks. The Blind Tiger was killed by an arrow he almost certainly did not see coming. A stooping cyclops reached beneath the steel-plated argosy and tipped it over. The great machine floundered like a beetle on its back, fire and smoke spouting from either end.
Clay’s eyes roamed the battlefield, hoping to determine Lastleaf’s whereabouts, but there was simply too much chaos. He looked to the frenzied sky for sign of the wyvern matriarch, but he couldn’t pick her out from so far away.
The Dark Star soared overhead, mist streaming from its tidal engines. Rot sylphs bounced from its prow. Bats scattered from its path or were burned to ash by its storm-wracked sails. The same pitch bombs that had laid waste to The Carnal Court were now unleashed upon the Horde, a hedgerow of thumping explosions that vaporized hundreds at a time.
At last the daeva and her red-robed thralls came spilling over the sides, gliding toward the battlefield below. Her minions were more numerous than Clay would have figured, and he was wondering if she’d left any on board when the dreadnought’s inevitable course became apparent.
So, no then, he thought—or hoped not, anyway—since the Dark Star, its prow ostensibly crammed with more of those volatile bombs, ploughed straight into the second giant’s face. The resulting explosion lit the sky like a second sun, a flash of blinding incandescence followed by a BOOM that rattled Clay’s teeth in their sockets.
For a heartbeat, as scraps of burning skyship rained down, every soul on the plain stood struck by horrific expectation. The giant tipped forward, and the mercenaries trapped within its shadow looked up in despair, but then it rocked onto its heels, toppling backward, an avalanche of flesh and bone crashing down into the midst of the Horde. The battlefield heaved; men and monsters bounced like bowls on a table struck by a god.
Clay was thrown from his feet, and for a moment he simply lay on his back, gazing up at a sky that already seemed brighter absent the looming threat of two rampaging giants, until a glossy black feather drifted above his eyes. He rolled to his knees, surged to his feet, preparing (if not the least bit prepared) to bear the brunt of Larkspur’s vengeance.
Her thralls hit the ground first, red robes fluttering as they tumbled through a tribe of wild orcs. They wasted no time joining the fight, hands and feet a blur as they secured a space in which their mistress could land in safety.
The daeva’s wings fanned as she descended. Her armoured toes aimed like a nail at the earth below. The scythe in her hands gleamed dully, white as a winter sky, and Clay’s newborn hand itched at the sight of it. If she bore any lasting injury from being impaled by one of Barret’s bolts, it wasn’t evident at the moment. Larkspur touched down, folded her wings, and made straight for Ganelon.
“Took you long enough,” said the warrior.
“Fuck yourself,” she snapped, and drove the butt of her scythe into the ground like a conqueror coming ashore in a heathen land.
The kiss that followed was sudden as lightning, fierce as a storm at sea. She seized his throat with an iron claw. He clasped her hair in a mailed fist, and Clay saw her bite down on his lip.
When they finally wrenched themselves apart, Gabriel loosed a loud sigh. “Spring Maiden’s Mercy, I thought I was the dramatic one. If you two are finished …?”
“For now,”
said Larkspur. The look she gave Ganelon was that of a torturer setting bloody instruments aside.
Ganelon’s grin was flecked with blood. “For now,” he agreed.
Gabriel hefted his sword. “Good, now we need to find—” Lastleaf, he’d been about to say—Clay was sure of it—except Lastleaf found them first.
The wyvern matriarch hit the ground like an anchor dropped into shallow water, splashing blood and bodies in every direction. Ashatan’s black wings thrashed to either side, spines and talons shredding mercs as though they were stuffed with straw. Her tail lashed out, punching into the chest of one of Larkspur’s monks and lifting him from the ground. The poor man screamed until venomous foam came boiling from his mouth, and the wyvern shook him loose with a snap. She had another of the daeva’s thralls pinned to the ground with her snout, and Clay watched, repulsed, as her jaws burrowed into his gut. The man was dead by the time she raised her head, pulling entrails from the steaming ruin of his chest.
To their credit, or at least as testimony to the potency of Larkspur’s preternatural charm, her remaining thralls positioned themselves between their mistress and the matriarch. The area cleared by the daeva’s arrival earlier remained wide-open, since Grandual’s mercenaries were more than willing to pick fights elsewhere, and Lastleaf’s minions cowered instinctively from the great black wyvern and the man upon her back.
Lastleaf, the Autumn Son.
He no longer wore the Duke of Endland’s tattered longcoat. Now he was clad for war in a suit of skirted, silvergreen scale. His left arm was sheathed in overlapping plates of red metal that joined seamlessly with the pauldron on that shoulder, and he was wearing, of all things, a helmet: sleek and steely green, like his armour, with flared casings for his backswept ears. A crest running front to back was plumed with what looked like long, red-orange leaves.
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