Maybe he sees something I don’t. Something I can’t. Shona had never thought much about what Eroh was; she’d never let herself think much about it. There were hard realities she had to deal with, and they took precedence over what she believed in—or didn’t. But those eyes didn’t come from nowhere, did they? It was more than a little bit frightening to consider. Frightening, but liberating, too, in a way.
After a long silence, Shona said, “Fine.” Let the Lord of Eagles take responsibility for him. I’m done.
Rudol blinked, surprised. “You’ll let me go?”
“I’ll tell the guards. Get whatever you need.” She gestured to the far side of the courtyard, where supplies were still being loaded. “You can ride with the next wagon.”
“Thank you, Shona. You won’t regret it.” He said it like he was swearing an oath.
It was too much. She couldn’t look at him anymore. She turned her back, and busied herself checking the ropes and poles holding the bird cages in place. “Just go,” she said. “Go die, if that’s what you want. But know that it doesn’t make up for anything.”
Rudol didn’t answer, and Shona said nothing more.
When she finally looked up again, he was gone.
Rudol
It was easy for Rudol to slip into the chaos unnoticed.
The supply wagon he’d caught a ride on came to a stop some distance up the road from the Eyewall. Above, there had been men on the road—messengers coming and going, physician’s aides carrying the wounded to the tent they’d set up behind the front—but not so many that the wagon couldn’t make its way through. Below, the press of bodies was so close that forward progress was impossible.
They had obviously been expected, though, because a slight man in the twilight-sky blue of the army stepped forward and raised a hand to get the driver’s attention. “Bring her in right here,” he called. He pointed towards a clear space to the side of the road. As soon as the wagon pulled aside, he and several others began to unload supplies.
No one questioned Rudol as he hopped down from the front of the wagon. In his chainmail and Storm Knight greys he looked like any other knight, and a helm with a long nose-guard covered his face. No one looked at him with the disappointment he’d seen in Shona’s eyes, or Carissa’s; he was no false king here, no failure as a brother or a husband or a son. Here, he was just another man come to fight.
And he could fight. It was about the only thing he did well. Even if everything else about his life was a lie, he still had that.
He looked down the road toward the wall—a swath of white under a veil of smoke and darkness. The Eyewall was older than the Mad Duke’s Gate, but its primary purpose had never been defense. It was a monument more than anything else, built long ago by Queen Aryssa—sometimes called the Chastor’s Queen—as a show of piety rather than a practical fortification. Constructed of pure white stone, it rose some fifty feet high, but much of that height belonged to the eye it was named for: a great circle of colored glass, twenty feet in diameter, gold around a dark center. An eagle’s eye, like the windows that decorated the eyries, only on a far grander scale. The hole was set at a slight downward angle, so the eastern sun would shine down through it for most of the day, casting a circle of gold light on any who approached from below. The judgement of the Sky God’s eye, falling upon any who wished to enter Aryllia’s duchy.
Which was, Rudol had always thought, fine and well as a metaphor, but a giant hole covered in glass didn’t make a wall any easier to hold.
The eye was still shining now, even in the dark, but the sun had nothing to do with it. The glass had been shattered, and only a few shards of gold remained in place, glinting in the light of a large fire that had been built in the middle of the hole. Two ladders leaned against the lip of the opening, and men were carrying wood up to keep the fire stoked. Clever. Fire will keep a Deepling back better than glass. A makeshift barricade of debris had been piled high on the near side of the fire, balanced precariously on the slanted stone; behind it two knights jabbed with long halberds at the dark shapes moving beyond the flames. Rudol couldn’t think of a better way to hold the eye, but it was far from ideal even so. He knew from experience that the Deeplings would try to find another way, but if nothing was left to them but flames, they would push through. It only took one or two to scatter a fire so that the rest could follow.
Two more bonfires burned at either side of the ramparts above, roaring orange beacons against the night sky. The wingbowmen and squires and Storm Knights fighting there were little more than flat black silhouettes against the smoke and firelight. At the base of the wall, men were bracing the wooden gate—already torn through in places by Deepling claws—with heavy beams. Even as Rudol watched, a black blade pierced the heavy door and tore away another chunk. They’re through the portcullis, then. The wood won’t hold much longer if the steel is gone.
The Eyewall was very nearly lost already.
Rudol waded into the men surrounding the wall, and the sounds and smells of battle closed over him: shouted orders and cries of pain, the thick stench of blood and smoke and terror-sweat. He pushed his way toward the front through ranks of men standing ready for the doors to break. Most were militia, unexperienced in battle against other men, let alone monsters. He could see their fear in wide eyes and shallow breaths, in trembling fingers resting on borrowed sword-hilts. They would be scarcely better than nothing against the creatures tearing through the gate.
As Rudol neared the front, though, the militiamen gave way to ranks of the standing army, and then a double-line of men in grey with swords of blue lightning across their chests, waiting just inside the failing doors. Some hundred Storm Knights, all of them wearing the same grey surcoats with Aryllian blue sashes, the same mail hauberks and the same steel helms. It was hard to tell them apart by anything but build—protecting as much skin as possible from the Deeplings’ blood was more important than recognizing faces. They were arranged in two lines, fifty men armed with long steel-plated halberds behind another fifty holding heavy steel shields—the only formation that ever did much good against so many Deeplings. Rudol guessed that the same strategy was in place here as at the Mad Duke’s Gate: hold until this wall fell, and then the knights would be the front line of a fighting retreat to the Queensgate.
The final line of defense.
The first wall had lasted less than two hours; this one, it was already clear, was not going to last much longer. Not even four hours between two walls, with only one left to fall back to. The Queensgate would stand longer than the others—it had been shaped by Aryllia’s Highcraft, not the hands of men, and the Deeplings’ power to cleave earth and stone weakened as they moved skyward. But even so, it wouldn’t stand long enough. Not against such numbers. Not against an enemy that could scale sheer stone walls. To have any hope of actually breaking the attack, they would have to hold until sunrise—no Deepling could bear the sunlight for long.
And sunrise was still five hours away.
“Make way for the king!” a voice called, and the men parted for a small procession coming down the stairs.
Josen’s guard made a circle around him and his swamplings, mostly shielding them from sight, but even so Rudol turned his head away to hide his face as they passed. Shona might not keep his presence a secret—although he thought, for no particular reason, that she would—but right now, it would do no good for Josen to know he was here.
He’s falling back to the Queensgate. Which meant that Rudol wasn’t the only one who could see that the Eyewall was already lost. But they’d left the retreat very late; maybe too late. If the Deeplings broke through now and the men at the gate couldn’t hold them back, they’d be on Josen before he and his guard reached the safety of the last wall.
Maybe I can do something about that. This wouldn’t be an easy fight—he wanted to believe that Shona had been wrong when she’d said he couldn’t make a difference, but she’d probably been right that he would die here. A great many would.
And maybe I owe Josen that much. The thought made his fists clench, but he couldn’t ignore it. Whatever his brother was guilty of, it was less than Rudol had believed; less than Rudol had tried to punish him for. And that mistake had led to too many others.
Led to this.
He knew now that Aryllia’s blood had never flowed in his veins; that he should never have been in the position to make those mistakes. But telling himself that didn’t change the fact that he’d made them. All he could do now was try to make up for it as best he could, doing the one thing he knew how to do.
He didn’t think the Deeplings would keep him waiting for very long.
He was right about that much, if not about where the final push came from. He’d assumed it would be the eye that fell first, or the door, but Josen and his guardsmen weren’t yet around the next bend in the road before a gut-wrenching scream sounded from the ramparts above.
An instant later a body plummeted backwards from the top of the wall. The knights at the front stepped back as the body hit the ground with a sickening wet thump.
Rudol pushed his way through the line so he could see. The dead man wore Storm Knight greys; a halberd lay half across his body. One of his legs had been severed at the hip, and the other remained attached by no more than a thread of sinew. Rudol knew that sort of wound. Only a beetleback’s blades did that.
“They need help up there!” cried one of the knights, and took a half step toward the stairs.
Rudol grabbed the man’s arm. “No,” he said firmly, though he had no authority to give orders here. “This line has to hold. The door won’t stand long.” He looked back over the line, and raised his voice. “Hold your positions, all of you! Remember that you stand between these monsters and your king! Hold until the retreat is sounded!”
And then he snatched up the fallen man’s halberd, and started for the stairway that led up to the ramparts.
That was where the fighting was, and he needed to fight.
One of the bonfires was very near the top of the stairs; the flames rose more than twice Rudol’s height into the air. The heat was oppressive, painful on his bare skin, and the smoke made his eyes water. Just standing this close was near unbearable, but still men stayed near enough to keep it stoked. Better the fire than a Deepling’s claws.
A haze of smoke coated the battlements, but even through it Rudol could see the Deeplings—they were too large to miss, too strange, too fundamentally wrong. All along the outside edge of the ramparts, creatures were scuttling up the stone wall: rotborn gripping the stone with decaying boggard arms, grublings crawling on hundreds of centipede feet, beetlebacks hauling themselves up on their arm-blades with hooked beetle legs scrabbling behind. And below, hundreds more covered the road. In the dark of night and the shadows of the pass, Rudol couldn’t make out individual shapes, just a writhing mass covering the ground, like ants swarming over a piece of rotten fruit.
More Deeplings than he had ever seen at once, and all of them moving relentlessly toward the Eyewall in utter, terrifying silence.
If Shona was right, it was Lenoden Castar who had summoned them. A man Rudol had trusted, defended, lied for. A man who had used him and cast him aside, just like everyone else in his life.
And Rudol had a feeling that she was right. It wasn’t natural for Deeplings to move in such numbers, or to venture this high above the mist. Something had to be pushing them.
Or someone.
At the base of the wall, patches of burning pitch spotted the ground, and in the flickering light, Rudol could see half-devoured bodies littering the road, crushed and broken. Men who had thrown themselves to the Deeplings, or died fighting in the retreat from the Mad Duke’s Gate. Men he’d let down. Not just his brothers in the grey, but lowborn men who had only wanted to defend their homes. The people he’d pledged to protect, as a knight and as a king. A king that should never have been. A bastard in a crown.
This is your fault, little brother. Josen’s voice. Always Josen’s voice, even now. Maybe you deserve to die here.
“Maybe,” Rudol answered quietly. For a moment, he let himself feel the full weight of that shame, and then he shoved all of it into the furthest caverns of his mind. He didn’t know how to face it, and even if he did, it was of no use here and now. Perhaps he could still make some kind of amends to the living, but they needed his sword, not his guilt. “But by the Above, I mean to take some of them with me.”
Death was something he knew how to face.
He didn’t rush in; instead he looked over the ramparts, searching for where he might do the most good. Most of the swarm was at the centermost point of the wall, furthest from the conflagrations blazing at either side. Rudol could see where there had been a third bonfire there—the smouldering remains had been scattered and smothered by a massive grubling whose charred corpse still lay atop a pile of wood and ash.
The knights and wingbowmen were doing their best to hold back the tide—using halberds to shove the monters from the battlements, dousing them in pitch and setting them aflame with burning bolts. Cauldrons of boiling pitch hung around the bonfires, and more were mounted above braziers of hot coals all along the wall, for men to dip and ignite their bolts. Barrels of the stuff were being set alight and thrown over the edge to burst among the Deeplings below, splattering them with clinging flame. Overhead, Rudol heard an eagle’s cry now and again, and once his eyes caught a diving silhouette that he could only guess was the Windwalker boy’s pet. He’d never learned its name. A brave little thing, it seemed, though he couldn’t imagine it was doing much of use.
One beetleback had already crested the top of the wall, and six knights with halberds closed around it in a half circle, trying to push it back. Bloodied arm-blades glistened in the firelight, and one of the six fell, cut open from shoulder to navel.
There. That was where Rudol was needed. That was where he could help. They need more than another spear, though. A single man, well-trained, could fight a deeprat or the common rotborn—in the right circumstances, one man could even kill many. Two or three men could kill a grubling, and four or five one of the older, larger rotborn. But a beetleback was different. A quarrel flung by a thunderbolt could sometimes pierce that dark armor, but it would take a dozen men with swords or halberds to find an opening, and not half of those would survive the fight. There weren’t a dozen men to spare here. He needed something else, a way to put the thing off its guard.
A trio of cauldrons sat around the bonfire at the top of the stairs. Rudol looked inside one, found it empty, checked another. It was full of dark pitch, bubbling slow just as it would have in the pitch-pits of the southern Swamp. He thrust the head of his halberd down into the liquid and then whirled to touch the black-soaked weapon to the bonfire.
The halberd burst into flame.
Only four men were left opposing the beetleback’s rampage now. Twin sweeps of those black blades severed a halberd in two, leaving the man holding it defenseless, and the beetleback cut him down as the three remaining knights aimed futile jabs at its armored body.
Rudol sprinted toward them, crossed the last few feet in a leap, and shoved his flaming halberd at the beetleback’s face, right where its eyes should have been. Rearing soundlessly, the Deepling scuttled back.
Now that he was close he could hear the Voice of Corruption, whispering from somewhere deep inside, bidding him to drop his weapon and step closer still. Bleed for me, it said, and no one will ever ignore your strength again. He ignored it without a second thought, same as he ignored the horrifying look of the thing that should have turned his stomach. He didn’t need to count backwards or recite rhymes, like they taught squires at the Stormhall. For Rudol, the focus of battle had always been enough.
He wasn’t listening to anything but his instincts, now.
“I’ll push it toward the fire,” he shouted to the others. “Look for an opening. Take the legs, if you can.” The joints of their segmented legs were a vulnerability common to many of the Deeplings.
Rudol advanced, his halberd held out before him. The beetleback retreated from the flaming polearm towards the bonfire at the far end of the ramparts, opposite the stairs. The three knights followed, spreading out to surround it from the sides. Rudol couldn’t identify them beneath their armor, but he’d already sorted them in his head by their builds: tall and thin beside him, prodding at the creature’s chest; tall and broad-shouldered circling around to the right; short and stocky moving left.
Harried by flame and steel, the beetleback retreated with surprising agility. When one of the knights struck at a joint in its armor, it twisted so that the blow glanced off chitin; when they struck at its legs, it scuttled and danced so that the halberds struck only air. It stopped only when it felt the heat of the bonfire behind it, and then it reared up, lifting the front pair of beetle legs off the ground. Its arm-blades slashed at Rudol’s halberd; heated steel and charred wood snapped off easily under the razor-sharp chitin.
With no space left to retreat, the Deepling lunged forward. The thin knight’s halberd skipped across its armored chest to no purpose, and one of the beetleback’s blades opened the man’s neck all the way to the spine. Hot blood spattered across Rudol’s face and chest, but it was red, not black; it didn’t merit consideration. Not now.
The second blade lashed at Rudol’s head, impossibly fast. He ducked—just barely—and dropped his broken haft to snatch up the still burning halberd-head. He had to keep the beetleback from turning on the others while they tried to find an exposed joint in its armor, and the fire was the best chance he had to do that. Darting in close—too close to defend himself against those blades—he thrust the flames at the monster’s face once more.
It reared again, and dropped down nearly on top of Rudol; the weight of its lower torso struck him in the chest and he staggered, fell to one knee. Wreathed in smoke and firelight against a dark sky, the great black form of the beetleback loomed over him, and lifted its arms. Defiantly, Rudol held the sad remnant of his halberd aloft, but he knew the failing flames wouldn’t be enough this time. One stroke of those serrated razors would take both his hands, and the halberd blade would go with them.
The Swampling King (The Windwalker Legacy Book 1) Page 81