by Dylan Doose
“Chayse, give him a rub that will get his fire lit!” Ken yelled, followed by a deep, bestial laugh.
Whether Chayse took Ken’s order or not, Theron could not know, but Aldous sent a mass of fire the size of a burning keg into the swarm. It hit them just under a hundred feet away from the trench, and it burst on impact.
“Fire!” Theron yelled, and a susurrus carried as arrow after arrow arced through the night, hidden by the darkness. The creatures started screaming as they were taken by arrow or fire, and the ones that were caught on fire ran wildly, creating greater visibility on the field. Theron’s blood ran cold as he set eyes upon the sheer number of them. When he had said days past that there would be over a thousand, he had been hoping that number was a thousand and one at most. Over two thousand would have been more accurate .
On the wall, whispers passed from man to man: “Sorcerer… demon…”
The smell hit them first, rotting, putrid, like a dead sheep left under the sun. And then the first rat came over the palisade.
“Eyes front, you bastards, and be thankful such a demon is now standing with you!” Theron bellowed as he drove his pike into the rat’s throat. It fell into the crevice between the palisades and the wall.
And the escalade began. With immense speed and force, the swarm rushed through the trench, crawling over each other, and ripping themselves apart on the palisades. It did not slow them. They did not care about pain. They did not fear. They did not reason. They were hungry for death and slaughter.
“Oil! Pour the oil!” Ken cried.
The men on the walls tipped the great cauldrons that were heated above small fires. The oil poured into the fissure between the palisades and the wall first, and the shriek of the downed rats could split glass as the smoldering black liquid set their bodies to a bubbling boil. Men close by vomited off the wall as the scent rose to them. From the fissure, the oil ran past the logs of the palisades and seared the feet of those rodent devils in the trench. They squeaked and squealed, but they kept driving forth. Some stuffed their own kin into the hot oil and clambered over the downed bodies to avoid the terrific heat.
“Light it now!” Theron ordered. A man next to him skewered a rat that was climbing the wall. When he withdrew his pike there was a hissing noise from the gaping wound in the fiend’s lung. Theron drove his own pike down the throat of a snapping beast closer to himself, and sent it tumbling down.
The torches dropped and lines of fire burst from the base of the wall and ran into the circle of the trench, which burst into flame entirely. The magnitude of what the people of Dentin faced became visible. From all sides they came; the purple and black pustulant carbuncles writhed and glowed on their flesh. Some were naked of fur, wrinkled and pale; others had tufts; more had long, mangled fur like that of an unkempt dog. They all had claws, though, claws and grinding maws. Some hulked, while others were frail and decrepit, but all came forth, the tide of obsidian sick wading up the hill.
Some of the men on the south wall jumped down from their places. They tried to run and hide in the keep.
“Hold! Hold, you scum! Back on this wall, back on the fire step, or I shall drag you back up here myself and throw you over to the horror below!” Theron heard Ken from down the wall and turned just as Ken caught one man by the back of his shirt and threw him back to his place. The others turned, some shaking so hard they could barely walk, and returned to their places at the wall.
Theron caught Ken’s eye and nodded, and Ken nodded back.
The circle of fire that surrounded the trench did not slow the rats, but it hurt them. One in three came through fully ablaze and screaming, mostly the shaggy ones. The others popped and steamed, their naked flesh blistering from the heat, but they did not fall and turn and smolder. They kept on. So many impaled themselves on the palisades that some of the spikes splintered and snapped under the weight of the squirming things skewered on them.
More keg-sized balls of fire came hurling from the keep and into the mass beyond the wall. Chunks of meat and limbs flew into the air, ablaze as they did, and Theron silently thanked Aldous, and he silently thanked his mother for the catalyst the boy now used to bring great suffering upon the rats.
“Stab them, gut them, burn them!” Ken held a pike at its center in each hand above his head, and he impaled and retracted at a steady pace. His part of the wall was beginning to pile so high with corpses that the rats could touch the top by crawling over their own dead and dying. “If we keep up like this the fuckers will never get over the outer wall. Show them we have fangs; show them we are hounds.”
There was a cheer, and the men on the southern wall were rallied by Ken’s fury as he impaled the fiends.
Ken stared at four of the knights and a handful of the men-at-arms pushing themselves against the gate as it thudded and buckled from the blows of the vermin beyond. Above on the platform, villagers poured oil and set the things ablaze, but the seemingly endless advance of the rats quickly stomped out the fires on the dead backs.
It was not enough. The gate would not hold.
“Kendrick! The gate is going to give!” cried Sir Crowle.
“If I leave this post, they will come over the wall!” Ken called back as he ran east down the southern wall to slaughter a rat peeking his head over the fire step. For this he threw his pikes into the mass of foes and drew his axe and mace. He splattered five of the men on the step with the creature’s blood and brains. “The bodies, you fool! Drag the corpses over to build a mound!”
He waited only long enough to see Sir Crowle nod at him before he turned back to the men fighting at his side. All around them the hail of arrows from the archers above continued to fall. And Aldous continued to send fireballs down to light the rats ablaze.
“Swords and axes!” Ken cried. “We have made an easy escalade for them from their dead. Swords and fucking axes; they are coming up too quickly and too close. Time for a fight!”
The first man on the wall to die got his gut torn open by a putrid claw, and the lads close by screamed and shouted as they hacked the culprit to bits. A second rat emerged and pulled the wounded man into the abyss of rats by his spilt intestines.
“Hold! Do not panic—if you panic, they get through! If they get through, we die!” Ken swung his axe into an oncoming claw and split the assailant’s limb apart with a crack of bone and a spray of blood. A mace blow sent it back over the wall and tumbling down its dead kin through the shattered palisade, and into the trench where the rest of its life burned away.
Another man went down on the wall, then another, and a third in quick succession. Ten paces down from Ken, a good-sized breach was beginning to form and the rats were making it through. Three of them leapt down from the fire step and charged the men-at-arms in the courtyard.
“Time to wet your blades, lads!” yelled one of them, and he was the first to die. Gullet torn out by the first rat, he hit the ground, hands on his throat trying to cork the leak. It did him no good.
Ken turned back to the wall and pushed his way to the breach. The stone fire step had become slippery with blood and guts, so he took his time.
They’re through now, and they’ll keep making holes. No need to rush, not anymore—just keep killing, nice and steady.
A dying man stumbled into Ken, screaming, “God save us! Luminescent save us all!” as he bumbled wildly, his arm missing, having been chewed and clawed off like it was a piece of jerky. Ken looked him in the eyes a moment; tears rolled down the man’s ash- and blood-stained face. “My wife! My wife!” he croaked, the certainty of death in his eyes. Ken used the axe to slit his throat, a mercy, tossed his body into the courtyard, and moved to the widening leak of rats.
Sentiment is long gone.
“Close it up!” he called as he buried the beard of his axe in rodent skull. The rat twitched and Ken smashed the things face apart with his mace. The snout caved in. The jaw ripped off, and then it was just pulverized flesh. On to the next.
His calm confidence
inspired the nearby troops, and they recovered and hacked their swords and axes madly into the tide. Men went down, but others filled their places. They were frenzied, they were wild, and they were hungry for life. They were rat hounds on the rats; they were mad curs in the pit, purpose and humanity all forgotten. All that remained was the animal violence, the fury only heightened by the growing slaughter. Men vomited and pissed their britches, they screamed and sobbed, but most of all they just kept killing, and killing because they needed to.
“There it is! Fight, you dogs. Fight! Show the devil your spirit. Let him know that his realm is not the only home of demons.” They closed the gap, but just as they did another began to form. Ken looked to the north, where he saw Theron surrounded. All the men around him dead, rats to his sides and front, but the hunter only became more deadly in his solitude, for his great claymore swung freely and severed limb and head from body like a farmer scything through the fields .
“Aldous! Chayse! Focus your fire to the north wall. It is falling. It is overrun,” Ken called up to the keep.
Aldous released another fireball, this one bigger and faster than the others. A chunk of wall exploded, and with it over a score of rats. Flaming bits of meat soared into the sky then rained down on the next invaders. Flame arrows poured into the burning breach and the screaming rats died by the dozen, but still they came.
Ken leapt from the south wall and charged across the courtyard, ignoring the fights between the men-at-arms and the rats that leaked through the south side. The north side was no longer leaking but gushing.
“Theron! To me!” Ken called to the hunter.
Theron finished a swing then leapt from the north wall, and came to Ken. The horns on his helm dripped with blood, his mail coat shimmered red and black, and the blood groove in his sword drained into the drenched ground below.
“Close ranks! Form a shield wall! Chayse, Aldous! We need you down here.”
Aldous braced his shoulder against the wall to stay upright, the staff in his hand heavy and consuming. From far away he heard Ken calling for their aid.
“Swords, shields, into the fight!” Chayse said to the archers, who had thus far had remained out of the thresher.
The men roared and followed Chayse from the balconies and battlements back into the keep. Depleted, Aldous forced himself to pick up a shield in his left hand while he kept his staff in his right, leaning his weight on it as he followed the others down the stone steps. They gave a final rallying cry before they burst from the door into the courtyard.
It was frightening from above, but it was not like this. The vantage point had given Aldous confidence; entering the heart of the melee sapped him of that. But Theron, Chayse, and Ken stood fearless, as would he.
The remaining villagers, men-at-arms, and knights closed ranks and formed a shield wall. Aldous found himself within the protected formation. They back-stepped toward the door to the keep. A few archers remained above to give suppressive fire.
A rat took a quarrel and just kept coming unfazed. Aldous squeezed his way to the front of the formation, where a wild Theron pulled the smaller rats one at a time behind the shield wall and then stabbed, and stomped the guts and brains from them. Ken did the same.
“A warming sight, to see you here with us, Aldous!” Theron said, his voice wavering as he repeatedly drove his boot into the face of a twitching man-sized rat, its eyeballs bursting from the obliterated skull on the last stomp.
“Perhaps you shall find this more warming,” Aldous said, then he raised his staff over his shield like a spear. Breath deep, relax, focus. Small bursts. He visualized a swirling beam of fire, a tight whirlwind of burning death shooting from the staff, and then it was so.
A thin funnel of flame shot from the raven side of the staff, and set three incoming rats to fire. Spears thrust into them from the shield wall. Chayse pushed her way beside Aldous. Halberd in hand, she got to thrusting and hacking right away.
Every time a man fell the formation grew tighter, but for every man that died so did five rats.
“They are thinning!” Ken gave a drubbing blow with his mace. “Keep at it, they are fucking thinning! We shall fight to the last man, for they will fight to the last rat.”
It was easier said than done. The men were far past the point of exhaustion. Some were mortally wounded but kept fighting, kept fighting on fury and hatred alone. Hatred for being eaten alive by rats to be the end of a hard life. A hard life was only justified by a hard death. So the men of Dentin dug deep, past their hearts, and they found that hatred and spite needed to fuel that hard death.
When the storm finally began to calm, there were fewer than three score of them left. It began to calm, but it was not over. The grass of the courtyard was covered, every inch and more, hundreds of dead men and over a thousand dead rats. The formation was broken. The survivors walked around freely, butchering the stragglers and the ones too wounded to fight back.
“We have won! We have repelled the devils! We have won!” roared the old knight, Sir Crowle, thumping Ken on the back. “Well done, my boy. Well done.”
The remaining survivors took up the cheer.
“Victory!”
“Dentin is saved!”
“Our women and children are safe.”
“She is here,” Aldous whispered, feeling the presence of the Emerald Witch like the slide of dank mud oozing along skin. He looked to Theron, but the hunter had already stilled, head cocked, expression dark, as if he, too, sensed her.
“Silence,” Theron said, just over a whisper. No one could hear him but Aldous. “Silence, you dogs!”
Where the energy came from for the volume Theron had just found, Aldous did not know, but at his call the cheers broke.
“She is here. And she brings reinforcements. It is not over. Ready yourselves.” The hunter took a deep breath. He looked too tired to stand, and he looked too tired to live, never mind keep fighting. Yet his eyes, peering from his mighty horned helm, told a different story than his body. His eyes were those of a beast cornered and looking at death, feral and refusing.
A great thundering vibrated the front gate. Then came a bestial roar, like a bear but greater in sound and higher in pitch. Such a bellow Aldous had never heard.
Ken stepped forth to Theron’s side. He too looked exhausted, but at the same time fully composed, ready, and calm. If it was a mask, there was no horror in the world of men or the pits of hell that could crack it. His calm was ice.
The gate cracked, and through it came an arm larger than a man. Again, whatever was beyond gave its roar .
Chayse notched an arrow and stood with Ken and Theron. She was haggard and on the verge of collapse from exhaustion. Her hair was wild and matted with dried blood and pus from her foes. She was still beautiful to Aldous even then.
She looked back at Aldous, unfazed by the second giant fist smashing through the gate.
“Join us, Aldous—come fight with us.” Her words were soft and inviting. Aldous was tired, he was drained from his magic, he felt as if he were plastered drunk, and he could hardly stand. He was not sure how much fire he had left within. But he went to them, for there was nowhere else he would want to be but by their sides, and they stood, ready for whatever came through that gate.
A final blow, and the thing splintered through, a colossus, a true behemoth amongst its fallen ilk. It was twice the size of the mighty brute they had fought in the dungeons of Norburg. Its great fists were the size of boulders, and splintered wood protruded from its boil-covered knuckles. Its head was larger than a horse’s, and it had a monstrous, overgrown tooth on the lower jaw that pierced the upper lip.
It stood in the shattered gateway, and from the smoke she appeared. The Emerald Witch. She wore a green dress, long and thin, that clung to her form. She trotted in atop a mare the same un-shimmering black as her long, flat hair. Her pale white skin was a lifeless light in the dark reds of gore, the vibrant orange and vermillion of the flames, the blackened sky, and the piles o
f rats. Her black iron knights were next to materialize from the fog, nine of them, with a score of the last rats. Lastly came the ones that set Aldous’ blood to freeze beyond anything they had faced thus far. Five seekers, eyes glowing blue fire, their wide hats shadowing their faces.
They, of all the things that had come this night, were here for him .
It is a sensation beyond words, beyond art and music, beyond any alchemical substance. Sadly, I am not an artist, nor am I a musician, and I cannot through the medium of a book provide you the reader with any alchemical substances, so words are all I have to help you understand the process of magic. There is a cost, you see, a sort of economy of life and death, a delicate scientific/mathematical balance that must be kept within the self, that must be in an instant understood and controlled, or else the scale will lean too far toward death, and the death shall be your own. Magic is neither altogether a sensation of pleasure nor a sensation of pain; it is rather the feeling of riding the wind of eternity—in a ship or as a bird, it does not matter. What matters is that the mage understands he is riding on nature’s force. Riding a magnificent storm, and if the mage does not keep his sail steady, his wings steady, the result will be catastrophic. The forces of the elements are outside; they exist in the world not within the body, and the mage is able to unconsciously connect with the forces, to ride them, to let them set their coarse. The greatest spellcasters can tame the forces. They themselves become the catalyst of nature and they decide how it flows. The pursuit of such control is the most common cause of death for magi—next to burning at the stake, of course.
Phelix Calliban, from his forbidden text An Introduction to the Forces.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Dentin’s Demons
K en stared at the massive beast that had bludgeoned down the fortress’ gates with its bare hands, and for the first time in a long time, Kendrick the Cold felt fear, true and pure. If he hadn’t already been to hell in the east, he could be damn sure he would see it now.