by Phil Tucker
He nudged the matriarch, and she hopped and surged forward, then beat her wings. She leaped up once, twice, then she was aloft. She surged upward, forging a path into the sky, then moved to hover over the largest of the trolls. Hoary with age, his form calcified by the centuries, he gazed up at the matriarch with a visage from another world, his small yellow eyes gleaming, and extended his arms.
The matriarch's claws wrapped around them, then she screamed and powered her way up into the air.
Tharok rose above the roofs and saw Abythos beyond the town. What must the humans be thinking? he wondered. Did they recognize their doom?
He directed the wyverns to fight for height. He could sense them weakening, but this was a short flight, a single mission that required their all. Up they went, lurching and lunging with brutal sweeps of their wings, the trolls hanging beneath them, placid and waiting, their feet losing contact with the earth for the first time in their lives.
Up they flew, over the town, then they passed over the tribes below. Horns were being blown frantically within the walls of Abythos.
Oh, weep, little humans, Tharok thought. Let loose those wails. Welcome us with your cries of anguish!
Fifty wyverns flew awkwardly up above the range of the ballistae, but still the humans tried, launching spears as their platforms turned in a manner most ingenious. The thwok was accompanied by puny hisses as the great dragon-killing spears whipped beneath them, arching and hitting their apex, then falling into the fields beyond.
The wyverns opened up, flying out into a great circle, five per tower. It wasn't a perfect approach. The weight they were bearing was too great, and he saw one troll fall, then a second as claws lost traction, as strength gave out. They fell, tumbling, one to crash in a plume of carnage and dust in the center of a tribe, the second missing Abythos by a dozen yards to impact with the stone ground beyond and shatter apart.
No matter. There were plenty left.
When he gauged that their positions were optimal, Tharok inhaled a deep breath and rose to his feet. This moment, oh, this very moment of potential, of doom risen high above the human heads as they received the first intimations of their destruction!
Then, with a scream, Tharok caused every wyvern claw to spasm open, and release their lethal cargo.
An unnatural rain, massive and fell, they dropped down, hammers at the ready, to crash into the human towers. Tharok leaned out over the matriarch's neck and watched, his soul thrilling at the sight. Some missed, but most of them hit.
Directly below him, he saw three trolls collide with the tower top. One shattered a ballista into matchwood, the second landed on a human team, while his own release, the massive troll the matriarch had lifted aloft, fell dead center, rupturing the mechanism that spun the ballista and wrenching it out of place.
Trumpets and horns were calling frantically. The first screams filtered up to him as humans left their machines to throw themselves at the trolls. Tharok roared his delight as the trolls gathered their wits and began to swing their hammers. Humans were knocked clear off the tower tops to hurtle to their deaths below.
The matriarch wheeled, putting him in plain sight of Kyrra far below, and he raised World Breaker in a salute, their pre-ordained signal. The first blow had been struck. Now it was time to tear Abythos down, stone by bloody stone.
It was time to launch the main attack.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Kethe was standing at the head of her column, facing into the tower cylinder, sword held tightly in one hand, biting her lower lip and trying to fight down the urge to scream. The scouts had kept accurate track of the kragh approach, had warned them that the kragh were making remarkable time as they devoured the fields and undulating lowlands with their mile-eating strides. They'd known the kragh were coming, had known the attack would come today, but now that the moment was here, now that the time for battle was upon them, Kethe found the anticipation so straining that she almost wished she'd been kept ignorant.
Almost.
All was silent. The twenty yards of stone meant that she couldn't hear a damn thing. Behind her, Sighart and Dalitha were waiting just as anxiously, their weapons drawn, their breath audible as they fought to stay calm, to conserve energy. She could feel the strain wearing on her Honor Guard too, could feel the silence wearing them down. This was unlike any other siege or war these men and women had known. Down here, they were cocooned in ignorance, sheltered from the visual horror of the approaching horde that would have both grounded their imaginations and helped them steel their nerves.
"I hate being down here," hissed Dalitha. "How much longer they going to make us wait?"
Kethe held up her fist, and Dalitha subsided.
She gazed at the other seven arches that led off the interior of the tower cylinder. Wolfker was standing in one tunnel, Kade in another, and Ennoian warriors were in the remaining five. All of them were staring intently up at the distant grating, waiting, trying not to let the tension sap them of their courage, their willingness to die.
They'd been standing at the ready for over an hour now. Damn Achiatus, thought Kethe. Damn his vaunted planning! He'd not taken human psychology into account. She could feel the soldiers growing more nervous. The tunnels echoed with their shallow, rapid breathing. They had to go up, and soon. They'd snap down here otherwise.
Faint yells sounded from above. Screams? Kethe took a couple of steps into the cylinder and stared up at the grating. The yells were so faint that she could barely make them out. Then a trumpet sang out, distant but gut-churningly desperate. Wolfker and the men in several of the other radial tunnels bolted into the cylinder.
"Hold!" Kethe's voice was a whipcrack. "That's not our trumpet! Hold till we're called!"
The men and women stared at her in confusion, then nodded and began to try to press back into their tunnels. A mess resulted, and voices were raised in anger. "Just stand still!" Kethe's nerves were about to snap. "Just stand where you are!"
Finally, their trumpet blew, raw and desperate. The sound echoed down the cylinder, blaring with a ragged fury, and with a scream five hundred soldiers moved into action.
Kethe was the first to reach her stairwell. She had to fight the urge to take the steps two at a time. She had to pace herself so she didn't leave her column behind. Up and around, up and around she went, her whole body jittery with barely restrained energy.
She burst out into the tower's lower room, and that was when she first heard it: roars unlike any she had ever heard before. Even here, down in the center of the tower, she felt a spike of terror at the sound. No human could roar like that. It sounded like an avalanche, a cacophony of boulders shattering as they smashed into each other.
The trumpeter had ceased his blowing, and he pointed at the stairs going up to the tower top. "Go! Go, go, go!"
Kethe needed no urging. She sprinted into the next stairwell, and this time she raced up, not caring if Sighart and the others kept pace with her. She needed to see what was up there, what they were fighting. What could pulverize rock like that.
She burst up the last set of steps onto the tower top. Bright, blinding light struck her, and she squinted as she tried to take in the chaos.
The ballista directly before her was ruined, its massive beams and shafts snapped like kindling. Blood, crimson-bright, was sprayed across the wood and the floor. Bodies lay everywhere. A stone building was collapsing upon her from the left.
Instinct kicked in, and she dove forward just as the wooden platform on which she'd been standing erupted.
She came up on both feet, spinning so that her back smacked against a crenellation, and gaped. It was no building. A giant of stone was turning toward her, hauling its hammer back up. A dozen feet tall, it had a carapace of blue stone embedded into the flesh all along the backs of its arms and shoulders. Its skin was a pale blue, and its face was a nightmare. A massive nose hung over its lips, its tiny eyes were piss yellow, and its bat ears stuck out what looked like a foot on each side of
its great head.
Worse, it wasn't alone. A second monster was in the process of tearing a soldier apart behind it.
"By the Ascendant," Kethe whispered, staring up as the first troll raised its hammer to blot out the sun, frozen in place by what she was seeing. Long, thin muscles along its rangy arms flared into view, and it brought the hammer screaming down. Kethe threw herself aside and the crenellation against which she'd been leaning exploded.
Sighart came stumbling up into view, shielding his eyes with one hand, Dalitha right behind him.
"Down!" Kethe screamed. "Sighart! Down!"
He raised his sword as the second troll dropped the ruined soldier and backhanded its hammer at him. Not knowing what he was facing, not understanding the magnitude of what was coming at him, Sighart raised his blade to block the blow.
The hammer hit him in the chest, knocked him off his feet and sent him flying over the tower battlement.
Like that, he was gone.
Time seemed to slow. Kethe saw Dalitha opening her mouth in horror. Saw the first troll raising its hammer.
Fury born of pure denial erupted within her, and she threw herself forward. The huge hammer was falling, and Dalitha was reacting, but she was too slow, too stunned. Kethe's scream tore at her throat, and she tasted blood. She leaped forward, her blade extended, and although she knew it was futile, she sought to parry the hammerfall.
Her sword slipped forward, and white fire burst down its length, so bright it burned her eyes to look at it even in the light of day. Then the hammer hit, and Kethe bellowed as pain wrenched her arm and wrist. Her shoulder hit Dalitha and knocked her aside, and then she was bending beneath the hammer, clutching the hilt of her weapon with both hands as her knees gave way, bowing down beneath the impossible strength of the troll.
Bowing, but she was not broken. The hammer's descent stopped.
The troll's horrific eyes opened wide in confusion. The hammer's head was inches from Kethe's brow. Arms shaking from shoulder to wrist, Kethe screamed and cast the hammer aside, slipped out from under it and forward, her white, burning blade sweeping out to open the troll's paunch. Then she was past it and running at the second troll.
Her Honor Guard was pouring out onto the tower top, sprinting into combat, but the second troll let out a stone-crushing roar and swept its hammer through them. The carnage was ghastly. Six soldiers were simply knocked aside, arms, spines, and swords snapping and bodies rupturing as they tumbled into a heap.
Kethe leaped. One foot landed lightly on the hammer's head, the second halfway up its shaft, and she drove the tip of her blade directly into the troll's left eye. The white fire flared into a blinding corona as she leaped over its shoulder, holding on to the hilt the whole way, driving the troll's head up and then snapping it back as she tore her sword free and almost fell into the abyss beyond the tower top.
Nothing but instinct saved her. She twisted and drove her sword tip into the battlement as she passed over it. Metal sank into stone, and she snapped short, both shoulders almost dislocating, then swung around over the drop to crash into the wall.
She didn't have a chance to climb up. Hands reached down and hauled her back over the top, and she sank, gasping, into a crouch just in time to watch the second troll stagger back and topple over the battlements into oblivion.
"What," she rasped, "the fuck is going on?"
She rose to her feet to see for herself. Across every tower top, madness was raging. She saw Akinetos, one tower over, catch the descending haft of a troll's hammer and stop it cold, his own hammer trapped in the troll's fist. On every tower top, ballistae had been wrecked, their crews slaughtered; stone was crushed and bodies were knocked into the void by horrific sweeps.
An odd sound made Kethe look up, and her breath caught in her throat when she saw an entire cloud of dragons. They blotted out the sky, wheeling their sinuous death patterns like a serpentine cloud of doom. No, not dragons; these were smaller, only two legs. But, by the Black Gate, who cared?
She turned again and stared down at the kragh army. Her heart sank. There were so many of them. She'd heard the numbers, but seeing them massed up and waiting to attack was like taking a troll hammer to the throat.
"What's that?" Dalitha had moved up beside her and was pointing down at the massed kragh in front of the gatehouse.
A black-robed kragh, looking somewhat like a doll from this height, was beginning to burn green. It rose into the air, lifted by what looked like a burning tornado of flame. Kethe's blood ran cold as she saw faces gibbering in that fire, maniacal and fey, whirling around and around the black-robed kragh.
"Kethe," said Dalitha. "What is that?"
Kethe didn't have a chance to answer. The kragh threw back its head, opened wide its arms, and then it screamed, a high-pitched cry that was half-agony, half-ecstasy. The green fire coalesced into a burning sphere that hid the kragh, and then it flew forward as if it had been hurled by a catapult.
It left a streak of viridian behind it as the kragh was hurled screaming at the gates of Abythos, where it exploded with such power that Kethe felt the tremor through her feet.
"By the Ascendant," Kethe muttered, leaning out. The combat was slowing on the other towers as people gaped at what had just happened.
The front gate of Abythos was sheathed in iron and had been reinforced from within by three yards of tightly packed rubble, behind which masons had erected a new wall that was two more yards deep. It rose to fill and choke the gatehouse tunnel, and should have been impervious to any form of attack, from battering ram to sapping. The green-burning kragh had blasted open a huge hole, but it hadn't destroyed the gate.
"We're all right," she said, her voice shaking as she pulled back from the wall. "It didn't break through the gate!"
"Look!" Kade cried. "By the Ascendant and his Seven Virtues, look!"
Five more black-cowled kragh were beginning to burn with green flame, their voices raised in a madness of chanting. Up they rose, higher and higher, lifted by their own personal vortexes of insanity.
"What are they?" Wolfker had pushed his way to the front. "What the hell are they?"
Understanding clicked into Kethe's mind. She leaped up onto the battlement and stared out over the soldiers and Consecrated who were packed along the castle walls and tower tops. The central courtyard was completely bare. "Down!" She heard the first screaming wail and felt the consequent shudder of an explosion. "To the courtyard! To the front gate! Go! Go now!"
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Tharok watched the battle unfold from his high vantage point. The matriarch flew where she was bid, lower now that the threat of the ballista had been negated.
The trolls had performed better than he'd hoped. A third of them had missed and fallen to their deaths, but enough of them had hit the mark to wreak havoc and summon the humans out of hiding. It was fascinating to watch them emerge by the hundreds only to gape at their attackers; precious seconds were lost to amazement and horror, seconds which cost the humans hundreds of lives.
Kyrra had sworn to him that she would take care of the front gate and the walls, that she and her shamans were more than equal to the task, and Tharok felt both satisfaction and unease as he watched them do so. He'd never heard of a shaman unleashing such power, had never imagined that the spirits could serve them so. It was clear that the shamans were sacrificing themselves with each strike. Each explosion came at a terrible price. Tharok narrowed his eyes and grinned. This was perfect. Kyrra was weakening herself even as she helped him accomplish his goals.
The matriarch swept out over his army and then wheeled so he could gaze upon Abythos as the huge front gate exploded in green flame again and again. It had been reinforced with rock, he saw. A wise precaution, but still, it was giving way.
"Down, old one," he said, and nudged the matriarch. She swooped low, her descent giving her terrible speed, and then whipped over the ground before his waiting kragh, wings extended. Tharok leaped up to stand on her shoulders ag
ain and once more raised World Breaker.
It was the signal his warlords had been waiting for. They roared their commands, and the ladders were passed to the front. The matriarch swooped all the way around, and twenty thousand kragh began to rumble and move forward, their continuous roar akin to thunder – a storm about to break, a tidal wave that was going to wash away the citadel of Abythos forevermore.
The kragh raced forward, crossing the five hundred yards in no time at all, and their huge ladders swung up, arcing across the sky to clatter against the battlements of Abythos. Hundreds of ladders, on every side, and immediately the kragh began to climb.
Tharok looked up. "Now!" he commanded, and he unleashed his wyverns. As one, they broke their endless wheeling and furled their wings. He watched them descend and strafe the battlements, driving humans to their knees, buffeting others off, terrifying them, but most importantly, preventing them from tackling the ladders.
Almost all of them.
A young woman in enameled crimson armor did something impossible. Tharok saw her race along the top of the battlements, leaping from crenellation to crenellation, and then, as one of the wyverns swooped past, she leaped out, soared through the air, and latched on to the wyvern's leg.
Tharok urged the matriarch up, up, and watched the crimson-clad woman as she climbed up the wyvern's leg and up between its wings. Impossible, he thought, but no matter. The matriarch paused her ascent, rolled, and plummeted down upon the distressed wyvern.
It didn't matter how able this human was. She couldn't be ready for what was about to hit her.
The matriarch fell upon the embattled wyvern just as the young woman drew her blade across its throat. Blood sprayed out in a fell curtain, the wyvern's scream was cut short, and then the matriarch slammed into the wyvern from above, claws brought to bear, the impact such that the smaller wyvern's spine immediately snapped.