“Y-yes,” she said faintly.
“It’s worse when it’s a person. I’m sorry you had to experience it. Now get the hell out of here before—”
The three creatures had reached him and he couldn’t spare the focus to speak. At least they’re the generic kind, he thought, and not those crazy half animal mutants.
He sidestepped as best he could on the narrow battlement and slashed downward at the first creature as it passed. It howled, twisted, and came at him again while he was knocking aside the claws of another. The third sprouted a knife in its eye and dropped to the ground, twitching.
Three more quick cuts, and the other two monsters were also down on the stone, bleeding and dying, or already dead.
“Thanks for that,” he said, tipping his triangular hat to Nicole. “Now get Dr. Walt and get down to where it’s safe. Sam will kill me if he finds out I brought you into battle.”
Nicole narrowed her eyes as she helped Dr. Walt up. The old scholar had hit the wall hard and rebounded to the stone floor of the battlement. “Don’t you worry about Sam. I can take care of him. Are you okay, Dr. Walt? Here, let me help you up.”
Danaba chuckled. “I know you can, Nicole, but I would feel better if you two were in the keep. You’re too important to the Republic to be playing soldier.” He paused. “Please?”
“Oh, fine.” She retrieved her knife and cleaned it as before on the creature’s fur, grimacing and becoming paler by the second. “I think I may have to go find a secluded place to be sick anyway. Let’s go, Dr. Walt.”
The two hurried down the closest set of stairs and disappeared, Nicole rushing out ahead of the doctor, no doubt to find that secluded place she was looking for.
Danaba thought for a moment about what the woman had gone through since she had come to Gythe. And he thought of his first kill, all those years ago. That one wasn’t a monster, but a man. She would be fine, but she wouldn’t look at the world the same way ever again. He sighed.
“Turkin, what the hell happened there?” he yelled as he turned toward the men who had just finished off a small group of creatures that had made it over the wall. “We almost lost the leader of our new government. Your job is to stop them from getting past you, man.”
General Danaba Kemp went and checked on his soldiers to make sure they were holding up. It was barely midday, and they had already seen dozens of attackers make it over the wall. How much longer could they hold out? He hoped Sam got back soon with some good news and some miraculous magic. If not, he might witness the end of the Republic before it even got started.
Chisin Ling and her squad of special soldiers made their way silently through the shadows around the walls and toward the cliff where the besiegers’ bridge lay. She scoffed mentally at how lazy the creatures and their commanders were. There was no guard set on the platform they had placed over the chasm. That was their mistake, and an opportunity for the soldiers of the Republic.
The black-clad figures made their way to the edge of the bridge. The captain could barely see the handful of her men skirting the wood planking and disappearing over the edge and she did the same on her side. A fog had rolled in, giving the entire place an eerie feeling.
They were using a set of tools that had been used years ago when the Sapsyra had breached the walls and tried to kill the Gray Man. Their attempt on the villain’s life didn’t end well, but the metal hooks they used to get to the walls worked as well as anything could have. They had been gathered from where the women had left them and put into a storage room. Nalia had shown them to Chisin Ling one day while telling her the story of how they were used.
“We used these harnesses with the hooks attached to get up the path to the fortress without being seen,” Nalia told her, putting one of the harnesses on to demonstrate.
The mass of straps supported the Sapsyr around the backs of both legs and tied tightly around her waist. Two long lengths of leather strap came from the front of the harness. They had metal hooks with handles attached to them.
“We would put one hook on the lip of the stone parapet like this.” Nalia put the sharp point of the hook on the edge of a table next to her. “Then we would hang from it. When we were ready to move, we would pull up on the handle—”she raised the hook above her head and pretended to pull herself up on it “—and then place the other hook two or three feet away.” She raised the hook in her right hand up and out a few feet and then pretended to set the hook in an imaginary edge.
“Then,” she continued, “we could rest or we could pull up on the newly placed hook and move the first next to it. We would continue this way, inching up the wall unseen from the path or the battlements of the fortress until we got to the drawbridge, which was down. Crossing the drawbridge was done the same way.”
Chisin had nodded her head. “That was clever. Did it work? Did you get to the main walls?”
“We did.” Nalia’s expression slipped for a moment and the captain could see her memories were not good. She knew the story of the slaughter of the Sapsyra once they breached the walls. She didn’t press Nalia for more information. Her mind had spun with different ways she might use the hooks the Sapsyra had made. Tonight’s plan was something she had come upon quite suddenly while watching the mutants swarm across to attack the walls.
Chisin Ling set her hooks and lowered herself below the level of the besiegers’ bridge. She moved over ten feet, inching along as Nalia had described, realizing that it was quite a feat of strength to lift herself with one hand like that. She was glad she had only chosen the strongest half dozen of her squad to actually use the hooks.
When all six were in place, three on either side, they unstrapped the bundles they had brought with them and began to secure them to the underside of the bridge.
This was not as easy as she had thought it would be. The bundles weren’t heavy, but hanging in empty air by two hooks attached to straps made the manipulation of them awkward. The captain looked down between her straps and saw nothing but blackness. It could have been only a few feet, but she knew it was two hundred feet to the ground, certain death if she fell. She gulped and focused on the wood in front of her. She was not fond of heights.
The captain could barely see the other three hanging from the wood planking. She raised her hand to them, made a gesture with three fingers to let them know they would all act simultaneously at the count of three, and removed an object from the pouch hanging from her shoulder. With a quick, swiping movement of the three fingers, she let them know to begin their count. On three, they all acted.
Using only the strength of her arms, she swung what was in her hand up against the bottom of the bridge. It was a metal device, not unlike a hand holding an imaginary apple on its fingertips. The “fingers” of the object were sharpened and barbed, and when it struck the wood, it made a dull sound almost like a hammer tap against a tree trunk. The other three sounds melded with hers and she was surprised that it died immediately without carrying. Maybe it was the fog surrounding them. Pulling down on the object, she smiled. It would hold fast.
On the bottom of the anchor was a solid loop with a hole the size of her index finger. She removed a stiff metal rod from her sack and fitted it through the ring. When it had been inserted exactly halfway into the hole, it clicked and was held fast.
The last part was more awkward than the rest. Chisin Ling and the others removed two small packages, one at a time. They were rigid containers with chemicals Emerius Dinn had put there. They slid onto the rod and were held firmly against the rough wood of the planking above.
The captain had put one of her packages onto the rod and was pulling the second from her sack when she heard the noise. She waved her hand to the others to freeze and they did, having kept her in their peripheral vision the entire time.
A light scuffing sounded on the bridge above them. It was so small a noise that she wasn’t sure at first if she had even heard it. The wind whistled softly in her ear as it made its lazy way through the chasm. It wa
s not even strong enough to disturb the fog much more than to swirl it, but it was enough to make her wonder if she had really detected a sound or if it was just a rustle of the breeze.
There. The sound came again, almost directly above her. It was accompanied by sniffing this time.
She pictured one of the wolf-mutants in her mind and remained perfectly still except for the slow swaying the wind caused. Fearing even to breathe normally, she took shallow, slow breaths and waited.
There was more scraping on the bridge above. It was coming closer. Soon, it would see the hooks hanging over the edge of the bridge and it would look down. If that happened, it would rouse the entire camp of creatures just a few hundred feet away on the main path to the fortress. There was not enough room for the mutants next to the gates, and that area was easily within bow range in any case, so they had all congregated on the pathway on the opposite side of the chasm.
Chisin thought of her options. She could motion the group to continue their work and probably be discovered. She could wait and see if the creature left without seeing anything. She could try to kill it without it making any noise. None of these options sounded good. She was willing to die to complete this mission. Her best chance of completing it was to hurry and finish setting up the objects and hope they could finish their job before they were ripped to shreds.
She was just about to motion the others, their eyes wide and white in the night, when the sound of the scraping stopped. Right above her. The sniffing grew louder, and she knew it had seen the hooks and was trying to catch a scent of them. There was nothing for it. They had to finish now and hope by some miracle they would survive.
A muffled twang filled the air, and a softer sound of sharpened metal entering flesh. A large, dark body fell past her, already still, and disappeared below.
She sighed. The others she had set to guard had seen the creature. She thanked her luck and motioned in a circle with one finger to the other three in her squad to finish their jobs. She could already hear movement in the camp, someone or something having heard the twang of the bow. It was time to leave.
After finishing up by placing the other package on the rod, she moved her hooks quickly toward the cliff. So quickly, in fact, that she had to wait for her companion to get to the side and be pulled up by the others. She finally made it to the cliff, was pulled up, and had her feet on solid ground. Blessed, beautiful, solid ground.
She wanted to roll onto her back and just lie there enjoying the solidity, but loud footsteps echoed on the wood of the bridge, and her squad started to fire arrows into them.
But they had one more thing to do.
The packages had thin, strong string attached to them. The four who had set them all pulled at the captain’s gesture.
And then they turned and ran.
Emerius Dinn had improved the initial design of his devices. When the string was pulled, it removed a small, flat piece of wood that kept two sets of chemicals from each other, allowing them to mix. That mixture ate through another blockage to another set of materials. In the end, it took approximately five seconds for the reaction to start getting violent.
The packages were not only what the hunter called “bombs,” but they also had the useful quality of spreading a sheet of flame over an area, flame that was difficult to put out because the liquid sprayed burned ferociously.
The effect was, Chisin Ling thought, worth the risk.
In three separate explosions one right after another, parts of the bridge were destroyed in an instant. Even though the planking was still in place when the smoke cleared, it was weakened and burning so energetically that nothing could put it out.
Arrows flew from the battlements, killing some of the creatures and slowing others. Chisin and her five ran for all they were worth toward the gates. Even now, she saw one of them swinging slightly open to receive them.
The squad member to her left went down, and she looked over to see why. He tucked into a roll and came up, but immediately went down again, sliding across the hard ground. He had some sort of spear in his leg.
“Well, that’s a new one,” the captain muttered as she turned to help him, drawing her swords. The mutants never used weapons. There must have been some humans with them. Three more of her men turned with her to help out.
In the darkness and madness, she didn’t even know which of her men had taken the projectile. She thought it was Marcus. He had two small children and a wife waiting in the keep. She would not go and tell them their father and husband was not coming back.
The archers on the battlements were firing arrows as quickly as they could, but they didn’t want to strike Chisin and her squad, so when the creatures were within twenty feet of them, they were no longer in danger from above. That left a good ten right in front of them and more coming across the bridge. It looked like they were in for a desperate battle.
Looking from side to side, the captain saw that all five members of her squad were gathered protectively around their wounded comrade. It was Marcus, and he was standing mostly on one leg with his sword out. He would not die without a fight. A fierce pride glowed in Chisin Ling over that. She had hand-picked each of the soldiers in her command, and Marcus had seen the most improvement of any of them. She turned briefly to her men and saluted them with her swords. They all returned the salute, Marcus even coming to attention to do so, though his face pinched with pain. Then they turned to the enemies charging at them.
“Protect Marcus,” she yelled, “and protect the gate. Both must be preserved.”
Her squad yelled in agreement, the two with bows roaring as they fired arrow after arrow into the mutants coming at them.
And then the monsters were there.
Chisin Ling cast about her with both swords, lopping off limbs and opening up torsos like an armed whirlwind. The creatures that had reached them were the garden variety mutants, with abilities enhanced beyond normal men, but not particularly dangerous or hardy when compared with the more specialized creatures. As she dodged a set of claws, sliced upward to open the creature’s belly, and ran another through with her other sword, she thought that maybe they would survive after all. That would be a bonus.
Then a loud crashing sound boomed around them, and in a flash of sparks and flame, the bridge finally broke. The two halves slid off the cliff and plummeted toward the ground, taking dozens of the creatures with it. The captain let out a long breath. At least their mission was successful. Even if she died, there was that.
In her momentary lapse of focus, one of her enemies scored her face with a slash of its claws. If her reflexes were not so superbly honed that she rolled her head with the blow, it would have been a fatal strike. As it was, her left eye filled with blood and she wondered if she would be blind on that side. Or if she would survive at all.
As she twisted to the side, she brought her sword up and slashed at the arm that had struck her. The creature howled until she punched her other sword through its throat and ended the sound abruptly.
There were only perhaps a dozen of the creatures left on her side of the chasm. Wiping at her eye—and still not able to see out of it—she surveyed the scene. Some of the soldiers from the keep had joined her squad and were helping with the enemy. At least three of her men were injured, though it didn’t look like any were dead. Yet. They could still get through this alive.
Then she saw a shape in the midst of the mutants coming at them. It had feathers on its head instead of hair and was laying about with talons on the ends of its arms. Damn! She hated those bird mutants.
She rushed in, a little disoriented from having the use of only one eye. The bird creature was tearing out the midsection of one of the other soldiers. She thanked whatever powers there were that it was not one of her men and then immediately felt ashamed of herself. A man had just lost his life. It shouldn’t matter that he was not in her command. Growling with a savage fury, she threw herself at the bird.
Chisin Ling was fast and strong. Few combatants could
withstand her flurries when she attacked with both swords. These bird mutants, though, were devilishly fast themselves, and their limbs were tough enough to withstand blows from even fine steel. It parried her strikes with its forearms and swung out to disembowel her. She stepped back, barely avoiding the talons.
And then Danaba Kemp was next to her.
“Together now, Chisin,” he said, winking at her, his big two-handed sword in his hands. “Can you see well enough?” He blocked two swipes from the bird’s limbs and sidestepped.
“Well enough.”
“Good,” he said. “I’ll draw it in. Watch for an opening.”
The general dove in with a thrust toward the creature’s midsection. It hammered the sword away with both arms. Quick as a whip, Danaba Kemp flicked the sword up and over the thing’s arms and slashed a shallow cut across its face, just to the side of its beak. Its eyes grew wide and it screeched.
He seemed to flow from movement to movement, here one second and there the next. The bird hunted him wherever he moved, screeching more and more with every miss of its claws. It seemed to have forgotten Chisin altogether.
The captain wiped the blood from her eye again and was able to see blurry outlines of shapes through it. Not blind, then, just full of red fluid. She watched, circling the creature and looking for an opportunity.
Danaba Kemp’s sword slapped dully against the hardened flesh of the bird’s arms. Clang. Clang-clang. The two moved so fast that Chisin could hardly follow it, especially in the dim light and with her flooded eye. Still, she tracked their movement carefully and finally found an opening.
Danaba had made a desperate block to a strike that could have taken his head off, the talon slashing downward and frontward at the neck from the back. He swished his blade in a circle and counterattacked so hard the creature had to block it with both arms. At that moment, Chisin spun, slashed at the thing’s neck with the sword in her right hand, turned a complete circle to slash in exactly the same spot with her other sword, and then delivered a slash with her right sword again.
Harmonic Magic Series Boxed Set Page 133