“It’s not too late to press our advantage,” Colonel Raji declared. “We may still have momentum on our side. It would have been better if Royce’s battalion had counterattacked immediately, but we can still take the battle to them.”
Raji’s forces made up the eastern side of the square. They hadn’t engaged the enemy. Nor would they be the obvious candidates to lead his proposed assault.
The Darkness bubbled angrily in my gut. “Two of my squads counterattacked, Colonel. They both lost half their strength, despite heavy supporting fire from the rest of my men.”
Raji turned to me with a little smirk. “Then I suppose the famous Shadowed Hand isn’t quite what we had been led to believe, is it, Captain?”
Almet physically interposed himself between me and the colonel, which might have saved Raji’s life. He snapped, “Are you really that much of a fool? We’ve all just got done saying how tough we had it when we had surprise and were dug in. You think we have a snowball’s chance in hell in a charge against a prepared Monolith line?”
Raji purpled. “General, I demand a reprimand for that insubordination.”
“Raji, you’re being an idiot. Is that enough of a reprimand?” Hake growled. “Keep your mouth shut if you’ve got nothing useful to say, or you’ll be leading your counterassault from the front.”
The tall colonel’s mouth compressed into a tight line. He kept whatever he was thinking to himself. I didn’t like him, but he wasn’t a stupid man.
Hake looked at me. “Any thoughts, Captain?”
“I don’t think the situation has changed much, sir. From the Monolith’s perspective, they just took a beating, but they’re still liking the odds. And they’re madder than ever.”
“You think they’re going to hit us again.”
“I hope so, sir.”
The enemy spent hours digging in. Our position was better, but they built up defenses in the ruins and woods with frightening speed and efficiency. Shortly before sundown they began to probe our square, feeling out the edges. Seeing whether we had a flank that could be turned. The remaining cavalrymen raced around us, taking our measure. We obligingly shot arrows at them when they got close enough. They lost two men before they learned to keep a more respectful distance. Then one of our better snipers took another in the head with a carbine. After that they stopped riding around for a while.
Their infantry didn’t try to completely encircle us. They were content with their positions on our southern and western fronts. But they did extend their lines past our own. That would make it hard for us to launch a flanking attack, and easier for them to swing around and press the eastern and northern sides of the square.
We shifted a couple of companies to the west and south, but we were still outnumbered by more than two to one on each of those fronts. Ammunition for the carbines had been redistributed and was now critically low everywhere. If the Monolith did come, we would not have an easy time of it.
I spent another evening reassuring my troops. I tried to be a bit more upbeat with Luco. “We smacked them around before. We’ll do it again.”
“They didn’t know what was coming last time. This time they will.”
“I’m supposed to be the brutally honest one here.”
He managed a weak smile. “Spent too much time with you.”
I’d assigned what was left of Railes’ squad to Pious. Groff’s squad had moved from the second floor to ground level.
“You okay?” I asked the big sergeant.
“What’s not to be okay about? We’ve been through worse.” I couldn’t tell if he was serious, sarcastic, or trying to cheer himself up.
I settled for clapping him on the arm and saying, “Exactly.” Even though I was pretty sure we hadn’t.
Sesk was repairing arrows the other side had fired at us. For a while I just watched the short, dark man reset arrowheads and adjust fletching. His squad was up on the roof, the only one left providing cover fire for our infantry on the ground. At least they would have plenty of arrows.
After a while he said, “Plenty for the dark wolf to eat today.”
The sun was going down. Campfires and torches sprang up to mark the enemy lines. There were a lot of them.
“Still think I shouldn’t feed it?” I asked.
He met my eyes and slowly shook his head. “Dunno.”
Kafer was in Sesk’s squad, and I settled down on the roof next to him. I pulled out my katana, inspected it, and allowed the Darkness to play over the blade, touching up tiny spots of corrosion. The weapon was carbon steel, and it rusted if you looked at it wrong.
“I think I miss your sister,” I said. “Even if she would tell me I was damned.”
He nodded. “I miss her all the time. I mean, she’s a colossal pain in the ass, but still.”
“Yeah. She’s the best person I ever met, you know.” I closed my eyes and let myself remember. “I was really angry at her. I risked my life for her, more than once. And then she just threw me out. Because of this.”
I looked at the Darkness flowing over the sword. “But now I’m thinking she wasn’t wrong.”
“Just because she’s a good person doesn’t mean she’s always right, Captain.”
“No. But it’s a better starting place than most. If we live, you should write to her. She worries about you.”
“Have you been writing to her, Captain?”
“I’m not the kind of thing people worry about.”
That wasn’t fair. Sesk treated me like a person. So did Luco, and Groff, and Railes, and Almet. I was feeding the dark wolf again. It liked the taste of self-pity.
I summoned up a smile. “Don’t die tomorrow. That would be the one thing she’d never be able to forgive.”
“Same to you, Captain.”
I was just finishing my meditation when something touched my face. My eyes snapped open to find Cat crouching over me.
She pulled her hand back, but said in a voice of great determination, “Not die, you.”
I had to grin. “Is that a prediction, or an order?”
“Yes.”
The Monolith infantry advanced in ranks two deep, shields locked and raised, spears poking over the edges. Most of our arrows clattered off harmlessly. Their archers returned fire in massive volleys, keeping our men under cover where we couldn’t aim as well.
The day before, our guns and bows had slaughtered scores of the enemy before their wild charge even reached our positions. This time we brought down a few handfuls.
None of us rushed out to meet them this time, not even Pious. Instead we let them hack at doors and climb awkwardly through broken windows. A round of arrows met the first of them to clamber into the buildings. With their shields out of position, more fell. Then it descended into a chaotic melee, cutting and thrusting and smashing.
The weight of their numbers was telling. They got the worst of the initial assault, but more kept coming. I abandoned the roof, stumbled down the stairs, and hurled myself into the thick of it.
Bodies milled in the shadows, shattered windows blocked by more Monolith troops forcing their way in. All semblance of order was gone. To my left, Pious had opened a circle with vicious swings of his pick, but he was bleeding freely from his left arm. To my right, a crush of flailing limbs stabbed and beat at each other.
I launched the Darkness in a wave. It scored bloody rivulets in exposed skin and clawed at eyes. I flung myself into a gap and swung my katana in a wide, high arc. It sliced above a soldier’s shield, laid open his cheek, deflected off the nose guard of his helmet, and cut a vicious chunk from his lip. I’m not sure he even noticed.
I stepped past him inside the guard of another spearman and rammed the blade to its hilt into his guts. That one noticed. Briefly.
I called the Darkness back. It spun around me in a cloud, fouling enemies’ strokes, getting into their faces so they couldn’t focus on me. Now I was behind the ones inside, cutting them down even as they turned in confusion. Pious exploited their d
isarray and smashed his way toward me.
Someone drove a spear through my leather jerkin just above my hip bone. I cut the shaft of the weapon in half and pulled the point free. My attacker gabbled in terror and flung himself out a window. I stuck the remains of the spear into a Monolith soldier’s thigh, then set about me with the katana in both hands. The strength the Darkness gave me battered shields aside, hacked through armor.
A Paladin standing in the doorway screamed, “He is one man! Even if hell itself -”
He didn’t manage to finish his thought because Pious’ pick thudded into his helmeted skull so hard the point emerged from the other side.
“Mirt is dead! Fall back! Fall back!”
They retreated in good order, not a panicked rout. A few of my quicker thinkers picked up their bows and sped shafts after them, but brought no one down.
I sent a probe of the Darkness to our left. Pious and I were perhaps the fiercest melee fighters in the brigade. If we had barely repelled the enemy, I doubted things were going well elsewhere.
And they weren’t. The third building in the line was overrun. Platoons of reserves were holding back breaches in almost every street, though our archers were inflicting crippling casualties when the enemy fought in the open.
I sent to Cat, “Raji and Thonn have to take them in the flanks! Attack now! Now!”
Cat passed the message to Hake. I scrambled back to the roof where I could see.
I stood at the edge, gasping. My side hurt where the spear had pierced me. The Darkness was at work on that wound and a half dozen lesser cuts and bruises.
“You might want to move back from there,” Kafer said mildly. I had wedged myself out between two tables to get a better view. Prophetess’ brother popped up, sighted carefully, and fired an arrow into the swirling mass in the street below. He was back behind cover before answering fire came from the woods and the second story of a house across the way.
I twitched out of the path of two arrows. “Let them waste their shots.”
“Can you dodge bullets too?” Kafer asked.
I got back behind the tables. The Monolith forces didn’t seem well-provisioned with firearms, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have any at all.
“There we go,” I breathed. Either the enemy’s plan or their discipline was less than perfect. Their projecting wings had swept in to strike our square. Raji and Thonn’s troops were unfolding from cover like a flower opening, swinging around to hit the attackers from behind.
The Monolith cavalry had split into two groups. They came out of nowhere at a full charge to hit each of our flanking forces. They were less than a tenth the size of Raji and Thonn’s battalions, but their mobility and the weight of their mounts let them do damage out of all proportion to their numbers.
Our archers engaged them to good effect, but our envelopment had lost momentum and devolved into yet another bloody melee.
Somebody on the other side had had enough. Horns sounded. Slowly, painfully, in struggling knots, the Monolith troops disengaged and pulled back to their defenses.
“How do you make their losses?” Hake asked.
Captain Selles, his adjutant, had been going from roof to roof, counting. He looked just a little bit ill. “Hard to tell for sure. They pulled their wounded in last night but not all of the dead. I’d say today there’s somewhere between five hundred and a thousand of them lying out there.”
The dead “out there” included heaps of enemy corpses we had pitched out of our defensive positions. We had taken a few prisoners. But not many. Bodies from both sides lay where they had fallen. It was amazing how quickly living men became masses of inert tissue with red things exposed that should have been decently hidden by skin.
The general nodded grimly. “Say a quarter of their force over two days. How did we do?”
“Better than they did. Not as well as we did yesterday. Nearly four hundred casualties. About half of those are wounded, but a lot of them won’t make it.”
The Shadowed Hand had taken another brutal beating. We had only three more dead, but another five in the infirmary. My company, always undersized, was down to little more than half its strength.
“You’ve called it pretty well so far, Minos. Think they’ll try again?”
“I don’t know, sir. We’ll see.”
“Last night you said ‘I hope so.’ Not looking forward to it this time?”
I tried to smile but couldn’t quite pull it off. “It just isn’t as much fun anymore, sir.”
They didn’t come again that day. Or the next. They didn’t move, either. By noon of our fourth day in the ruins, the brigade’s mood had soured even further. While the respite had been welcome for twenty-four hours, now we were back to waiting. Would they attack or wouldn’t they, and when?
Both sides buried their dead, men sweating as they dug into cracked earth. The summer heat didn’t fade even at night. The living smelled bad enough - the stench of the corpses was intolerable.
I spent time in the infirmary, doing my best to help. I didn’t accomplish much. I could do things the medics couldn’t, but I was slow, and the effort tired me. I like to think I saved a few lives in that little slice of hell on earth. Many of the wounded died anyway. It was hot, and humid, and stank of sweat and infection. We were running low on provisions. It was hard even to get enough water to keep the men hydrated.
Every few hours I would flood the place with the Darkness and kill all the flies that swarmed around the still or softly moaning bodies. I was good for that, at least.
I could also talk to Railes. The only question around the camp had become, “You think they’re going to hit us today?” Mostly people asked me that. I asked him instead.
“Why should they?” my lieutenant wheezed. “All they got to do is pin us down until reinforcements come up.”
It wasn’t that the tattooed soldier was a strategic genius. The situation was obvious. Outside the infirmary, the men were tense, and if anything the officers were worse.
“I sent couriers down to Rockwall yesterday,” Hake said, “But who knows how long it’ll take them to get through.”
“If they do get through,” Raji snapped. “Or if headquarters deigns to send us any support. The maps put us less than a week from the Hawks’ Nest, and the enemy has an open road behind them. What are the chances we get reinforced before either another Monolith brigade or a couple of Hawk battalions come up? I’d say pretty damn close to none.”
The general shrugged, suddenly weary. “We did the best we could with the hand we were dealt.”
Raji glared at me. “It’s maybe a shame we relied on a sorcerer for our tactics. When you sold your soul to hell, you might have asked for military genius as part of the exchange.”
The Darkness pounded in my chest, a caged beast trying to claw its way free. I choked out, “I’ve still got one more trick up my sleeve, Colonel. But no one’s going to like it.”
“So…” I muttered to the cloud in front of me. “Let’s see if we can do this without killing our own team, shall we?”
The cloud seethed and coiled, but said nothing in return.
In the end it was just Cat, Sesk, and Pious with me in the tangled, night-shrouded woods north of the enemy’s position. The rest of the Shadowed Hand - what was left of it - was fifty paces behind with carbines and all the ammunition left in the brigade.
I trusted Cat and Sesk to stay out of my way. To be honest I didn’t care if I killed Pious by mistake.
I pulled the eager Darkness back inside me, felt it bubbling behind my eyes. I heard it in my voice.
“Stay clear,” I repeated. “This isn’t like any other time. Sometimes you have to feed the dark wolf if you want to live.”
The night was moonless. I didn’t see as much as sense the hunter’s frown. “There are worse things than dying,” he muttered.
“I’m pretty sure I’m damned already, Sergeant. But I’ve made a habit of surviving over this past year. I don’t care to give it
up. And besides, it doesn’t seem fair to sacrifice the whole brigade for what’s left of my soul.”
Sesk grunted. He disapproved, but he would follow me.
Even in the dark I could see Cat’s white teeth in her wild grin. Without the Darkness I wouldn’t have known she was frightened. Now I felt everything around me, the movement of every branch in the wind, the heartbeat of every field mouse. The Darkness and I were one.
This must have been what it felt like to be Yoshana, to let slip every constraint on the Darkness. It coiled and hissed, feeding on Cat and Sesk’s fear, feeding on Pious’ hate. It was growing maddened, a pressure building that would need the release of fight or flight. It fed on itself, a dark wolf chasing its own tail of rage and pain.
I wasn’t Yoshana. I couldn’t master that wild flow the way she could. But for one night, there would be no greater terror than me on this side of the Muddy.
Once I was moving, I couldn’t say where my body ended and the Darkness began. The concept ceased to have meaning. Did I cut down the Monolith sentries with my blade or a million devouring mouths? It made no difference. They fell.
There was a sea of fear before me, and screams. I moved into it, drinking deeply from the well of its suffering. Behind me there were other, lesser things. They followed me, and I was angry. Did they want to steal my food? I nearly turned back to strike them down, but there was so much to kill in front of me. I would destroy the small creatures behind in due time.
Metal pierced the solid parts of me. I roared my rage and washed over the things that had hurt me. My solid core was vulnerable but strong enough, and I could repair the damage done to it. At least enough to keep killing. The things that fought me couldn’t repair the damage I did to them. I laughed. I was predator. They were prey.
There were nodes in the sea of fear, almost solid. Some of the prey had a will of its own. I didn’t like that.
Then there was fire. My limbs burned. I recoiled in pain. The prey should not use fire. There was a wall of it between me and the prey. I seethed, hurt and angry. I must flee, but that would mean abandoning my food. Rage and hunger and fear warred in me.
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 53