Tholden was ahead of his father. The truth was that he had been too worried for sleep. After trying uselessly to rest until after midnight, he had gotten up, put on his clothes. If Quiss hadn’t restrained him, he would have gone to wear himself out pacing around the stockade to no purpose. But she had compelled him – almost by force – to sit down and drink a flagon of wine; she had kneaded the knots in his neck and shoulders and back until her hands ached; she had made love to him. After that, he pretended to sleep until she let down her guard. Then he got out of bed again.
He was in the front room stirring up the fire when he heard the alarm. Roaring in a voice that wasn’t made to convey anger or violence, he left the house. For a second, he wheeled, trying to find which direction the alarm came from. Then he set off at a run, his beard lifting in the dawn breeze.
Terisa groped awake, roused more by the way Geraden exploded out of bed than by the shouts. He seemed to jump unerringly into his clothes while she fumbled to follow him, catch up with him; he flung the door open before she had begun to button her shirt.
Nevertheless she did catch up with him. Out in the hall, he collided with Stead and had to stop to lift his injured brother off the floor. Stead clung to him for a moment. “Get me a knife,” he panted. “I can’t run anywhere. But I can fight here if I have to.”
“I’ll tell Quiss,” Geraden replied as he pulled away.
With Terisa beside him now, he reached the front room, shouted Stead’s message to Quiss, then dashed out of the house.
“Where?” he demanded of the first man he met.
The man looked too frightened to have any idea what he was doing. “West.”
“West,” Geraden muttered, thinking hard. “So it isn’t soldiers. Soldiers would come from the north. The northeast.”
Terisa saw what he was getting at; but her heart was pounding in her throat, and she couldn’t speak.
“Eremis is sending Imagery against us.”
She nodded. They ran west among the buildings.
Everyone was running west. Tholden’s instructions to Houseldon had been explicit: women and children, stay at home; anyone who was too young or too frail or too sick to fight, stay at home. Unfortunately, the folk of Domne had lost the habit of taking orders. The streets were crowded with people who shouldn’t have been there. Some of the men who were prepared or equipped or at least determined to fight had difficulty working their way through the throng.
But Tholden had replied to the alarm so quickly that he was ahead of the crowds; he didn’t know he was being imperfectly obeyed. He reached the guard post and climbed onto the platform where the man who had raised the alarm was on watch in time to see the whole attack clearly.
They came in without a sound except for the rush of their paws and the harsh murmur of their breathing: strange wolves with spines bristling down their curved backs, a double row of fangs in each slavering jaw, and something like intelligence in their wild eyes. Only a few dozen of them, Tholden thought when he first spotted them. Enough to ravage a herd of sheep. Or terrorize a farmstead. Not enough to threaten Houseldon. They won’t be able to get past the stockade.
Then the leader of the pack sprang at the wall.
The wolf seemed to come straight up at him. Leaping at least eight feet in the air, it got its forelegs over the wall. While its hind legs scrambled for a purchase on the wood, its jaws stretched toward his face.
For an instant more horrible than anything he had imagined, Tholden couldn’t move. He was a farmer, not a soldier: he didn’t know anything about fighting. Deep down in his heart, he had always believed there was something secretly crazy about people like Artagel, who went into battle with such fierce joy. The men standing on the platform with him had already flinched away. One of the bowmen rushed to bring up his bow. But Tholden just couldn’t move.
Then hot slaver splashed into his face as the fangs drew near, and something inside him shifted. Although he never thought about it, he was prodigiously strong, and his strength came to his rescue. He reached out, caught the wolf by the throat, and heaved it backward.
It fell among the pack, breaking the charge, preventing the wolves behind it from gathering themselves to spring. The pack burst into snarls – a raw, red sound, avid for blood. Jaws snapped. Then the wolves swirled around to regain their momentum so that they could leap.
“Bowmen!” the Domne’s son cried desperately, “get some arrows into those things! If they get over the wall—!”
Not fast enough. Already three wolves were leaping, four, six. And instead of attacking the guard post directly, they hurled themselves at a part of the wall where there were no immediate defenders.
He was appalled by the realization that these beasts knew what they were doing. They were at their most vulnerable while they tried to cross the top of the wall – so they moved out of reach.
But an arrow thudded into the chest of the nearest wolf. It fell away, coughing blood. While the bowman snatched up another shaft, someone below the platform threw a hatchet that buried itself between a pair of glaring, wild eyes. Someone else tried to use a pitchfork as if it were a javelin; the tines missed, but the wolf was forced to drop back.
Three down.
The other three got over the wall.
Tholden saw a farmer swing an axe and miss – saw him go down with his throat torn out by an effortless toss of the wolf’s head. Luckily, the next man struck a solid blow with a club, and the wolf wobbled. While the beast was still unsteady on its legs, one long sweep of a scythe disemboweled it.
Defenders arrived as quickly as the narrow streets and the crowds permitted. The second wolf over the wall ducked between two hostlers – who nearly brained each other trying to hit it – ripped open the best baker in Houseldon before he could raise his hands, then flung itself at a knot of young boys who had escaped from their mothers. But it went down when an ancient sword in the hands of an old man who remembered the wars struck between the spines protecting its back.
The third wolf took an arrow in its hindquarters from a terrified young apprentice bowman. As if it thrived on pain, it killed the young man, bit off another man’s hand at the wrist when the man tried to stab the creature with a knife, then raced down an alley toward the heart of Houseldon.
At the same time, more wolves sprang to the attack.
Only a few dozen of them, Tholden thought. He wanted to tear his hair.
A second bowman ran up from the guardpost where he had been stationed. Like his comrade, he began picking wolves off the top of the wall as fast as he could nock arrows to the string. But they were only two. Every time one of them reached for a new shaft, three or four beasts got into Houseldon.
Calling frantically for help, Tholden leaped off the platform.
The other bowmen were on their way, but hampered by the crowds. And the defenders at the scene of attack didn’t know how to fight an enemy like this; they got in each other’s way. In a sense, the wolves were losing. They would all be killed eventually. But if enough of them ran loose in the streets, they would do terrible carnage before they were hunted down.
And if they killed the bowmen—
Maybe the wolves wouldn’t lose.
Tholden snatched an axe from a man who obviously didn’t know how to use it effectively. Planting himself in the path of the wolves, he hewed at them as if they were nothing more than a stand of timber. He had no idea what else to do.