“Piss off,” Kizzie replied. She felt completely dead inside, all of her fear replaced by the pain and nausea of too much godglass sorcery. “I’m not made to be the acolyte of a monster.”
The Tall Man made a motion that seemed very much like a shrug, but Kizzie couldn’t be sure with its inhuman anatomy and drooping arms. “Then we have arrived at the same conclusion.” It reached toward her with one set of talons.
“Montego is dead?” Kizzie asked, letting the hand holding her blackjack fall. What was the point, anyway? Dying with a weapon? Without it? She would still be dead. Just like Baby. She tried to find anything within her but shock. Montego had been killed, and it was her fault.
The Tall Man paused, head tilting slightly, its talons curling inward in a surprisingly gentle gesture. “I didn’t know that a human could fight like that. I will craft a song for him, I think. It’s been hundreds of years since I did so, but he was worthy. The Yuglid will sing of him for long after humanity is dead.”
Yuglid. So this creature had a name for what it was. A race, even. “There’s more of you?” Kizzie asked in disbelief.
“You have no idea,” the Tall Man chuckled. It looked down at itself, and Kizzie could almost see annoyance in that inhuman face. “It will take me months to grow my human skin back. Oh well. You proved yourself, Kissandra Vorcien. I’ll make this quick.” It began to reach out once more, and Kizzie closed her eyes and waited for the sharp pain of death. A whisper reached her ears, and then a soft grunt, and she waited for several more seconds before opening her eyes again.
The Yuglid had fallen to its knees, eyes wide in panic, arms flailing. Montego stood over its shoulder, face a sheath of blood both crimson and black, teeth bared and one muscular arm braced across the Yuglid’s neck. The Yuglid thrashed, slapping backward with its hands, talons scraping deep grooves across Montego’s cherub-like cheeks. Montego flinched, hissing in pain, but did not let go. He raised his other arm, and Kizzie could see that he held her missing stiletto, which he buried in the Yuglid’s neck.
The Yuglid’s thrashing grew more desperate, but it did not die. It gurgled and spat, mouth hanging open, trying to breathe, eyes full of fury.
“Because,” Montego said, as if answering an unspoken question through gritted teeth, “you turned your back on the greatest killer in the world without making sure he was dead.” He began to saw with the stiletto, ripping a jagged line across the front of the Yuglid’s neck, just above the sternum. “I will not be some glassdamned song for your pissing race. I am Baby Montego and I will sing my own song.” The Yuglid shook and stirred, nearly bucking Montego from its back, but Montego’s braced arm did not release. He paused with the stiletto long enough to drive an elbow down against the Yuglid’s neck, the force of which seemed to break the creature’s will. The thrashing stopped, and Montego tossed aside the stiletto and grasped the Tall Man’s bestial head between his palms.
Twisting and pulling, he ripped its head off.
Black blood fountained from the severed neck. The creature slumped and fell, leaving Montego standing behind it, holding the head, which slowly slipped from his fingers. It was now, without the Yuglid blocking her view, that Kizzie understood why the Tall Man had thought Montego was dead. The big fighter was torn up, torso sliced to absolute ribbons, pieces of fat hanging from his stomach like he’d been worked over by a blind butcher. His pants were so heavy with blood that they were sliding down, and his mighty body heaved and trembled with every breath.
The eerie silence of death fell across the empty mansion. Montego looked down at himself, then up at Kizzie. “I know I look terrible,” he said, “but Kizzie Vorcien, would you like to get tea with me sometime?” His eyes went suddenly glassy, and he collapsed on top of the Yuglid’s corpse.
Kizzie summoned every ounce of strength she could muster, crawling across the marble floor until she reached him. He was completely still, no sign of life left in his body until she managed to get her cheek right up against his mouth and could still feel the heat of his breath. She raised her head, looking around at the carnage, wondering how she could possibly get them both out of here.
“I’d like that,” she said softly, and began to pull herself up onto her feet.
Idrian reached the medical tents with Braileer slung across his shield like on a stretcher, balanced on his shoulder. He’d covered miles at a dead run, listening to Braileer’s gasping breaths and panicked crying the entire way. Crying was good, he told himself. It meant the young armorer was still alive.
Idrian shoved his way past the Foreign Legion reserves guarding the medical camp and into the biggest of the tents, where a constant stream of wounded soldiers flooded in carried by National Guardsmen recruited for the dirty but necessary work of dealing with casualties. He set Braileer carefully down on one of the hundreds of bloody wooden slabs. “Glory!” he bellowed for the Ironhorns’ own surgeon. “Glory, get over here!”
“One moment,” came the answer from the other side of the tent. A dozen heads turned, surgeons and medics staring at Idrian briefly before returning to their work. Some of them did nothing more than distribute cureglass and then move their patients back out of the tent, while others worked with needles, knives, and bone saws to try and save those that needed more than sorcery to stabilize them.
Idrian was soon joined by a hatchet-faced man with dark Marnish skin, wearing a pair of armless spectacles balanced on the tip of his nose. Glory got his nickname from always giving a little more attention to soldiers who were wounded doing something “interesting,” no matter how stupid. He had his work cut out for him in a battalion of combat engineers.
“This is the kid with the fiddle, isn’t it?” Glory asked, scowling down at Braileer. He leaned over. “I’m going to need you to stop making that stupid sound,” he said in Braileer’s face. “It’s annoying, and it’s making it harder for you to breathe.”
“It’s called crying, Glory,” Idrian said. “And you hear it all the time.”
“It’s still annoying.”
“Take it easy on him,” Idrian snapped. His chest felt tight. He knew the poor kid was going to die, ever since their conversation about death. He was too soft for the army. Too good-hearted. Idrian should never have let him come on that mission. A dozen other recriminations bounced around inside his head, all while the phantoms of his madness laughed in his ears.
Glory moved up and down Braileer’s body with clinical precision, first checking his neck and then listening to his breath at the mouth and chest. “What happened?”
“You know that rumor about the thing I fought on top of Fort Alameda?” Idrian asked. He saw Braileer flail weakly with one hand and reached out to take it.
“Yeah.”
“It got him. It broke Squeaks’s arm and killed two of Valient’s soldiers, too. Jorfax won’t be that far behind me either. She had a horse fall on her.”
“Squeaks just broke an arm,” Glory sighed. In Idrian’s experience, the surgeon had just two emotions: mildly irritated and very irritated. “Glassdamnit, probably the same one.”
Idrian rocked back and forth on his heels as Glory continued his examination, biting his tongue so he didn’t yell at the surgeon to hurry up. It would only get on his nerves. Idrian looked around the tent and then toward the constant stream of wounded coming around a nearby hill. “How close are we to the battle?”
“Half a mile behind it,” Glory said without looking up. “Some of the Drakes’ dragoons brushed past us not long ago but they respected the medical sigils we’re flying. Thank the glass for that.”