Vansen wiped his eyes and lifted his warding-ax again. He wished he had a short sword or a stabbing-spear. The ax was useful for keeping the enemy at arm’s length, but its weight was wearing him down. The Funderlings must be stronger than they looked: two of the warders were still using theirs, although Jasper was carrying a pair of sharp rock picks instead, one in each hand.
“I’m ready.” Vansen wiped blood from his face and flicked it away. “Let them come.”
“You’re a good man, Captain,” Jasper said abruptly, eyes on the darkness beyond the barrier. “I had you wrong, I confess. You’re nearly a Funderling yourself, if a scrape on the tall side. I don’t mind dying with you at all.”
“Nor I you, Wardthane.” Vansen wished he had something to drink. They had finished the last of their water skins an hour before and his mouth was dry as the Xandian desert. “But first let’s take a few more of these unnatural things with us…”
Jasper’s reply was lost in the roar of the attack. A small, dark shape leaped up onto the top of the barrier, then quickly fell away again, howling, guts spilling from a blow of one of the warders’ axes. Two or three more figures swarmed up to take its place, one of them thrusting a blazing torch into Sledge Jasper’s face so that he had to lean back to avoid being burned. Vansen slammed the blade of his weapon into the torch-bearer, piercing what felt like leather armor and skin, although it was impossible to tell if the blow was mortal or not. A moment later he and one of the other warders were wrestling with another of the shapes which had come scrambling over the top, a drow with a long, pointed knife that sliced Vansen’s forearm below his chain mail and almost reached his face before he tightened his hands on the attacker’s arm. He squeezed as hard as he could and heard a thin shriek above the tumult as the drow’s wrist broke in his grip. The creature dropped the knife, but before Vansen could pull it to him and snap its neck the drow fought its way free and fell to the ground on the defenders’ side of the barrier.
Something large now loomed up before him, blocking the torchlight. Jasper bent and clubbed the drow beneath their feet with one of his picks. Vansen felt it go limp, but his attention was almost entirely taken by the thing before him, one of the huge ettins. The creature’s rumbling growl shook his bones. Vansen brought his ax down hard on its head even as it reached for Jasper, but the ax bounced off the plated skull without doing any discernible damage. Ignoring him, the ettin closed one of its huge, bearlike paws around Jasper, lifting the small man off the ground and bringing him toward its maw. Vansen grabbed at its heavy arms but it knocked him away, flinging him against the corridor wall like a child throwing a doll. He slid to the floor. He was struggling to get back onto his feet to help Jasper when a flash of lightning and booming crack of thunder turned the entire passage into skull-shattering day—a second of the brightest bright light and a piercing, painful thump of sound that felt like two giant hands clapped over his ears, and then Ferras Vansen knew no more.
A thousand artists could never paint such horror, Matt Tinwright thought as he cowered in a doorway. A thousand poets, all of them a thousand times greater than himself, could never tell it all. Southmarch was under attack. Many of the buildings around Market Square were aflame, but no one was trying to put them out. At least a dozen bodies lay within Tinwright’s view, arrows jutting from their backs. The air was full of smoke but he could smell something else as well, an unfamiliar odor, sweet yet nauseating as decaying flesh. It made his eyes burn and his throat and chest ache.
Dozens of strange armored shapes continued to fire arrows down into the square from atop the huge thorny black trunks that had grown across the water and over the wall. Other invaders had already clambered down on ropes and had slaughtered dozens of other hapless Southmarchers before Durstin Crowel and his guards had managed to push them back. Small knots of fighting had spread all over the square, men and monsters hacking each other in a strange near-silence: even the screams of the wounded and dying seemed muted, as though the smoke hanging in the air somehow muffled the cries.
Hendon Tolly was here in Market Square, too, and fighting fiercely, his black surcoat with the red boar clearly visible across the square, the black plume in his helmet waving like another puff of smoke. The castle’s lord protector stood high in the stirrups of a great warhorse, swinging a sword and shouting to his companions as they milled around him in the chaos of the fight. They had driven most of the attackers back into the shadows of the giant thorns, shadows that grew larger as the sun dropped down behind the western walls, but they could not make the Qar retreat and more of the fairy-warriors were now swarming across from the mainland on the thorn bridges.
Another thin shout went up from the castle folk who were struggling, like Tinwright, to get away from the fighting. A vast shape on a heavy battle charger had just come clanking into the square with another troop of soldiers, these armored and caparisoned in the crimson and gold of Landsend. It was Avin Brone, up and fighting despite his age and illness, looking a little like a teapot in his rounded cuirass, his beard halfway down his chest. The old man swung an ancient two-handed sword as he rode into the knot of fairies around Hendon Tolly with his men close behind, forcing the enemy to break and scatter. A few of the Southmarch folk cheered to see it.
Still, it seemed all but hopeless. Tinwright knew he should be fighting, but he had no weapon and no knowledge of how to use one. In any case, he was terrified.
I’m a poet! And a coward—I know nothing of war! I should never have come back! But Elan M’Cory and Tinwright’s mother had left everything behind here when they fled to the safety of the inner keep, including the money he had given them—money Matt Tinwright could not afford to lose. But now I shall be dead for the sake of a couple of starfish. Why wasn’t I born rich… ?
More Twilight People were dropping from the huge black trunks like beetles tumbling out of a rotten log. For a moment it seemed the newcomers might overwhelm the couple of hundred Southmarch soldiers, but whatever else his faults, Hendon Tolly was no coward: he and several of his men held the attackers off as Berkan Hood, the lord constable, rounded the rest of the defenders into some kind of order and began to back them away across the square in slow retreat, shields raised so that the fairy arrows bounced harmlessly away.
“Fall back!” came Brone’s muted voice. “Fall back to Raven’s Gate!”
Some of the noncombatants had realized what was happening and were running along the arcades at the edge of Market Square, urging all who were hiding there to flee over Market Road Bridge to the inner keep before the guards closed and secured the gate.
Can it be? Tinwright’s heart felt as heavy as lead. They are surrendering the outer keep entirely?
A moment later he realized that if he didn’t move quickly he would be part of what was surrendered. The colonnade along his side of the square was blocked with abandoned carts and other rubbish left behind by the terrified residents when the attack began; Tinwright had no choice but to wrap his arms over his head and run across the open cobbles as fast as he could, positive that any moment he would feel the horrible pain of the arrow that would take his life.
A few missed shots skittered across the stones beside him, but he reached the crowd on the bridge and ducked past a wagon some fool was trying to bring across as soldiers screamed and tried to shove the creaking cart back off the bridge. Protected for a moment by the bulk of the thing, Matt Tinwright joined the panicky crowd as they struggled over Market Road Bridge and up the hill toward the gate to the inner keep, packed so close together that he could smell the sharp, ugly stink of other people’s fear.