And, in the river beneath, the Aberrants were swimming across. 'It is time, Lucia,' Mishani murmured.
Lucia ignored her. She could see what was going on below as well as Mishani could. From their vantage point on the crest of the hill, the battle seemed strangely removed and insignificant in the last of the light, the deaths too distant to be real. Nuki's eye had gone now, leaving only a soft blue glow in the sky through which the stars were visible. The three moons, all of them full, had risen from the same horizon and were converging slowly. There was something eerily malevolent in their steady movement, heavy with purpose.
Four guards stood around them, doing their best not to glance at Lucia or the Sister who stood by her. Mishani waited for a reaction to her comment, then turned her head to regard the young woman at her side.
'Lucia, it is time,' she repeated.
Lucia slowly met her gaze, a deep sorrow in her eyes. For a moment, Mishani was struck by an awful thought: that Lucia would confess it was all a sham, that there were no spirits coming to their aid. But what she said instead was almost as worrying.
'Whatever comes after, Mishani, think well of me,' she murmured. 'I made a choice that nobody should ever have to make.'
Mishani did not reply. She sensed that she did not need to. There was no time to discuss this, anyway, for the Aberrants were almost across the river now. The soldiers on the south bank were riddling them with rifle balls as they swam, but there were too many of them to stop.
Lucia bowed her head and closed her eyes.
The change in the atmosphere was swift and immediately noticable. At first, Mishani thought it was the onset of the moonstorm, somehow beginning before the great satellites had aligned. But though it was similar, it was not that. The air tautened, stretching across the senses and bringing with it a sense of dislocation, a faint notion that the eyes and ears had become detached from the mind. The wind began to pick up, at first in sporadic gusts and then rising to a fitful bluster, whipping back and forth. Lucia's cropped blonde locks, now grown a little wild, began to lash against her cheeks; Mishani's newly cut hair did the same, escaping the jewelled combs she had used to tame it. She had the impression of movement on the periphery of her vision, slender, shadowy figures darting between the guards that surrounded them. But they were phantoms, and when she tried to catch them with her eye they were not there.
The surface of the river became a chaos of ripples, coldly glinting frills chasing each other with the switching of the wind. The Aberrants swam through, oblivious, cutting across the slow current of the Ko.
Then there was a howl, rising above the battlefield, and the first of them disappeared under the water.
The river was suddenly alive with a white churning. The Aberrants began to bay and shriek and hoot as their companions were sucked down, and the white froth turned pink. Spectral shapes, sinuous like eels, arced and slid among the Aberrants. They curled and swept and plunged, encircling their victims in the knots of their bodies and dragging them under as they dived. The Aberrants thrashed and twisted, but it did them no good. The river spirits caught them all, and none survived to reach the other side.
Some of the Aberrants, their fear of the spirits overriding even the urging of the Nexuses, tried to brake themselves at the river bank; but the momentum behind them tumbled them over, tripping those that followed, and in a clutter they slumped into the water. Hundreds more fell in that way, to be drowned in the Ko, until the Nexuses managed to gain control of the horde and check their assault. Gradually, the headlong rush dissipated, and the Aberrant army was still. Their only way to cross now was the Sakurika Bridge, and only a finite amount could cram onto that at once. The artillery, relentless, continued to pound them without mercy; but the animals paid no attention to the carnage being wreaked upon them, and whenever a hole was blown in the horde more simply moved in to fill it.
Seeing their enemy halted and frustrated, the forces of the Empire raised a triumphant cheer, echoed by the guards who stood on the hilltop with Lucia and Mishani. They gazed at her with fear and wonder and a kind of adoration, and though she did not see it through her closed eyes she sensed their emotion.
'I'm sorry,' she whispered, so quiet that only Mishani heard it; and Mishani felt a chill clutch of trepidation take her.
The air crawled with invisible conflict as the Sisters and Weavers engaged. The scope of their combat was immense. Not only did they seek to kill each other, and in greater numbers than had ever matched before, but they sought to manipulate the battlefield as well. The Weavers probed tendrils towards Lucia, trying to find her even though she, by dint of her unusual abilities, was invisible to them. They reached towards men's minds, to persuade generals to make rash choices, soldiers to turn on their brethren, to shift their fire-cannons so that they fired into their own allies. The Weavers were trying to take down the artillery positions that were accounting for so many of their troops, for they had no ranged weaponry to fight back with, but the Sisters worked to foil them, and thus far they had been successful.
Still, there were too many options, too many possibilities. Sooner or later, something had to get through. Yugi, Nomoru and Barak Zahn watched the battle on the bridge from horseback. They were down near the river bank, in the thick of the men but out of reach of the fighting. Here, a circle of soldiers and a Sister was gathered round a sapper who crouched with his lantern at the end of a fuse. The fuse was threaded through a long, thin pipe that was buried just beneath the turf. It emerged from the end of the pipe near the bridge, where it was connected to a package of hidden explosives. Detonating this one would detonate the others that had been placed around the structure, and bring the bridge down. In case anything went wrong, there was another sapper nearby who had a secondary fuse.
The Aberrants were cramming onto the bridge now, and though they were gaining ground the soldiers made them pay dearly for every inch. The boards of the bridge were slippery with fluids, and the combatants stumbled as they fought. Terrible wounds were sustained on either side as blades and claws chopped through flesh, sometimes severing cleanly, more often not. Men were opened to the bone from armpit to thigh, shrillings tore away faces from skulls, ghauregs were hamstrung and crippled. Up close, the savagery of man against animal was unparalleled.
'Pull them back,' Zahn said to the Sister. 'Prepare to blow the bridge.'
The Sister wordlessly passed on the order to another of her kind, nearer the front, who advised the general that she accompanied. The rising wail of a wind-alarm signalled the retreat, and at once the soldiers on the bridge began to back away, allowing more of the Aberrants to crowd in.
'Light it,' Zahn said to the sapper, who touched the flame to the fuse. It hissed into life and disappeared into the mouth of the tube, burning its way along the darkness within. Elsewhere, the secondary fuse was also being lit.
The soldiers had retreated to the south edge of the Sakurika now, and they pressed forward again, bolstered by riflemen who picked off the taller ghauregs with headshots.
The fuse sparkled its way through the tube, across the arch and up one of the spandrels of the bridge, accompanied by another which burned up a different route. Two tiny lights in the darkness, racing towards a single destination. With the bridge down and the river impassable, they had only the feya-kori to worry about, and the blight demons had yet to make an appearance.
The second fuse caught up with the first, and they reached the hidden package at the same time.
And went out, inches short of the end.
Yugi's vision was not sharp enough to see the fuses being extinguished, but it was not long before he realised that the bombs had not gone off. He saw the line of soldiers at the far end of the bridge bowing under the press of predators, and knew that it was about to collapse.