'Are you hurt?' came a gruff demand. He shook his head, and the man patted him roughly on the shoulder. 'Then come on! We've got a bridge to win back!'
Heartened and strangely touched by the soldier's bravado, he grinned and shoved his way forward, with the other man closely accompanying him. At the point where the armies met, the battle lines were like liquid, flowing uneasily as men or Aberrants fell and the victors surged into the gap. Down here, in amongst the press instead of above it on horseback, the reek of sweat and the claustrophobia was overwhelming; Yugi was too charged with adrenaline to care.
He saw a man killed in front of him, and there in his place was a chichaw, a nightmarish thing like a giant four-legged spider, its head thick with curling horns like a ram's and with a long, beak-like jaw full of tiny teeth. He stepped into the gap left by the fallen man, his sword already sweeping a cold arc in the moonlight, trailing spatters of its last victim's blood.
The Aberrant lunged at him, lashing its forelegs, which he belatedly noted were edged with chitinous blades along their length. He pulled his body aside and they glanced across the leather armour on his chest, cutting a deep groove but not getting through; and he turned his sword stroke so that it hacked one foreleg off. The chichaw recoiled automatically at the pain. He used that instant to gather a great lateral swing into the creature's flank, opening it along the side so that its internal organs crowded out in a great steaming spume. It collapsed, juddering, in the throes of shock and imminent death.
A flash of movement on his right among the chaos of swords and teeth. He turned in time to see a furie charging him over the bodies of the fallen, a wall of muscle and tusk; but the corpses shifted beneath its weight and it stumbled, and then a great overhand chop from the soldier at Yugi's side severed it nearly in half. It slid in a broken heap at Yugi's feet, the sword still stuck in its ribs. Yugi wrenched the weapon out and threw it back to his saviour, who offered him a quick salute of thanks and was then swallowed by the fray.
Yugi lost track of time after that. His past and future contracted to a single instant in which he was still alive, where the aching of his body was a distant and dull nothing and his muscles and mind were geared only towards his blade. He cut and slashed, not out of conscious desire to kill but because it would make them stop trying to kill him. He moved along lines drawn by years of practice, dodging and slashing and parrying without thought as to where the next strike would go, not daring to imagine how close he had inched by death since this battle had begun, for to do so would break his nerve and crush him. At some point, he became aware of wounds on his body, deep cuts that he had felt as tiny nicks, dribbling warm blood across his skin. He ignored them. He could do little else.
And then a gap appeared in the moon-drenched phantasmagoria of horrors that faced him, and he saw the end of the bridge, a mere dozen metres away.
The sight of it caused him to pause. How long had he been fighting? How far had they come? He became aware of the yells and screams of men all around him, but there was a predominant tone which sounded like defiance. Their assault had been bolstered by other troops, men eager to lend their blades to a winning cause, and the rally had multiplied and invigorated the soldiers. Now, as the bridge neared and the Aberrants on the south of the Ko were being cut off from their reinforcements, the other soldiers pressed in with new zeal to drive the creatures against the river bank and into the water. The spirits embarked on a fresh frenzy, drowning any living thing that came within their reach. Yugi could taste cold, wet dirt on his lips. The air was becoming tighter still now, seeming to pluck at them, to lift them upwards. The moonstorm would soon be upon them.
Yugi wanted that bridge. With a cry that was more like a shriek, he fought on, and his men fought with him. Nomoru ran low through the dark forest of soldiers on the south bank, careful to stay behind the lines of riflemen that loosed shot after shot over the river. Far behind her, there was the churn of combat on one of the hills, where Zahn was making a stand against the Aberrants that had made for the artillery position. Now that Yugi was steadily advancing to plug the mouth of the Sakurika Bridge, the creatures were finding themselves becoming isolated and were steadily being whittled away on all sides. Nomoru could not see over the heads of the soldiers, but she heard the reports, spreading from the mouths of the Sisters, out through the troops.
Idiot, she thought. He will get himself killed.
She was thinking of Yugi. She had not imagined him as one for heroics – and indeed, she suspected that the stories being circulated were more than a little exaggerated for the purposes of morale – but it bothered her. As she slipped along the river bank, accompanied by the clip and stutter of rifle fire, she wondered how she would feel if he did die. Probably very little, she had to admit. Their affair so far had been pleasurable, but no more than that. She was a woman who had grown up amid the depravity and impermanence of the Poor Quarter of Axekami, and her heart was thickly calloused because of it. Death did not really affect her. She did not allow any feeling to dig in deeply. It was not a conscious decision, but it was her way and she had never felt it necessary to examine that or try to change it. She existed on a constant level, untroubled by spikes of wild happiness or terrible sorrow. She was a survivor, and survival was a business best enacted without the luxuries of emotion.
She brought her concentration back to the matter at hand. She had gone some way along the river bank now, heading away from the bridge. The explosives had been secreted carefully: that meant that they presented a very tricky target, concealed as they were in the corners of the stonework. Nomoru, with a sniper's instinct, had taken account of where they were and was making for the angle that would present the best shot.
Well, that was not strictly true: the easiest angle to fire from was right at the side of the bridge, but there was no way she was going to be that close to the Sakurika when it went up.
Judging that the time was right, she slipped through the riflemen. The bank dipped sharply towards the water, and she clambered carefully down it and settled herself into a crouch, so that she was below the level of the guns firing over her head. The River Ko, a mere foot or two away, was quiet now, though the ripples of its surface still flocked this way and that with the unpredictable wind. Nomoru gave it an uneasy glance. The river spirits were still down there. Nomoru had a suspicion that if she so much as touched the water they would take her too.
She put it out of her mind and allowed herself to relax. She ignored the threat of the river, the fusillade ripping over her head, the oppressive atmosphere of the oncoming moon-storm. She ignored the endless barrage of artillery bombardment, and the distant sound of swords clashing and the bellow of ghauregs and furies. She set her rifle against her shoulder.
Gods, it was dark. The greenish, steely light, bright as it was with the clear sky and the three moons out, was barely adequate. When the moonstorm began, she would hardly have a hope. She calculated where she thought the explosives were, sighting past the near spandrels and up into the corner of one of the further ones. There; it had to be there. She shifted her aim slightly, sighting on another spot. There too. She could not see them in the shadow, but unless they had moved somehow, that was where they were. She only had an angle on two of them; the rest were obscured by the architecture.
Most would have said it was an impossible shot. But Nomoru liked a challenge. The conflict between the Weavers and the Sisters around the bridge was so intense that Yugi could physically feel the atmosphere crawl. He looked more like some golem of the earth than a man now: he was caked and gloved in blood and muck, his muscles fuelled only by animal fury. They had stopped aching now: he had gone beyond tiredness. His strikes were unsubtle and clumsier than before, but enacted with more viciousness than he had believed himself capable of. His ears rang with the cries of men and he felt their burning adulation. Some faint, rational corner of his mind knew that they were inspired by him, but it was not clear why that was. He knew only that he fought in the forefront of a great column of soldiers that had carved its way deep into the clot of Aberrants on the south bank, and that at some point, as he wormed his boot through the slither of corpses to find solid ground, his foot came down on wood instead of dirt and he was on the bridge.