Logan knew better. Crouched down, moving quickly from position to position, he warned the defenders to be ready. “They’ll come again right away,” he told them. “When they do, trigger the flamethrowers first. That won’t stop them, but it will slow them. Fire into those who get past for as long as it takes them to reach the last of the snap spikes, then fall back to the redoubts.”
He could have ordered them to hold their positions, to keep the enemy from breaching the forward defenses. But he already knew that this would be impossible, that they wouldn’t last the day no matter what they did. He didn’t want them all killed when they were only delaying the inevitable. They would have to blow the bridge if they were to escape.
Helen Rice came up to him, crouched low, face stricken. She gestured at the carnage. “How much more of this can they take?”
“More than we can. These are once–men, Helen. They don’t feel anything the way we do. Dying isn’t a deterrent. They’ll keep coming at us until they break through.” He put his hand on her shoulder, steadying her. “I’m sorry, but we aren’t going to be able to hold them for long. Go back and tell them at the command post to stand ready to blow the bridge. When we fall back from the redoubts, I’ll give you the signal. When you see it, trigger the detonator.”
She fled back off the bridge at once, happy to be away from the killing field. Logan took up a fresh position at the center of the barricades. He peered out across the carpet of dead and wondered what the enemy would try next. He was already worrying that the bridge defenders weren’t sufficiently prepared to deal with it.
He was right. When the attack came, it took an entirely different form. While they were searching the far shore for signs of movement, dozens of skrails swept down out of the skies in long, looping lines and dropped canisters of flammables that exploded on contact. In seconds, defenders and defenses alike were engulfed in flames, and everything at the center of the bridge became clouded with roiling black smoke. As soon as that happened, the once–men attacked again, charging out of the flats and onto the bridge, clambering over the remains of their fallen comrades, rushing through the invisible, porous bodies of the ravening feeders.
The bridge would have been lost and most of the defenders with it except that the prevailing winds blowing down the canyon from the ocean cleared the smoke away in seconds. The fires continued to burn, and a handful of the defenders died in the conflagration, but the rest stood their ground, heeding Logan Tom’s orders and triggering the flamethrowers and firing their automatic weapons as their attackers closed. For the first time since the attack began, Logan used his staff, shattering the center of the enemy rush, leaving the wings to more conventional weapons.
Everywhere, the feeders leapt and dove among the dead and dying, joyful scavengers of the dark, terrible emotions expended.
Again, the attack was broken, leaving hundreds more of the once–men dead and dying on the bridge span.
But Logan had seen enough. The damage to the forward defenses was extensive, and the central portion of the bridge was a shambles. On the next attack, either the defenses or the defenders or both would collapse, and they would all be swept away.
“Everyone back!” he ordered them. “Take cover in the redoubts!”
They retreated at once, crouched low as they backed toward the half dozen redoubts, carrying their weapons with them. Logan went last, still watching the smoke–clouded south bank and the movement he could see taking place within. Another attack was coming, and it was coming sooner than he would have liked.
He took a quick head count of those missing, and then pulled out those too badly injured to do much good and sent them back to Helen and the command post. He redistributed the others so that the redoubts were as evenly defended as was possible. But they were down to less than fifty able–bodied men and women, counting those getting ready for the flight north, so he could count on no more than five or six for each redoubt.
It wasn’t enough. But then, what number would be in the face of this enemy?
He scanned the far bank once more, searching for something that would tell him what was happening. They wouldn’t use the skrails again; they knew the defenders would be looking for that. Something else, he thought. But what?
Then a dark mass pushed through the smoke and crowded onto the bridge. Dozens of Elves, chained together like slaves, their hands bound behind them, their ankles shackled so they could do no more than shuffle, were being marched in front of a fresh body of once–men. The Elves had a desperate, helpless look to them, faces stricken, eyes rolling wildly. He could hear them crying out, begging for help. He could see their terrible injuries and their blood–streaked limbs.
In the very center was Simralin.
Logan Tom experienced a moment of heart–stopping shock. Simralin! The once–men were using her–using all of the Elven prisoners–as a living shield. If you want to kill us, they were saying, first you have to kill them.
For a second he was so stricken that he couldn’t think straight. They must have captured her in the Cintra. They must have forced her to talk, forced her to reveal that he was a Knight of the Word and in love with her. Otherwise, how would they know to place her right at the center of things like this? How would they know that this, of all possible tactics, would undo him? The choice he was being given was both horrific and impossible to make. The defenders surrounding him were yelling wildly, demanding orders, unsure themselves of what to do. He felt frozen by what had happened, unable to act.
How could he kill Simralin?
Then, eyes still scanning the faces of the Elves being marched toward them, he saw Praxia, too. For just a second, he thought he must be imagining it. But no, there she was—Praxia–her small, dark pixie–face unmistakable amid the other, lighter–complexioned faces.
But Praxia was …
He had buried her …
Then he noticed that there were no feeders among the prisoners, not one dark shape in all that hapless mass of potential victims.
He caught his breath. It was a trick.
“Fire!” he ordered at once. He levered his black staff and roared in fury and fresh shock. “Now! Fire!”
The defenders pulled the triggers on their automatic weapons and the Elven wall collapsed and then disappeared in smoke, gone in an instant, vanished completely. An illusion, as Logan had realized just in time—a trick to make the defenders think the Elves were hostages when in fact they were not. It had almost worked. Logan had almost been taken in by it. His feelings for Simralin had very nearly persuaded him.
That old man, he thought suddenly. That old man had found him out and used what he had learned–maybe from his spies, maybe from Kirisin–against him. He could still see the other’s cunning face, the knowing smile, the certainty that he owned an eight–year–old boy whose parents and brother and sister he had just killed.
Or maybe this wasn’t about him at all, but about Kirisin. Maybe the use of Simralin was an effort to flush him out and cause him to expose himself while at the same time overrunning the defenders of the bridge. The old man would still covet the boy’s power over the Elves, and would not hesitate to use his sister against him.
Logan felt a rush of hatred so intense that for a moment it threatened to overwhelm him completely.
The foremost ranks of once–men had reached the barricades and taken cover behind them. More were surging out of the flats, hundreds of them, thousands, screaming and brandishing their weapons, swarms of feeders rushing after. Logan’s defenders were firing into them, but the effect was negligible. The once–men had secured a foothold, and they wouldn’t stop now until they had it all, no matter how many were killed.