The captain got to his feet and found that he’d kept his sword. His chamois gloves were ruined and his left hand was bleeding where he’d grabbed the blade too high, above the area left dull for such purposes. He’d twisted his ankle, and he had to blink rapidly bring the world, spinning around him, back into focus.
The thing twitched, and he buried his point in the eye he could reach.
The courtyard fire glimmered on the belly of the second wyvern.
Forty archers threw shaft after shaft, so that the fortress seemed to have a new column of sparks rising into the fire-lit monster, and something happened – not suddenly, like the strike of the siege shaft, but gradually the wyvern’s wings tore, holed, it lost lift and screamed in fear as the men below brought it down and it realised there was no escape from the deadly upwards rain of steel. It slipped lower and lower, wings beating more frantically, turned sharply and suddenly one mighty wing failed. It plummeted to the hillside and crashing down with such weight and speed that the captain felt the steps shake under his boots.
‘Sortie!’ the captain shouted. He meant to shout, but it came out as more of a croak . . . although it was understood, and his eight armoured knights had the gate open and were away down the road, led by Sauce.
As the courtyard stilled it showed twenty dead people – dead or terribly maimed. A girl of fifteen or so screamed and screamed, and the woman who had thrown the barrel bent and gathered her into her arms.
A child tried to drag himself by his arms, because he had no legs.
Nuns were suddenly pouring from their dormitory – ten, twenty, fifty women, surrounding the injured and the dead in a storm of grey wool and clean linen, spreading out to access the scale of the dead, injured and traumatised. The captain slumped against a wall, his right leg a torrent of pain, and wished he could just slide into unconsciousness.
She screamed again and again. His eyes flickered to her but only after a long look did he see that most of the left side of her upper torso was gone. He couldn’t believe she was alive, or screaming. The woman who had saved his life was covered in her blood – shiny with it, trying to help her – and there was nothing to be done.
He wished the screaming woman would just die.
A pair of nuns wrapped her tight in a sheet, round and round, and the sheet turned red as fast as they could wrap another layer, and still she screamed, becoming one voice amongst a chorus of anguish that filled the night.
He staggered up and stumbled to Michael, who lay crumpled against the chapel.
The boy was alive.
He looked around for Amicia. She had been standing right there – there, where the woman screamed. But she was gone. He shouted for a sister – for anyone – and four responded. They ran their hands carefully over him before lifting him away from Michael.
Men were shouting now. Even over the screams, their shouts were triumphant, but he ignored them and dragged himself over to Tom.
Tom was sitting against the stable. ‘Backplate took it,’ he said with a grin. ‘Christ, I thought I was done.’ He pointed at the sword. ‘Nice trick, that.’
‘Half-sword versus wyvern,’ the captain said. ‘A standard move. All the best masters teach it.’ He stripped away the ruin of his left glove and wrapped it tight around his cut. ‘I just need more practice.’
Tom chuckled. ‘Sauce just killed t’other, I’ll wager,’ he said, pointing at the cheering archers.
Sure enough, the next moments brought the mounted sortie back through the main gate, dragging the head of the second wyvern. Brought to earth by fifty arrows, it had died on their lance tips without injuring a single human.
Tom nodded. ‘That was well done, Captain.’
The captain shrugged. ‘We were ready, we laid our trap, you burned their camp and surprised them, and they still killed our people.’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t ready enough. I was caught lollygagging.’
Tom shrugged back. ‘They killed a lot of people.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘But not many of our people.’
‘You’re a hard bastard, Tom Mac Lachlan.’
Bad Tom shrugged, obviously taking it as a compliment, then something caught his eye in the chapel. He wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled something bad.
‘What?’ asked the captain.
‘Ever notice how they’re always smaller when they’re dead?’ Tom asked. ‘It’s just the fear that makes ’em seem so big.’
The captain nodded. He was looking at the wyvern too, and he had to admit that it was smaller than it had seemed in the fight. And it looked different. Paler. A mass of wounds and cuts and barbs.
Almost pitiful.
Tom smiled and started to get to his feet, and the Abbess was there.
He expected anger or recriminations from her, but she merely extended a hand and took his.
‘Let us heal your people,’ she said.
The captain nodded, still pressing his glove tight around his hand. There was a lot of blood. She got an odd look on her face, just before he fainted in her arms.
Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus
Deep in the marches of the next night, the enemy attacked the castle of Albinkirk.
Ser Alcaeus had passed beyond fatigue. He was in a world lived one heartbeat at a time, and events passed him in a series of illuminated flashes, as if lightning was playing on all of them.
There were some assaults on the walls of the castle, but unlike the low stone curtain walls of the town the castle walls were too high and too well maintained for the flood of Wild creatures to climb. The handful of beasts who made it to the top were killed.
But every attack cost him a little more.
One flash was a fight with an irk – a tall, thin, beautiful creature with a hooked nose like a raptor’s beak and chain armour as fine as fish scales that turned his sword again and again. And when, by dint of desperate strength, he knocked it to the stones, and its helmet spun away, the irk’s eyes begged for mercy. Like a man’s.
Alcaeus would remember that. Even as his dagger terminated it he registered that it, too, had humanity.
. . . and what followed was worse.
Because something came.
It was huge and foreboding, out in the horrifying fire-lit ruins of the town. It strode forward with a hideous shambling gait, and it was as tall as the city wall or taller.
It was alive.
And now it raised its staff – the size of a mounted knight’s heavy lance, or bigger – and a line of white-green fire struck the castle wall. The stone deflected in it a wash of white-green fire for as long as the terrified men on the wall might have counted to ten.
And then there was a rending crack and the wall breached, about ten paces to the left of the gate. The whole wall moved. Men fell – chunks of flint fell to crush the creatures below.
Then the monster raised its arms and seemed to call the stars down from the heavens, and as they began to plummet, Alcaeus fought not to fall on his face and hide.
The stars screamed down from the clear sky, falling to earth with an eerie, unearthly wail, and struck. One struck out in the fields, killing a wave of boglins. One struck in the centre of the town, and the cloud of fire reached into the heavens. The whole castle moved, and a cloud of dust reached like a fist into the heavans.
The third struck the castle wall mere feet from the great crack, and an enormous piece of masonry and stone fell outward with a crash.
Alcaeus ran for the breach, and found himself with another armoured man – Cartwright, he thought, or the Galle, Benois. The breach was narrow – two men wide.
They filled it with their bodies.
And the enemy came for them.
At some point, Benois fell. He was stunned, and Alcaeus tried to cover him, but the enemy reached a hundred hands and talons for his feet, sank claws into his flesh and dragged him to the edge of the wall, inch by inch. He screamed, unmanned with horror, and tried to rise. Boglin weapons cut him in the soft places not covered by armour, peeled his plate away.