Blood in the Valley Page 15

  As the cheering subsided, Vohl raised his voice. “Now, the details are pretty simple. We have the main gate district. We’ll have a detachment from the Legion with us. Report to your Watch foremen and they’ll place you. Together, we’ll not let one of those inhuman filth over the walls!” The cheer started up again. Grinning now, Vohl pumped a fist into the air and bellowed, “Not a one, do you hear me?!?!”

  The gathering broke up with a racket, one group starting up a bawdy drinking tune. Vohl leapt down from the table to find Muddle laughing. “Perhaps you ought to make a run for the Assembly? You could do a damned sight better than that bed-wetting whelp, Aigann.”

  Vohl glared at the half-breed. “Not here, all right?”

  Muddle’s smile faded a degree. He shrugged. “If you say so. But something’s got to be done. We can’t leave—”

  “Not here, I said!” Vohl hissed, glancing about. “There are too many ears.”

  Muddle nodded, craggy features going lugubrious as he retreated into himself. Vohl noticed Danelle lingering in the shadows under the placard of the tavern, seeming smaller than her remembered her, shriveled up within the folds of her robe. He stepped close to her. “Did Jayce tell you anything else before he left?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Do you...” Vohl fought down a lump in his throat. “Do you have any sense that he’s still out there? Alive, I mean?”

  Her eyes flared out of the gloom of her cowl. “He is alive! He must be.”

  Recalling Aigann’s similarly vain insistence on the survival of Vennitius, Vohl could only nod and look away, try to ignore the sickened, pained tightening in his gut. Did you take one risk too far this time, old friend? He said to her finally, “I’ll need you, Danelle. Whatever strength you have in you, I’ll need your best.”

  Before she could answer a bugle trilled in the near distance. Citizens still milling outside the Loving Imp froze and went silent. Vohl stiffened and looked south, felt his innards chill with the realization that the alarm came from the main gate. The bugle sounded again, was joined by others, sputtering to life in a chain tracing along the battlements. Shouts carried across the rooftops, coupled with the clang of metal.

  Vohl locked eyes with Muddle for a moment before roaring, “To your posts!”

  The crowds broke free of their lethargy and poured south through the streets towards the main gate, the centaurs leading the way, hooves pummeling the cobblestones. As Vohl followed, Muddle at his side, Danelle huffing to keep up with them, he caught snatches of Eredynn folk exchanging brief embraces with loved ones, occasionally handing off keening babes or shoving youngsters into darkened doors.

  Vohl wondered how many were giving their final farewells.

  Steel squalled ahead and Vohl saw the flash of Legion armor as men fought to hold the battlements and the blocky gatehouse of the city’s main entrance. Tattered shapes heaved themselves over the crenels, moving stiffly, strangely as the Legionnaires pummeled them down. A mist hung glimmering and blue-black in the tossing light of torches.

  Nearing the fight, Vohl realized it was no haze, at all, but swarms of flies, souring the air with a gagging sweetness he recognized as rot. Mounting the stairs to the gatehouse his skin tingled not only with the insectine assault but an otherworldly chill. Muddle pounded up the stairs behind him, but others slowed, faces slackened, motions taking on the numb shuffle of men paralyzed.

  “Remember your homes!” Vohl screamed, pausing near the top of the stairs to draw his sword and wave it. “Come on!”

  He turned and vaulted the last steps to join the fray. A Legionnaire was down in front of him, the man’s helm off and his face clawed to bloody streaks as a pale, emaciated figure pawed for his throat. Vohl drove the point of his sword into the thing’s kidneys, noting absently that the attacker was no goblinoid. Thyrrian steel grated against spine and caught. The figure stiffened and then, astonishingly, stood and began to turn, nearly yanking Vohl’s weapon from his grip. Vohl put his boot to the thing’s buttocks and jerked the blade free. The figure went down on the stone of the walkway but began to rise again, turning its face to Vohl.

  The attacker was a man. No, Vohl corrected himself through a screaming daze of revulsion, a dead man.

  Vohl backed away, stunned. A shape came over the battlements to his right and filthy-nailed hands scrabbled at his shoulder, catching in the links of his mail coat. Vohl flinched, retreated before a gaunt, leering visage of torn, dangling meat and grinning teeth. Eye sockets had been gouged empty, gory cavities that still seemed to see—see right into his fluttering heart.

  A hoarse bellow at his back shook Vohl and he ducked, already knowing it was best to be down when battle-lust seized a half-hobgoblin. Muddle’s axe whistling through the air over his head and crunched into the living corpse’s forehead, carried away the top of the skull in a fan of putrescence and flipping the thing backwards off the battlement.

  Vohl regained his feet with a bawl of outrage as shock faded behind disgust. The dead thing he’d stabbed before moved for him and he thrust again, this time for the throat, the point of his blade punching through windpipe and catching the vertebrae beneath the skull. He sawed back as the corpse fumbled for his face and the skull flopped backward off the shoulders, dangling by tags of meat as the body stumbled and went down.

  Another mounted the battlements and Vohl backhanded it in the chest, hammering the pommel of his weapon into its sternum with a crackle. It toppled from sight, but a hand snagged his sleeve and yanked him forward to the wall, slamming him into stone and blasting the breath from his chest.

  Dead hands sprouted over the wall for his face. For a moment, Vohl beheld the tide of the dead below. Animate corpses piled up at the base of the wall, allowing their lifeless comrades to climb over them, mounting their shoulders, their heads to scramble for purchase on the uneven masonry. Horrid, death-marred faces stared up, locking him in their collective, icy thrall. Another creature gripped the edge of the crenel near Vohl and reached for him, mouth opening to expose gaped, jagged-broken teeth.

  Something drew Vohl back from the edge, a force that seemed all around him, a pressure tingling on the skin. It held him hovering inches off the walkway for a moment longer before setting him gently down. To his left stood Danelle, hands aglow with the power she’d just wielded to rescue him.

  As the dead boiled over the battlements before them, Danelle turned in that detached, lightly-moving way that told Vohl she was in her spell craft and pointed a hand. A sheet of lightning scythed forth, blasting stone from the top of the crenels and wiping the attackers away with a crash that nearly rocked Vohl backwards off the walkway.

  Heartened by the show of power, the citizenry rushed up the stairs to the wall to fill gap left by the sorcerous detonation, slashing with swords until the folly of hacking things that no longer lived became apparent then hammering with staves, hammers, and the flats of blades. They fought with abandon, mindlessly—better to not think on their horrid work—driving the dead back or containing breakthroughs long enough to gang up and chop animate bodies to pieces that could no longer threaten.

  The first deadly, desperate minutes of the fight dragged into hours. Dawn became a tight, yellow-white band of light on the horizon that under-lit the overcast churning red. The fight settled into deadly drudgery, give and take, fill the gaps and then scramble on to the fresh ones.

  After what seemed an eternity of violence, Vohl slumped against the battlement for a moment of rest, the peril in his area momentarily stabilized. Breathing hurt, his ribs protesting in shivers of electric pain that tightening to knots about bruises. Perspiration seared in shallow gashes along his forearms and one cheek. His skull throbbed and his stomach roiled, ready to empty what traces of food and wine remained. He fought to not look over the wall and see the writhing mass of things below.

  Horns blared harshly from the knolls opposite the gatehouse. A great jeer rose and a mass of darkness glittering with torches lurched forward. Goblin
drums thundered but were lost in the surf-roar of thousands of feet. The charge narrowed with those fastest and most eager stretching the great mob into a wedge careening for the city. From other knolls poured similar formations and the plains to the northeast seethed with the goblinoid tide.

  Vohl put his head down on a merlon and sighed, weary past fear, consumed now only with the resignation of the doomed. He felt a hand on his shoulder but did not recoil, sensed the warmth of living flesh in the presence. He looked up to smile at Muddle.

  “We made it home, at least,” Vohl said quietly. “It’s not so bad to die here.”

  “I’m not planning on dying,” Muddle replied, his free hand clenching about the handle of his axe, angled over his shoulder.

  “Oh?” Vohl said. “You plan on turning that back by yourself?”

  Muddle chuckled. “Well, I had hoped on you helping a little in that.”

  Vohl straightened from the battlement and took up his sword again, gave the weapon a testing swing. “Sure.” He glanced past Muddle’s bulk and took in the battered, worn faces of the other citizens, most of them quiet now, the fight of before largely won. They watched the horde approach with expressions that must surely mirror his own; exhaustion that had taken even the sting of death away.

  “The appetizer is over, everyone!” he called. “It’s time for the main course!”

  The bravado only having just left his lips, Vohl felt some of it drain away as a shrill cry clawed across the heavens. A winged shape parted the overcast, sent clouds purling away to either side in wild, sun-painted vortices. Leathery wings spread, carried a long, sinuous shape down towards the city, mighty claws and borne fangs glimmering even at a great distance. The beast let loose another shriek and stroked its wings, began a sharp dive.

  Vohl hefted his sword to his shoulder, sighed, and waited die.

  LONADIEL HEARD THE reptilian call from the air behind them and glanced at Satayebeb. Her eyes remained on the horde, rushing to reach the walls, and on the struggle still raging between Eredynn’s defenders and the living dead.

  He turned and looked to the sky, wasn’t surprised to see the winged shape there. Alarm tinged his relief, though. Something about the silhouette didn’t seem right, nor did the angle of the beast’s descent. He thought he spied a rider on the creature’s back. A moment later, as the wyrm neared and its mouth stretched open, frothing with an internal blaze that trailed sulfurous smoke in its wake, his unease became terror.

  “Mistress!”

  A shaft of fire hammered down on the goblinoid charge, only dozens of yards shy of storming the walls. The infernal blaze panned through the mass’ center, cleaving it evenly as howls of triumph became screams of agony and terror. The passage of the wyrm shook the air, the monster swooping barely fifty feet over the knoll before beating its wings to give it altitude again. Below it the goblin attack wave splintered and came apart, dozens writhing in the inferno, hundreds more spraying away from them. The stampede reversed as the little brutes forgot bloodlust or plunder and scurried for survival.

  The dragon—Lonadiel could see with shock now what it was—banked over Eredynn, its spread wings momentarily blotting out the spires of the city temples as it came back around. The mouth opened again with a great wheeze warning of another torrent of hellish ejecta. Wings clapped the air and it careened back towards the horde, blazing apocalypse belching forth.

  Lonadiel dove to the ground instinctively, a wave of heat and smoke rushing over him. He struggled to breathe as caustic fumes seared the mucous from his nostrils and wormed down into his lungs to burn. Flames bit at his hair and the back of his neck. Sobbing for air, he rolled, beating his helm free to smother the fires slithering into flesh. His armor became a crushing, burning weight.

  The dragon shot by, its sweep dragging a torrent of howling wind behind it that churned the flames it had birthed to further fury. Lonadiel rolled again and staggered to his feet, beating out cinders at the fringes of his cloak. Around him, goblinoids poured through the roiling haze, throwing aside weapons and packs bulging with ill-gotten gains, trampling one another in their desperation to get clear.

  Even the tight blocks of the Blood-drinkers began to fray, hobgoblins carried away in the tide, others forgetting their cohesion as they slashed about in mindless fury. Lonadiel caught sight of Groon Blood-drinker, the warlord stomping through his kin, bellowing orders to hold tight. But the hobgoblin’s eyes rolled in the sockets, gone yellow-white with near-panic.

  From the battlements of Eredynn, cheers began to rise, almost disbelieving the change in fortune.

  Satayebeb stood motionless on a patch of untouched earth, ringed with dragon fire that had somehow not touched her. Lonadiel stumbled to her side, felt calm wash through him as he joined her, an unearthly eye of composure in this storm of anarchy. Her gaze followed the dragon’s course, streaking over the plains, northeast of Eredynn, hosing flame across the horde as it passed and glided out over the lake.

  “The wizard,” she said through gritted teeth, nodding as the dragon curved back towards the city in obvious preparation for another pass. Its rider was obvious now, a hand upraised. “Clearly, I have underestimated him. The wyvern must have failed.”

  “What are we going to do?” Lonadiel asked, his voice a ravaged croak.

  Satayebeb shook out her hands. Lonadiel saw the glimmer of cyan about her fingernails and stepped back—was pressed back by a tangible billow of power.

  “When it comes in again,” Satayebeb said, “I will teach that beast the folly of serving such a master.”

  ILLAH SAW THE WINGED shape roar over the column then heard the cacophony of destruction from the front. Fire ravaged the sky and screams carried over the hills. Goblins poured over the tops and cascaded down the reverse slopes, churning those left to the rear into confusion. They boiled past her prison cart, rocking it back and forth as the press ground the unfortunate ones against it. Her hobgoblin guards jeered at their smaller cousins for their cowardice, lashing about with tulwars, cutting goblins down and being forced to engage others who forgot their fear enough to realize their kin were dying and who was doing the killing.

  The hobgoblin whose wrist Illah had broken was thrown back against the bars near her perch. A pair of goblins scrambled over the brute but it caught one by the throat, lifted it high to bring it crashing down on the second one with a crackle of shattered skull.

  Illah caught the flicker of the hobgoblin’s key ring in its belt and saw her chance. She shot forward, snaking an arm through the bars. A twist from the hobgoblin carried the keys away and her fingers came to rest on the handle of its dagger, instead. She jerked the blade free of its sheath and thrust her other arm out, wrapped it around the top of the hobgoblin’s skull to draw it back to her. A surprised gurgle escaped its throat as its own weapon cleaved windpipe.

  Illah gritted her teeth as the hobgoblin stiffened and slid to the ground, the keys going with it. Twisting, stretching, pushing joints to the edge of their tolerance, she slipped the tip of the dagger under the key ring, twitched it upwards. Around the cart, the panic and fighting raged on, the air going hazy with hellish-stinking smoke and further disguising her efforts. Finally, she drew the key ring to the fingertips of her left hand, got a grip and pulled it free.

  Undoing her shackles took moments; releasing the lock on her prison, less. One of her other minders burst through a tangle of fleeing goblins, saw her with widening eyes and rushed to stop her. She flung the hatch open with a squall of rusty hinges, caught the hobgoblin in the face with enough force to shatter fangs. The hobgoblin stumbled backwards, blood pouring from gashes across its face. Illah streaked over it, her dagger flashing under a floundering guard to sink to the hilt under its unarmored armpit.

  Taking up her slain jailor’s tulwar, Illah turned slowly.

  Goblins ignored her, the stream of them parting to avoid her like a flood against a boulder. But another hobgoblin emerged from the chaos, hurling goblins aside to bawl a challenge.
The tulwar in her fist an unfamiliar and clumsy weight, Illah raised it to parry, catching the hobgoblin’s furious overhand slash on the flat of the blade. She pivoted on her heel as the brute’s momentum carried it past and drove the dagger into its back. It stiffened and dropped to its knees, gave a sigh and plopped face-first into the dirt.

  Smoke and flame obscured all. Illah began forward, knowing a Yntuil could easily disappear into the madness and never be missed. But she’d only gotten a few steps before something stopped her, held her limbs frozen.

  I love you, Illah...

  No, Illah thought, shaking her head as the confrontation replayed in her mind. He is lying. He must be.

  Everything I did was for us.

  Liar! Illah tried to force her feet forward. But Lonadiel was there, in her muscles, in her nerves, still holding on to her.

  Tell me you don’t still love me.

  Illah dragged forward a step. The tulwar dropped from her hand and she slumped to her knees. A sob shook her frame, then another. Goblins scurried by in the haze, one pausing with a curious eye before its fellows shoved it onward before them.

  Now who’s lying?

  Illah clenched a fist and beat it against her head. I have to go. I have to. There is nothing here for me now.

  If that was so, you would already be gone.

  No!

  Tell me you don’t still love me.

  “I can’t...” Illah said aloud, her voice a forlorn croak lost in the chaos.

  Then stay with me.

  Illah looked back to the prison cart, the slain guards and the open hatch still swinging on its hinges. She pulled herself to her feet again, took a step away then a step back. She looked skyward, sought some sign from Zaiden, from any of the Gods who claimed to love mortals.

  Only churning smoke met her gaze.

  Stay, Illah...

  JAYCE CLUNG TO THE dragon’s back with all the strength left to him. The wind lashed across his body, threatened to tear him free. The fumes of the monster’s breath trailed over him, its oily, naptha stench tearing his lungs at every breath, burning in his eyes. Drawing his cowl across his mouth barely helped. He tried to straighten up, get a look at what was happening and maybe get above the choking haze.