“Never doubted it.”
“Touched,” said Amris, amused but sincere.
“Stop talking before you start spitting blood.”
And she’s not wrong about that.
“The judge has spoken,” said Darya.
You’re damned right.
Not caring who saw, she moved as close to Amris as his armor allowed. Plate mail, when she tried, proved too uncomfortable to be any sort of pillow. She could imagine how bad it was for him—could feel a trace of it, for that matter—but he was relaxing nonetheless, slipping closer to sleep with every moment.
He’d done this a few times before.
The idea smoothed out the knots in Darya’s spirit. War, this large-scale fight, was new to her, comparatively new even to the soldiers, but familiar to the man at her side. Somebody she trusted knew what he was doing—and Gerant, as he’d always done for her, was keeping watch for danger.
She closed her eyes and felt both of them in her mind. “Wish this wasn’t happening,” she muttered, hearing her own words muddled with sleep, “but couldn’t ask for better people to see it through with.”
Chapter 35
“Climbing!”
And they were. Darya had no time to put a face or a voice to the warning. The twistedmen had reached the base of the walls, where arrows from above couldn’t reach them, and were swarming upward. Their claws dug into the wood, giving them hand- and footholds that a human army would never have had.
The midday sun was bright. Every hideous feature showed as the monsters came closer, and while they’d cringed and hissed when they first started climbing, they faced the walls and pressed onward.
Darya shot the last of her arrows, taking another twistedman in the side as it made for the wall. Then she dropped her bow and picked up one of the spears close at hand. It was little more than a long stick, sharpened between bouts of training and stockpiling at the same time that she’d been poisoning arrows, and it too was coated with venom.
“Hold!” came Hallis’s voice, steady through the noise, though it was as cracked and ragged as Amris’s had been. “Wait—”
Darya gripped her spear one-handed, drew her sword, and peered downward, watching as the mass of skinless muscle and barbed black teeth grew closer, estimating range as best she could.
“Ready?” she asked Gerant.
Always.
“Now!” Hallis roared.
Soldiers along the walls braced themselves and tipped up huge pots of hot oil. Black and tarry, the stuff slid down along the walls, engulfing the twistedmen who were too far up to retreat. It flowed over the faces of the uppermost, suffocating as it burned, not giving them the breath to cry out. Others, lower down or to the side, shrieked plenty.
Joy, equally hot and dark, flowed up through Darya, and she felt her lips slide back in a grin. “That’s right, you bastards.”
But there was little time for celebration. The oil didn’t cover every patch of the walls. Many of the twistedmen fell, dying, to join the others on the ground, but more followed, and some of the wounded only snarled and kept coming.
After heat came cold. Darya reached out to Gerant as she’d done a hundred times before, joining her focus with his power, and pointed her sword downward along the wall.
The spell wrapped her in an invisible blanket of ice for a heartbeat. Then it concentrated at her heart, ran down along her arm, and howled forth out of the tip of her sword. The twistedmen just below her stopped in place and writhed in pain as the water in their bodies froze. Amris was too far away to lend his strength, so neither died, but Darya saw the eye of one cave in with a spill of black ichor. Those around them flinched, and while they kept coming, they were slower.
Gerant’s presence vanished from Darya’s mind, and so, she knew, did the shield around her. Quickly she sheathed her sword again and grabbed the spear with both hands. It would come to blows very soon.
* * *
Death made up all the world.
No orders remained to be given. The vats of oil had spilled over the attackers; while more was heating, it would take time. Archery did little good now, with the twistedmen at such short range. The mages, the priests, and the Sentinels knew their business and were carrying it out with no need of Amris.
Now there was only the weight and motion of the sword in his hands, the backward swing to gather momentum and then the thrust or the slice, the wet, yielding squelch of flesh and the jarring scrape of bone, the withdrawal and the next assault. Twistedmen came up like grim children’s toys, met Amris’s blade, and fell back screaming, when he left them a head to scream with. Claws raked along his armor, and the air was too full of noise for him to notice the shriek of sharp chitin on metal.
