The man next to him fell back, his throat opening red down his chest. Amris turned and gutted the twistedman as it came up over the wall, then spun backward to shear half the skull off another. He knew the hole in the line next to him, and held it while that was needed, but saw no more of his replacement than a human figure with a spear; just so must the man in his turn have seen Amris earlier, when he’d come to relieve a wounded soldier.
Faces and names were no longer important. There were arms with weapons, and there were bodies that took blows so that the arms vanished and had to be replaced, flesh that fought and flesh that absorbed.
Ichor ran down the blade and over his gauntleted hands and arms. The stink of it was one with the smells of smoke and human blood, and the whole of it was familiar. Amris had been fighting the battle for a hundred years; he would be fighting it for a hundred more; there was nothing outside of the patch of wall he defended and the creatures swarming up to try and take it from him. Even his own body was remote in a fashion, the senses he needed focused on their targets and no others intruding into his awareness.
In such a state, he could have gone on shouting until the very cords of his throat snapped and not have felt the pain of it, any more than he felt the straining muscles in his arms and back, or the bruises and cuts where his armor had pressed through the padding and into his skin under some onslaught. He couldn’t have thought of many words—maybe his own name—but he could have kept shouting.
But there was no longer anything to be said.
* * *
Darya yanked her blade up and out of her opponent. Avoiding the rib cage was always the trick—that, and not letting the creatures run up the blade and bite you, as a few tried. She let her weight fall backward, shook an oncoming cramp out of her arm, and then saw the man on her right.
He’d lowered his spear. That wasn’t good. She didn’t turn, because the next twistedman would get into range soon, but she called to him out of the corner of her mouth. “Guard up, there!” It might be time to get a replacement up, if they had any.
The man stepped forward. The spear dropped.
“Shit,” said Darya.
A large clawed hand shot over the top of the wall and grabbed the soldier around his ankle. He didn’t even scream when the twistedman started to drag him toward it.
Darya hurled her boot knife at the forehead of the twistedman climbing up toward her. Sword in one hand, she flung herself over across the blood-slick top of the wall in a barely controlled leap, bringing the blade down on the twistedman’s arm as she landed. At the same time, she planted her free hand in the man’s chest and shoved him backward.
He yelledthen. So did the twistedman. It clawed its way up with its remaining hand, the stump of the other arm gushing ichor, and its head shot forward on its too-long, too-bendy neck, oversize jaws open and aiming for her face. Darya raised her blade to meet it.
One of the bird-things, clinging to the handholds the twistedmen had gouged in the wood, raised its own head and opened its beak. Rows of yellowed teeth looked like ivory spearheads. Between them a cloudy gray shape…danced? Twisted? Pulsed? Itmoved, and the movement suggested that if you watched long enough, you might be able to figure out what it was, and what the shape was, and any number of other things. Stare long enough, and you’d learn anything you wanted to know.
A sudden chill shot up Darya’s back and into her mind. She wrenched her head away and around, and the twistedman’s jagged black fangs snapped together just short of her cheek.
Instantly, rage took over. A stab and a slice sent the son of a bitch’s head falling to the wall, where she stamped a booted foot onto it just to be sure, reveling in the crunch. She wished it had still been alive and suffering—that thing that had almost hurt her, and all through its comrade’s trickery.
Well, she could put an end tothattoo.
She grabbed the soldier’s fallen spear. The recruits on the walls had been told not to bother throwing them—the chance of hitting anything was too slim—but Darya was a Sentinel, muscles and vision alike forged by the gods, and if she hadn’t cut her teeth on a sword like rumors said, she’d had her hands on weapons since not long after she’d learned to walk.
Aiming without looking fully at the beaked horror was a new wrinkle, but she’d overcome worse, and fury fed her will. She lifted the spear, flexed, and threw.
The point took the beaked creature through the neck. Its teeth gnashed together, obscuring the bewitching pattern between them, and then opened too wide, as its grip loosened in death and the spear bore it backward and down to smear itself on the ground below.
Farther down the wall, another of its comrades burst into sudden, howling flame. Emeth had probably just used her blessing.
“Don’t look at the bird ones!” the cry went up from one of the lieutenants. “They’ll bewitch you! Shoot ’em if you can!”
“You don’t say,” said Darya.
Then there were more twistedmen coming up, pressing toward Darya’s spot on the line. They saw one woman guarding a range that used to have two people. She’d been a good hand with a spear, but now she only had a sword, and they’d have her at shorter range. They saw, she knew, a weakness.
Darya brought her sword up and smiled, once, before going out to greet them.
Chapter 36
Toothed beaks gaped wide, and even forewarned, soldiers fell prey to the dancing patterns within. When a chance look could entrap a person’s mind, and when the monsters had closed so that there was one every few feet, warnings only did so much good.
Strong-willed Isen stepped to the edge of the wall. Amris saw him and cried out a warning while he kicked away the reaching claw of a twistedman and brought his sword down to hack away at another attacker. The woman at Isen’s side called to him too and reached, but a claw swiped at her face. By the time she’d fended it off, the head groom was gone, dragged down the wall under a mass of writhing claws and fangs.
To note that it had happened, and to save up the mourning for later, was almost itself too much. That was nothing new to Amris. He kept slicing through the ranks in front of him, his mind leaden with a weariness he couldn’t let his body feel. Around him, the troops he’d trained and joked with barely pulled one another back from disaster, or went down bleeding and screaming, the lucky ones back to their own side of the wall to heal or die among humans.
He saw events elsewhere, background to the rictus grins and claws in front of him. Branwyn’s arms and face shone pure metal, and the twistedmen struck at her in vain, while behind her wounded soldiers crawled back to safety and her sword spun deadly arcs in the air. On his other side, Olvir leaned forward, looking with neither fear nor entrancement at a beaked monster, and then took its head. Old Gleda paced her section of wall behind the soldiers, hands moving in constant gestures, and the troops near her shook themselves out of their bewitchment.
