The double-bladed axes swung down.
With a heaving gasp, the Prince sat upright, his head pounding as the dark shadows of unconsciousness splintered to reveal reality behind them.
He was in a large, dark room lying on the ground in what looked to be a makeshift infirmary bed of some kind, amidst a large number of other people who were all wearing bandages covered with blood and dirt.
“What…?”
He cut off as what felt like a hot poker stabbed through his side. With a groan of pain, he fell back on the makeshift bed of blankets and rags. He brought his hand away from his side, expecting blood from the wound he remembered taking in the ambush, but it came away clean. With a sort of frantic energy, he pulled up the tattered remnants of his tunic, hastily cut open in order to allow someone to examine the wound, and found bandages wrapped around his chest. He breathed a large sigh of relief that sent a small jolt of pain through his body but did no more than that.
“So, you’re awake!”
The Prince looked up for the source of the stern voice and found an older woman with so draconian an air about her that he immediately felt he had done something wrong and needed to apologize for it.
“Yes…?” he responded cautiously.
“You should be dead,” she said curtly.
The Prince wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this remark.
“I’m… sorry that I’m not?”
She rolled her eyes and walked toward him. Before he could react, she grabbed his head, thrust it under her arm, and held him in place while she checked his bandages. He was so startled by this treatment that he didn’t even think that he might try to stop her until she had already released him, and then she was forcing a white porcelain mug of hot liquid to his lips.
“Drink,” she commanded. He coughed and spluttered at first, but the woman’s hands were insistent and dexterously managed to spill most of the cup’s contents into his mouth. It tasted strongly of peppermint, with a disgusting, bitter aftertaste. She pulled away to let him breathe.
“You’re healing well, but you need another day of rest before you can even think about going back to the fight.”
“Fight?” he asked, coughing and gasping. He seemed to remember the ambush being a success. Surely they wouldn’t need to fight again until they made it back to the Stand, which was days away.
“Yes,” she said, now eyeing his head critically as if she might have missed something. “You can’t go back to join the defense for another day.”
“We don’t have another day,” broke in a young man, dressed in the same plain light brown wool the woman was. He bent to an unconscious man lying next to the Prince and began to unwrap a bandage from around his eyes.
“Don’t speak like that,” the woman responded sharply, her tone brooking no argument. The young man’s demeanor changed to one of deference.
“Yes, Elder,” the man responded.
“The walls will hold,” she continued, her voice loud enough to be heard throughout the room, “they always have.”
The Prince noticed other wounded men lying around the room, and watched several of them nod at this reassurance, but the general feeling seemed to be in grave disagreement with the hopeful pronouncement.
A loud, muffled rumble shook the floor.
“What was that?” the Prince asked. It repeated, and then again, in a slow mournful rhythm. He knew that beat but didn’t want to.
“Where am I?” he asked the woman quickly.
“Lie back down and finish drinking,” she commanded. The Prince caught a glimpse of a rough wooden door partially open onto what appeared to be a dark balcony over to his left. He ignored the woman and pushed himself to his feet.
Immediately, fire rushed up and down his side, sending shockwaves down his arm and leg before spiking throughout his whole body. But the pain diedaway in the next second, fading to a harsh but manageable ache, and he stumbled forward.
“No!” the woman said, placing a hand on him. He grabbed her arm and twisted, sending the old woman to the floor with a shocked cry of surprise. Pushing his way through the crowd of injured Kindred, he forced his body to carry him out onto the balcony.
What he saw took his breath away. Rain lashed his face from an overcast sky, and the night was lit only by torches and watch fires. Laid out before him was a city-fortress, seemingly carved from the living mountain on which it had been built, with natural gray granite walls laced with veins of black onyx and green serpentine. Three tiers had been hewn out of the rock, broad enough to contain layers of houses and huge guard towers, each sporting its own protective gate and wall. The three tiers seemed to spiral up one into the other, moving with the contours of the landscape. The keep itself, the castle within the fortress, rested squarely on top of the mountain, a large spire rising from its center and defiantly spearing the sky.
There were three walls ringing the city: one around the keep, one halfway down the mountainside, and one of awesome size and proportion that circled the roots of the mountain. This bottom wall had a double gate facing a single road that appeared to be the only way in or out of the city. The Prince was on the third tier, and from his vantage point he could see to the left a broad river that butted against the mountain itself; having worn away the rock over years of violent elemental struggle, the river had created a sheer drop-off that, the Prince was willing to bet, was impossible to scale. To his right, bordering the fortress’ outermost wall and circling around out of view, was a cliff face so steeply inclined that no advancing army would have been able to bring any siege equipment to bear, making it unassailable. The only approach to the fortress city was directly ahead—and that was where the Prince of Oxen’s army had gathered.
The first wall, the one that surrounded the first tier that was even with ground level, was enormous, and its double set of gates was being assaulted by an army so vast that it had cloaked the ground outside the city for miles.
