Page 22 of Beds and Blades

What made the vampires particularly frightening wasn’t their speed or strength. It was the absence of hesitation.

Every predator carries a flicker of doubt. A moment of calculation before the strike. A single beat where the future could still split, where something might change. These vampires had no such moment. The decision was already made long before they moved. There was nothing to bargain with. No ego to stroke, no fear to pry open, no hesitation to stretch into an advantage.

They moved as if they shared a single will. No signals, no speech, no delay. Just action, immediate and absolute.

I had read accounts of armies that inspired terror. Hannibal at Cannae, the Mongols at the Indus, the dread recorded by soldiers who had faced formations they understood to be beyond their capacity to survive. The accounts always described the same thing—the moment when the scale of what was coming became clear, and the body understood it before the mind did.

I never imagined that I would personally experience that terror.

The army below made almost no sound. No shouting. No nervous chatter. No ambient noise at all. Just the wind off the Zhaduun Mountains carrying its wrong smell, and below the walls a mass of things that had once been people moving with the patient certainty of something immortal.

I had spent years studying casualty figures, siege reports, and battlefield accounts.

None of them had ever looked back.

My heart was beating noticeably faster than the situation strictly required for someone standing behind several hundred feet of fortification. My hands had somehow found each other and locked together hard enough that my knuckles were pale.

I watched the front-line vampires reach the walls.

One of them reached the wall directly below me.

An arrow took it through the shoulder. Clean and hard. A shot that would have dropped a living soldier. The vampire reached up and pulled the arrow free with the energy of someone removing a splinter. The wound closed in the time it took me to register it was closing. Not gradually. The skin decided it was done being open and acted accordingly.

It began to climb.

The stone was sheer—forty feet of dressed rock built specifically to be unclimbable. The vampire climbed anyway, fingers finding routes through the stone that did not appear to exist, moving upward with patience.

The garrison soldier above me leaned out with the nine-foot hook and swung.

Calling it a hook was technically correct in the same way calling a guillotine a knife was technically correct. The hook was a crescent of sharpened steel mounted perpendicular to the shaft, its inner curve honed to a sharp edge.

I understood the design immediately.

It was not a weapon designed to wound. It was not even a weapon designed to kill.

It was a weapon designed to remove heads. It was engineered to catch flesh and bone, yank the head back, and slice clean through the neck in a single, decisive strike.

It was a vampire killer’s weapon, ugly and efficient.

The curved blade caught the vampire at the neck. The soldier put his weight behind the pull. Dark blood sprayed across the stone.

The body hit the moat below a fraction of a second before the head did.

The purpose clicked into place as I saw the weapon in action: only by taking their heads could they be killed; anything less merely slowed them.

The soldier was already resetting. Already watching the next one at the base of the wall. The same motion was going to be required again in approximately forty seconds, and then again after that, for as long as the assault continued.

I pulled my attention from the soldiers and looked up at the wall instead.

The archers working the wall slits were, by my rough count, predominantly women. They were moving through the reload cycle with a focused precision I recognized from an entirely different context. It was the precision of people who were good at holding two things in their heads simultaneously—the immediate target and the pattern underneath it.

The human soldiers atop the walls carried the hooks in numbers that I found difficult to ignore. After watching one remove a head, the design no longer seemed unusual. The quantity did. Entire racks of them lined the battlements.

Around me, the garrison moved with the grim, mechanical rhythm of veterans who had spent years doing nothing but hunting and beheading the bloodsucking undead. Every swing, every follow-through, was practiced and utterly merciless.

The archers were hitting them. Repeatedly. Accurately. Under normal circumstances, the casualties would have been catastrophic.

Instead, the arrows merely slowed them down. Climbs paused. Formations briefly lost momentum.