Page 23 of Beds and Blades

Then wounds closed, broken flesh knitting itself back together almost as quickly as it had been damaged, and the advance resumed.

The arrows were for suppression, not lethality.

The nine-foot hook axes were the kill mechanism.

The arrows existed to keep them at the wall long enough for the hooks to arrive, and the hooks arrived, and the vampires fell, and the garrison held the line with grim, practiced efficiency.

The garrison was holding. Easily. Too easily.

I watched for another four minutes, long enough for the patterns to emerge. Then I stopped watching the walls and started watching the vampire commanders.

The vampire commanders were not watching the walls.

They were watching the other side of the fortress.

I had been watching for four minutes when my brain did the thing it always did. I stopped looking at what was in front of me and started looking for the last time something like this had happened before.

The answer was 332 BC.

Alexander the Great took the island fortress of Tyre in 332 BC. Tyre had never been taken. It sat on an island with walls that rose straight from the sea, and every prior commander who had looked at it had decided that the math did not work.

Alexander spent seven months building a causeway through the ocean to reach it. Seven months of engineering so audacious that the Tyrians spent most of those months preparing for it. They mobilized everything to defend the causeway approach. They put their full attention and their full force on the one visible threat, the one that was so enormous, so obvious, and so clearly the thing that needed stopping.

The causeway was not how he took the city.

The causeway was how he kept their attention while his navy came in from the other side.

The Tyrians lost because they defended the causeway so completely that they stopped looking anywhere else. Alexander understood that a sufficiently obvious threat consumes attention. The more urgent it appears, the harder it becomes to notice anything beyond it.

The recently turned vampires climbing the wall in waves, absorbing arrows, losing heads by the dozen—they were the causeway. They were not the point. They had never been the point.

They were the thing you watched while the navy came in from the other side.

I was already moving before I had fully articulated the thought.

***

I ran from the tower.

The command tower was farther along the eastern wall, overlooking the main assault. If there was a place the High Commander would be during an active engagement, it was there.

I arrived at the command tower slightly out of breath.

Skip was there.

Of course he was.

A dozen soldiers surrounded him. Messengers arriving with reports, officers waiting for instructions, runners departing the moment they received them. Orders flowed through the tower continuously, moving outward from him and down the wall.

He stood at the center of it all. He was the point through which the entire defense was being coordinated.

The battle spread below him while runners came and went, reports were exchanged, and orders moved down the line.

He looked at me like he was encountering a variable he had not planned for.

“Meghan.”

Not a greeting.