Page 24 of Beds and Blades

“Listen to me,” I said.

He started to say something about me returning to my quarters. I talked over it.

“This is a distraction,” I said. “The eastern assault. Look at what they’re sending—recently turned, barely coordinated, no siege equipment, no scaling strategy that has any real chance of working against that wall. They’re absorbing casualties at a rate that makes no tactical sense unless casualties are not the point. The commanders in the back aren’t watching their own assault. They’re watching the other side of the fortress.”

I paused for one second.

Skip looked at me.

He looked at the wall.

He looked at me again, realization flashing across his face.

Then he made a decision. The way he made all decisions—immediately and without visible hesitation.

“East wall. Hold and maintain,” he said to the soldier beside him, in the voice that did not require a second repetition. “You four, come with me.”

He pulled a short hook axe from the bracket on his armor.

It was a miniature version of the weapons mounted along the battlements—the same crescent blade, the same inward-curving hook, the same singular purpose. Only the scale had changed.

He looked at me. “Go back to your quarters.”

I held his gaze and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

He was not going to spend time on the conversation.

Without breaking stride, with the resigned efficiency of a man who had just lost an argument he hadn’t had time to make, he reached into a bracket on the wall beside the door and held something out.

A short hook axe. The same weapon he carried. The same crescent blade. The same inward-curving hook. The same singular purpose.

I took it.

It was heavier than I expected. Not unmanageable, but substantial in the way objects designed to separate heads from bodies ought to be.

“The only way to kill them is to take the head,” he said. “Don’t let one get close. If they cut themselves and get blood near your mouth, don’t swallow. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I said.

“Stay behind me.”

I intended to stay behind him. I had every intention of staying behind him. My prior weapons experience consisted primarily of opening online purchases with a box cutter. The purchases had been uniformly non-hostile.

Skip started toward the stairs, and I followed.

Between us and the western wall lay the courtyard.

***

Four vampires had made it into the courtyard.

This did not surprise me.

It did, however, prove more unpleasant to witness in person than it had been in theory.

These were not recently turned. They were older, faster, dressed in the fitted dark armor of the command layer. They had come over the low western wall. That was the gap that existed because everyone with a weapon was on the eastern wall watching the distraction.

Three of Skip’s garrison soldiers were already engaged. One of them hit the wall hard enough that I heard the impact from twenty feet away, slid down it, and did not immediately get up.