Those that had somehow survived all the way down had been dispatched by the soldiers assigned to guard the inner courtyard.
Sil had gotten used to the noises of battle surrounding her work. It was only fighting, the clangs of metal, the screams of pain, the roars of the monsters.
But there was seldom any panic among the soldiers, same as there was generally no fear. They fought for there was no other choice but to fight. It made it easier to stomach the nighttime and its terrors when the city’s defenders were such stalwart souls.
To hear screaming in the courtyard in the daylight, when the sky was still fiery orange with sunset light, was a whole new experience that sent a first inkling of fear through her. They were whistling nearby, calling men and women to arms. The pace was frantic.
Something big had come to the Rock.
All the healers in the ward knew it. Even Kor, normally quiet and withdrawn into his work, had come out of the operating theatre and gazed out through the open doorway.
“Best you all arm up,” he said, voice steady and level. “Just in case.”
An echoing boom resounded, like something hitting the stone wall outside. The ground shook. The walls did not. That did not bode well.
“What’s that?” Camille asked, though Sil suspected the question to be rhetoric. They all knew just about as much, which was nothing at all.
She gripped the hilt of her mace and recited the mantra. On her neck, the shard hung loose, nestled against her breast, dressed in gauze to hide its blinding light. At a thought, she could leave the Rock behind and join Tallah, wherever the sorceress might have ended up at.
It would only take a thought and a moment of weakness.
Soldiers ran outside. Those inside drew their weapons and moved calmly to the three entrances leading in. They surveyed the scene unfolding but said nothing.
Another boom resounded, louder, stronger. A squeal of tortured metal followed, then a crack, and then silence. Echoes rebounded several times around the walls.
A more familiar sound announced the raising of the iron gate, followed by greeting alarms. It seemed the scouts had returned and were being led in.
So, the attack’s not coming from the outside.
Sil watched the men flowing into the ward. Several had arms in slings or makeshift bandages covering bloody wounds. Only one needed the goddess’s healing. Kor handled him.
Caragill came in nursing his right arm. A deep gash ran down from elbow to wrist, and the hand hung limp and bloody. Sil set to cleaning and stitching up the wound. He wouldn’t carry a sword again anytime soon, but he wouldn’t lose the hand either.
“Did you see Tallah?” she asked as she worked.
“Not since morning,” he answered. His voice was rough, gravelly and deep. She suspected the scars had something to do with that. “She dipped down into the ravine, and that was the last we saw of her. One of my men spotted the dragon at the Bloody Hand, but we didn’t see any fighting.” He shrugged. “She’s either at the Anvil, or still en route. I expect we’ll learn soon enough.”
They’d argued with Tallah about who should have the second shard. She’d been clear it would stay with Sil.
The weight of the stone around her neck made her aware of how tempting a target her back might be to anyone wanting to escape the Rock and live like a king once back in Aztroa. Who, if anyone, at the Rock would be foolish enough to take on that gamble, she couldn’t say.
You would’ve, once upon a time.
“The dragon’s passed overhead just a couple bells ago,” Caragill went on, stoically not reacting as she kept on sewing. The cut was deep. She needed to work in layers but he didn’t complain. “It headed to the Bone and we haven’t seen it since. Odd, that.”
“Why so?” she asked, keeping her mind off the growing commotion outside the hospital.
“It doesn’t range there. Nothing to eat. We assume it’s got a lair somewhere closer to the Anvil. It’s bloody strange it’s come here.”
By now even he wasn’t paying attention to her work, but was watching the doors and the soldiers stationed there.
Another boom split the noise outside. Whistles followed, filling the courtyard with echoes.
And another boom. They were coming faster now.
“You done?” Caragill asked as she cut off the surgical thread.
“Yes. I’d say not to force yourself, but—”
The scout master was already on his feet, calling to one of the soldiers. “Tie my sword in my hand,” he demanded, wincing as he drew the weapon out. “Nice and tight so I don’t lose it.”
Sil sighed and watched the act carried out. An entire fortress made up of suicidal do-gooders like Vergil, and she had the mission of saving their lives when they invariably got themselves wounded past reason. She sighed and drew out an ink nettle pouch just in time for the next boom to shake them up.
Caragill ran out and some of his men followed, those that weren’t wounded or being worked on.
The boom came and shattered into a loud, keening cry of metal twisting, breaking. Sil felt her heart accelerating as she listened and waited, same as all the other healers in the room. Kor fished out some pipe from somewhere and lit it, blue plumes of smoke drifting lazily through the room. It had the faint scent of wyrm’s root, a nerve calmer.
“Don’t gab about,” Kor called to everyone lulling. “Get tools and medicine ready. Do you have enough thread? Do you know where the new brews are? What they do?”
A chorus of affirmatives answered him. Only some of the other healers rushed out of the room. Sil appreciated the distraction but knew this would not end easily or well. Tallah was away and the monsters were here. That booming could only be something come through the tunnels. She’d seen the gates, understood their strength, feared their breaking.
The next boom was followed by a roar that thrummed in the air. Then another. And another. The chorus of screaming filled the world with blasting echoes, bouncing off the inner wall and down into the city to return amplified. A war horn sounded. Soldiers screamed defiance outside. They ran into battle howling like madmen.
Vergil was out there, she was certain of it. And he wasn’t infused.
Let him die. It’s better than being near you.
It took all her will not to drop everything and run out to get him, or at least cast the tether. She needed line of sight. Putting herself in danger just then wasn’t going to help anyone.
I am of the many…
It takes only a bit of illum. A thought. Channel into the shard and run, and we may live to fight another day, Dreea’s voice whispered in her ear.
Had Sil been a coward as well as a torturer in that previous, squalid life? It made her anger rise and her fist grip the mace. She channelled, alright, but right down into the weapon, infusing the runes. She pricked her finger on a spike, and the second set of runes came alive with red glows.
Weapons rang against armour. Men screamed. Shadows flitted outside, ran past the ward’s door. The soldiers inside peered out, nodded to one another, and remained waiting by the doors. They didn’t speak, nor did they need any words for what was to come next.
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Sil went to them and pressed her hand to the first man’s chest—his name was Jared, she knew.
“I require a blessing of Cassandra,” she chanted.
Jared nodded his thanks to her. She did the same to the other soldier, a woman named Corrine. Other healers were invoking the same blessing on whoever was ready to fight.
Sil looked out into the chaos outside. Something big was there, out of sight, trampling the ground. A thick roar resounded just before men screamed.
She pressed a hand to her own chest.
“I require a blessing of Cassandra,” she demanded. The mace grew light as a feather in her hands. A white imprint remained on her chest, signalling Cassandra’s favour.
It wasn’t forbidden to invoke Cassandra’s blessing on a priestess of Panacea. It was simply not something done often.
She was dressed in the last of the clothes the spiders had woven for them. They were white-grey and pristine. Loose trousers with a long-sleeved shirt that hugged her body tight. She would’ve wanted some armour. Felt she needed it as she stood in the doorway between the soldiers, watching and waiting.
Healers never fought on the front line. Ilunas sometimes did, if there was need of shields. But invisible barriers were as big a threat for those they protected as they were for attackers.
Dark shapes began rushing through the gathering gloom. They were met by other dark shapes, these ones carrying torches. The fighting was intense and brutal, the monsters smaller than the normal beastmen, but frighteningly tenacious. There was something feral about the lithe shapes dancing with trained men. One was not an issue. Two became a worry. She watched four surround a soldier, disarm him, and drag him down.
Run. Run away. You won’t survive the day.
Her feet moved on their own. She wove a shield into the shape of a disc, attached it to her free arm, raised it as she rushed for the stricken man. Cassandra’s strength flowed in her veins.
Have I gone insane?
The mace’s spiked head came up in an arc. It met the daemon’s head and passed straight through, exploding skull and brain batter. She barely registered the impact. She kicked out at the creature atop the soldier. It staggered sideways and what was to be its killing strike missed the man’s head.
Sil swung the mace again, catching the third daemon in the chest, its mouth full of the soldier’s shin guard. Ribs crunched, spine shattered. The creature fell to the side, writhing in agony. Already the other two were turning in her direction, red eyes like coals glaring at her. She brought up the shield and caught a taloned strike on the weave.
She’d always thought herself too weak to carry a shield or block a blow. She wasn’t a fighter. She wasn’t like Vergil, endlessly optimistic and tireless and young and courageous.
But she was so bloody tired of it all!
The first creature to pounce at her met the mace’s head with its own. The spiked ball proved sturdier and Sil felt the impact all the way up to her shoulder, rattling her bones. Gore splashed down on the soldier as he tried to rise. She extended her arm, dismissed the shield, and helped him up. The final daemon ran off, squealing.
These were different than the beastmen, at least the most common varieties. They were skinny and feral, naked, frightfully quick. Their heads were horned and nearly skeletal, the mouth just a gash filled with uneven fangs.
More were filling the courtyard.
“Are you alright?” she asked the soldier. His helmet was covered in blood and brains, but he nodded all the same. “Can you keep on fighting?”
“Aye,” the man answered as he picked up his sword. “I’m in your debt, lady Iluna.”
She could have returned to the ward. There would be work to do. Soldiers were already extracting others and carrying them back for help. She should have returned to her post, do her work, make sure men survived the night.
Instead, she turned towards the inner courtyard and stalked forward, mace at the ready, weaving as she went. First the shield. Then the harness.
Run! Run! Run!
“Be. Quiet,” she growled, tired of her past’s insistence on being a pest.
Sil knew all she needed to know of her past, had remembered enough to understand who she’d been.
She’d tortured good men and women. She’d done it for her station. She’d done it because she’d been chosen to and her ego had demanded it.
Dreea had broken away from her duties not because she’d grown a conscience, but because Tallah had shown her that no amount of service to empire and empress, no amount of defilement and sacrifice could ever be enough to appease the empress’s hunger for power. Tallah had given her sister and then been taken herself soon after. Dreea had been promised her own sister’s safety—whoever that might be.
Empress Catharina had bought her as easily as that. Sil couldn’t remember who that sister was, what she looked like, who she’d been as a person. She remembered, however, being proud of surpassing her in some way.
Foolish, foolish hen.
She wove on as she approached the clusters of fighting men. A harness to keep the invisible plate in place. She’d practised on Vergil. She knew her body well enough to better understand the shape of what she wove. The weave was tight on her, almost constricting, but the invisible armour only lagged behind her physical motions by a heartbeat.
“If you’ve nothing better to do in your cage,” she snarled as she swung the mace at an on-rushing daemon, “then help keep me safe. Be more, for once.”
Ever since she’d killed Erisa, she’d had no moment of peace from her past self. Always there. Always speaking. Always angry. Sil was tired of it and was tired of not knowing who she was. Someone to save for Tallah. Someone to protect for Vergil. Someone to love for Mertle.
Someone... who was tired of being uncertain and afraid. Dreea might have been sequestered away, but she was always just a thought away, reminding Sil she was nothing, a made thing, a construct.
Another swing of the mace caved in a beast’s chest, exploding it out into a shower of gore. It spattered her and fell off the invisible armour without a streak left behind, leaving her chest pristine in off-white grey.
She went around the outside of the ward, killing the creatures as she progressed. As long as she drew them to her one by one, they were easy pickings. Her muscles were barely warming up. Her breath was heavy with both efforts she maintained, but it was all getting easier. The weave clung tight to her and moved in near sync. The weapon was light, and the runes performed as expected. Four enchantments learned from Mertle, two from Vergil’s sword.
I should’ve done this a long time ago. She was so very tired of seeing the short end of the stick, usually heading for her head with no time to duck.
The whole courtyard was a battlefield in the gathering dark. She wove a sprite and set it above, feeding it illum until its light broke through the gloom. Soldiers dropped sputtering torches and ran to her, gathering around the light to form a wedge that moved into the thick of battle, cutting and killing now that they could properly see.
They’d been attacked just as daylight failed into night. The inner shadows were thick, heavy and dark. Red eyes glowed atop buildings. Darker, larger things moved around the enclosed space, swinging great meat cleavers to cut apart whatever soldiers were in their way.
This was an attack to really cripple them, she was certain of it. Now they came to take the fortress. Was it something to do with what Tallah did? Or something else? They may not survive the night to learn.
A large shape lumbered out of the dark. Spritelight glinted off a weapon as tall as Sil herself. A mountain of muscle frothed forward, its outline hazy and shifting, a fever dream. It swung an arm the size of a man and the weapon screamed through the air. Soldiers ducked to the ground to escape it. Sil wove a barrier with her as a focal point. She set it at a slant.
The cleaver hit the invisible wall, cracked it, and slid upward to unbalance the creature.
“Charge!” Sil heard herself scream.
The soldiers closest to the beast were already moving as the monster tried to get back its footing. It was naked but covered in thick, bristly hide. Their swords punched straight through it, just beneath the arm pit. It roared and tried to swat at the annoyances. Sil built another barrier, moving it upward again, catching the monster’s swing and diverting it just enough to put it off balance on the other leg.
They cut behind the knees and down at the thick ankles.
It toppled forward and dropped like a felled tree, screaming all the wile. It took five men stabbing down into the thick neck to sever to head. Black blood pooled as the creature writhed and died.
They didn’t cheer but were already moving, ranging ahead, beckoning Sil forward.
She’d never done this before, she knew. She’d always hated being in danger, being depended and demanded upon. That had been Dreea’s way. Do the work only to suit the need. Never more. Never in danger. Never at risk.
Never, ever doing anything but serving the hunger inside.
Sil spat, shook gore off her mace, and advanced to where the fight was thickest. A tide of creatures were disgorged out of the tunnel, pushing back the soldiers trying to hold there. Something huge lumbered on the outskirts of the light.
First she thought it was some kind of boar, swollen to grotesque size. Then it turned fully and the sprite’s light glinted off its armoured hide. A gigantic horn caught the light. Blood and viscera shone wetly.
The thing turned in full to face her small force. It moved ponderously from the end of the courtyard. Whatever daemon stood in its path was mulched. Like an armoured avalanche, it picked up speed. The earth rumbled. Soldiers dove out of the way. Arrows pinged off its glittering carapace. Screaming bounced around the walls, echoing in panic.
Sil watched it approach. She slit open a rend, dug inside, and pulled out one of her last accelerants, eyes never straying from the charging monster. Approaching, it grew and grew and grew until it looked ready to fill up the entire world.
Dreea’s whispers cut off as the rhino bore down on her. Sil was not her past. She refused to be only that. Panacea had clearly wanted them to do something since she’d sent them there. If it was just to die, then this was the moment of proving.
Death thundered nearer and she meant to meet it smiling for once.
Sil raised her mace, aimed it at the monster, and chanted the prayer.
“I demand your aid, you manipulating tart!”
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