*Nathlan*

  He shivered as the last rays of the setting sun vanished from the world. Dusk came thundering in on shadowed hooves as soon as day retreated, and Nathlan found himself studying the treeline some half a mile distant.

  He resisted the urge to drum his palms against the stone crenelation before him or look around to observe the soldiers on either side of him. He was supposedly playing a role here, and it would not do to show them how nervous he was.

  He heard the calls and shouts of a war-host assembling itself for battle on the plain before the gates of Castle Ryonic, but that was not what scared him. He was at the north tower, far on the other side of the castle and unlikely to see much fighting. The men around him certainly seemed glad of that fact, though they tried their best to hide it.

  No, what had Nathlan desperate to glance around nervously and fidget like a child was the uncertainty that the next bell would bring. They were already off-script when it came to the original plan. Lamb was gone – alone and underground once more, the poor man. A gods-damned army had turned up and was in the process of laying siege to the castle, and Jorge and Vera were currently hiding out in the woodlands probably expecting a check-in from them sometime in the night.

  At least they were likely to have seen the Sultan show up, and he could only hope they were working on a cunning plan right at this moment. And that was what Nathlan was worried about. He knew the defensive wards of the castle, had mapped them out earlier himself and had identified a number of weak points he could exploit to bring them down in a heartbeat.

  But should he? And if so, when? He knew they were working on assumptions and guesswork, but it was terrifying that he may be the one who would make or break this new plan, whatever it might be, with his decision. If Jorge and Vera came sprinting out of those woods right this moment, what should he do?

  He couldn’t risk dropping the wards now or else the Sultan would notice and stream in through the breach alongside his army. But if he did nothing, Jorge and Vera would draw too much attention to themselves when they tried to mount the walls. The men and women alongside him would attack them from relative safety, and while they might not do much damage, the wards themselves would surely hurt his companions enough to force a retreat if directed and empowered by the defenders.

  Gods, this was a mess. He hated improvising. He had always been drawn to the steady step-by-step logic of academia. If x, then y. Instead, here he sat, mired in shades of grey with no good answers to be found and uncertainty shadowing every path.

  He looked to his left where the nominal commander of this section of the castle stood. She was a gruff-looking woman; a bit of a gut but with broad enough shoulders to convince most that a fight was a bad idea. The armour she wore – chainmail and a steel breastplate beneath a conical helm with the colours of Duke Ryonic’s personal guard emblazoned across her cloak – went some of the way to making her look a little more fierce, but Nathlan wasn’t overly concerned.

  He was confident in his position as the unquestioned strongest fighter here, and most of the defenders alongside him were still in their 1st tier and boasting support classes that were hardly optimised for combat. The commander was in the 2nd tier, as were a few of the veterans speckled into the dozen men around the north tower, so he wouldn’t be able to single handedly clear the wall, even were that to be a good idea.

  He turned and walked calmly to the commander, giving a tight nod and waiting to one side while she finished discussing something of import with one of the aforementioned veterans. She turned and looked up at him a moment later, gesturing him impatiently to go on when he paused for a moment to gather his thoughts.

  “The wards are powerful but require a significant amount of input and direction by your men to use. That will be difficult when the battle is joined, should the Sultan have men hidden within the treeline over there,” he said with a gesture.

  She shrugged. “It’s the best we’ve got, barbarian.” Then she leaned in closer and spoke in a hiss. “Not so loud, mind, you’ll scare the boys.”

  Nathlan replied in the same register he had used before, ensuring some of the men and women manning the walls on either side could overhear. “I can alter them, if you allow me. They won’t be fully autonomous, but two men should be enough to take charge of their use on this tower while the rest of us fight…if you let me make some minor alterations.”

  She looked like she would object, so he gave her one last verbal nudge. “Temporary alterations, of course. I just need to boost some of the circulating Hoffstedder Amplifiers, which should allow automatic target recognition and reduce the burden on the power output to cover the entire tower with-”

  He didn’t need to finish his babble of nonsense, the stoic woman eventually sighing and giving in. “Fuck it, what have we got to lose?” she asked rhetorically. “On your head if this all goes tits up, mind.”

  He smiled in response, her vulgarity strangely endearing. “I’ll be back before you miss me,” he said, and then dropped over the inside wall, enduring the shorter fall to land on the platform below it. Just at the edge of hearing, the commander’s voice drifted over to him on the wind as she spoke to one of her men.

  “Weirdest fucking barbarian I’ve ever heard of. Sounds like he spends his life with his nose deep in a book.”

  Perhaps his acting needed some work. Still, it had done the job, and he descended the wooden stairs quickly to bring him down to the central courtyard, where he hurried along the inner wall and found the point below the north tower he had identified earlier.

  The wards were woven into the foundations of the structure meaning he would not need to scale the wall and hang halfway up chipping away at stone. That would look suspicious to anyone. After another brief moment of focus, he identified the node that controlled the retributive functions of the ward on this section of the wall, and took a breath.

  Fighting down the urge to turn around and check if he was being watched – he knew that would draw more attention than anything else – he drew his straight-edged blade and cast his spirit into it, his skill activating as darkness enveloped the blade. With A Whispered Lie sheathing his weapon, he thrust it forwards, feeling no resistance at all as his phantom blade passed through stone.

  When he had upgraded the skill in the 2nd tier from Deception’s Edge to A Whispered Lie, he had lost much of its original functionality – no longer could he use it like a regular sword. Instead, it became, for a brief few moments at least, a purely spiritual blade, a weapon of concept rather than reality. That had many drawbacks, and had necessitated a drastic change to his fighting style, but it also came with a few important boons. One of them was the ability to directly disrupt the magic of his opponents, and he put the skill to good use here.

  With a careful flick of his wrist, he severed part of the complex chain of runic circles woven into the stone at the base of the tower, and in so doing destroyed the wards that protected it. Not entirely – the walls were still magically reinforced and incredibly difficult to break – but the retributive power of the wards that the gave the defenders such a profound advantage over the besieging army, was abruptly cut away.

  Hopefully, none would notice until the battle was joined, and Nathlan suspected that by the time they tried to harness and project the power of the castle wards out at the men and women climbing the walls, it would be a little late to think about why and how there was no response. They would be too busy dying, after all.

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  He quickly sheathed his weapon, burying the disquiet thoughts of the innocence or worthiness of the soldiers and deaths to come, and hurried back up to the wooden steps lining the walls on the inside of the castle.

  Suddenly, a cry of “ware!” split the sky, and he heard the sound of sabaton-clad feet slamming into stone as armoured men and women ran along the wall by the gate. Fearing he had been spotted, he turned to look towards the gate, and saw a clamour of movement as men and women hurried to their stations, raising shields and hunkering down below the crenelations.

  A moment later, he heard the scream of air as balls of fire exploded above, deflected by the shielding ward of the castle. It was a brilliantly placed reminder that he had made the right decision regarding keeping the whole castle wards in place, and he marvelled at how easy it would be for a large battle like this to be decided by one action. Had the Sultan managed to sneak in someone to disable the wards, Castle Ryonic would be all but fallen within the next half a bell.

  He scurried up the stairs and made it back to the top of the tower, giving the commander a nod and moving to her side.

  “Keep two men back to interface with the wards should somebody attack. Do not draw power from them until the time is nigh,” he said, holding her gaze evenly and putting as much weight as he could into the statement. “Once activated, the retributive wards will funnel power constantly, and it needs only to be directed towards the attackers. It is intuitive and easy, but I suggest you assign people who have some experience with magic rather than frontline fighters.”

  She nodded in gratitude, giving him a tight smile. “Thanks. Some of my men might live out the night because of you,” she said quietly, giving his shoulder a firm squeeze.

  He shook of the guilt even as he graced her with a thin smile before turning and heading to the wall once more. He spent the next half bell trying desperately to ignore the sounds of violence coming from the opposite side of the castle.

  Men and women screamed on occasion as an errant arrow found its mark, or some ranged skill caught a careless soldier and dragged them from the parapet. Mostly though, time passed with just the hissing of arrows, the twang of bowstrings, the bellows and shouts of desperate people trying to retain some semblance of control as an invading army approached.

  The Sultan’s army had so far kept their ladders in reserve, sending only the general body of soldiers forward in cyclical waves to harass and busy the defenders with range attacks, without ever engaging for long enough to lose lives. There were always exceptions however, and it was from those throats that the screams echoed loudest.

  As chaotic and loud as it was, it eventually settled into simply a background noise. It was hard for a body to be strung so high for so long, and eventually one had to relax and let the heart slow down. The adrenaline wore off slowly until Nathlan found himself almost drowsy.

  It was then that the Sultan moved on to the second phase of the attack. The first phase had clearly been made to tire and drain the defenders, as well as lull them into a false sense of security behind their walls. This new configuration was a true attack.

  Things changed abruptly though with the inclusion of the Al’Asakir to the fight. He’d overheard some of the guardsmen whispering in fearful tones about them – legendary warriors, peak 2nd tier fighters trained by the Sultan himself, led by his first-born son into battle. They were apparently a match for most of the Crimson Lions too, though Nathlan wasn’t sure what was true and what was fear mongering cooked up by desperate soldiers.

  In any case though, the battle was soon joined in earnest, as the Al’Asakir rushed the walls under the cover of renewed fire from archers and mages acting as siege engines themselves. He couldn’t see the charge itself, but he soon saw wooden siege ladders smacking into the parapet around the gate at multiple points, and soldiers with vibrantly coloured headscarves streaming up and onto the wall, laying about with their curved swords in a litany of blood and terror.

  The defenders weren’t idle though, and many of the elite troops were sent reeling back over the wall from the blasts of unfocused magic provided by the castle wards and directed by its defenders. The duke himself, and a few of his most capable warriors also strode along the wall, reinforcing points of weakness, and ensuring the wall was never fully taken.

  It was akin to a rising tide rushing up a beach. Not quick, and the Sultan’s men retreated whenever the duke closed in on them, giving up parts of the wall they had nearly taken for the safety of the plains below where the Sultan could face the duke should he follow, but it was inevitable.

  Bodies were left in their wake whenever they departed, but there were more of the Sultan’s men to begin with, and every passing moment brought the Lions closer to reinforce him – supposedly anyway.

  Nathlan found his attention yanked back to his portion of the wall – blessedly silent as most of the soldiers near him no doubt thought – by a shout from the commander.

  “Ware the front!” she shouted, and Nathlan and the guards turned to watch as a second tide of soldiers streamed from the treeline before them. They were dressed very differently though; black cloaks, tight fitted dark clothes and weapons wrapped in dark fabric except for their gleaming steel blades.

  They ran in silence, scurrying over the empty ground like a swarm of rats from a ship’s bilge, and leading from the front was a skeletal man, looking more corpse than human in the dark of night. He scampered faster than Nathlan could follow, and a moment later there was a clang of metal on metal followed by a scream as a soldier down the line pitched from the wall.

  Nathlan shook his head, then caught a flash as a dark object swept down from high above and landed in the outstretched hand of the figure in the front. Fandar, wielding some sort of throwing disk. A boomerang, or chakra of some sort by Nathlan’s guess, though he wasn’t particularly familiar with that type of weapon. Strange to see an archer not relying on his bow, but no matter.

  Nevertheless, the figure was hard to mistake as anyone but the tall, gaunt and strangely imposing leader of the local resistance, and soon the black-clad figures were swarming up the walls, grappling hooks and long poles hitting their mark to allow them purchase on the smooth stone.

  Nathlan looked about in urgency, drawing his blade and trying to make his decision. He couldn’t sit by and watch the rebellion fighters – most younger than him – be massacred by the soldiers on the wall. But if he set about killing his fellow soldiers now, the ruse would be up, and the duke would surely see that something had gone wrong.

  He cursed to himself before a light blinded him. Just a flash. Orange, a hint of red, and bright enough to obscure his vision for a moment and he gasped as he saw two figures sneaking along the grass silently perhaps a few hundred meters away from the rebellion fighters. He cast about to either side, but nobody seemed to have noticed the light, and when he zoned back in on the figures, he saw that one was holding some sort of mirror-like contraption up in the air.

  Squinting, he recognised the big form of Vera, and realised what was happening. He raised his sword in salute, then turned on his heel, marching over to the commander. He pushed aside men and women who were clambering at the wall, trying to loose their projectiles or else lie in wait with blades drawn for any unlucky fighter than managed to scale the wall.

  Two black-clad figures leapt over the wall in front of him, grabbing a defender each and then jumping backwards over the wall again, the screams of the soldiers following their descent and then cutting off abruptly. Given the ropes that had been wrapped around the two rebels though, it was unlikely they had shared such a grisly end, and would surely be back soon for more.

  After he muscled his way through to the yelling commander, he grabbed her by one shoulder and made to shout over the din, but her eyes lit with fury the moment she saw him. “What did you do!?” she screamed, pulling a dagger from her gauntlet. “The wards aren’t working!”

  Nathlan widened his eyes, and swayed his head aside from her first strike, catching her wrist and bellowing into her face. “I fixed them! That’s your men’s fuck up, not mine!”

  He tried to channel his best impression of Jacyntha, then thought better of it and used Sadrianna as a template instead. “I’ll fix it if your lads are too incompetent, but you must send a runner to the duke!”

  “There’s no time,” she shouted back. “I’m needed here.”

  “Then fucking point one out to me!” he screamed back, matching her decibel for decibel.

  She glared at him a moment, but another scream from the wall caught her ear, and she pushed him away, pointing with one hand at a slim soldier further away along the wall, currently holding a bow awkwardly as if unsure he really wanted to commit to firing it.

  Nathlan strode over to him, grabbed him by the shoulder and shouted in his face; “Get a message to the duke! Tell him we’re under attack by the rebels, but we’ll hold them off. Tell him the barbarian’s are good for the word, and will be charging a premium for each rebel head they take.”

  The young lad hesitated, glancing back towards his commander, before Nathlan bellowed “Go!” in his ear, and he scrambled off. He then turned and marched up to the two men frantically tearing their hair out trying to figure out how the wards worked and started shouting jibberish at them.

  They stared in shock as he gesticulated while spouting off about how they should circulate their spirit to match the fluctuating capacitor relay before unlocking the alpha mandella pathway, before finally he just threw his hands up and shouted. “Get back to the fighting if you’re this useless! I’ll sort this myself!”

  He then took a few deep breaths before committing to his plan. He waited until he saw Jorge and Vera slip over the wall and then drew his sword.

  Steeling his heart against the slaughter to come, he strode into the mass of soldiers surrounding the north tower, and began to kill.