B3Ch92-Town Assault (Patreon)

Harold eased forward on his elbows through the wet bracken behind the scout, and the smell of the town rolled down the slope to meet him: pitch smoke, goat dung, and the sour-milk reek of a few thousand goblins living on top of each other.

The scout stopped at the lip of a shallow fold in the hillside and pressed one hand flat to the ground. Harold stopped with him and pressed against the snow-covered rock.

Up the slope, the town squatted black against the last green smear of dusk. Torches moved along the wall in slow pairs.

Carter slid in on his left and put his mouth close to Harold’s ear.

“Scouts happy as a pig in shit,” he murmured. “Says the garrison’s thin. Most of ’em marched out towards Third Corps, and his boys have been watching the gate ever since. Nothing’s come back in.”

“Sawyer counted the torches?”

“Counted torches, counted cookfires, counted trolls.” Carter wiped his nose on his wrist. “Two trolls on the gate, but they’ve got stalls for over twenty.”

“Then they are somewhere else.”

“Yeah. Off chasing Third Corps.”

“Maybe.” Harold watched a pair of torches reach the corner tower, turn, and start back. “The goblins are smart. They wouldn't leave this town undefended. It’s critical to their entire defense.”

Carter chewed on that for a moment. “So you think there’s something in there.”

“I would think so.” Harold ran his thumb along his jaw, over the seam where the new skin met the old. “There’s no way they don’t know we have scouts up here.”

“Lovely,” Carter breathed. “Love a surprise.”

“And we need it intact when we’re done.”

“Fast, whole, and through whatever’s waiting.” Carter scratched under his helmet strap. “Anything else? Want me to pick you some flowers on the way up?”

“Daisies, if you see any. I want to surprise Adeline when she gets here.”

Carter snorted into his sleeve.

Then there was nothing to do but lie there. The scouts had marched the Legion in one file at a time, starting an hour before dusk, and hidden them into every gully and dip on the hillside, and now ten thousand men lay in the grass, the snow soaking through their gambesons. Somewhere two folds back, a man coughed, and Harold heard the flat smack of a centurion’s hand on a helmet while his friends snickered around him. Have you ever tried to keep a group of close men quiet? It’s impossible. One joke sets them all off.

White light stuttered behind the north wall.

Three flashes came close together, and a heartbeat later the sound rolled down the slope, heavy thumps he could hear from the town. He would know the thump of Finn’s potions anywhere. They were his own potions after all. Then the sound of blades ringing on blades, and a goblin screamed and stopped.

Harold got to his feet.

His guard came up around him, Carter first, then Ren and Corwin and the rest in a ring of dark shapes. To his right, the slope shifted and hissed as the Legion rose out of the grass at once. Maren’s cohorts peeled away toward the east wall at a run, and the rest fell in behind the guard. The only sounds were leather creaking and ten thousand men breathing through their teeth.

He pushed mana down into his legs and ran.

The town came up at him fast. The wall stood three times the height of a man, built of squared grey blocks with mortar lines as thin as a hair, the work of builders long dead. The goblins had added their own touches. They’d hung hide banners off the towers, and set a row of skulls into niches above the gate, dwarf and human mixed together. 

Inside, the clash of steel climbed. Harold lengthened his stride, and the hundreds of meters of open ground between him and the gate shrank under his boots.

Sarah was in there. Her whole team was in there, and so was Jampa. When he had heard he was only sending a small team inside, he had immediately volunteered. Jack arrived at his right shoulder without a sound, as the Lava King's crown on his helm flashed orange and red. Carter came up hard on his left a breath later and fell into step with him.

“You’re outrunning your own guard again,” Carter said. “Makes the whole guard part of the job real tough, Harold.”

From over the wall, high and furious, Mira’s voice cut through the racket.

“ARE YOU SERIOUSLY HITTING ON ME RIGHT NOW? I HAVE A BOYFRIEND, JENKINS!”

The answer drifted back, plaintive.

“SORRY!”

Harold laughed under his breath, and his stride loosened.

There were twenty of them in there: Sarah’s team with Cassian and Jampa folded in, Elroy and Jenkins, and eleven men of his guard to round it out. If Jenkins had breath left to hit on Mira, then none of them were dying yet.

The ground tilted up under him, and he started the climb toward the gatehouse.

Off to the east, a cracked bell finally started to clang, far too late, and goblin horns picked it up all around the circuit of the walls as Maren’s cohorts slammed into the base of the east face with their ladders. On the north tower, one of the big catapult arms lurched, sagged, and toppled inward with a groan of timber he heard from two hundred meters out.

Mira’s voice carried over the wall again, sharp and clear through the din.

“ELROY! ASSASSIN, RIGHT! CASSIAN, WATCH HIGH!”

Steel answered her, and under it came the thin rising hum of mana blades cutting air. Harold had heard that sound in a hundred fights, and it climbed into a whine and broke off short as it cut through its target.

He came over the crest of the hill at a dead run with the wall rising straight up in front of him, and he didn’t slow down. On the mountain he’d run straight up a rock face behind Balfiel, pushing mana down through his boots and pulling the stone up into steps under each footfall. He did the same now, and threw his weight at the wall.

But this time the stone pushed back.

It reflected his mana, and his boot skidded off the smooth stone. He dropped back to the foot of the wall and hit the dirt hard enough to rattle his teeth.

Jack and Carter slammed into the wall on either side of him and put their backs to it. They bent at the knees, laced their fingers together into a saddle between them, and held it low.

“On three,” Carter said. “One—”

Jack threw on one.

Harold got a boot into their hands, and the two of them heaved together with mana roaring through their arms, and he went up the face of that wall like a Titan II missile off the pad. He heard Carter yell “That was ONE!” somewhere below him, and Jack’s answer floated up after it: “Felt like three, old boy!”

Then he cleared the palisade and came down in the middle of a goblin shield line.

They were big ones, the defender breed, built heavy through the shoulders and carrying tower shields as tall as they were, and they’d been braced facing outward along the wall walk. Harold landed behind them. The nearest one started to turn, and he took its head off before it got halfway around.

His blade lit as he swung, white mana running up from the crossguard to the point, and the greatsword sang. The dwarven-made weapon wanted to be swung. He took the second goblin through the shield and the arm behind it, put his shoulder into the third, and drove it off the wall and down into the town.

The nail in his chest screamed.

It was pure, ugly pleasure, a howl that came up through his breastbone into his teeth as the blood began to flow, and the blood answered it. It came up off the stones and off the bodies in thin red ribbons and wound around him in loops and spirals that kept tightening and twisting into patterns he couldn’t follow. He could see right through the dense web the blood made, and a goblin hacked at his back, and a ribbon of red snapped between him and the cleaver hard enough to knock the blade wide. Another blocked a spear point an inch from his ribs. Harold laughed and went to work.

Down the wall to the north, on the far side of a burning siege engine, he caught sight of Sarah.

A goblin twice her weight was coming at her with a cleaver in each hand, frothing, its eyes rolled back white, and with long gouges down its chest that it didn’t seem to have noticed. Sarah ducked one cleaver and turned the other on her bracer and gave ground, a quick step back and then another. Harold felt his body start to turn toward her.

A shield crashed into him from the side, and he had to deal with that first.

When he looked again, his guard was coming over the wall around him in twos and threes, hauled up on ropes and boosted like he had been, and they hit the wall fighting. Ren went past him with his shield up, bellowing at the men behind him to close in. Corwin put a goblin over the inside edge with his boot. They cleared the walk in a rolling crush and fought their way along it to the gatehouse, and Harold went with them.

Inside the gatehouse they killed everything in it, including some kind of goblin that had managed to injure a couple of his guards, and his people threw their weight on the windlass. Below them, the gate groaned and started to open.

Harold stepped out onto the gatehouse roof and wiped his face with the back of his wrist.

To the east, Maren’s half of the Legion had stalled at the wall. A long building near the east gate was burning end to end, and as he watched, the doors at the end burst open, and four trolls came tumbling out of it, smoking and enraged and swinging at anything that moved. They waded straight into the base of the wall and started tearing men off the ladders and flinging them down. The legionaries up on the wall walk had nothing they could hit them with. The trolls stood twice their height, below them and out of reach, and they were tearing through the ranks.

Harold turned, already opening his mouth to tell Carter to peel off a few men.

A dark figure dropped onto the shoulders of the nearest troll from the eaves of the burning building. Twin short swords flashed in the firelight, and the figure rode the troll’s shoulders like a man breaking a horse and drove both blades into its neck, again and again and again. Jace. The troll howled and clawed at its own head. Beside it, a cloaked man with a spear came in low and fast at the second troll, opened up the back of its knee, and was gone before it could turn.

Harold closed his mouth.

The town below him was in chaos. The fire had leaped from the burning building into the rooftops beside it and was running fast down the row on the wind, and goblins were spilling out of doors and alleys in every direction, some running toward the fighting and some running from it. Through the open gate beneath him, the Legion came pouring into the town in a flood of shields and steel.

A roar came down the hill from the keep, and the whole town stopped fighting.

It was a sound he felt in his bones before he heard it, deep enough to shiver the stones under his boots, and every goblin and legionary in the streets below froze and looked up. Harold looked up with them, and the blood drained out of his face.

A wyvern sat on top of the keep. It was huge, built bigger than most he had seen. Iit was scaled from snout to tail in plates of dull bronze. It had its claws hooked into the battlements and its wings half-spread, and it swept its head slowly back and forth over the town like it was choosing what to kill first. That wasn’t an example of a young wyvern, like they had fought on the way here.

“Shit,” Harold said.

He turned to Carter. “Get the Legion inside and finish the attack. Try to contain that fire before it takes the whole town. The rest of the garrison’s forming up outside the keep.” He pointed up the hill with his sword. “Hit them before they get set.”

Carter cut down the last goblin on the roof, kicked it off his blade, and spun around. “What are you going to do?!”

“That’s the lord of this town.” Harold was already moving to the edge of the roof. “I need to keep him busy before he starts pushing into Maren’s half.”

The nail drove him toward it. It was awake and howling and straining toward the wyvern like a dog on a leash, and it wanted that blood worse than anything it had tasted tonight, and Harold felt the same hunger in himself. He packed mana into his legs until the muscles burned.

He jumped.

The wind whistled past his ears as he sailed out over the street.

“Wait! Harold!” Carter’s voice cracked behind him. “DAMMIT!” Then, in a roar that carried across half the town, “Kill these and get after the lord! Ren! Corwin! Go now!”

Harold landed on a slate roof across the street and ran to the edge of it and jumped again. He came down three roofs over with tiles shattering under his boots, ran, and jumped again. Up ahead, the wyvern let go of the keep and dropped off into the air, and its wings opened with a crack like a sail filling. It swept out low across the burning roofs toward the east wall, where Maren’s cohorts were forming up around the breach.

It banked, turned, and folded its wings for a stoop.

On the wall and in the street below it, the Legion was ready for it. The front ranks drew back their arms with mana flaring blue along every shaft, and on a centurion’s shout they loosed a hundred javelins into the air together in a dense, bright wave.

The javelins hit the wyvern and glanced off its scales. They spun away into the dark, trailing their light, and the wyvern kept coming.

A tall central tower rose from the middle of the town ahead of Harold, a slim stone spire of the old builders’ work with goblin banners strung from its top. He hit the base of it at a full run and threw his mana into the stone, and this time the stone allowed it. It flowed up under his boots in rough steps that formed as fast as he could plant his feet, and he ran straight up the face of the tower with the town falling away below him.

He reached the top and kept running.

He threw himself off the edge into the open air with his sword over his shoulder, straight at the wyvern as it came down on his people. He pushed everything he had into the blade, and white mana roared down its length and lit the air around him and drove the dark back in a wide circle. In his chest, the nail heaved and thrashed toward the wyvern, every bit the mad dog straining for its throat.

The wyvern hit the front cohort before he reached it.

It came down out of its stoop with its wings folded tight and smashed into the shield wall like a falling house, and the front rank went flat under it in a crash of steel and splintering wood. Men flew. It surged up out of the wreck already twisting, and its tail came whipping around low and fast toward the century behind, a thick club of bronze scale heavy enough to cut a line of men in half.

Harold came down on top of it with his sword already falling.

The lit blade met the tail a pace behind the club and went through it. He felt the jar of it in his elbows, scale and meat and then bone, and he landed in a crouch on the cobbles with the stump spraying past him. The club of the tail kept going on its own, cartwheeling over the heads of the century, and smashed through the front of a house across the street.

The century stood there gaping at him with their shields up.

The wyvern screamed. It wheeled on him, dragging its ruined tail across the stones and spraying blood across the wall of the nearest house, and its head came down to his level at the end of that long neck with its jaws parted and dripping.

On its back, strapped in among the spines at the base of the neck, sat a goblin.

It was small and lean and wrapped in dark leathers, glaring at him with flat yellow eyes over the wyvern’s head, its lips peeled back from its teeth. The wyvern roared again, right in his face, so close that the hot, wet stink of it washed over him and his ears rang and the cobbles shivered under his boots.

Harold’s aura rose to meet it.

He didn’t push it so much as stop holding it back, and it came up out of him and filled the street. The air went thick. The legionaries nearest him staggered back a step and dropped to one knee with their shields braced in front of them like men leaning into a gale, and the fire in the windows of the burning house behind him flattened and guttered. Harold leaned into the roar and tried to crush it back down the wyvern’s throat.

The roar broke and choked off. The wyvern shook its head hard, like a dog with a wasp in its ear, and then it braced its legs and pushed back.

It was huge and old and certain of itself, and its pressure came down on him like a wet sail. Behind it, thinner and colder, came the goblin’s, sliding in under it like a knife between ribs. The two of them pressed into him together, and Harold’s knees bent an inch under the weight before he locked them.

Behind him he could hear the Legion moving, centurions bawling orders, men dragging the wounded clear and stamping back into line, the street opening out around him as they cleared it. Then someone started banging his sword against the rim of his shield, slow and steady, and the man beside him joined in, and then the whole cohort.

“CAL-DER! CAL-DER! CAL-DER!”

Harold started to circle to his left.

The wyvern turned with him, swinging its whole body around on its haunches to keep him square in front of its jaws, and its head swayed low on that long neck as it watched him. The goblin rode it with its knees, leaning with every turn. Harold kept moving with his sword held low and his weight on the balls of his feet, and the street went quiet in his ears except for the chanting and the crackle of the fire.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Come on, come on, come on.”

His whole body was wound tight under the plate. He waited.

Then he saw it. The muscles along the base of the wyvern’s neck bunched, rolling up under the scale toward its jaw, the way a snake’s coils gather before the strike.

Harold went before it did.

The head came for him a heartbeat later, jaws wide and lunging to rend him, and he dropped low and felt the teeth snap shut on the air over his back. He came up inside the strike with his sword swinging around from behind his hip, and he poured everything he had into it, every scrap of mana he could find and all of his strength behind it, and the blade sang as it went.

It went through the neck in one long stroke.

For a moment, the wyvern’s body stood there without its head. Then it folded in the middle of the street, and the head rolled to a stop against the wall of a burning house with its eyes still open.

The Legion roared behind him, a solid wall of noise that shook the shutters along the street.

The nail roared with them. It tore into the blood pooling around his boots like a starving thing, and the blood rose off the cobbles in thick red ropes and poured toward him, wrapping around his legs and sinking into the plate over his chest, and the nail drank and drank as fast as it could pull it in. Harold stood in the middle of it with his sword hanging from one hand and his chest heaving, and his lips peeled back from his teeth.

Something punched into his shoulder from behind.

It went through the back of the Thresher King’s plate as if it were cloth, and a bright line of agony followed it into the meat of his shoulder. Harold cried out and spun around with his sword coming up.

The goblin lord crouched on the cobbles two paces behind him, low and loose on its haunches, with a long knife in one hand. It lifted the blade to its mouth and licked his blood off it in one slow stroke from hilt to point, and its eyes rolled half shut in pleasure.

The goblin lord vanished.

There was a soft clap of air where it had crouched and a whiff of hot copper, and then pain lit up the back of Harold’s left knee as the knife went in behind and out again. He swung around with the greatsword and cut through empty air. The clap came again on his right, and the knife opened his cheek along the seam of new skin the nail had knit an afternoon ago.

“Fuck!”

He lashed out backhand with the blade. The goblin was already gone, and it came back low on his left and slid the knife between two plates over his ribs, and Harold felt it scrape along a rib on the way in.

Behind him, someone yelled and boots started forward.

“STAY BACK!” Harold roared without turning. “Hold the line! Nobody comes in here!”

The boots stopped.

The nail was furious about it. Heat poured up from his sternum and chased each wound as fast as it opened. Forced to spend the blood he had just gathered. The knee knit closed behind the knife, the cheek sealed with a burning itch, and the rib grated and settled back into place. The blood came up off the cobbles again in dark ropes and whipped around him in tight coils, and one of them slapped the knife aside a finger’s width from his throat as the goblin flashed in on his right.

It laughed at him. It was a high, giggling sound, and it came from four different places as it blinked around him, gone and back and gone again, and every time it came back, the knife went into him somewhere. The back of his thigh. His forearm through the bracer. The meat under his arm where the plate didn’t reach. Twice the blood ropes caught the blade, and once Harold got his pauldron in the way, and then it was gone again and laughing.

The nail was pulling the wyvern’s blood into him as fast as it could drag it in now, sucking the whole puddle off the street in long red streams, burning it to keep up. Harold could feel it straining. Every wound closed a little slower than the last as some kind of poison affected him.

He stopped swinging.

He stood in the middle of the street with the greatsword held low and let the next cut come, a long slash across the back of his hand, and the one after it, behind his right shoulder blade. He didn’t turn for either of them. He watched where the clap came from instead.

The goblin came in on his right, then behind, then low on his left. It always came in on whichever side the blood was thinnest, and it always came back to his left, where the stab in his shoulder had gone in. It liked the taste of that one.

“Pull it back,” he breathed to the nail. “Left side. Let it in.”

The nail didn’t want to. He felt its outrage climb up his throat, and then it did it anyway, sulking, and the coils on his left side thinned and fell away to almost nothing.

Harold kept his eyes on the burning house across the street and waited.

The air clapped at his left shoulder, and he was already turning.

He dropped the greatsword and his left hand shot out and closed on something wiry and leather-wrapped in the air beside his head. The knife went into his forearm to the hilt. He didn’t let go.

The goblin lord hung in his fist by the throat and the top of its chest, kicking, and its flat yellow eyes went very wide. It tried to blink away. He felt its mana gather and twist, and he crushed his own mana down on it and smothered it.

Harold brought it in close to his face.

“Got you,” he whispered.

He squeezed.

The goblin shrieked and clawed at his wrist and his fingers and tore its own nails off on his bracer. Harold kept squeezing, steady, with mana packed into the muscle of his hand and arm. Bone gave under his fingers, then more bone, and the shriek climbed and broke into a wet gargle and stopped.

He opened his hand, and what was left of the goblin lord of the town dropped onto the cobbles at his feet.

The nail rejoiced. A hot, giddy rush of it flooded his chest and ran out to his fingertips, and the knife in his forearm slid back out on its own and clattered onto the stones as the flesh pushed it out and closed behind it. Then the blood on him began to move. It crawled up off his plate, out of the creases at his elbows, off his face and out of his beard and out from under his fingernails, and drew itself into his chest through the plate in thin red threads until he stood clean in the middle of the street.

Behind him, the Legion had gone completely silent.

A notification slid into the corner of his vision.