somersaulted and contorted in the air, many limbed and limp as the dead… for they were the dead. Bodies. Naked bodies. They hit the ground about a hundred paces out, smacking down with sickening thuds. All that long arc of motion ended in an instant. Some of them split apart and sprayed red mist into the air. Most just landed. The sounds of the impacts followed one another in a quick, dull staccato.
“The deserters were found out,” Edell said.
“And this is their punishment?” Perrin asked. “Monsters. They’re monsters!” He whispered it first, and then he shouted it. As if in answer, a second rain of falling forms crashed down. Again the staccato of thuds.
A scream yanked Mena around.
Fingel. The woman stood a little distance away, with Rialus beside her. She dropped to her knees, pointing with one arm at the thing they had all already seen. She emitted a sound from somewhere in the tormented center of her. It carried a misleadingly rising tenor, as if she were about to scream or moan, but kept having the foundation of it pulled from under her.
A third catapult hurled its grisly load, ten or so bodies.
“Why are they doing this?” Perrin asked.
The first catapult launched again.
Rialus’s voice answered. “They’re sending us a message.”
The second catapult snapped forward again.
“What message?”
Mena answered, “They would rather be without servants than be betrayed by them.”
The Auldek kept it up throughout the day, building scattered piles of hundreds and hundreds of broken, exploded, naked bodies. A battlefield’s worth of carnage lofted through the air as a sickening gift. It was as Rialus said: a statement, not an attack.
T he attack came that night.
Lookouts sounded the alarm when the Auldek were still out beyond the piles of corpses, riding in atop antoks. Mena-awake this time-jumped out of her cot fully clothed, snatching up the King’s Trust. Hearing the alarm horns, the Auldek responded as well. They discarded stealth. They spurred the beasts forward. As Mena reached the barricade, the antoks rushed toward them, bellowing. They plowed through the bodies. They sent the white bears that had come to feast on the frozen meat running, roaring their anger as they did so.
Perceven shouted for archers to man the barricade. Perrin directed the foot soldiers into ranks. Bledas sprinted past, his sword drawn, rallying the confused and groggy. Mena connected with Elya, telling her to stay put, sheltered and hidden.
When the attackers were just a few hundred yards out, the catapults, still in front of their encampment, lobbed balls of flaming pitch instead of bodies. The orbs hurtled upward like shooting stars, bent with the earth’s pull, and then plummeted. The catapults this time had been calibrated to send their missiles farther. The first one hit near enough to Mena that the impact knocked her from her feet. The impact area became an instant inferno.
Fly, Elya, Mena thought, hoping the bombardment at least meant the freketes had been held back. Get high and stay safe. Out loud, she shouted, “Ignore them. Ignore the fireballs. Distractions! You can’t run from them, so forget them. Look at what else comes!”
Once into the crimson highlights of the fire’s glow, the antok riders pulled up their mounts. The beasts halted, churning the turf with their hooves, raking their heads about, impatient for the living blood on the other side of the barricade. The Auldek clinging to them began to leap off. They hit the frozen ground and came up, drawing their weapons. They proceeded forward, leaving the mounts fuming. In their arrogance, Mena realized, the Auldek wanted to do the killing themselves. As far as they were concerned, they did not need the monsters to do it for them.
They were just as tall and fierce as ever, long limbed and fast. They wore dark body suits that covered them entirely, with hoods over their heads, but no obvious armor on them, none of the encumbering bulk of her own troops’ thick layers. The Auldek batted away the arrows that hit them as if they were troublesome insects. Even the arrows that struck them in the chest did not stick. Mena saw a heart shot knock an Auldek back. It caused a hitch in his step, but did little more than that. The arrow hung there until he ripped it away. It had not penetrated at all. It had just caught on his clothing.
“Aim for their faces!” Mena yelled to the archers around her, and then stood on her toes and passed the order over to Perceven on one side and Bledas on the other. “Everyone, aim for their faces!”
Another fireball exploded nearby, flinging out a molten wave of pitch. A man near her got splashed with the stuff, one arm so drenched that it liquefied while he was still on his feet. Other pitch balls landed with powerful whoomps, followed by the horrible splatter of flying liquid and the screams of the burning. They fell everywhere, igniting tents and supplies. The animals worked themselves into a grunting, squealing frenzy. The air, a moment ago ice pure and gelid, filled with the stench of burning pitch, flesh and hair and wood and fabric.
The Auldek reached the Acacians’ barricade. The wall, put up and taken down hastily each time they moved their camp, was more a visual gesture than a true fortification. A delay and a nuisance, although for the Auldek it was barely even that. They leaped over it, chopped into it, shoved their way through it. Mena was right there in the front of her troops, yelling for them to attack them as the Auldek came through, while they were encumbered. She hacked at the arm of an Auldek whose feet were caught in a crosshatch of timbers. The man yowled, but the arm did not get sliced through, as she envisioned. She struck again, on his helmet, shoulder, slashing up in the hopes of reaching his face. None of the blows bit. She hacked down on his shoulder with enough force to sever it. In response he buckled beneath the blow for a moment, then surged upright, spouting what must have been Auldek curses.
He was through-and others were through. Instant chaos, at a frantic level immediately different from just moments before. Her troops behind her surged forward. They became a squirming, struggling press of bodies into which the Auldek cut bloody paths. Mena got shoved away from the Auldek she had been fighting, and had to watch as he waded into the soldiers next to her. Slashing and shouting, the sound of metal striking metal, shouts of agony and rage and fear, guttural Auldek punching its way through their Acacian. For a time the battle was such utter confusion that Mena had no control over anything. She struck at any Auldek she neared, but she was too hemmed in. Her own soldiers pushed her into the jumble of the barricade so that she struggled even to stay upright. This burned away any trace of fear and left her red hot with anger.
Seeing an opening, she dove for it. With the King’s Trust clenched in her sword hand, she scrambled on all fours beneath a lattice of wooden beams, along an overturned sled, and then over another into the clear. Outside the camp now, she ran along the barricade, trying to work out what they should do. The Auldek had all passed through already, which meant there were not so many of them. Only Auldek, and only a small group of them. She had the sickening thought that they must have drawn lots or something to win the privilege of this slaughter.
Think, Mena!
They had taken control of the moment, but was fight and die all that she could respond with? She would not accept that. She found a clearer section of the barricade, climbed on a wagon, and got a view. The Auldek rampaged through the camp. They did not stick to any formation, but ran where they pleased, swinging their massive swords and axes with a blurred rapidity that horrified her. They looked like dancers working through a practiced choreography, except that they were slicing off limbs and sending arcs of blood into the air with every move. Another sickening thought: that this might be the night the war ends for her and her army. Had they done enough? Had they delayed and hurt them enough for Corinn and Aliver to be able to defeat them?
Think!
She was just about to call Elya to her when she saw Perrin and another soldier fighting with an Auldek. The monster bore down on them, stepping through the bodies he had already cut down. He slashed and spun. He tossed his sword from one hand to the other and slashed and spun again.
A game, Mena thought. It’s a game to him.
It was not a game to Perrin and the young soldier. They barely managed to fend off the Auldek’s blows. They kept trying to round the brute, but the Auldek herded them, kept them backing. Perrin tripped once and only avoided getting cut in half because he rolled away, then gained his feet again. In the blurred moment that followed, the young soldier went down. Mena did not see how, but his body fell to the ground, twisted without dignity in a way that only the dead permit. The Auldek celebrated by pumping his fist in the air.
Something in the gesture shot Mena through with recognition. The warrior she thought to be an Auldek-
