Crusader

Chapter 113

Vara

Day 223 of the Siege of Sanctuary

They came in a flood now, from all directions, from holes in the wall that were beyond number. The Sanctuary defenders were forced up against the front steps in retreat, and there was fighting everywhere within the walls. There is only room in this space for a few thousand, but a few thousand we have and more. A few thousand of ours trying to beat them back, a few thousand of theirs trying to come forward, and we’ll be left with a few thousand dead on each side by the time this is through-a better bargain for them with their more than a hundred thousand in number than us with our less than four.

The striking of swords, the guttural cries of men and women at war: these were the things that dominated the space around her. Clash of weapon against weapon, of blade on blade and against armor, shield and gauntlet. It was frenzied chaos, wall to wall, a shoving match and a swordfight all in one, and the smell of the dead filled her nose until she could taste it, death and despair in equal measure, and no matter how many times she plunged her sword into a dark elf, it did not cease.

Fortin was at the gap, the closest one, where the gate had once stood, and he was holding out, armored bodies flung through the air every few seconds. She saw spells arcing toward him but the rock giant appeared unmoved by them, and another armored dark elf hit the wrecked wall, cracking and screaming as he fell back to the earth.

A fire burst held the next gap, surging, almost a living flame, reminding her of the bit of magic she’d seen used against the trolls at the last assault on the foyer. We’re losing. Too many of them, too few of us, and all the time in the world helps us little. She felt a nick against her arm as a dagger bit into it and she gasped but did not halt her swing. She killed the wielder of the blade and was prepared to deal death to the next dark elf in line when a face popped into her view.

“This is not going well,” Aisling said to her, wrenching a dagger across the throat of an unsuspecting dark elf who stood between her and Vara.

“Ah, so your talent for understatement is what Cyrus finds attractive about you,” Vara muttered, striking down another dark elf with even more fury than she thought she had in her.

“Actually, it’s my talent for-” The dark elf was forced to parry a strike by a troll, rolling between his legs and coming up behind him to strike him in the kidneys with two blades. “Well,” she called back to Vara as the troll toppled over, clutching his back. “You know.”

Vara did not answer, but a bout of fury overcame her and the next enemy who crossed her sight line ended up bisected at the waist from an unrelenting strike. As the upper body fell, she parlayed it into a diagonal cross strike of her next foe, and she saw the blood shining from his exposed ribs as he fell. Go on, bitch. Say it again. Tell me all about it, I could use some rage to fuel my fire. She raised a hand at the gap in the wall to their left and mentally repeated the incantation she knew by heart; at the last moment a bit of excess anger bled into her thoughts and something hiccupped from her hand, a blast of pure, furious force that ballooned wider than she’d ever made it go before. It surged forward, knocking flat half a hundred dark elves flooding through the gap, flinging countless numbers of them into the air and into their fellows to sounds of bones breaking, men screaming in pain, and bodies falling from their apogee, some launched as far as twenty feet into the air. She blinked and looked back to Aisling in surprise.

The dark elf stared back at her, openmouthed. “Would it help if I taunted you again?”

“It wouldn’t help you,” Vara growled, and turned back to the enemies that came at her in two prongs. Her sword was a blaze of motion, and the frenzy was more than she could stand. He held her, touched her, was-WITH her-smelling her white hair, pressing his skin against hers. She fought off the urge to feel anything but the rage and turned it loose, sword a blur of fury, blood scything through the air around her.

“We can’t hold them back!” The voice broke into her consciousness after several minutes and she seemed to come back to herself. It was darkening, the skies above them, and not with rain. The sun was nearly below the wall and the sky was dimming. How long have we been fighting? The lawn was strewn with bodies, countless dark elves and more than a few of her own. Healers are mitigating that. If they weren’t, we’d be matching them corpse for corpse. “We need to retreat!” She looked to the source of the voice and realized it was Vaste, his staff in hand, at the top of the Sanctuary steps only feet away. The troll whipped his staff across the face of a dark elf that charged up at him then grabbed the man and flung him off the top of the stairs. “Vara, do you hear me?”

“Just … keep healing us!” she called back, at the base of the stairs herself. She blinked in surprise. Wasn’t I at the left break in the wall just a moment ago?

“We’ve been doing so for hours,” Vaste called back. “We’re nearly dry of magical energy. Call the retreat and barricade the doors while we recover, or every soldier you lose will be lost for good.”

The world spun about her, filling her vision with cracks and a whirl, as though the sky had taken up its own rotation. We can’t lose. We can’t fall, not now. She looked to the front gate, where it had stood; even Fortin had moved back now, only thirty feet in front of her, and a solid wall of dark elves was pushing forward. The rock giant wobbled, and black liquid ran down the surface of his body as he battled with three trolls simulataneously. They were all of a height and looked like titans fighting in the middle of the battlefield.

“Retreat,” she whispered, so low only she could hear it at first, or so she thought. Aisling’s head snapped around to gape at her in shock. “RETREAT!” she called again, louder this time, and heard other Sanctuary voices take up the call, weary ones, almost drowned out by the screams of victory by the dark elves around them, screams that echoed off the remains of the walls of Sanctuary and up and up, until she was certain that they could be heard the whole world over.

Chapter 114

Cyrus

It was nearing night now, and the end of the bridge was close, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The sweat poured off him in gallons, he was certain, as though his whole skin were drenched with it and the blood of the scourge, that foul-black stuff that had smelled of death only this morning. The gasping of those fighting on the line beside him was strong but not overwhelming, and Cyrus could scarcely feel his arms but to know that they were there, and that Praelior was in a death-grip in his right hand, ready to deal out whatever destruction he saw fit to mete.

“Running out of time,” Terian’s call was calm, calmer than Cyrus thought it should be given the circumstances.

“And to think,” Longwell said, driving a lance through three of the scourge to the far right of Cyrus, “I could have been mouldering and dead on the shores of my homeland right now. Instead I get to watch us fail here and see these things delivered upon the shores of Arkaria.” He almost sounded mocking, but there was no joy in it. “I can’t thank you enough for saving me so I could witness this day. Truly, it will haunt me for all the rest of my life, all six months of it, should the pattern of Luukessia hold.”

“I don’t wish to see these days, either,” Odellan said darkly. “To think of what we’ve wrought on the people already dead is almost too much to bear. To add Arkaria to it is a frightful thing, not worthy of contemplation. I would rather die here than watch my land go slowly into the devouring mouths of these things the way we watched Luukessia go. Better to finish out swiftly than the slow slide, like ailing to death.”

There was silence for only a moment before Alaric spoke from Cyrus’s left, his blade always in motion and faster than even Cyrus’s had been. “I find it dispiriting, your lack of faith that we can stop these beasts before they