He could feel the weight of the pike, its head still buried in his back, heard it clatter along his horse's rump-armour as the beast slewed and pitched.
A fishmonger's knife found the unprotected underside of his left knee, searing up into the joint. Itkovian chopped weakly down with the lower edge of his shield, barely sufficient to push the attacker away. The thin blade snapped, the six inches remaining in his knee grinding and slicing through tendon and cartilage. Blood filled the space between his calf and the felt padding sheathing it.
The Shield Anvil felt no pain. Brutal clarity commanded his thoughts. His god was with him, now, at this final moment. With him, and with the brave, indomitable warhorse beneath him.
The beast's sideways lurch ceased as the animal—pike plucked free—righted itself despite the blood that now gushed down its chest. The animal leapt forward, crushing bodies under it, kicked and clawed and clambered its way towards what seemed—impossibly to Itkovian's eyes—a cleared avenue, a place where only motionless bodies awaited.
The Shield Anvil, comprehending at last what he was seeing, renewed his efforts. The enemy was melting away, on all sides. Screams and the clash of iron echoed wildly in Itkovian's helmet.
A moment later and the horse stumbled clear, hooves lashing out as it reared—not in rage this time, but in triumph.
Pain arrived as Itkovian sagged onto the animal's armoured neck. Pain like nothing he had known before. The pike remained embedded in his back, the broken knife-blade in the heart of his left knee, the hatchet buried in the shattered remains of his collar bone. Jaws clenched, he managed to quell his mount's pitching about, succeeded in pivoting the animal round, to face, once more, the cemetery.
Disbelieving, he saw his Grey Swords carving their way free of the bodies that had buried them, rising as if from a barrow of corpses, silent as ghosts, their movements jerky as if they were clawing their way awake after a horrifying nightmare. Only a dozen were visible, yet that was twelve more than the Shield Anvil had thought possible.
Boots thumped up to Itkovian. Blinking gritty sweat from his eyes, he tried to focus on the figures closing in around him.
Grey Swords. Battered and stained surcoats, the young, pale faces of Capan recruits.
Then, on a horse to match Itkovian's own, the Mortal Sword. Brukhalian, black-armoured, his black hair a wild, blood-matted mane, Fener's holy sword in one huge, gauntleted hand.
He'd raised his visor. Dark eyes were fixed on the Shield Anvil.
'Apologies, sir,' Brukhalian rumbled as he drew rein beside him. 'For our tardiness.'
Behind the Mortal Sword, Itkovian now saw Karnadas, hurrying forward. His face, drawn and pale as a corpse's, was nevertheless beautiful to the Shield Anvil's eyes.
'Destriant!' he gasped, weaving on his saddle. 'My horse, sir… my soldiers…'
'Fener is with me, sir,' Karnadas replied in a trembling voice. 'And so shall I answer you.'
The world darkened then. Itkovian felt the sudden tug of hands beneath him, as if he had fallen into their embrace. Pondering that, his thoughts drifted—my horse… my soldiers—then closed into oblivion.
They battered down the flimsy shutters, pushed in through the rooms above the ground floor. They slithered through the tunnel of packed bodies that had once been stairwells. Gruntle's iron fangs were blunt, nicked and gouged. They had become ragged clubs in his hands. He commanded the main hallway and was slowly, methodically creating barricades of cooling flesh and broken bone.
No weariness weighed down his arms or dulled his acuity. His breathing remained steady, only slightly deeper than usual. His forearms showed a strange pattern of blood stains, barbed and striped, the blood blackening and seeming to seep into his skin. He was indifferent to it.
There were Seerdomin, scattered here and there within the human tide of Tenescowri. Probably pulled along without volition. Gruntle cut down peasants in order to close with them. It was his only desire. To close with them. To kill them. The rest was chaff, irritating, getting in the way. Impediments to what he wanted.
Had he seen his own face, he would barely recognize it. Blackened stripes spread away from his eyes and bearded cheeks. Tawny amber streaked the beard itself. His eyes were the colour of sun-withered prairie grass.
His militia was a hundred strong now, silent figures who were as extensions of his will. Unquestioning, looking upon him with awe. Their faces shone when he settled his gaze on them. He did not wonder at that, either, did not realize that the illumination he saw was reflected, that they but mirrored the pale, yet strangely tropical emanation of his eyes.
Gruntle was satisfied. He was answering all that had been visited upon Stonny—she now fought alongside his second-in-command, that small, wiry Lestari soldier, holding the tenement block's rear stairwell. They'd met but once since withdrawing to this building hours earlier. And it had shaken him, jarred him in a deep place within himself, and it was as if he had been shocked awake—as if all this time his soul had been hunkered down within him, hidden, silent, whilst an unknown, implacable force now ruled his limbs, rode the blood that pumped through him. She was broken still, the bravado torn away to reveal a human visage, painfully vulnerable, profoundly wounded in its heart.
The recognition had triggered a resurgence of cold desire within Gruntle. She was the debt he had only begun to pay. And whatever had rattled her upon their meeting once more, well, no doubt she had somehow comprehended his desire's bared fangs and unsheathed claws. A reasonable reaction, only troubling insofar as it deserved to be.
The decrepit, ancient Daru tenement now housed a storm of death, whipping winds of rage, terror and agony twisting and churning through every hallway, in every room no matter how small. It flowed vicious and without surcease. It matched, in every detail, the world of Gruntle's mind, the world within the confines of his skull.
There existed no contradictions between the reality of the outer world and that of his inner landscape. This truth beggared comprehension. It could only be grasped instinctively, a visceral understanding glimpsed by less than a handful of Gruntle's followers, the Lestari lieutenant among them.
He knew he had entered a place devoid of sanity. Knew, somehow, that he and the rest of the militia now existed more within the mind of Gruntle than they did in the real world. They fought with skills they had never before possessed. They did not tire. They did not shout, scream, or even so much as bark commands or rallying cries. There was no need for rallying cries—no-one broke, no-one was routed. Those that died fell where they had stood, silent as automatons.
Hallways were chest deep in bodies on the ground floor. Some rooms could not even be entered. Blood ran through these presses like a crimson river running beneath the surface of the land, seeping amidst hidden gravel lenses, pockets of sand, buried boulders—seeped, here in this dread building, around bone and meat and armour and boots and sandals and weapons and helms. Reeking like a sewer, thick as the flow in a surgeon's trench.
The attackers finally staggered back, withdrew down almost-blocked stairwells, clawed out of the windows. Thousands more waited outside, but the retreat clogged the approaches. A moment of peace settled within the building.
Light-headed and weaving as he clambered his way up the main hallway, the Lestari lieutenant found Gruntle. His master's striped arms glistened, the blades of his cutlasses were yellowed white—fangs in truth, now—and he swung a savagely feline visage to the Lestari.
'We surrender this floor, now,' Gruntle said, shaking the blood from his blades.
The hacked remains of Seerdomin surrounded the caravan captain. Armoured warriors literally chopped to pieces.
The lieutenant nodded. 'We're out of room to manoeuvre.'
Gruntle shrugged his massive shoulders. 'We've two more floors above us. Then the roof.'
Their eyes locked for a long moment, and the lieutenant was both chilled and warmed by what he saw within the vertical slits of Gruntle's pupils. A man to fear… a man to follow… a man
to love. 'You are Trake's Mortal Sword,' he said.
The huge Daru frowned. 'Stonny Menackis.'
'She bears but minor injuries, Captain, and has moved up to the next landing.'
'Good.'
Weighed down with sacks of food and drink, the militia was converging, the command to do so unspoken, as it had been unspoken every time the gathering occurred. More than twenty had fallen in this last engagement, the Lestari saw. We lose this many with each floor. By the time we reach the roof there'll be but a score of us. Well, that should be more than enough, to hold a single trapdoor. Hold it until the Abyss of Final Night.
The silent followers were collecting serviceable weapons, scraps of armour—mostly from the Seerdomin. The Lestari watched with dull eyes a Capan woman pick up a gauntleted hand, severed raggedly at the wrist by one of Gruntle's cutlasses, and calmly pull the hand from the scaled glove, which she then donned.
Gruntle stepped over bodies on his way to the stairwell.
It was time to retreat to the next level, time to take command of the outer-lying rooms with their feebly shuttered windows, and the back stairs and the central stairs. Time to jam yet more souls down Hood's clogged, choking throat.
At the stairs, Gruntle clashed his cutlasses.
Outside, a resurging tide of noise…
Brukhalian sat astride his huge, lathered warhorse, watching as the Destriant's cutters dragged a barely breathing Itkovian into a nearby building that would serve, for the next bell or two, as a triage. Karnadas himself, drawing once more on his fevered Warren of Denul, had quelled the flow of blood from the chest of the Shield Anvil's horse.
The surviving Grey Swords at the cemetery were being helped clear by the Mortal Sword's own companies. There were wounds to be tended to there as well, but those that were fatal had already proved so. Corpses were being pulled away in a frantic search for more survivors.
The cutters carrying Itkovian now faced the task of removing buried iron from the Shield Anvil, weapons that had, by virtue of remaining embedded, in all likelihood saved the man's life. And Karnadas would be on hand for that surgery, to quench the blood that would gush from each wound as the iron was drawn free.
Brukhalian's flat, hard eyes followed the Destriant as the old man stumbled after his cutters. Karnadas had gone too far, pulled too much from his warren, too much and too often. His body had begun its irreversible surrender. Bruises marked the joints of his arms, the elbows, the wrists, the fingers. Within him, his veins and arteries were becoming as cheesecloth, and the seepage of blood into muscle and cavity would only grow more profound. Denul's flow was disintegrating all that it flowed through—the body of the priest himself.
He would be, Brukhalian knew, dead before dawn.
Yet, before then, Itkovian would be healed, brutally mended without regard to the mental trauma that accompanied all wounds. The Shield Anvil would assume command once again, but not as the man he had been.
The Mortal Sword was a hard man. The fate of his friends was a knowledge bereft of emotion. It was as it had to be.
He straightened on his saddle, scanned the area to gauge the situation. The attack upon the barracks had been repelled. The Tenescowri had broken on all sides, and none still standing remained within sight. This was not the case elsewhere, Brukhalian well knew. The Grey Swords had been virtually obliterated as an organized army. No doubt pockets of resistance remained, but they would be few and far between. To all intents and purposes, Capustan had fallen.
A mounted messenger approached from the northwest, horse leaping the mounds of bodies littering the avenue, slowing as it neared the Mortal Sword's companies.
Brukhalian gestured with his blade and the young Capan woman reined in before him.
'Sir!' she gasped. 'I bring word from Rath'Fener! A message, passed on to me by an acolyte!'
'Let us hear it, then, sir.'
'The Thrall is assailed! Rath'Fener invokes the Reve's Eighth Command. You are to ride with all in your company to his aid. Rath'Fener kneels before the hooves—you are to be the Twin Tusks of his and Fener's shadow!'
Brukhalian's eyes narrowed. 'Sir, this acolyte managed to leave the Thrall in order to convey his priest's holy invocation. Given the protective sorcery around the building, how was this managed?'
The young woman shook her head. 'I do not know, sir.'
'And your path across the city, to arrive here, was it contested?'
'None living stood before me, sir.'
'Can you explain that?'
'No, sir, I cannot. Fener's fortune, perhaps…'
Brukhalian studied her a moment longer. 'Recruit, will you join us in our deliverance?'
She blinked, then slowly nodded. 'I would be honoured, Mortal Sword.'
His reply was a gruff, sorrowful whisper that only deepened her evident bewilderment, 'As would I, sir.' Brukhalian lowered the visor, swung to his followers. 'Eleventh Mane to remain with the Destriant and his cutters!' he commanded. 'Remaining companies, we march to the Thrall! Rath'Fener has invoked the Reve, and to this we must answer!' He then dismounted and handed the reins of his warhorse to the messenger. 'My mind has changed,' he rumbled. 'You are to remain here, sir, to guard my destrier. Also, to inform the Shield Anvil of my disposition once he awakens.'
'Your disposition, sir?'
'You will know it soon, recruit.' The Mortal Sword faced his troops once more. They stood in ranks, waiting, silent. Four hundred Grey Swords, perhaps the last left alive. 'Sirs,' Brukhalian asked them, 'are you in full readiness?'
A veteran officer grated, 'Ready to try, Mortal Sword.'
'Your meaning?' the commander asked.
'We are to cross half the city, sir. We shall not make it.'
'You assume our path to the Thrall will be contested, Nilbanas. Yes?'
The old soldier frowned, said nothing.
Brukhalian reached for his shield, which had waited at his side in the hands of an aide. 'I shall lead us,' he said. 'Do you follow?'
Every soldier nodded, and the Mortal Sword saw in those half-visored faces the emergence of an awareness, a knowledge to which he had already arrived. There would be no return from the journey to come. Some currents, he knew, could not be fought.
Readying the large bronze-plated shield on his left arm, adjusting his grip on his holy sword, Brukhalian strode forward. His Grey Swords fell in behind him. He chose the most direct route, not slowing even as he set across open, corpse-strewn squares.
The murmuring rumble of humanity was on all sides. Isolated sounds of battle, the collapse of burning buildings and the roar of unchecked fires, streets knee-deep in bodies—scenes of Hood's infernal pit rolled past them as they marched, as of two unfurling tapestries woven by a mad, soul-tortured artisan.
Yet their journey was uncontested.
As they neared the aura-sheathed Thrall, the veteran increased his pace to come alongside Brukhalian. 'I heard the messenger's words, sir—'
'Of that I am aware, Nilbanas.'
'It cannot be really from Rath'Fener—'
'But it is, sir.'
'Then the priest betrays us!'
'Yes, old friend, he betrays us.'
'He has desecrated Fener's most secret Reve! By the Tusks, sir—'
'The words of the Reve are greater than he is, Nilbanas. They are Fener's own.'
'Yet he has twisted them malign, sir! We should not abide!'
'Rath'Fener's crime shall be answered, but not by us.'
'At the cost of our lives?'
'Without our deaths, sir, there would be no crime. Thus, no punishment to match.'
'Mortal Sword—'
'We are done, my friend. Now, in this manner, we choose the meaning of our deaths.'
'But… but what does he gain? Betraying his own god—'
'No doubt,' Brukhalian said with a private, grim smile, 'his own life. For a time. Should the Thrall's protective sorcery be sundered, should the Council of Masks be taken, he will be spared the horrors that aw
ait his fellow priests. He judges this a worthwhile exchange.'
The veteran was shaking his head. 'And so Fener allows his own words to assume the weight of betrayal. How noble his Bestial Mien when he finally corners Rath'Fener?'
'Our god shall not be the one to deliver the punishment, Nilbanas. You are right, he could not do so in fullest conscience, for this is a betrayal that wounds him deeply, leaves him weakened and vulnerable to fatal consequence, sir.'
'Then,' the man almost sobbed, 'then who shall be our vengeful hand, Brukhalian?'
If anything, the Mortal Sword's smile grew grimmer. 'Even now, the Shield Anvil no doubt regains consciousness. And is moments from hearing the messenger's report. Moments from true comprehension. Nilbanas, our vengeful hand shall be Itkovian's. What is your countenance now, old friend?'
The soldier was silent for another half-dozen paces. Before them was the open concourse before the gate to the Thrall. 'I am calmed, sir,' he said, his voice deep and satisfied. 'I am calmed.'
Brukhalian cracked his sword against his shield. Black fire lit the blade, sizzled and crackled. 'They surround the concourse before us. Shall we enter?'
'Aye, sir, with great joy.'
The Mortal Sword and his four hundred followers strode into the clearing, not hesitating as the streets and alley mouths on all sides swiftly filled with Septarch Kulpath's crack troops, his Urdomen, Seerdomin and Betaklites, including the avenue they had just quitted. Archers appeared on the rooftops, and the hundreds of Seerdomin lying before the Thrall's gate, feigning death, now rose, readying weapons.
At Brukhalian's side, Nilbanas snorted. 'Pathetic.'
The Mortal Sword grunted a laugh that was heard by all. 'The Septarch deems himself clever, sir.'
'And us stupid with honour.'
'Aye, we are that indeed, are we not, old friend?'
Nilbanas raised his sword and roared triumphantly. Blade whirling over his head, he spun in place his dance of delighted defiance. The Grey Swords locked shields, ends curling to enclose the Mortal Sword as they readied their last stand in the centre of the concourse.