Chapter 11 - The Fall of Dawn

In those furious minutes, the sheer savagery of the fight had eclipsed all else. Even the sight of the Holy Army - our army - rising up over the ridge, the pre-dawn gloom lit by their torches and flaming brands. They'd marched through the night to get here, and anything less would have meant our annihilation.

Assaulting a city in the dark was tactical madness, but Commander Sabrine had seen the urgently strobing light of Caius's signal. There was no time for strategy, no time for forming ordered ranks - All that remained was to go right for the gate while it remained open, while the beastmen hacked and chopped and clawed at each other in their desperation to kill us.

And so the templars and the knights had gone forward. The earth shook beneath the thunder of hooves, bright swords and lances raised. The armsmen came behind them, running to keep up, a mass of men surging towards the sliver of the open gate across the plain.

With them came the angels.

The priests had spared nothing, held nothing back. Every iota of power, of divine favor, had gone into the summoning: The Holy King himself had beseeched the Elemental Gods for Their aid, and perhaps his prayers meant more than the rest put together. 

The angels had materialized mid-flight, halos and flaming swords blazing, soaring towards the battlements with singular purpose-

But then an answering cloud of dark, churning bodies had streamed from the walls of Lyost, and met them head-on. Crows, bats, carrion-eaters, lead by their larger kin. Both sides commenced tearing each other apart, swords pitted against needle-sharp beaks and pitiless talons, rending and ripping.

The angels were proof against mortal weapons, but there was only so long they could remain on this plane. Every second counted, as the demihuman horde within the city stirred, shouting itself into order.

All they had to do was drop the portcullis. Raise the drawbridge, and pick off the knights as they milled futilely outside.

But to do that, they had to kill us all.

---------------------

Of course, none of us knew anything about this. All we knew was the tightening noose of beastmen, stabbing with spears and catchpoles, their jeers echoing in our ears.

When the guardroom had been lost, Caius and Skander had fought their way up the steps for their last stand. Their goal was simple: To hold the winding mechanism for as long as possible, to stop our foes from undoing our work.

Ran was on their heels, his spear hissing with a liquid serpent-quickness, punching into eyes and through throats - the killing edge crackling with lacerating energy, each strike spraying bloody flecks as he wrenched it out.

Dogged, determined to fight to the end, Brother Jozan stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me. His armor was covered in gouges, his shield long gone - the useless, broken remnants swinging around his left arm like an oversized bangle, as he swung his mace with both hands. He was still game, battering a mantis-clawed killer to the ground, but from the spreading stain on his surcoat I could tell he'd taken a bad hit.

Skill no longer mattered. Only effort. My limbs felt like they weighed a thousand pounds, as I hacked and slashed; the blue fires of the Interfector burned brighter than ever, but every swing made dark spots of effort flicker in my field of vision, my breath coming in ragged gasps. I wasn't even sure if I was hitting anything, now - the beastmen feared Gabriel's sword, and gave me a wide berth.

Those that didn't, burned.

And then the beastmen were falling back. I had felt them falter, like a tide receding; the last few had rushed in with fear in their howls, with the blades of the others at their back. Between the six of us, we had accounted for over ten times our number, above and below.

There was, of course, no-one to keep score. Everyone else was dead.

"Is that all they've got?" Skander asked. He was panting hard, his face bloodless with pain and effort, but there was still a laugh in his voice. "Think we can kill every last one of 'em?"

Shujiro was flagging, too. His swordsmanship was becoming wilder, a flurry of dazzling, ringing blows that didn't kill his opponents so much as slice them to still-twitching pieces. His teeth were gritted, that handsome face contorted in a sneer.

The prospect of death strips away all illusions. For Shujiro, it meant he wasn't bothering with the genteel, calm facade any longer.

"Where," he hissed through his teeth, "-are the damn angels?"

Even his hair was in disarray now, hanging slack and loose around his features. A lucky slash had unraveled his topknot, and he seemed to have taken it personally.

Almost as personally as the death of his slave, her empty eyes staring blankly at nothing, her slim fingers still gripping at the knife in her guts.

There was nothing I could do for her.

Caius looked like he'd aged a decade in the span of a few minutes. He'd taken a bad hit to the hip, and he pressed his hand to it as he fumbled a potion from his belt. When he swallowed it, some color returned to his face, sticky with sweat and gore.

"Here's-" he spat red saliva, wiped his mouth. "-an idea. Why not shout at them, maybe they'll hear you-"

"Shut up, you - you withered old eunuch! You've led us all to our deaths!"

Skander grinned at Shujiro. It was a nasty, sharp-toothed smile, the smile a man has when he's at the gallows, contemplating the drop ahead.

"Too late to back out now," he rumbled. "You volunteered, remember? Never trust a recruiter, I always say."

Shujiro went silent. Glaring at both of them, in helpless rage. His fingers flexed around the grip of his sword, his white shirt sliced and torn: Skill - or luck - had kept him from taking more than superficial injuries, but he'd pushed it about as far as it could go.

I was - dimly - aware of the clamor outside. The sound of battle, the cawing screech of carrion-eaters and the flaming blades of the angels. It all seemed so distant, now; so very far away from the walls of the stone chamber, gore drooling down the steps, steam rising from the cooling corpses.

A hand latched onto my arm, fingers gripping with desperate strength. Warmth radiated through my bones, and the pall of fatigue lifted, ever-so-slightly, gray wisps twisting along the dents in my armor.

"Better take over for me, I think," Jozan said, and slumped.

His hand fell away from his ribs, revealing a ragged hole in his side. His flanged mace clattered to the ground as he crumpled, his eyes foggy - I could see something dark and spongy moving within the wound, and hissed.

"Caius!" I said, urgent. "He's-"

"I know, lad. I know." He dug in his pouch, came up with a slender red vial. "Last one - Make it count."

Caius tossed it to me, and I caught the potion, popping the wax seal. Brother Jozan turned his head to the side, when I pressed it on him.

"Don't bother," he rasped, blood flecking his lips. "Already dead-"

"Drink it, damn you," I said, forcing his head back. He tried - weakly - to pull away, but didn't struggle when I poured the draught down his throat. I stared at the wound in his side, willing it to close, willing the flesh to seal over...

"They're coming," Throne Gazer warned. His mother-of-pearl armor was scabbed and dented, and his skin was more blue than green-tinted, now; His blood flowed sluggishly, thickly, from his wounds, as he leaned on his spear for support. Those bulbous eyes closed once, solemnly.

"One final effort, I think. It was...good to fight alongside you. All of you."

Skander reached down. He prised a cudgel free from a dead hand, hefting it to test the balance. "Good," he growled, as the stones shuddered from the tromp of armored feed. "-I was getting bored."

Caius exhaled - A slow, measured sigh. "Well," he said. "At least it isn't raining."

He looked down at the strange little doll I'd seen before, small enough to fit into the palm of his hand. With infinite tenderness, he kissed it and tucked it away - reverently - into a belt-pouch, testing the edge of his notched sword.

"Now, let's give them something to remember us b-"

And then there was a fury of light and heat, and around me, the world went to pieces.

---------------------

It was magic, of course.

The beastmen were savage. Brutal. Hungry for glory, to please their bloody-handed gods, for human flesh.

But they were not - for a moment - fools.

When the fireball erupted, the blast hurled us all from our feet. Masonry rubble rained down from the roof, and the outer wall of the gatehouse collapsed in a landslip of rubble. Air rushed in, thick with the smell of sulphur, of cooking meat, dense smoke coiling and gusting like funeral incense.

In a single blast, the building had been reduced to a hollow shell by the firestorm. Something, somewhere was burning, ash and cinders falling like snow from the boiling smoke. Half a wall had toppled on us, fist-sized bricks pounding us unmercifully, and all I could hear was a distant drone in my ears.

I couldn't move. My skin felt scorched, like a full-body sunburn - It hurt to breathe, as blood trickled into my eyes. My armor glowed, faintly, neon glyphs shimmering with witchfire radiance on the cuirass and pauldrons; somehow, it'd kept the worst of the flames from me.

The others weren't so fortunate.

Jozan was gone. All I saw of Shujiro was an arm protruding from the rubble, one that might have been his.

It was Throne Gazer who lurched to his feet first. He'd taken the brunt of the blast, scorched and charred by the flames - He clung to his spear as he forced himself to his knees, his form momentarily silhouetted against the caved section of wall…

I heard chanting. Low, slick and evil. A brittle crack, like the air splitting-

He jerked. His body twisted, as if shoved by an unseen hand. Something had happened to him that I couldn't quite understand, until the merman lurched forward, his head lolling. Only then did I see the gleaming silver of the hissing projectile that had gone right through him, a single long spine that pierced his side.

Gazer’s weebbed fingers uncurled from his spear. He vomited blood in a great torrent across the debris-strewn ground and fell against it, then went still.

Figures were scrambling through the smoke. Up the steps, along the mound of rubble.

I heard laughter. Terrible, wheezing laughter.

Skander's clothes hung from his body in tatters, his arms charred halfway to the bone. He had his hands over his eyes, like a child hiding from the dark. He was laughing, his burly form trembling with the force of it, as he took them away-

His eyes. His eyes were charred pits, blinded by his own scorched flesh.

"I wish," he rasped out. "I wish I could see you, old man."

His face twisted, in a bloody, cracked-lip grin. "Guess we'll just have to settle things up there."

Caius. Where was Caius?

The effort brought tears of agony to my eyes, but I forced my head to turn.

He lay face-down, about ten meters away, in a pool of his own blood. A shard of ice - ice, of all things - had taken him in the back, and left an exit wound the size of my fist. He still had his sword clamped in one blood-smeared hand, the skin scorched away.

No, I thought. No.

Pain tore at me, and from it I knew I was still alive. There was a crushing weight on my back, and every time I moved it rocked back and crushed me a little more. But - even as my eyes stung with smoke - I could see the pommel of the Interfector before me. The blade lay where it'd fallen, the flames stilled; without a wielder, it was merely a sword and nothing more.

Move, I told myself. I reached, and agony lanced up my side as I stretched, working my fingers across that tiny length of stone. My universe seemed to shrink down to that, as if the blade was the only thing that mattered…

I could hear them coming closer, now. Horned, masked figures, appearing from the gloom. I glimpsed pink silks and curving tulwars, their animal stench mingling with what might have been perfumes and oils.

I reached. It was all I could do. My fingertips brushed the Interfector, and - with tooth-grinding care - I dragged it close, my fingers curling around the hilt.

Please, I thought. Please, God-

There was the hiss of a blade, and Skander's laughter ended in a gurgle. Arterial blood spurted, splattered the ground before me in a long streak. I heard the thump, as his body crumpled to the ground.

I tried-

A boot came down on my arm, and pinned it to the ground. One of the masked figures loomed over me, casting a long and hungry shadow. I could see the charms strung from the thing's featureless mask, veils fluttering as it looked down at me.

It was then I realized - with slow-blossoming disgust - that the figure had four arms, two riling in subtly obscene motion as it lifted a ritual knife with another. Seeing that I was pinned, it turned its head and laughed, a hideous fluting sound. Mimicking my distress.

Mocking me, before it moved it for the kill.

Red, red, a flare of insulted rage-

And then the Interfector's blue-steel blade burst into flame.

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What happened next isn't easy to explain.

It was, I think, an act of desperation. The realization that this was it - the bitter end. A whole life lived, then less than a week of confusion and bloodshed and killing, and it would end here.

Forever.

I rejected it. I denied it.

I strained. Reached, drawing deep on reserves that I barely knew existed. I heaved at the crushing weight that pinned me, an effort that sent adrenaline bursting through my brain-

And I stood.

How, I didn't know. The pinning rubble slid away, toppling with a splintering crash, and I hacked the Interfector through the Magelos' leg with one savage swipe. I heard it yowl as it flailed back, gore fountaining from the stump, before I put the point of the blade right through that mask.

I could sense my moment. As though an opening had been granted, or some key had been turned in a lock.

I saw the distant towers of the Platinum Spire, brilliant and gleaming beneath the fat, gibbous moon of Arcadia’s final night. All of this transposed against the fire and carnage of this chamber of horrors, filled with monsters whose masks displayed only blank inhumanity, their voices muttering like the insane.

And I cut loose.

They barely moved, as first I struck. Again.

And again.

And again.

In the space of that single breath, I had delivered so many cuts with the Interfector's remorseless edge, that the masked warriors had lost their arms and legs. They were still in the act of falling, of twisting and writhing in their death-agonies, when I moved past them, accelerating towards the tall, alien figure they flanked.

I didn't just kill Shahmat Uth-Matar, ruler of the Twilight Veil tribe, Witch-Queen of the Prophet’s Horde. I dissected her, before the first syllables of her final spell could even leave her mouth, before her hands could shape the blasts meant to wipe me from the face of the world.

And then I was past her. Charging towards the nearest rising monster, a huge claymore and a raspy roar waiting for me. I could see the beastman's kin waiting for me, all of them raising their weapons far too slowly as I drove towards them, raising the Interfector with both hands-

Then I was in the midst of them, cutting and slashing like a whirlwind of blades. My brother's sword moved so fast, it seemed like a dozen oblate blades, slashing in every direction at once. The Interfector became a sweeping scythe, a blur, three times its length as I drove through the closing wall of creatures, slicing heads and torsos, armor and shields, anything that stood in my way.

The fire was within me, now. I could feel it scorching the air, boiling from my eyes, my armor, a rippling mantle of blue flame. Blood sprayed, superheated to churning vapor, dragging extravagant contrails of cooked gore across the walls.

I was halfway down the steps now, I realized. Out in the open air. Flame licking at my heels, all sound drowned out by the hammer of my pulse in my ears. As if my heart was on the verge of bursting, as if all this would surely end.

Nothing stopped the Interfector. Nothing.

Flesh disintegrated. Armor melted beneath that pellucid blue flame. Weapons shivered apart or were cleaved through, in that same relentless motion. I was at the heart of my own personal storm, a rising hurricane of raggedly severed limbs as beastmen swarmed around me, as if hoping to bury me with their numbers.

As if wheat could stop the scythe.

I could see the terror in their eyes as I came for them. Haloed by amorphous contrails of rippling blue fire, blade moving so fast it was a blur, I was a demon to them, something spat out of the most terrible of Hells. They mobbed around me, like hyenas on a lion, trying to drag me down, trying to choke my blows. Terrified of me, but even more terrified of letting me live.

Some flew apart, when the Interfector tore through them. Others immolated where they stood, some surviving to reel away screaming and beating at the all-consuming flames that never went out. Split asunder, bodies were hurled aside by the sheer kinetic impact, carried by their own momentum as they were carved.

Arrows flew at me. Spears. They burned away before they reached me, the mantle of flame roared up at my back. I could see smoke wisping from my gauntlets, the rippling blaze enfolding me as I turned towards the archers sending desperate shafts whistling in my direction.

Ogres and orcs, dogmen, and stranger things, still. All gathered in a milling crowd, a firing line. Throwing everything they had at me, all to ensure that death would not take them too.

I left burning footsteps on the cobblestones as I strode towards them. Gathering speed, as I broke into a run. A sprint.

A charge.

I leapt. Higher than ever before, higher than Heiter could have imagined. They were scrambling back, parting before me, shields and spears raised in wavering hands and claws to meet the assault-

I smashed down into them, and the street disappeared in a volcano of fire and exploded earth. When the Interfector's blade plunged down, a cataclysm of flame spewed outwards. Those that were caught became living torches. Those who weren't were felled by the hail of stones, or scrambled away coughing blood from their scorched lungs.

I was past the gatehouse, now. Alone against an army, the panicked horde scrabbling away from me, like a single entity recoiling from a plague bearer. I cut them down as they fled, a relentless straight-ahead march, carving and killing with every step-

It was unreal. Insane. A fever-dream of power, more vivid than any fantasy.

The Interfector flung beastmen out of my path. Left them twisted and broken, hacked and cleaved, the ground strewn with fallen shields and weapons. Even in flight there was no escape; When I swept the sword across, fire rushed down the street, like a searing wall of acid.

Those caught in it writhed for frantic moments before they were scorched down to their bones, then to dust that blew away.

And I-

"Forward!"

"For the King!"

Dimly, distantly, I realized someone was bellowing orders. Riders were sweeping in, lances couched, running down the beastmen as they fled. Spears punched through flesh, javelins flurrying out like arrows as steeds thundered past me. 

The infantry was advancing, too - Angels swooping down from above, the fierce light of their swords eclipsed by the Interfector's blaze.

I stopped.

The press around me had broken, and the ground was covered in jumbled bodies. I looked around for Caius, for Jozan - for anyone - but saw only the broken forms, the slaughter wrecked in the wake of the charge. Scorched, twisted, cleaved, decapitated...It was like an anatomical study, like the jumble of mutilated and burned toys left in the wake of a cruel but ingenious child.

Somewhere, a horn sounded. The banner of the Liberation Army fluttered bravely ahead of me, carried deeper into the city.

Fighting, somewhere in the distance, like the echo of someone else's war…

The hammer of my pulse had stopped, at last. My hands were shaking, a fine patina of ash clinging to my form as I stumbled forward, coming down off the pitch of blind rage that had driven me into the fight.

I looked back, at the trail of destruction I'd wreaked.

At the corpses I'd carved my way through.

At the distant gatehouse, far behind now, a gaping hole in one wall as blue fires flickered fitfully within.

I felt my legs turn to cloth, my knees buckling beneath me as I sank to the ground.

I realized what I'd done, and the thought made me gag. Somehow, somehow, I choked back the vomit, even as I felt something like a hot knife sawing at my stomach, acid reflux churning at the back of my throat.

And that - later, once the killing was done - was how the Holy Knights found me.

Next: The Four Blessings