Chapter 35

Forty men dropped dead in an instant.

Kaze showed me a little bit of her art on the way over. Not enough for me to learn even the basics; that required talents that I simply didn’t have. But enough to know how it worked, at least well enough to explain it.

Each knife in her harness was assigned a number, one through ninety-nine. Those numbers corresponded to a specific frequency of mana encoded into the point. As the enemy rushed through the gate, she tagged each one with a number, assigning them their very own knife.

Exactly where she placed the knife’s target depended on the vulnerabilities she spotted. This one didn’t have his gorget buckled properly. This one had the visor of his helm up. This one had a tear in his mail. None of them made it through the mortars’ preparatory barrage completely unscathed, so she had her pick of targets.

When she activated the spell, she didn’t control the individual knives. She could control a few, keeping them whirling through the air with sheer kinetomancy, but that wasn’t necessary to strike her targets. She simply had to connect the two points with a hair-thin strand of mana. The knives raced towards their assigned target, attracted like the opposite poles of a magnet. An instant before impact, she removed the mark from the target and reassigned it to the knives’ sheathes in the harness.

The knives couldn’t stop in time, not when they were traveling at a noticeable fraction of a bullet’s velocity. They simply punched through, flipped around violently enough to shake free the bits of blood and other detritus they collected, and returned home. The whole process took less than a second.

Why the staff? It was a specialized piece of kit designed to help her keep track of the various mana signatures. Even a mind as sharp as hers could never keep them all straight, not in the heat of battle, when milliseconds mattered. All she had to do was tell it which number went where and supply the mana. The enchantments encoded into the fist-sized ruby at the head did the heavy lifting.

That was what made knife witches so dangerous. They could attack without warning, faster than most races could react, and they didn’t often miss. Numbers meant little. Kaze could kill one shy of a hundred men in the blink of an eye, and another hundred the next. Armor offered some protection, though it took expensive enchantments to be completely proof. The normal gaps found in mundane armor, a necessity born of letting the wearer see, breathe, or move, were exploitable.

The only way to reliably kill a knife witch is to wear them down. No one casting used much mana, and Kaze had plenty to spare. Her supply wasn’t infinite, though, of mana or knives. She would run out of both eventually. Nor was her range. If they opened the measure and pelted her with arrows from outside her effective targeting range, she’d be in trouble.

Likewise if they sent in heavy infantry with enchanted armor or greatshields to box her in, or someone with the skill to break her staff. Pin her down, and she’d wear herself out. Break the staff, and the number of knives she could control at once dropped to a pittance.

In a battle of attrition, she would, eventually, lose, if only the enemy commander had the guts to sacrifice their men in job lots.

There was a pause by the door. The first through were probably meant to take the gatehouse and open the massive timber construct. Absent an open door or a signal of some kind, they had no way of knowing what befell their comrades.

Some brave soul stuck his head through the gap. Kaze removed it from his shoulders.

Another pause, and chaos erupted.

Someone on the other side of the door read the situation correctly. There was a knife witch waiting for them. Subtlety was out the window. It was time for brute force and ignorance, or the gate was as good as lost.

Three separate mages blasted the doorway with everything they had. Pyromancy on its own is impressive for area control. Mix it with aeromancy and you turn a gout of flame into a blowtorch. That alone is a pairing worthy of nightmares. Throw a hydromancer in for good measure, and the situation goes from barely survivable to catastrophe.

It sounds counterintuitive, I know. Water and fire aren’t a good mix. Water isn’t a particularly good projectile weapon, either. But when the heat generated by the pyromancer is sufficient to flash the water to steam, and there’s an aeromancer to whip it into a high pressure jet, water completely outclasses nearly every other area of effect spell in an enclosed environment.

There are few things more dangerous than high pressure steam. It can strip flesh from bones on contact. Even if it doesn’t touch you, radiant heat can cause full thickness burns in seconds. It’s blinding and choking. And the noise, the noise is incredible. Imagine a kettle the size of a dragon and you’ll have some idea of the screeching hell that was unleashed through the doorway.

Against anyone else, it probably would have worked.

Not Kaze.

Space is the enemy of area of effect attacks. They can control an area, deny the enemy the ability to move freely through it. Because they’re diffuse, though, designed to spread the carnage over as much territory as possible, getting out of range is a matter of reading the room and knowing what’s coming.

Kaze backpedalled away from the billowing vortex, opening up the range until the steam was merely hot, not scalding. She couldn’t see, true, but neither could they. But then, she didn’t have to.

Five knives swept out from under her skirt and lacerated the air around her in a wide, sweeping arc. There were screams, and patches of steam were tainted pink. The enemy tried to be clever and sneak more troops in behind the impromptu smokescreen. Steamscreen? Same principle, different vector.

These knives, numbers one hundred through one hundred and five, were different from the rest. They were choppers, with heavy forward-weighted blades meant for cleaving rather than piercing. They spun as they flew, crashing into armor with enough force to leave dents in steel and cleave through cloth and flesh with no more resistance than air.

The kills weren’t as clean this time. She was lashing out blind against a foe that might be there, rather than precisely targeting weak points. There were screams and cries and calls for help from the wounded, and swears of pain from those who were merely dinged.

The hydromancer and pyromancer cut off their respective attacks, leaving the aeromancer to send a blast of compressed air through the door, dispersing the cloud of steam so they could take stock of the situation.

The soldiers who sneaked through the steam blast weren’t even infantry. They were a specialized subset of engineers sent to handle elemental-based obstacles. Their armor was well proofed against magical attacks. It provided only light protection against physical attacks. The survivors had just enough time to realize they were screwed before they were skewered.

So far, the battle was going in our favor. Kaze wasn’t even panting, though the extra heat and humidity added by the steam were enough to have me reaching for my cup of fruit juice.

What? It’s important to stay hydrated.

If the enemy continued trying to force their way through in the same old way, we would win. Kaze could kill them faster than they could pour through the sally port. If they pushed heavy infantry, I could stack them up in an improvised barricade. We could keep this up for several more hours before either of us tired.

It was up to the enemy commander to try something new, something unexpected.

I wasn’t entirely surprised when someone came stumbling through the door. I was surprised when Kaze let her live long enough to survey the battlefield with her wide, terrified eyes. Well. I say eyes. One was swollen shut, the whole side of her face a massive bruise.

Kaze’s jaw dropped.

“Deela?”