The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1) (31 page)

And so you kill.

And you move.

If these men survived, most of them would slip away into madness. But for now? They needed to live, and living meant killing.

A loud cheer erupted from the front lines.

The gate was splintered. And like the rotting foundation of a house, it collapsed inward.

This was where the real war began. And if Tylik was right, where it would end.

A battery of conjurer and city guard cavalry stormed out of the gate, trampling over the footmen who stood in their way as fodder. That’s all they were, a distraction for those behind them who hurried to the wall with wooden ladders to augment the men and women who rushed through the gate.

One of Dercy’s officers shouted out orders to his archers, and Vayle barked at her cavalry, deploying the remaining three thousand on the wings.

Suddenly the mix of conjurer soldiers and city guardsmen reared around and fled deep within the castle walls, as if a horn bellowed a retreating boom.

I turned to the Rots. “Should I embark on a speech like Dercy? Or should we just go in there and kill the cunts?”

Expecting smiles, I was disappointed to see what could only be described as unadulterated horror on their faces.

Then I heard it. And I turned, and I saw it.

Half of the godforsaken wall uprooted itself and flung its tons of stone frame outward, crushing cavalry and footmen alike. A bloated geyser vomited dust and snow into the air, obscuring my vision.

Warhorses raced out of the fog, heads down, hooves exploding through the snow. Some were painted in splotches of bright pink from where their flesh had been sawed off. Others collapsed in a heap, as if the snow had wiry tendrils that coiled around their thick legs, yanking them down. Most either had no rider or were dragging the man who used to sit atop them.

Thousands of heartbeats gone, just like that. Thousands of voices chanting courage and bravery silenced. It felt like the world had idled, as if everything out there — the wind, the cold, the stars, the sun, the moon, the sky, the great unknown — had stopped to witness what we were capable of.

And then like cows in a field resuming their consumption of grass and roughage after deep reflection, they all went back to work. The wind whipped, the cold stung, and I was sure the stars glittered and the sun continued on its arc below the mountains.

The second portion of the front wall wrenched itself out of the iced-over dirt, spilling reverberations across the field that rippled through the white powder like the wake of a boat on the ocean.

And then…
boom.
It leaped outward, every square stone falling in perfect harmony with one another. More dust, more fog. More silence, more death.

My eyes swiveled back and forth across the field, mindlessly sweeping along the debris of collapsed stone. And then squinting at the effervescent white smoke concealing the horde of corpses. Thousands more remained alive — if you stretch the definition — frantically searching for some semblance of hope.

This was all part of the plan. We knew the freaks wearing the jagged
C
would use their demented minds to wreak havoc on the battlefield, although evulsing an entire wall and shattering it on the skulls of our men… well, that was a bit more than expected.

“Round up the cavalry!” Vayle shouted. With a quick pull of the reins, her steed pivoted and began galloping toward the right wing of the battlefield.

The officers behind me pulled off to the left. I could hear them shouting as they drove their horses hard through the snow. “Back, back, back, back! Back, back, back, back!”

“I feel as useless as a blind man’s eyes,” a Rot said.

“You won’t for long,” I told him.

A few battlements of our archers advanced ahead. I clicked my heels, spurring my horse onward after them. I circled around in front of them.

“Get your asses back there,” I yelled.

One of the archers pointed ahead. Looked no older than a baby-faced eighteen-year-old. “If we got the cavalry and infantry comin’ back toward us, northernmen’ll be on ’em like hungry hounds. We’re their only defense.”

Pointing the tip toward the back line, I lowered my eyes into a glowing glare and said very slowly, “Get back, now.”

He held my stare for a few seconds. Then, “You heard him. Pull back.”

I met back up with the Rots, shaking my head. “Thought I was going to take an arrow to the throat there for a moment.”

“We woulda fucked ’em up for ya,” Klon said.

Vayle and the other officers soon returned, and behind them trudged a much smaller company of warhorses than were sent out to meet the conjurer and city guard cavalry. The footmen followed in short order. Many of them were dashed with specks of blood, and some of them were mortally wounded. Their helmets were askew, their faces streaked with sweat and powder from crushed stone.

From behind them, like a beam of moonlight thinning through a black forest, ambled Dercy on his mighty warhorse. When he got to us, his breathing was labored. He sat hunched over in the saddle.

“A wall, huh?” he coughed out. He wiped his arm across his mouth. “Never told me they were capable of doing that, Astul.”

“To be fair,” I said, “I did tell you Amielle crumbled a shelf of rock that I was standing on.”

“Couldn’t pick her out of the crowd up there,” Dercy said, pointing his tiny dimpled chin toward the balcony, which was hazed over still with dust. “But I saw at least five hurling their guts over the banister after the first wall fell. One collapsed, and then the dust came up and I couldn’t see a thing.”

Interesting. It took five to uproot one wall, which meant it probably took ten in total. There weren’t many more than ten conjurers on that balcony, so unless more were in reserve… they may well have blown their load. Although Amielle and Sybil surely had a few surprises remaining.

Everyone watched in silence as the sheet of white soot hanging over Edenvaile began to methodically settle back into the snow. Still couldn’t see a thing.

Dercy sat back in his saddle. “Hear that?”

“Hooves,” Vayle answered.

“I was going to suggest steel,” I said.

“You’re both right,” Dercy said. He turned to Tylik. “Let’s hope you are as well.”

Like serrated daggers of lightning piercing a gray sky, pikes and swords charged through the obfuscating cloud. It was something out of an occult nightmare, the muscular frames of horses peeling back and climbing through the dust as a demon might propel himself from a portal of the underworld.

I felt the storm brew in my legs and then my thighs, swirling up my arms and echoing in my skull.

“Steady, now!” Dercy advised his men. Most of them probably couldn’t hear over the steady growl of thunder.

There were enough horses coming through the fog to level every man in Dercy’s army, continue on to splinter his wagons and stamp the slaves into the snow without ever circling back around. You’d be hard pressed to find one city guardsman within the group. The thousands of cavalry all wore the jagged
C
of the conjurers. It was as if Amielle and Sybil had forced Vileoux to hold his men back just to show us the full power of the conjurer army.

But first, they’d have to reach us. The uneven terrain that boots and warm blood had turned to slush wouldn’t prevent that, and neither would a bunch of brave soldiers who wore faces flushed with anger. Nothing would prevent them from turning us into ink on the pages of history except Tylik’s promise.

And what a promise it was.

The promise was a fleet of warhorses.

It was the charging banners of an ominous mountain upon which Icerun had been built.

It was a faction of disgruntled vassals who Vileoux Verdan had never sought to mollify.

It was a testament to just how easy the North is to fracture.

It was a blizzard winding through the snow, thrusting out from the rear of Edenvaile.

The armies of Patrick Verdan and all the northern bannermen he’d gathered galloped and ran and roared with a singular voice. They poured out around the walls. There were tens of thousands of them, a mix of cavalry and footmen. There were slingers, swordsmen and pikemen. Knights, lancers and some good old-fashioned grunts clad in quilted armor.

The brigade of conjurers charging us peered back. Their advance slowed, and then utterly stopped as they learned a rather well-known secret among the inhabitants of Mizridahl: trust does not exist, and the truth is as capricious as the wind.

The initial push of the northern armies drove into the middle of the conjurer cavalry, halving them and forcing the two sides to split off, where the remaining northernmen rounded them up and cut them down.

I glanced at the Rots. “Now we have some fun.”

With a few kicks, my mare whinnied and plotted a course down the middle of the battlefield. She dashed through the snow, shoveling clumps of it behind her. Most of the fighting was a good two hundred feet away, to either side. There were some leftover conjurers wandering through the middle, but they paid a small band like us little attention. We had to be a bit wary of the northernmen who pursued them, though — in war, everything and everyone looks the same. You swing first, apologize later.

We arrived at the corner of the Edenvaile wall. Well, where the corner of the Edenvaile wall
used
to be. The Rots and I climbed down from our horses, smacked them on the butts and sent them off.

“It’s a fuckin’ graveyard,” Kale said.

We stepped over mashed corpses and pulverized stone alike. Tops were detached from bottoms, legs from hips, heads from necks. Chalky bones jutted out of mangled flesh. Red syrup, like the filling of a sweet cake, had swallowed the white of the snow. It stuck to the soles of our boots and smelt heavily of copper.

“Go, go,” I urged them on. Conjurer and city guard reinforcements were flowing from the center of the city into the field. Around the side walls still standing came a swarm of northerners who I had a feeling were not on our side.

“Kale,” I said, “wait. Lend me a hand.”

A wooden ladder lay in the snow, still intact. It was obnoxiously large but curiously light. Kale and I carried it to the other Rots, who stood by the forge.

“Seems quiet here,” Rory said.

I craned my neck around the corner, to get a better look at the balcony. It was empty. “People don’t tend to gather around forges. They’re all probably holed up inside the keep, which we need to get to. Figure all the doors to be barricaded, and behind the barricades we’re probably going to find more than our fair share of guards.” I kicked the ladder gently. “Luckily for us, we’ve got this giant fucking thing. Balcony door probably won’t be barricaded.”

“Trick is getting there,” one of the Rots said.

Light as ever on my feet, I inched toward one of the snow-cleared paths that eventually ran perpendicular with the keep and intersected the market square.

If I had some gold jingling in my pocket, I’d bet it all on coming upon a couple cavalry or a platoon of city guardsmen. But I reached the path without confrontation. They must’ve been gathered near the market square, ready to spill out in the form of more reinforcements if called upon.

I continued down the path, listening intently for the unmistakable sound of a snorting horse or crunching snow.

Nothing.

A few more steps. Still nothing. No voices, no shadows flicking across the ground.

A few more steps and I stood at the edge of the market square, directly in front of the fountain and the steps leading up to the double-leaf doors of the keep.

The belly of Edenvaile growled hungrily as a furious wind slapped my cheeks. I returned quickly to the forge.

“Well,” I said, “everyone’s gone.”

Kale motioned toward the field. “I’d say everyone’s fightin’.”

With the mishmash of clashing swords and the blurs of horsehair blending together, you couldn’t tell friend from foe, not from where we were. But if what we’d seen exit Edenvaile, both from inside the city and its rear, were all the reinforcements this kingdom had… they were outnumbered three to one by Dercy’s remaining men and Patrick Verdan.

Even if Vileoux Verdan and Amielle and the others were very poor at math, they understood this would not bode well for them. That was why they’d retreated into the keep: one last stand. Or in the case of Amielle and Sybil, more time to craft a little surprise.

I snatched the ball-peen hammer from the forge and smacked it off the anvil. “Listen up. Your primary targets are Amielle and Sybil. Vileoux and Chachant are your secondary targets, Edmund Tath your third. Any conjurer you come across will have a jagged
C
stitched upon their chest. Kill them.”

“Wots ’bouts thems lads and girls?” Iggy said.

I looked at his rotund face and repeated what he said, which was something I had to do every time he spoke. Not only did his accent add esses to nearly every word, but the bastard never made sense. Good with a sword, though.

“What?”

“Thems lads and girls that lives here. Young’uns.”

“Doubt you’ll encounter them near the royal quarters, which is where we’re going. They’re probably stuffed in a basement. If you do see them, leave them be.”

A Rot named Slenna unsheathed a dagger and hugged the blade with her hand. Blood trickled down her wrist and sunk into the snow. She wiped the crimson liquid on her face like it was makeup.

“Makes me look fiercer,” she said, winking.

“Let’s move,” I said, “before the rest of you get it in your mind to start dismembering yourselves.”

Kale and I lugged the ladder along, him on one end and me forty feet away on the other. It was awkward to hold, awkward to carry and awkward to turn. We smacked the legs off a tavern roof at one point, which woke up an angry mound of snow sitting atop, causing it to fall on our heads and down our backs.

We danced the rest of the way to the keep, attempting to persuade the icy powder to evacuate. It instead fell in my pants. A whore whose kinks outnumbered the leaves on a tree once told me it felt good to put ice between your cheeks, right up against the opening there. I was drunk, so I let her do it to me. It didn’t feel good then, and it certainly didn’t feel good now.