Wolfbreed (53 page)

None of the bishop’s men were in sight, but their smell was mixed with the scent of dust, dry wood, and the stench of tar and pitch.

She stayed low to the floor, slinking along behind a row of wooden crates that smelled of old canvas.

“Give me the girl,” she called out to them in German, “and I will let you live.”

The edge of the crate in front of her splintered as a crossbow bolt blew through to embed itself in the stones of the floor. She reached over and pulled the bolt out.

It wasn’t silver.

She licked the blood off her muzzle and bared her teeth.

rhard and his brother knights gazed at the carnage outside the armory. He looked at the bodies, barely visible in the light coming through the arrow slits from the dying pyre outside. The bodies were twisted, broken, echoing every battlefield he had ever seen.

Perhaps it was the press of time, but again Lilly’s violence was uncharacteristically restrained. The two men with the bishop’s livery still breathed, and Johann’s men had fallen with their bodies intact.

That was a bad sign. For him, Lilly had always fought like an animal, tearing her victims apart, leaving a horrid display for the survivors to reflect upon. Since her escape, she seemed to fight more and more like a soldier, attacking not for the slaughter, but to take her opponent out of the fight.

I have done this
, he thought.
I taught her. I showed an animal how to fight like a man. Better than a man
.

“Gather crossbows for us,” he told his men. “And silvered bolts.”

One of his men carried a hooded lantern and edged the shutter open just enough to illuminate the armory itself, slightly better than the corridor.

“You know what we face,” he whispered. “If you’re within arm’s reach, she can kill you. She’s heading up after the bishop, so she will be cornered.” He hefted a crossbow, pointed it down, put his foot in the stirrup, and drew back the tension. “If you see a shot, take it. Kill or disable. Keep the walls to your back so that you see her coming.”

He loaded a silver-tipped bolt.

“Don’t let her surprise you.”

he men of the bishop’s entourage were little effort. The first had been crouching to fire ineffective crossbow bolts at her. She leapt on his chest and pulled his upper torso up until she broke his spine in half.

The second swung a sword at her while standing too close to a murder hole. She dove low, biting his calf, hamstringing him, sending him screaming backward through the hole, falling five stories to the bailey below.

While she was crouched before the murder hole, the third one cut deep into her shoulder with his sword. She sensed the man approach her, but the fact these men were not armed with silver allowed her to concentrate solely on attack. And even though the blow was only about a hand’s breadth from being mortal, decapitating a moving target with one stroke of a sword was a near impossible task.

He didn’t get the second stroke. His head collided with one of the tar-filled cauldrons, hard enough to crack the iron and knock the lid askew with a massive clang. The lid released noxious odors from the viscous black contents. The man dropped his sword and went slack.

She heard the fourth man running toward her and raised her limp burden up between herself and the attacker. The attacker’s sword glanced off the unconscious man’s mail. The attacker shifted to thrust around Lilly’s improvised shield, and Lilly threw the unconscious man at him.

The attacker fell backward under the deadweight and she could sense that he was the last soldier in here.

Where’s the bishop? Where’s Hilde?

As the man scrambled to push his comrade off of him, Lilly leapt on his sword arm, biting through his wrist. He yelled curses as he dropped his sword. Lilly didn’t understand the language.

She grabbed him by the neck one-handed, and dragged him upright.

“Where is she?” she growled at him in German.

The man closed his eyes and prayed.

She held him for a moment, muzzle wrinkled in an angry snarl, shoulder itching where the latest wound knit together. She felt a horrible ache in her stomach, the smell of blood igniting a fierce hunger in her gut. The wolf was pure bloodlust now. All it wanted was to taste more of this man’s warm pulsing flesh.

But the wolf was not the only part of her present.

“You think death is the worst I can give you?”

The man continued praying, and Lilly dragged him to the open cauldron. She slammed his back to the wall. His eyes flew wide and his prayer stopped with a gasp.

“Tell me!”

The man shook his head.

She hooked her claws into his belt and upended him, shoving him headfirst into the cauldron. The tar was barely liquid; the brazier heating the contents had just begun its work. Even so, she managed to shove his body in all the way to the upper torso. His legs kicked wildly, his arms flailing.

Pulling him out was more difficult. His belt pulled free and she had to take her grip on his thigh.

He came free with a sucking sound, his helmet lost somewhere in the cauldron. His body was featureless black from the chest upward. Fist-size clumps of warm tar dropped from his face. It took him several seconds of effort to even open his mouth.

She righted his body and slammed him back against the wall, his face a blank lumpy mass, his mouth a ragged hole opening in a gasping wheeze.

She stepped to the side as he choked and started raising him toward a blazing sconce set in the wall.

“Do you feel the fire yet?”

The man started screaming in Latin, Italian, and German. “No … Don’t …” were the only words she could make out.

“Tell me!”

Lilly’s world was focused on this one man, who knew where Hilde and the bishop had gone. Her ears filled with the man’s polyglot pleading and cursing. Her nose filled with the scents of tar, pitch, and blood.

That was why she was unaware that her master had followed her here until a silver-tipped crossbow bolt tore through the left side of her back.

ankut helped Uldolf and Burthe carry Gedim clear of the riot, over to the outer wall. Here they were just one of a dozen small groups tending to injured. Uldolf looked at the blocky form of the keep, solid and impenetrable.

“It’s going to be a slaughter,” he whispered.

Lankut brought a bucket of water and asked, “Whose?”

“All they have to do is wait everyone out. I’m surprised more of the guard hasn’t come to finish us off.”

“Uldolf, do you know how many guardsmen are Prûsan?” He reached down and wiped blood off Gedim’s face. “There’s a reason they guarded their prisoners with foreigners.”

“What about Sergeant Günter?” Uldolf asked.

“Oh, him and his bootlicking—”

“Please.” Burthe’s voice cracked. “Have you seen Hilde? Do you know where my daughter is?”

Lankut shook his head. “I’m sorry. I was manning the gate when—”

Uldolf stood. “What is that?”

The top of the keep tower was wider than the base, the floor
extending out over the tower walls supported by closely spaced wedges of stone. Between every third pair of those wedge-shaped supports there was now a square opening flickering with torchlight.

“Someone opened the murder holes,” Lankut said.

“What?” Burthe asked.

“The siege defenses,” Lankut explained. “So the defenders can throw stones and pour burning tar on attackers.”

Uldolf shook his head. “Why aren’t they just firing crossbows into the crowd?”

“I was wondering—” Lankut began.

Someone screamed by the tower. Uldolf turned his attention back up to the top of the tower. A body fell through one of the murder holes, plummeting, flailing and screaming, to slam into the bailey just behind the thickest mass of the Prûsan crowd. Before the crowd enveloped the body, Uldolf could see the tattered colors of gold and green.

“That was one of the bishop’s men,” Lankut said.

“The bishop had Hilde,” Burthe whispered. Uldolf looked up at the top of the keep.

His sister was somewhere up there.

Did Lilly go in there?

For Hilde?