When they reached the wall near Overhill, it became plain how desperate things had gotten here.
“Where the hell’s the rest of the Seventh?” Ferkudi asked a poor woman struggling to beat out the sparks that had landed in her family’s thatch roof.
The woman slapped a sopping-wet dress against the spreading flames. “Half those bastards took some nobles’ coin to defend the walls near their own houses up south. Commander here done nothing to stop ’em when they left.”
Without a word, Ferkudi spurred his horse onward.
At the wall, he leapt out of the saddle and slapped the stallion’s flank. “Good boy!”
No need for him to die, too.
As he mounted the wall without so much as being challenged once, he saw the wan terror on the defenders’ faces. He knew this music here. This was what people look like right before they break.
He reached the top of the wall with his Mighty hard behind him.
A hellscape greeted him.
The red bane was a charred landscape that broke open in red seams everywhere it folded over, some of them afire, the rest ever threatening to take fire. The whole seemed to have the rigidity of a beached jellyfish that somehow yet moved, oozing up the shoreline toward the wall.
One of the Mighty said, “How do we invade that?”
Thousands of drafters and wights were surging from its surface toward the walls.
From the Prism’s Tower, Ferkudi had seen how Kip had set this whole bane afire by throwing the sub-red lux storm against it. From the charred bodies, it was clear that hundreds and hundreds of the enemy had died in that attack—but there were still so many more, and while the mundane soldiers had died in droves, the drafters and the wights had survived.
Now, whatever the reds’ original plan had been, they attacked without any discernible plan at all—and they attacked with rage to spare. They had no siege engines, no siege ladders, instead merely throwing themselves against the walls and using red luxin to clamber and stick and boost themselves as well as they could. It was stupidly inefficient, even insane, as the Chromeria always said.
But the numbers were on their side, and as fast as the few defenders atop the wall could pick them off with arrows and musket balls, still the rest climbed faster, heedless of their own dead, heedless of all but rage.
“We wait for our chance,” Ferkudi said. “Corvan Danavis is gonna give us a distraction. Maybe that’ll be it.”
“And until then?”
Some of the attackers had torn up still-burning trees and had flung them against the walls as makeshift ladders. The defenders couldn’t dislodge them.
“Until then we keep these poor bastards alive. We defend the wall,” Ferkudi said, hopping up and sprinting. His men ran hot on his heels along the top of the wall. They were spotted instantly, and soon missiles spitting flames were crackling past their heads.
They rammed into a tree and hurled it back from the wall, astonishing the scrawny defenders—surely the worst of the city’s worst—who’d been unable to move it at all.
But it wasn’t enough. Somewhere a hundred paces down some reds burst into view on top of the wall and lit into terrified defenders.
Ferkudi and his men cut through those fleeing.
His axes sent limbs spinning. As each of his axes got stuck—one in a Blood Robe’s shoulder joint and the other pinched between a screaming wight’s ribs—a wight popped into view over the top of the wall, and Ferkudi butted his bear helm into the thing’s face, sending it flying off the wall.
The next minutes passed in that odd blur of fighting—every moment lasting an eternity and every minute gone in a blink.
The reds reached the top of the wall in new places every minute, and Ferkudi spread his Mighty out. Most of the other defenders had disappeared, which at first Ferkudi thought was good—no one in his way as he ran back and forth.
Then he realized how bad it was.
One of his Mighty, Arius, went down with a leg wound. The nearest man, Amastan, flashed hand signals: Arius would live, but he’d fight no more today.
And then, inattentive for a moment while he tied a tourniquet around Arius’s bloody leg, Amastan took a spear through his armpit. Dying, Amastan clawed a pistol from the bag at his hip and handed it to the wounded Arius, even as he used his other hand to hold the spear piercing him in place. From his back, Arius shot the pagan drafter in the face, and they all collapsed on him.
Suddenly, the wall felt very, very empty.
Screaming defiance, Ferkudi reached up with his will and triggered the mirrors. He was flooded with blue light from a half-dozen directions in the waning light of the day. He jumped up on the battlements and bellowed his challenge at the Blood Robes below.
It drove them mad. Drafters who’d been unstoppably far to one side for Ferkudi to possibly fight abandoned attacking where they were and came to join the horde directly in front of him. They climbed over one another, crushing each other, making a ramp of their very bodies, heedless of everything except trying to kill him.
He hurled blue-luxin javelins into them. He broke reaching arms. He smashed faces with his knees and with his hellstone-knuckled fists. He carved great crimson wounds into their crimson bodies. Split heads with his glittering hand axes. Smashed once-men into each other. Extinguished flaming wights with blunderbuss gusts of blue luxin. Picked up wights and hurled them bodily from the walls.
But what he completely forgot was to let go of blue.
It should have helped him remember, blue should have, rational as it was.
But even blue can’t overcome the full grip of battle fury.
He didn’t remember the danger until he felt something twisting around his very will. It froze him, and locked up all the luxin in his body.
He couldn’t move. He stood with a Blood Robe’s chin in one hand, a fistful of his hair in the other, broken-necked. The dying man dropped from Ferkudi’s grip, almost taking him down with him. Better that he had. Now Ferkudi was exposed at the top of the wall, defenseless, hands extending, muscles straining against the empty air, his inchoate yell the only thing that could escape.
A red wight hopped up to the top of the wall a few paces away. His hair was slicked back to his head with white, fire-retardant gel and, uncommonly for a red wight, this man had no fresh burns or burn-scars whatsoever on his half-naked body, over which red danced and flickered. A careful red wight.
He balled fire in his hand, even as others mounted the wall and coiled to unleash it in Ferkudi’s face, when something dark and soft hit him from below. A wet cloth?
Ferkudi couldn’t even move to see where it came from. The wight threw down the wet dress—and was pierced through the ribs by a spear.
An instant later, he realized that the roaring of blood in his ears had been joined by another roar, and he heard impacts around him, saw bricks flung from inside the city pelting the Blood Robes taking the wall, and then hundreds of men streamed into view. The woman he’d seen beating at her flaming thatched roof with that wet dress pulled the spear from the wounded wight’s ribs and stabbed him with it again and again.
Then she stood, looking for Ferkudi’s approval. She looked scared and exhilarated, and her grip on the spear was all wrong.
Ferkudi noticed others claiming the top of the wall now, too: men in tradesman’s caftans, women in burnouses. They’d picked up the weapons dropped by the fleeing soldiers, and now suddenly even the soldiers were returning.