The Grim Company (51 page)

Barandas thought for a moment. ‘Keep the militia on the battlements. Launch a sortie to disrupt the siege weapons if necessary. We must hold them off for long enough.’

The captain opposite him blinked in confusion. ‘Hold them off long enough for what, Commandant?’

‘Let me worry about that, Captain. See to your orders.’

‘Aye.’ Loric saluted. He hesitated for a moment. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Lieutenant Toram?’

Barandas shook his head. He remembered the moustached officer from his brief visit to Malbrec. Not a good day.

‘No matter,’ Loric replied. ‘By your leave, sir.’ He saluted again and limped back across the square, heading eastwards.

Barandas watched him go. Faces peeked at him from behind drapes and then melted away again. The streets were empty except for soldiers and the odd militiaman scurrying about. Houses stood silent, shops closed, taverns barred shut. All those not actively involved in the defence of the city – women, the young, the old, the infirm – were taking refuge behind closed doors.

He thought of Lena back at their estate in the Noble Quarter. She would be waiting for him, sick with worry – and perhaps other things.
I’m going to be a father
. He had not seen his wife since yesterday morning and the guilt gnawed at him.
I have a duty
, he reminded himself.
To the city. To the people. To my lord
.

He reached into the small bag at this belt and withdrew the silk handkerchief Lena had given him to celebrate their fourth year of marriage. It smelled of jasmine and her favourite perfume, and he smiled when he brought it close to his face.

‘Sir,’ Kalen called. It sounded like a warning. Barandas looked up and saw Captain Bracka leaning on another soldier as he struggled to make his way towards them. One side of the officer’s face was covered in blood, which ran down his cheek to merge with the red of his beard, and he cradled his right arm in his left. Barandas could see bone protruding from the broken limb.

‘Captain, what has happened?’ he demanded.

Bracka’s eyes were haunted. He looked as if he had seen a ghost. ‘Monsters,’ he said dully. ‘Monsters clothed as women. They scaled the wall, killed three dozen men before we could react…’ His voice trailed off.

‘They came from nowhere,’ the young Watchman supporting Bracka interjected. His voice shook. ‘We received no warning.’

Barandas grimaced. The mindhawks had detected no sign of the pale women. Lord Salazar had warned him that the White Lady’s servants possessed strange abilities – he had witnessed their potency at first hand – but immunity to thought-mining was something even the Magelord had not foreseen.

‘There’s more, sir. The third company is on the move. The walls will be breached within the hour.’

Within the hour
. That was too soon. He had to protect the city – at all costs. He turned to his Augmentors. ‘Men, draw your weapons. We go to Dorminia’s defence.’

The brightness of the day suddenly intensified as glowing implements of death sprang from their sheaths. Garmond slammed one gauntleted fist into another with a force like that of two bulls butting heads. ‘At fucking last,’ he snarled.

Barandas placed Lena’s handkerchief carefully back into the bag at his belt and drew his own sword. It whispered softly as it brushed against the scabbard, like a dying man’s sigh. There was no ostentation about the cold steel. No magical luminescence. The only magic he possessed was within the mechanical instrument pumping blood around his body. Lord Salazar had told him that he required nothing more.

With a final glance across the square in the direction of the Noble Quarter, he beckoned to his men and set off towards the western wall.

When they arrived, it was to behold a scene of carnage. Bodies lay strewn all over the cobbles, twisted and broken like discarded dolls. Fighting raged ahead of them as the city’s remaining defenders attempted to hold the sundered gates against the flood of dark-skinned warriors trying to force their way through.

Smaller pockets of fighting had broken out in spots just inside the wall. A group of Watchmen surrounded a
pale-skinned
woman and were hacking at her desperately. She was missing her left arm below the elbow, but the grievous wound did little to slow her. With stunning speed, the woman twisted out of the way of a sword thrust and flung herself on the back of one of her opponents. She reached around his neck as he tried to shake her off and almost yanked his head off. Barandas heard vertebrae snap as the man’s eyes rolled up into their sockets.

Setting his jaw in a grim line, the Supreme Augmentor strode towards the pale woman, who leaped from the soldier’s back as he fell lifeless to the ground. She sprang at him, almost got her hand to his throat before his sword cleaved her skull in two. Foul grey matter splattered over his golden armour but he ignored it, searching around for new enemies. He spotted two more of the pale women over by the left entrance to the gatehouse. They were standing at the centre of a heap of corpses, their white robes soaked through with blood.

One of the women noticed him. Her dead eyes revealed no surprise, no fear, no regard at all for the horror all around them. She pointed at him. Together the two pale women began moving closer.

His vision blurred for an instant as something fiery streaked across their path and then one of the women was hurtling backwards, a smoking hole in her chest. Barandas glanced to his right and saw Kalen drawing back his bow for another shot.

The ponytailed Augmentor gasped suddenly as the bloody point of a spear burst through his chest. His Sumnian killer was still trying to tug the weapon free as Garmond appeared, gore trailing from his gauntlets, and snatched the man up from the ground. With a sickening crack, he brought the southerner down over his knee, breaking his back.

Barandas tore his gaze away and focused on the unnatural creature approaching. The woman slowed a short distance from him and cocked her head as if surprised by something. ‘You have no heart,’ she observed in an emotionless monotone.

He gripped his sword more tightly, every muscle poised to spring into action. ‘I am more human than you, creature. Whatever you are.’

The woman’s lips curled into a smile, though nothing reached her eyes. ‘Then I will gladly fall beneath your blade, if you are worthy. I pray it is so.’

The smile faded.

As Barandas stared at the creature, understanding dawned. This… thing, whatever it was,
wanted
to die. He would do his best to oblige her.

She darted towards him and he rolled at the last instant, springing to his feet and twisting around to meet her as she pivoted for another attack. This time his sword caught her below the knee, causing her to stumble past him. Quick as a flash he reversed his swing and severed her spine. She stumbled to the ground – and then, to his horror, began pulling herself towards him with her arms, dragging her useless legs along the blood-stained cobbles.

‘
Do it
,’ she rasped, staring up at him with those soulless orbs. He nodded once, brought his sword up and back down, splitting her head like a melon.
Whatever you were, I pity you
, he thought. He watched the discoloured fluids draining out from the creature’s cranium. The thing was rotting from the inside; it smelled as if it had been dead for months.

Ragged cheering drew his attention. The arrival of the Augmentors had given the defenders a boost. As he surveyed the battlefield he saw most of the pale women were now dead or dying, though he had lost Kalen and, it seemed, his friend Varca, whose magical helm rested fifteen feet away from the Augmentor’s body. The severed head was still strapped inside the helm. Elsewhere the Sumnians had been driven back, and now the militia and the remnants of the Watch were pressing ahead, pushing them back further still.

Barandas raised his sword and gestured at the mêlée ahead of him, just outside the gates. ‘Forward!’ he shouted. His remaining Augmentors and the nearby defenders rushed to obey his command and together they surged into the enemy ranks. He turned away one spear, stabbed the owner through the guts and then yanked his sword free to behead another southerner.

A wall of shields suddenly loomed before them. The red-haired Augmentor, Jardwym, raised his mighty enchanted maul and swung it with all his strength. The shields exploded in a shower of splinters and the men holding them were thrown twenty feet backwards through the air from the force of the impact. Some struggled to their feet; others would never rise again.

Barandas’s eyes narrowed. Over there, on the hillock: a monster of a man, unimaginably tall, towering above even Garmond. He was naked from the waist up, his chest crisscrossed with old scars. This could only be the infamous general he had heard so much about.

The Supreme Augmentor made for the leader of the
dark-skinned
mercenaries.
Cut off the head and the body will die
. Lord Salazar was fond of that phrase – though he had done the opposite when he had massacred Shadowport…

Barandas gripped his sword firmly. This was not the time for uncertainty. He pressed ahead, killing with surgical precision any Sumnian in his path. The enchanted heart in his chest ensured his body never tired. Mentally he required occasional rest as might anyone else, but physically he was a machine: an inexhaustible instrument of unmatched lethality.

A lone enemy appeared just as a clear stretch to the small hill opened before him. Unlike the rest of them this one was white of skin. He was panting heavily, a greatsword clutched in his gnarled old hands. A jagged scar ran down his battered face and his hide armour was covered in spots of blood.

Barandas frowned.
A Highlander? Here?

He thrust all thoughts aside as he closed on the greybeard. He launched his attack, intending to make short work of the old warrior. His first swing was blocked just as he anticipated, so he dropped his shoulder and reversed his stroke, ready to dash by the instant his blade sliced through—

His slash was parried. Shocked, he barely got his sword back up in time as the old man launched a counter-attack, striking with alarming skill, first one direction and then the other, the massive greatsword flowing as easily as the Redbelly River. Incredibly, Barandas found himself being driven back. He knocked aside one thrust, just about parried another, and then almost gasped in shock as the pommel of the greatsword caught him a glancing blow on the nose.

The old Highlander stared at him with implacable blue eyes. ‘Come at me,’ he growled.

Barandas obliged.

The Hero’s Destiny

 

 

 

Davarus Cole stepped carefully around the debris and glanced up at the black monolith soaring above him. Smoke still billowed from the top of the Obelisk. Chunks of granite – the fallen remnants of the tower’s apex – littered the surrounding courtyard almost to the entrance, which was deserted. At any other time, at least twenty Watchmen would be stationed in the barracks either side of the courtyard. Right now every soldier in the city was desperately holding the walls against Dorminia’s would-be liberators.

Lost in thought, Cole accidentally bumped the chair against a piece of rubble. It jerked and almost toppled over. ‘Shit! Watch where you’re going!’ hissed his charge as he clung on for dear life.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. They had got this far on the pretence that Eremul had been summoned by the Tyrant of Dorminia, with Cole his begrudging helper. That deception would be useless once they were inside the tower. He was sweating under his leathers, and not just from the warmth of the afternoon sun.

Eremul hissed suddenly, ‘There’s someone coming.’ A
red-cloaked
guard emerged from the shadows shrouding the entrance to the Obelisk. The mage shot him a warning look. ‘Let me do the talking.’

The two of them continued on up to the gates. The uneven surface caused the wizard to bounce up and down like a man sat astride a particularly recalcitrant mule.

‘Halt!’ demanded the Watchman. He levelled his spear at them. ‘The Obelisk is not expecting visitors.’

‘Well met,’ said Eremul brightly. ‘I am the Halfmage. You may have heard of me. I am here in answer to his lordship’s summons.’

The guard appeared unimpressed. ‘Tough shit. I was told to allow no one through. Thurbal’s orders.’

A strange expression slowly distorted Eremul’s face. Cole almost shuddered, so gruesome and unnatural did it appear. It took him a moment to realize the mage was smiling. ‘Come now, friend. We both know Lord Salazar does not explain his whims to the likes of us.’

The Watchman’s monobrow arched in confusion and his eyes seemed to glaze over. Finally he nodded and lowered his spear. ‘Right you are. I’ll open the gates. Ah, about your friend here…’

‘He’s with me. While my compact frame bestows many benefits, traversing multiple flights of stairs by myself is not among them.’

‘Of course.’ The guard’s face seemed frozen in a peculiar dreamy stare. He turned and unlocked the great iron gates, then beckoned Cole and Eremul through with his spear. ‘How’s it going on the wall?’ he asked as they strolled by him. He gestured in the direction of the fighting.