“How many people can we press in Aberdine?” Stoyan asked.
Elara frowned. “Not many. These same people threw rocks at us when we tried to ward them. It will take a lot to make them trust you. Unless you do something impressive enough to cut past the fact that they’re scared of us, you won’t get much help.”
“Let’s assume I’ll do something impressive,” Hugh said.
“There are two thousand two hundred and three people in Aberdine,” she told him. “Forty-seven percent men, fifty-three percent women. About half are between the ages of twenty and sixty. They are used to fighting the forest every day, so they are armed, and they won’t have a problem defending themselves, but they’re not professional killers.”
“That’s fine,” Bale said. “We are.”
Dugas walked into the room, nodded to her, and parked himself to the side.
“Let’s cut that in half,” Lamar said. “Accounting for the infirm, parents who have to stay with children, and cowards. That gives us about four to five hundred people.”
“I’ll give you half of my archers,” Elara said. “Forty people, all very good.”
“Thank you,” Hugh said.
He stepped to the desk. The centurions and Dugas clustered around him. She got up and walked over. Stoyan and Lamar made a space for her. A map of Aberdine lay on the desk.
It was a typical post-Shift settlement. Once a small town spread out in the shadow of Coller’s Knob, Aberdine compacted under the onslaught of the magic waves. Coller Road ran through town, snaking its way ten miles to the southwest to touch Baile castle and stretching another three miles to the northeast to catch the ley line. Somewhere around the first few houses inside Aberdine’s city limits, Coller Road turned into Main Street. The forest took no prisoners, especially during the magic waves, so to keep themselves safe, the villagers walled in Main Street and the few surrounding blocks, protecting the municipal buildings, the marketplace, grocery store, the gas station and a few other essential places with a concrete wall topped with razor wire. Two gates punctured the wall, where it crossed Main Street. Each gate had a guard tower. All of that was painstakingly marked on Hugh’s map.
Most of the houses hugged the wall, with braver or stupider homeowners venturing further into the cleared land, their homesteads wrapped in fields guarded by deer fence and barbed wire. About a hundred yards or so of cleared land ringed the farms. The rest was dense forest. The woods tried to take back the land and Aberdine’s residents spent a great deal of time holding it back. Elara knew the struggle very well. They had to do the same thing to keep the land around Baile cleared.
In times of crisis, bells would ring, and the residents would run for the safety of the wall.
“You’ll have to evacuate them,” Dugas said. “The ley line seems like a natural point, but moving fifteen hundred people to it will be a nightmare.”
“I can take evacuees,” she said.
Hugh looked at her.
“We have experience in caring for refugees,” she told him. “We can keep them for a day or two.”
“What if the mrog dickheads burn the town down?” Bale asked.
She looked at him. “Make sure they don’t.”
“We split the evacuees,” Hugh said. “Anyone able to walk, ride, or drive ten miles will come here. Everyone else will go to the ley line. Stoyan, set up two squads to escort them.”
The dark-haired centurion nodded.
Lamar leaned over the map. “For a settlement this size, we can expect several hundred enemy troops at a minimum. They rely on surprise, armor, and their mrogs. We know they are coming, so the element of surprise is on our side, but it takes three of us to kill one of them because of that damn armor.”
“We draw them inside the walls,” Hugh said. “It will negate the number advantage.”
“If there was some way to confuse the mrogs,” Lamar thought out loud.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the standing theory says they follow visual cues from their masters?”
Hugh nodded.
“Would fog help?” Dugas asked.
“What kind of fog?” Stoyan asked.
“Magic fog.” Dugas wiggled his fingers at him.
“Can you control it?” Stoyan asked. “Will it stay inside the wall?”
“Yes,” Dugas said.
“Fog is good.” Hugh bared his teeth. A dangerous, sharp expression twisted his features, and Elara fought a shiver. No matter what kind of life Hugh d’Ambray lived, a part of him would always look for the most efficient way to kill.
He was going to Aberdine, she reminded herself. It was all that mattered.
Elara hugged herself. From the window in Hugh’s room, she could see most of the bailey. Iron Dogs and their horses swarmed, filling the entire courtyard. A mass of men and women in black on dark horses. The day was overcast, the sky choked with gray bloated clouds, and the gray light only made everything look grimmer.
The centurions had left. Hugh sat in his chair, putting on a new pair of boots. He was dressed in black from head to toe. She should’ve left, but she had stayed, and she had no idea why.
She turned to the desk where Hugh’s breastplate, solid black and reinforced with metal plates waited, and touched it. It felt hard like wood or plastic, not at all how she expected leather would feel.
“Cuir bouilli, reinforced with steel plates,” Hugh said.
“Will it stop a sword?”
“Depends on who is holding it.”
He got up, picked up the armor, and fitted it over himself, pushing his left arm through the opening between the chest and back piece.
“Since you’re here…”
She grimaced at him and buckled the leather belts on his right side, pulling the armor together. “Good?”
“Tighter.”
“Now?”
“Perfect.”
He buckled a sheath on his hip and thrust his sword into the scabbard. Hugh grabbed a length of black fabric from the chair and shook it open with a quick jerk of his hand. A cape edged with fur. He’d worn it when he first came to the castle.
He wrapped it around his shoulders. She took the leather tie away from him, reached for the other side of the cape and pressed it on the two metal studs there. Hugh picked up a helmet from the desk. It was a Roman style helmet with cheek pieces and a crest of black hair. A stylized dog snarled at her from the wide piece of the helmet that would be positioned just above Hugh’s brow. He put the helmet on his head. It didn’t hide that much of his face, but somehow altered it. Two blue eyes stared at her with a focused intensity.
She took a step back. Hugh was a big man, but the cape, the helmet, the armor, it made him look giant.
“You look like a villain in some fantasy pre-Shift movie,” she told him. “Some dread lord about to conquer.”
“Dread lord,” he said. “I like that.”
He would.
“Won’t the cape get in the way?”
“The cape and the helmet are for Aberdine. We don’t have time to play politics. Once I’ve got the town, I’ll take them off when the battle starts.”
Something had been nagging her since the strategy meeting. “What you told me about the ley point made sense at first. But the mrog soldiers don’t hold towns, Hugh. They wipe them out and disappear. Aberdine’s massacre wouldn’t affect our access to the ley point. Why are you really going there?”
“They broke into my castle. They attacked my wife. They attacked a child in our home. The point of having a castle isn’t hiding inside its walls; it’s being worthy of it. It’s being able to control everything around it. They’re growing bolder. They’re taking larger settlements. They’ve got my attention now. They will wish they didn’t.”
In her head she saw him let Raphael’s knife strike him again and again. He was riding into battle. Anything could happen in battle. All he would have to do is not try as hard. To not step out of the way of a sword. To let himself get shot.
She wanted him back.
>
“Preceptor?”
“Yes?”
Her voice was steady. The words rolled off her tongue. “You like making bargains. Here is one for you. Come back to me alive, and I will stay the night. The whole night.”
Outside the horns screamed and she almost jumped. There was something dark and primitive about the sound. A steady beat rose, thumping like a giant’s heart. The war drums grew louder and louder. She heard horses neighing, the clang of metal, the voices of fighters, all of it mixing with the drums into a terrifying marching hymn. Someone howled like a wolf, in tune with the horns.
She turned to Hugh. He had somehow grown darker, grimmer, scarier, as if he emanated some imperceptible magic. The darkness curled around him, like a willing pet with savage teeth.
“Done,” the Preceptor of the Iron Dogs said.
Hugh walked the line of Aberdine defenders. Men, women, some almost children, others well into retirement. Four hundred and seven people, who volunteered to defend their home. Behind him a line of the Iron Dogs waited and behind them Dugas and his druids chanted in low voices, brewing herbs and powders in their cauldrons. The air smelled of old ways and half-forgotten magic.
He’d sent Felix in first, keeping the rest of the Dogs hidden in the tree line. The scouts scaled the wall with no one the wiser, took the firehose, and rang the bell. The residents of Aberdine lived in a wood filled with magic. The firehouse bell meant running for the safety of the walls, which was exactly what they had done. Then, once they dropped everything and gathered on Main Street, Hugh had pushed the Iron Dogs into a canter.
The guard at the western gate was too focused on the bell. He didn’t see them until it was too late, which didn’t bode well for Aberdine’s chances in a real fight. They thundered inside the wall at a near gallop. Bucky reared in the market square, before an old Dollar General, pawing the ground and screaming. Hugh dropped a power word and the entire town went silent while he pulled a mrog’s head out of his bag and told them what was coming. He was there to defend their town. They had two options: leave or fight. The choice was theirs.
It took less than two hours to round up the die-hards holed up in their houses, but now finally everyone was on their way: two long caravans, one of horse-drawn wagons and enchanted water vehicles heading to the ley point and the other, mostly people on foot and horseback, to Baile Castle. They went armed.
Now he faced a ragged militia. A third of it was too old, a third too young and green, and the remaining third looked ready to bolt. He had to make them count, because Aberdine’s defenses were shit. Of the two ballistae mounted on the walls, the first had rusted through and the second fell apart when they tried to test fire it. There was no time to set up defenses. Warm bodies were all he had.
“An army is coming,” he said. “They’re armored, organized, and trained. They have monsters who serve them like dogs. They don’t want your money, your cows, or your homes. They don’t want what’s yours. They want you. Your bones. Your flesh. Your meat. And they will keep coming back until they get it.”
They listened to him, watching him with haunted eyes.
“This isn’t a fight for your town. This is a fight for survival. Some of you have fought before. Some of you have killed creatures. Some of you have killed people. This will be nothing like you’ve seen before. This will be a slaughter. It will be hard, ugly, and long.”
Directly across from Hugh, a kid about Sam’s age licked his lips nervously.
“You’re scared,” Hugh said. “Fear is good. Use it. There are few things as dangerous as a vicious coward on his home turf. Kill and show your enemy no mercy. If you get an urge to spare one of those bastards, he will kill your friend next to you and run you through with his dying breath. Kill him before he kills you. This is your town. Make them pay for every foot of ground in it.”
The line of shoulders rose slightly, as some of them straightened their backs.
“You will be broken into teams. Each of your teams will get an Iron Dog. These men and women are trained killers. They’ve fought battles like this before and they’ve survived. Obey your Iron Dog. Stay together. Don’t run. Fight dirty, do as you’re told, and you too might survive this.”
He raised his hand and flicked his fingers. The first Iron Dog, Allyson Chambers, peeled from the line. Solid, broad-shouldered, with pale skin and blond hair pulled back from her face.
“You, you, you, you, you and you!” she barked. “With me.”
The first six fighters peeled off and followed her down the street at a run.
Arend Garcia stepped into his place and pointed at a rough looking man twelve defenders down the line. “Everyone up to this man – with me.”
Hugh turned and walked to Dugas. The druid looked up from the cauldron. Sweat sheathed his face. He’d taken his eye patch off, and his bad eye sat like a chunk of moonstone in his tan face.
“How long?” Hugh asked.
“We’re ready now,” the older man said.
“Good. How long will it take to saturate the village?”
“Thirty seconds.”
“And it will stay inside the wall?”
“It will,” Dugas promised. “You’ll get about twenty minutes worth of cover.”
Twenty minutes would have to do. “Be ready to flood us.”
Dugas nodded.
Hugh walked past him to the ladder on the side of the firehouse, pulled off his helmet, and climbed the metal ladder up to the roof, where Stoyan crouched by a short bell tower next to Nick Bishop. Bishop, an athletic black man in his forties, adjusted his glasses. He was the town’s chief of police, National Guard Sergeant, and Wildlife Response Officer, all of which put him in charge of the same six people. He was quiet and held himself like he knew what he was doing, which was more than Hugh had been hoping for.
From here Hugh could see the western gate and the fields. He’d bet on the western gate. Its eastern twin faced the mountain and was better defended and fortified. It was the approach he would have chosen if he came for Aberdine.
In the field, a group of Bale’s berserkers, dressed in civilian clothes, enthusiastically poked the ground with farm tools.
“How’s the bell?” Hugh asked.
Stoyan grinned at him. The bell hanging in the faux tower on the roof looked as decorative as the tower itself. “It works,” Stoyan said. “I rang it.”
Bale sank his hoe into the dirt. It must’ve gotten stuck, because he wrenched at it. The hoe came loose, snapping up, and flung a chunk of dirt into the air. Bale ducked.
“Has your man even held a hoe before?” Bishop asked.
Stoyan grimaced. “Not that kind.”
An eerie glow appeared in the middle of the field, barely noticeable, a shimmer more than light. Here we go.
“Dugas,” Hugh called down. “Now.”
The druid raised his head to the sky. His good eye rolled back in his head, matching the dead milky one. Fog shot from the cauldron in spiraling geysers, expanding, flooding the streets, and turning around the corners to collide.
The glow snapped into a line of bright golden light.
Bale and his berserkers backed away, toward the gates.
The light flared, forming an arched gate, as if a small second sun was rising out of the dirt.
The inside of the wall was milk now, the thick fog hiding the contours of the buildings seven feet up. Across from them, on the roof of the Dollar General, archers took positions behind a wooden barricade nailed together from packing crates and plywood. By the west gate, the roof of a Wells Fargo bank had gained three feet of height from a makeshift wall built with chunks of concrete and rocks. A dark head popped up above the wall for a moment and ducked back down.
The glow snapped clear. Hugh saw sunshine through the hole in the fabric of existence, and then mrogs flooded out of the portal in a ragged horde.
Behind them a row of warriors stepped out in unison, twenty men to a line. The shoulder of the first man in the line shone with gold. br />
“One,” Stoyan counted.
A second line followed the first. Another leader with a gold shoulder. Officers.
“Two.”
With that many, there should be a commander.
“Three. Four.”
The berserkers turned and ran for the gate. The mrogs gave chase, dashing across the field on two legs.
Bale hesitated.
“What is he doing?” Bishop muttered.
“Trying to get a better look at where they came from,” Hugh told him.
Behind the fourth line a man rode out atop a white horse, his armor heavy and ornate, the shoulders gleaming with gold.
There you are, asshole.
The glow vanished.
Bale turned and sprinted like a bullet aiming for the gate. The mrogs were barely a hundred yards behind.
Seventy-six warriors, four officers, one commander, and at least three hundred mrogs. The armored ranks waited, unmoving, in a precise formation. Each armed with a sword and shield. A long rectangular shield.
Fifty yards between the mrogs and Bale.
Thirty.
Twenty.
Bale shot through the gate and spun to his right, vanishing into the fog.
The mrogs poured into the main street. The fog churned as the beasts searched it.
“Not enough people,” Bishop said.
“Eight berserkers is plenty,” Stoyan said. “Bale knows what he’s doing.”
Metal clanged, and the heavy gate dropped in place. The wall on top of Wells Fargo quaked like a rotten tooth about to come out and collapsed. Boulders and chunks of old concrete, some with rebar still sticking out, tumbled into the street onto the shifting fog and the crowds of mrogs beneath. Yowls and shrieks cut the silence.
The trails in the fog split, running from the falling rocks. The main mass sprinted deeper into the town, along the main street. Arrows whistled through the air as the archers on the rooftops fired blindly into the fog. The mass of mrogs broke and split as individual beasts took to the side streets trying to escape the barrage.
The remaining mrogs turned back to the western gate. They hadn’t gone far before a bright red glow burst through the fog, blocking their escape. The fog parted, blown away in a circle, revealing Bale and a mass of snarling mrogs in front of him. The berserker stood with his feet planted, a mace in one hand, a red aura sheathing him. He stood with his back to the gate, and the street narrowed here, funneling the mrogs at him four or five at a time.