The Pilgrims

57

They flew through the night, resting for one long stretch so Eric could sleep, though this was difficult with the war mage rigidly perched nearby, its gleaming yellow cat’s eyes flickering about in the darkness, its breath rasping like something about to die. Though it had evidently been as gentle with him as it could be — a servant, after all — his chest badly ached from where its arms had gripped him, especially where he’d been stabbed by the groundman’s spear, and he was tired of its animal reek.

The night was too complete here for Eric to guess at the kind of terrain below, but they were high up on a hilltop, and had before the light faded been getting ever closer to the mountains. He was so exhausted sleep did briefly drag him like a rough arm under dark dreamless waves.

When a hand shook him awake, he murmured, ‘Case?’ then screamed shrilly as the war mage’s savage, bearded face loomed inches from his own, unblinking, mouth hung open, its foul strange breath overpowering. Then it all came back to him, and they were flying again, day about to break.

As they neared Elvury the war mage gained altitude so it could stay near the thicker threads of shimmering raw magic, which thinned out the closer they got to the city. The less magic air it flew through, the faster its body had been heating; and now Eric cried out, for the mage burned hot against his body. From high up, as they paused to rest on a jutting ledge, Eric saw the large force assembled and waiting in the fields just beyond the mountain pass. There was a swarm of activity down there in the early morning light: voices sounding off, orders being barked, the chink of metal on metal — chain mail, and swords being drawn.

Their view of the mountain pass which led to Elvury’s gate was not very clear, but there too the ground was alive with activity, only some of it visible, as defenders moved around in their positions along many key points. A war was clearly unfolding, the war none of the Mayors would in their right minds have predicted, nor any general in his right mind have attempted.

But the General below knew things the Mayors did not.

Of course he knew he would soon lose a good many troops, likely half his invading force. And that for economic and political reasons this did not at all displease the Strategists back at the castle. The troops here gathered, though they came from many cities, were for the most part staunch Valour men, and no harm was done in shedding their numbers. Meanwhile those unsworn or already accepting Vous as their Spirit — at least professing to — were safe at home or on easy campaigns.

He also knew that — casualties or not — the city would be theirs, or at least no longer belong to its current Mayor. For something lurked beneath it the Mayors’ Command had not seen coming, and it had already begun its deadly work within the city’s gates during the night. The defenders in high places along the mountain pass, waiting to rain death down upon the General’s men, would probably just now be getting news of what had begun.

It had started later than intended, of course. The delay had tested everyone’s patience, from the poor doomed men who’d slept for a week in these fields, to the distant castle Strategists who were probably still panicking that something had gone fatally wrong after years and years of careful planning.

But at last the General heard horns blowing in the city, the notes which meant flee, evacuate. It had begun. By now, if any defenders remained in the high mountain passes, there was a good chance they were the only defenders the city had. There would be, the General was told, roughly a hundred creatures, minus what the city’s fleeing military could slay. These, his men — perhaps half the original twelve thousand — would finish off. Then they had a pleasant time of looting and plunder to look forward to …

The General’s main concern now was mutiny as he ordered thousands of men to charge, knowingly, to their probable deaths. Of the twelve thousand gathered, two thousand were here strictly to suppress such an event. Valour men were not noted for cowardice … nor, however, did they take kindly to treachery, from their commanders or anyone else, hence defectors like Anfen. The General cleared his throat, not without nerves, to give the order to march into the pass.

During the night, pouring from the sewers, from passages belowground pre-existing and those newly forged by groundmen slaves under whips, from the River Misery, which ran in two offshoots under the city’s busiest districts, Tormentors came in their hundreds.

If all went well, if the Strategists’ estimates were right — and they usually were — by morning, most citizens would have already fled through the southern gates, carrying with them stories of a deadly weapon in castle hands to the cities they escaped to. Not strictly true, but a very useful perception. Those cities would then have hard decisions to make, such as: Align, or be next. This city’s wealth, meanwhile, would sit largely abandoned in chests and safes to be pillaged at leisure. And there would be one fewer stronghold for defectors and Aligned country refugees.

The Tormentors rose from belowground into the city’s northern quarter. Some were so big that new underground highways had been built just for their passage here from the woods, where they’d been gathered and herded at considerable cost in lives. (The creatures could not easily be predicted and certainly not commanded.) At times they tolerated human and animal life nearby, even when it was loud and brash, when fingers were snapped in their faces or when they were prodded with sticks, as experiments had shown. Other times they attacked anything alive, roaming far to seek out prey, using that peculiar magic effect which none yet understood. Their behaviour towards one another seemed to be passive and even co-operative, though not to any observer’s view organised, as such. But they had never been observed in such numbers and in such close proximity as this. The larger ones were generally the most placid, but always the least predictable. Herding the big ones had not proved possible … but a handful had indeed followed their smaller kindred to the city of their own accord.

This invasion had been a difficult and expensive secret to keep. Very few of those unfortunates mind-controlled and trained to steer Tormentors were left alive in the miles-long tunnels. Many of the creatures remained still and silent in the highways belowground, but enough, easily enough, found their way towards the sounds and vibrations of the city, even as it tossed and turned in its sleep. As they neared the surface, the greatest noise and vibrations came from the northern quarter, and it was there they were drawn. There, in the wide, flat space before the northern gate, and manning the turrets and shelves up along the gate and walls, the city’s defenders waited for horn calls in the pass to alert them of the coming enemy.

High on the artificial shelf ringing around and above the city, Anfen tossed uneasily in his bed, trapped in nightmares under Loup’s sleeping spell. On his arrival, gazing at the crowds, he had reflected on the presence in the city of spies, usurpers and the castle’s Hunters. He hadn’t known that operatives had been here for years in greater numbers than anyone feared, chiefly in the city’s underground trade routes and their overseeing bureaucracy: smooth-tongued Hunters legally working their way into key positions of the city’s governance with a store of gold on hand to bribe, and the skills to murder enemies as needed, all of them taking orders from a distance. The underground highways leading from the woods were not merely for the transport of felled timber — that had been guessable enough, to those in the know. But the Strategists had told no one when the invasion would come, or what it would look like.

Nearly two hundred construction workers slept on-site beneath the surface. Tormentors came past their dim lantern-lit bunkers with enough wooden creaking for a ship at sea. Some men woke to screams echoing from deeper down the tunnels, then louder ones from nearby rooms. They found nightmares standing by their beds gazing at them with frozen alien smiles, others passing in great numbers past their doorways. Some thought they themselves still dreamed, even as time lagged and all they knew were razor-sharp points and edges, moving so very slowly.

The Tormentors stalked in their stilted gait past those screaming and fleeing, to the surface’s fresher air and better light. Once the last shrieks had been silenced in the bunkers the only sound was the constant creak creak creak, magnified many times, as death from beyond World’s End climbed at last to the surface and poured out freely onto the streets.

At the city’s northern gate, those posted in the many nooks and battlements keeping watch on the mountain pass fancied for a moment or two that the wind bore the sound of screaming. But it was so faint they weren’t sure, until those few people out and about at night — vagrants, night-workers, whores and their customers — saw dark, stalking shapes in the gloom, some of them huge.

A bustle of activity began amongst the soldiers. A horn blew, followed by another. Braziers were lit and the place was filled with the orange glow of firelight. All troops were now awake, thousands soon in formation. Orders were shouted. Metal hissed a thousand times as weapons were drawn. Most turned towards the gate, thinking the screams that came from within the city were from artillery fire, missiles catapulted over the city walls and over their own heads — yet, why had no warnings sounded from the mountain pass? No one posted in the high places outside had blown his horn to signal enemy sighted.

A clear enough sign came suddenly behind them. A tall shape — surely beyond six man-heights — swept with loping, swinging arms between two buildings. Those who saw it froze for a moment in disbelief before a rain of arrows flew at the lumbering beast. Arrows that struck it skittered off its hide. It stopped and swung its head their way, the enormous mane fanned out behind its head rattling, and stared at them. Another rain of arrows flew and fell; the sound of them glancing off the beast’s hide then onto the cobblestones below was like hail on a rooftop.

A whole company rushed over to meet it while it watched them, still motionless. Screams began to sound more frequently from deeper within the city as hundreds of the beasts, smaller than the giant one but almost always bigger than any man, poured towards the waiting soldiers from the shadows with fast jagged strides and turned the area into a churning sea of death.

The huge one ambled over too, as though convinced at last by the screams of fear and pain, and the ring of blades striking hard hides, that it too had a role to play. Arrows from the high wall still glanced off it harmlessly as it reached down into the crowds of men.