The Pilgrims

61

A human flood poured south: refugees clogged the roads, clutching what possessions they’d been able to carry through the frantic press of escaping bodies through the southern gate. The road was littered here and there with things cast aside as the realities of travel sank in, and a day or two of hauling excess weight proved plenty enough. The inns between Elvury and the closest city, Yinfel, were so stuffed that patrons paid big money to sleep under tables in their pubs, or in their closets. A good number refused to stop moving, certain the Tormentors would pursue them. But no new sightings were heard of.

News of Elvury’s doom travelled along the road much faster than the trudge of its refugees, spreading to the other Free Cities, whose forces frantically checked their underground passages and ramped up defences. Tormentors were now widely known of and rumoured to be attacking at the castle’s behest. There had indeed been sightings of them in remote places, usually from far away, those who saw them not having known what they saw, those who’d got too close not surviving to report it.

Through these nearly impassable crowds, Siel and Eric set out. That first day he slipped from his mount four times, miraculously escaping broken bones. They were fine steeds, tall and muscled as racing horses. Siel and Eric discovered why the ‘important folk’ hadn’t wished to brave travel on ground-level through the deadly stampede for the southern gate. On one nightmarish street half a dozen Tormentors had gathered to stand around motionless in strange poses, victims littered about their feet. The huge ones had slunk back towards the river as though all following the same impulse and, according to talk, stood motionless along the banks watching people flee, bodies impaled all over them, some still slowly writhing and screaming for help. The Tormentors loose in the city were bad enough; looters, invading soldiers, raging fires and occasional riots had not made things any safer.

The only light moment for Eric and Siel was when they found Loup patiently waiting by the roadside for them with a wide toothless smile and his own plundered horse.

Most on the road, Siel and Eric included, tried not to think about what they’d left behind. They tried to shut out the wailing of refugees unused to war so close at hand and no longer a distant abstraction, unused to being caught in the shadows of a man-god’s descending feet. It had all been so quiet for so long, the state of conflict between the Free and Aligned worlds … tense, but out of sight like an earthquake brewing. The shock on the refugees’ sleep-deprived faces said it all, the stagger of their walk as though under new and terrible weight, the disbelief as it sank in: We’re not going home tonight. There is no ‘home’.

Eric felt guilty at his relief on finally passing the grim-faced vanguard and leaving them behind on the road. Siel made no secret of hers. Loup whistled a tune like he hadn’t a care in the world.

Meanwhile the General leading the invasion had a far larger ‘mop-up’ operation on his hands than he had been led to expect. His men slammed open the city gates at last, lulled by the silence on the other side. He’d expected a few score of the creatures, a hundred at most, not several hundreds of them, all difficult to kill, some huge.

They made a dent in the monsters’ numbers before the last of the invading soldiers were killed or fled, enough to make the real mop-up a job at least possible. The General had missed something: that while men could be sacrificed, so too could generals who walked on ice that got thinner the closer they walked to the throne of power they served. The Strategists had long ago marked him as ‘ambitious’, a potential threat, and sought missions suitably deadly to throw him into, so he might have an honourable death for the rank and file’s gossip, and be useful as a martyr. That his ambition in reality had extended no further than his achieved rank was neither here nor there.