Chapter 9 – Dangerous Creatures #2
So many devils. How were there so many devils?
The riverbanks were boiling with them, gray-skinned ghouls and smoking black wolf demons, savaging the figures fleeing for the water. Someone on the hill was waving a torch in frantic arcs, trying to draw the attention of the devils to give someone else a chance to run.
So many devils. Stars, so many devils. Behind him, Siyoun heard a snarling that sent him bolting forward, and he tried not to see the ghouls scrambling onto the far side of the docks, or feel the wood shaking under the weight of the thing behind him.
The boards were warped and splintered, gray with weathering, and their repair was one of the many chores the fishermen frequently discussed amongst themselves, and never quite got around to doing.
On such small things, destinies were sometimes decided.
Beside him, Oranie tripped and went sprawling.
“Oranie!” Siyoun whirled to go back for her, his oar swinging out automatically, and so in the light of the moon he saw with perfect, eternal clarity his wife’s face frozen in a scream, her brown eyes wide with terror, and the sawtoothed maw of the wolf demon descending.
“Run, Siyoun, run!”
All those teeth crunched.
His son stopped crying.
Gone. They were gone. Just like that.
Siyoun turned and ran.
There were many young men standing before doors in the Andelin Valley.
Many young mothers making desperate last stands for their children.
Many elders sacrificing themselves, so that the next generation might live on.
There were cowards and traitors, opportunists and scoundrels, and heroes whose deeds would only be known to the watching eyes of the stars.
A hundred miles away, in the town of Ferrede, there was one young man whose worth had yet to be measured.
“Someone mind that window,” said eighteen year-old Rollon of Hollisey, a squire who was hoping he would live to see his knighthood. As the last light of day faded from the edges of the shutters, the nighttime chorus was rising, and something struck the door a glancing blow, as if to test it.
Rollon and his small party had been chased into Ferrede that morning with the last of the night’s ghouls, after two sleepless weeks on the road.
Most of those nights had been spent in treetops, kicking away stranglers and praying their horses would survive the night in makeshift corrals.
For one single, blissful hour, Rollon had spotted the smoke rising from the chimneys of Ferrede, saw the stout wooden walls of the cottages, and thought: we’re safe.
As it turned out, the entire population of the village looked at him and thought the same thing.
But as Sir Huber said, that was what it meant to be a man at arms. Rollon had served as page and then as squire to Sir Huber Adaman throughout the Vallethi war, and though Sir Huber was not a loquacious man, it added weight to the words he spoke.
He taught his pages that a sword was a responsibility, and if a man took up a weapon, he had an obligation to use it to defend those who could not defend themselves.
That was the oath a knight swore before his lord. And though Rollon was not yet a knight, he had knelt and sworn it before Remin, the Duke of Andelin: that he would protect the people of Ferrede, and build them a safe place against the devils.
Duke Andelin had only been seventeen when he saved Lomonde, Rollon told himself. And he had been a squire, too.
“Put at least two people on each window,” he said, trying to settle everyone else as well as himself.
“The windows are high off the ground, and too narrow for anything but stranglers. Even if we lose a shutter, they won’t come flying through all at once.
Not into a lit room with lots of people watching. ”
Or so he hoped. All the villagers were crammed into three rooms just like this one, drying sheds raised on stone foundations, with high, narrow windows to let the wheat breathe as it dried.
It had stout walls to keep out the vermin, and by daylight, it had seemed like a good idea to get everyone together behind those stout walls, with two armed soldiers on each door.
Now it occurred to him that it just meant every devil for fifty miles would be battering at a single structure.
Ghouls snarled at each other, thudding against the door, and behind him, a child started to cry.
“Sir knight,” said one of the women, her voice quavering. This did not seem like the time to remind them he wasn’t a knight yet. “There’s something scratching over here. It sounds like…digging.”
* * *
The glow of torchlight swayed, wobbling from side to side, and then plunged into the dark like a shooting star.
“Get that torch back up!” Remin shouted, moving at once into the new pool of shadow and smashing his shield out, sending three ghouls flying.
The devils were streaming into Tresingale like a river, with the larger debris of the wolf demons surging in the flood, and Remin and his men were the riverbank trying to contain them with shields and spears, channeling them into the killing ground of the archers.
Unfortunately, the stranglers were learning to go for the torches.
Tomorrow, they would have to find a way to brace them somehow, Remin thought, moving into position to guard the men working to get the torch tower up and lit again, defending that darkened patch of ground as the devils rushed toward them.
They did not fear the light, but they were strongest in the dark, and he went at once for a charging wolf devil, using his own shield as a break wall to smash it up and aside, heaving the beast into an open space in the nearest knot of men. A dozen spears stabbed it at once.
“It’s lit, my lord!” called a man behind him, and the line of shields moved at once back into position, bracing for the next wave of devils.
It was not a constant stream of the creatures; not yet.
They burst through gaps in the palisade or the wide open stretch in the middle of the east wall, a gap that was shrinking every day, but not quite fast enough.
The diggers were working frantically to advance the deep trench, which was nearly as good a barrier as the wall itself would be.
There were the torch towers, discouraging the devils from the hills and slopes.
There were shield walls on the ridgelines, shoving the devils onto lower ground, where they were slaughtered in their dozens.
Knowing the devils could not be kept out of Tresingale altogether, Remin had arranged the defenses to allow them strategic entry, and placed himself at this critical juncture, a place where the land sloped down between two hills, and the road rose toward the cluster of buildings around the cookhouse, including a certain small cottage.
The devils were not going to go that way.
“Ortaire, push the line forward! Move the wolf toward the archers!” He boomed, half the command lost in the deafening howl of another approaching wolf demon. It was accelerating toward them, shouldering ghouls aside as it charged the lines of armored men.
But for the heavy wolf demons, Remin had invented the restrati formation, named for the multilayered fishing nets that Capricians used on the Amati Sea.
Instead of blocking the wolf demon, the line of soldiers folded inward to isolate it, shields smashing into its sides to slow it down rather than facing the full force of its charge.
Behind them, the second rank of soldiers slowed it still further, enough that the third rank could slash out with their swords, leaving the crippled monster to limp into range of the archers.
Even as Remin watched, the rest of the remaining devils reached the open, well-lit killing ground behind him, and there was a whirring chorus of heavy beechwood arrows, slamming into the survivors. The squires moved among them with their own swords, mopping up.
All the defenses of Tresingale operated on this principle.
Slowing the advance of the waves of devils, blunting their momentum, winnowing them down so none of them reached the soft vitals of the town: the masons in their cloth tents, the craftsmen and laborers sleeping in fragile wattle-and-daub cottages, or the princess that would be mother to House Andelin.
Remin could not see their house from where he stood, but he felt her presence as keenly as if she were sheltered directly behind his own shield.
“Good, good!” Ortaire called from the line, the voice of a young man who was still not entirely confident in his own command. But he was getting there. “There’s a break in the devils ahead, my lord, should we thin them out?”
“Left rank, right rank, forward!” Remin ordered at once, and the two shield walls moved inward, narrowing the gap until the remaining devils were scrambling over top of each other. The spears plunged inward, and the devils died on a hundred points, churning the earth to mud with their blood.
And then, silence. On the distant palisade, torches winked, signaling that all was clear.
Devils tended to come in mobs. And though the night was quiet now, the howling tide of ghouls and wolf demons was only cover for the stranglers, who could eel through the thinnest slices of shadow, as evidenced by the constant threat to the torches.
It was hard to credit them with a plan; Remin had never heard any evidence of intelligence in the creatures, only malevolence, a hatred of lights and men and men’s things, a determination to kill.
They came in mobs because they were strongest in numbers, and even wolves had the cunning to hunt in packs.
“Get some weight on the bases of those torches,” he ordered, taking advantage of the lull to shore up the defenses. “Ortaire! Have your boys clear those carcasses out of the way.”
“Yes, my lord!”