Chapter 9 – Dangerous Creatures #3
They swapped ranks in the lull between the devils, letting the first rank rest and the second step forward to take the next wave.
The rear ranks were not idle. There were archers that needed more arrows, fresh torches to be lit, and the rear ranks swept back through the shadows to make sure nothing was creeping in the dark.
They turned up a dozen stranglers that might have otherwise come on them unaware, and Remin almost stepped on one of the creatures himself, crouching in a clump of bushes.
His sword lashed out on pure instinct, severing that loathsome head from its neck.
“I’ll take it, my lord,” said one of the soldiers behind him, dragging the corpse away to be counted with the rest of the devils.
Every night, they counted the dead. The corpses would burn by daylight, all evidence of the creatures blazing away into ashes, and they must know if there were more of them, to better prepare for the following night.
Every morning, the last thing his soldiers did before they sought their beds was to quarter every inch of the village, combing the fields and forests to make sure they had accounted for every single devil.
It was grueling work, and all too soon, the torches waved in a different pattern from the palisade, signaling that another wave of devils was coming.
Hour after hour. Night after night. Remin stood watch at the east wall, on the palisade, on the hill by the north gate.
His men began to fall in twos and threes as the number of devils swelled, cutting away sections of the line and overwhelming them with sheer numbers.
Men in armor were hard to kill, but wolf demons could take off a whole limb at the joint, and cackling stranglers dragged the downed men out of the light, yanking at their gorgets with long, thin fingers until they found the bare throat underneath.
“Seven wounded, two seriously,” said Jinmin when they convened at Remin’s command tent one morning in the gray light before dawn. “Two dead. Stranglers.”
“One dead on the east wall, two wounded,” said Tounot, ducking under the front flap of the tent and pulling off his helmet. His curly hair was matted to his head with sweat. “And the masons were pitching a fit again as I went by. Could be they’re hoping to renegotiate their contracts.”
“I don’t think that’s it this time,” said Miche, sighing.
He was as bloody and sweaty as the rest of them, his long blond hair caught back in a messy ponytail.
“They’ve been grumbling amongst themselves for a few days, and it’s not just the masons.
They don’t think the camps to the east are getting as much protection as the ones to the west. Maybe a few nights of personal attention from the Duke of Andelin would quiet things down. ”
“That will cost them you and Tounot,” Remin replied, his shoulders jerking with irritation.
His commanders were every bit as capable as himself, so this looked to him like an irrational indulgence, but Juste was continually reminding him that the craftsmen did not have three years of experience with devils.
“They ought to count themselves lucky,” said Huber, who had been listening quietly. The copper in his eyes flickered. “I wonder how well the rest of the valley is sleeping at night.”
That was the real question, and it had been gnawing at all of them.
It was one thing if the devils were just appearing a little early; that was inconvenient, but easy enough to overcome.
But all those small villages had nothing like the defenses of Tresingale, and no trained, armored men to guard them in the night.
Huber had been all over the valley during the war, commanding the mounted scouts that had been Remin’s eyes and ears, one of the most effective warfighting tools in his arsenal.
Huber had stayed in those villages. He knew better than anyone else what they were facing.
“It might just be us,” said Tounot into the silence. “I saw devils pass a small camp if there was a larger one nearby during the war, and more than once. There are more people in Tresingale than in the rest of the valley combined. I expect the devils can sniff us out all the way from the Berlawes.”
“Send word to the border forts and have them look in on Raida,” said Remin, his black brows lowering in thought. “It’s just as well we’re supplying them by sea. Where’s the map of the Medlenne? We might get a fair distance by river.”
“Not for much longer,” said Tounot reluctantly.
He oversaw most of the supply to the rest of the valley.
“The water level will be dropping by now, and there’s long, rocky stretches.
Here,” he said, tracing the section of river on the map as Miche spread it out on the table.
“You’d have to drag the boats out of the water off and on for about fifteen miles, and I wouldn’t swear that the bottom is deep enough to keep the devils off at night. ”
“And this is solid marsh for four or five miles,” said Huber, tapping another place further downriver. “Fucking nightmare, that was. We lost two wagons and almost lost a horse in that bog. You might get a man or two to Isigne or Selgin, but then they’d be just as trapped as everyone else.”
It would be the same in all the other villages. The old roads of the Andelin were overgrown, and most of the bridges had been destroyed in the many wars. The remaining villages had survived because they were inaccessible.
“A small party to each village is better than nothing,” said Miche.
“A small party to each village is a large party removed from Tresingale,” noted Tounot.
All of them understood the problem. Every morning, after he took the numbers of dead and wounded, Remin went out himself to examine the lines of defenses.
The blood on the ground, the toppled barriers, the trampled places in the grass where men had stood, fought, and fallen.
Every day he examined and improved his own defenses, searching for weaknesses, noting the places where men had died.
Those lines were being pushed back.
“We’ll start someplace closer,” he said. “Ferrede. There’s no cover for the devils in the Iron Hills, and we need to know if Rollon made it.”
It was cowardly to wait for someone to volunteer. Remin made the decision.
“Jinmin,” he said, turning to the big man. In his armor, Jinmin could withstand a horde of devils, as obdurate as oak. “You will go. Take three others with you.”
“Rather go alone, m’lord,” said Jinmin, after only a moment’s pause. “If there’s enough devils to kill me, there’s enough to kill anyone with me.”
And Jinmin would fight better if he wasn’t having to defend his companions. Remin nodded. He had made the offer only as a sop to his own conscience.
Men were not so different from devils. Everyone liked to tell stories about Remin Grimjaw, about Lomonde, about the Charge of the Gresein, but there was no single act of heroism that won the war, and no single act of heroism was going to save his people.
Just as the devils threw themselves at the barricades of Tresingale, it was the nature of men to throw themselves at the world, each one spending their lives to move just a little further than the last. Not every man died a hero.
Many men died to be planks in a bridge, or stones in a wall.
Only the stars could see where it would end.
The stars were fading in the sky when he finally went home, still arguing with himself. He knew he was doing the right thing, the prudent thing, but he had visited all those villages, too. He knew his people. If they needed help, they needed it now.
Ducking through the low door of the cottage, he quietly shut it and went to wash away the blood. It wasn’t his. The devils’ blood got everywhere, even drying in stiff flakes in his hair, and it was hard to tell the princess not to be afraid when he came in the door crimson to his elbows.
Setting a kettle over the fire, he dragged his sweat-soaked shirt off and ducked his head into a bucket of cold water, scrubbing.
“…Grace?” said a soft voice behind him, so quiet it was almost lost in the splashing of water. Remin glanced back to find the princess was already awake, sitting up in bed with a pillow clutched in front of her like a shield.
“You can sleep a little longer,” he said, resuming scrubbing. It just figured that she would wake up early today.
“I was already awake,” she said. “Is…is everything all right? I heard…”
“Everything is fine.” It came out sharper than he meant, and he huffed to himself. This situation was in no way her fault. “You are safe, Princess,” he said, snapping a towel over his shoulder. “If all the valley sank into the sea, every man here would be carrying you to a boat.”
* * *
Under the circumstances, it was incredible to think anyone would be trying to break into Tresingale.
The first survivor of the Brede crossing arrived in the beginning of June, and Ophele heard the commotion at the south wall as she was refilling Eugene’s water barrels.
Now that there were three wells dug in places that did not interfere with Master Ffloce’s plans for the artisan quarter, she made three long loops along the length of the wall over the course of the day, rather than multiple trips to and from the same well.
The people on the southern end of the wall were doing the finishing work of building tower houses and stairs, since twenty-foot ladders were not something anyone wanted to climb multiple times per day, and certainly not with packs of ghouls running around the base of the wall.
It was incredible to think someone had actually swum across the Brede for the privilege of hearing the devils personally.