5. Siege
Chapter five
Siege
Iwoke to trumpets. Actual trumpets. Plural, close, and clearly communicating: something is fucking wrong right fucking now.
This was more visceral than the alarm I had been using on my iPhone since my sophomore year of college. Unfortunately, there was no snooze button that I could press to make the military trumpets go silent.
I was upright before I was fully conscious.
I went to the window.
The moon was wrong in the same way the stars were wrong.
It was bigger than it should have been, its surface bright and textured but lacking the familiar craters and maria I had spent my entire life looking at.
It cast the kind of light I had previously associated with stage productions rather than actual moonlight.
Under it, the courtyard below was alive with organized motion. Soldiers moving with urgency.
I stood at the window for another thirty seconds, conducting a rapid analysis of my options.
Option one: Remain in my quarters. This was the safe choice, the sensible choice, the choice that a reasonable person in a foreign world with no combat training and no standing in this garrison would make.
Option two: Go find out what was happening. I was a military historian in the middle of an actual military engagement. The idea of remaining in a small stone room while history unfolded on the other side of the wall was genuinely, physically intolerable.
The old Meghan would have stayed in the room.
I would have sat on the narrow bed and waited for someone else to tell me what was happening. Waited to be told what to think about it. Waited to find out whether I was allowed to have feelings about it at all.
Something had shifted since I arrived in this world. I was no longer the old Meghan.
I got up.
Mytharo was going to get a different Meghan than the one from Earth.
The new Meghan was already looking for her clothes.
The red sweater and dark jeans were on the desk where I had left them before falling asleep. The clothes were the last physical evidence that I had, until yesterday morning, been a doctoral student in Philadelphia with a presentation to give and a committee to disappoint.
I picked up the sweater. I looked at it. I put it back down. It was a perfectly good sweater for 21st-century Earth.
It was not a perfectly good sweater for whatever was happening outside this window.
I needed something else. Fortunately, more Mytharo-appropriate clothes were delivered to the room while I was sleeping.
A large trunk filled with neatly folded women’s clothing sat by the door. I looked inside and chose an outfit.
Ten minutes later, I was standing in front of the small mirror by the door, and I was going to need another minute.
The corset had taken two attempts. The coat settled on my shoulders with the reassuring weight of something made for exactly this kind of morning.
The boots were buckled, the belt cinched, and the woman looking back at me from the mirror was not the woman who had put on a red sweater in Philadelphia yesterday and worried about a presentation.
I looked like someone who belonged here.
The corset did what corsets do. The waist was smaller. Everything else was impossible to ignore.
The crimson underlayer showed at the V of the neckline, and I stopped.
My hair had partially escaped whatever arrangement I had attempted that morning and was falling where it pleased.
Against the deep red fabric, it looked intentional.
The color pulled warmth from my hair; my hair pulled warmth from the color.
Together they were doing something I had never quite managed with a sweater and a pair of jeans.
The coat framed the whole thing perfectly. The boots added an inch. The result was taller, straighter, more of a presence than I had historically allowed myself to be.
I stood there and conducted an honest self-evaluation.
The result was unambiguous.
I looked good.
Not in the qualified, well-she-has-a-great-personality way I had spent years categorizing myself. Actually, straightforwardly, forensically good. Hot, if I was going to use the word.
I had never thought of myself as the kind of woman men looked at twice.
For most of my life, I had been the woman men looked at once. Intelligent. Competent. Probably fine. Then they looked somewhere else.
The woman in the mirror was making that assessment difficult to maintain.
She looked like someone worth looking at.
The whole composition. The coat. The lacing. The corset helped. So did the crimson.
But the real difference was the woman inside them. She had finally decided she was done being invisible.
I straightened my glasses.
I went to find the battle.
***
I worked my way up through the keep and into the eastern tower, which I had identified on the tour as the highest accessible point on that side of the fortification.
The men already stationed there spared me one collective glance—civilian, female, glasses, leather, not an immediate tactical problem—and returned to what they were doing, which suited me perfectly.
I looked out.
The army below was not what I had expected. It possessed all the outward characteristics of a military force—formations, spacing, hierarchy—but none of the reassuring evidence that it was composed of living people.
The front lines were filled with the newly turned. I could tell by their clothes—ordinary work garments and travel-worn cloaks. They wore the kind of clothes worn by people who had been living their lives until a vampire found them and remade them.
Their movement was stiff and relentless. They didn't move with the micro-adjustments that living bodies make constantly without knowing it. Arrows came down on them from the wall slits in steady, methodical volleys, and they kept moving.
Behind them, spaced with a precision that told me immediately they were not there by accident, stood the command layer.
These were not recently turned.
They did not gesture. They did not shout orders. They scarcely appeared to move at all.
And yet the force ahead of them responded.
Entire sections of the assault shifted direction, adjusted pace, or changed objectives with a fluidity that suggested communication was occurring somewhere. I could not see how.
Further back, mounted figures on horses that were not behaving the way horses behave when there was fire and noise nearby. These horses were standing at parade rest in the middle of a siege.
What made the vampires particularly frightening wasn’t their speed or strength. It was the absence of hesitation.
Every predator carries a flicker of doubt.
A moment of calculation before the strike.
A single beat where the future could still split, where something might change.
These vampires had no such moment. The decision was already made long before they moved.
There was nothing to bargain with. No ego to stroke, no fear to pry open, no hesitation to stretch into an advantage.
They moved as if they shared a single will. No signals, no speech, no delay. Just action, immediate and absolute.
I had read accounts of armies that inspired terror.
Hannibal at Cannae, the Mongols at the Indus, the dread recorded by soldiers who had faced formations they understood to be beyond their capacity to survive.
The accounts always described the same thing—the moment when the scale of what was coming became clear, and the body understood it before the mind did.
I never imagined that I would personally experience that terror.
The army below made almost no sound. No shouting. No nervous chatter. No ambient noise at all. Just the wind off the Zhaduun Mountains carrying its wrong smell, and below the walls a mass of things that had once been people moving with the patient certainty of something immortal.
I had spent years studying casualty figures, siege reports, and battlefield accounts.
None of them had ever looked back.
My heart was beating noticeably faster than the situation strictly required for someone standing behind several hundred feet of fortification. My hands had somehow found each other and locked together hard enough that my knuckles were pale.
I watched the front-line vampires reach the walls.
One of them reached the wall directly below me.
An arrow took it through the shoulder. Clean and hard.
A shot that would have dropped a living soldier.
The vampire reached up and pulled the arrow free with the energy of someone removing a splinter.
The wound closed in the time it took me to register it was closing.
Not gradually. The skin decided it was done being open and acted accordingly.
It began to climb.
The stone was sheer—forty feet of dressed rock built specifically to be unclimbable. The vampire climbed anyway, fingers finding routes through the stone that did not appear to exist, moving upward with patience.
The garrison soldier above me leaned out with the nine-foot hook and swung.
Calling it a hook was technically correct in the same way calling a guillotine a knife was technically correct. The hook was a crescent of sharpened steel mounted perpendicular to the shaft, its inner curve honed to a sharp edge.
I understood the design immediately.
It was not a weapon designed to wound. It was not even a weapon designed to kill.
It was a weapon designed to remove heads. It was engineered to catch flesh and bone, yank the head back, and slice clean through the neck in a single, decisive strike.
It was a vampire killer’s weapon, ugly and efficient.
The curved blade caught the vampire at the neck. The soldier put his weight behind the pull. Dark blood sprayed across the stone.
The body hit the moat below a fraction of a second before the head did.
The purpose clicked into place as I saw the weapon in action: only by taking their heads could they be killed; anything less merely slowed them.