5. Siege #2
The soldier was already resetting. Already watching the next one at the base of the wall. The same motion was going to be required again in approximately forty seconds, and then again after that, for as long as the assault continued.
I pulled my attention from the soldiers and looked up at the wall instead.
The archers working the wall slits were, by my rough count, predominantly women.
They were moving through the reload cycle with a focused precision I recognized from an entirely different context.
It was the precision of people who were good at holding two things in their heads simultaneously—the immediate target and the pattern underneath it.
The human soldiers atop the walls carried the hooks in numbers that I found difficult to ignore. After watching one remove a head, the design no longer seemed unusual. The quantity did. Entire racks of them lined the battlements.
Around me, the garrison moved with the grim, mechanical rhythm of veterans who had spent years doing nothing but hunting and beheading the bloodsucking undead. Every swing, every follow-through, was practiced and utterly merciless.
The archers were hitting them. Repeatedly. Accurately. Under normal circumstances, the casualties would have been catastrophic.
Instead, the arrows merely slowed them down. Climbs paused. Formations briefly lost momentum.
Then wounds closed, broken flesh knitting itself back together almost as quickly as it had been damaged, and the advance resumed.
The arrows were for suppression, not lethality.
The nine-foot hook axes were the kill mechanism.
The arrows existed to keep them at the wall long enough for the hooks to arrive, and the hooks arrived, and the vampires fell, and the garrison held the line with grim, practiced efficiency.
The garrison was holding. Easily. Too easily.
I watched for another four minutes, long enough for the patterns to emerge. Then I stopped watching the walls and started watching the vampire commanders.
The vampire commanders were not watching the walls.
They were watching the other side of the fortress.
I had been watching for four minutes when my brain did the thing it always did. I stopped looking at what was in front of me and started looking for the last time something like this had happened before.
The answer was 332 BC.
Alexander the Great took the island fortress of Tyre in 332 BC. Tyre had never been taken. It sat on an island with walls that rose straight from the sea, and every prior commander who had looked at it had decided that the math did not work.
Alexander spent seven months building a causeway through the ocean to reach it.
Seven months of engineering so audacious that the Tyrians spent most of those months preparing for it.
They mobilized everything to defend the causeway approach.
They put their full attention and their full force on the one visible threat, the one that was so enormous, so obvious, and so clearly the thing that needed stopping.
The causeway was not how he took the city.
The causeway was how he kept their attention while his navy came in from the other side.
The Tyrians lost because they defended the causeway so completely that they stopped looking anywhere else. Alexander understood that a sufficiently obvious threat consumes attention. The more urgent it appears, the harder it becomes to notice anything beyond it.
The recently turned vampires climbing the wall in waves, absorbing arrows, losing heads by the dozen—they were the causeway. They were not the point. They had never been the point.
They were the thing you watched while the navy came in from the other side.
I was already moving before I had fully articulated the thought.
***
I ran from the tower.
The command tower was farther along the eastern wall, overlooking the main assault. If there was a place the High Commander would be during an active engagement, it was there.
I arrived at the command tower slightly out of breath.
Skip was there.
Of course he was.
A dozen soldiers surrounded him. Messengers arriving with reports, officers waiting for instructions, runners departing the moment they received them. Orders flowed through the tower continuously, moving outward from him and down the wall.
He stood at the center of it all. He was the point through which the entire defense was being coordinated.
The battle spread below him while runners came and went, reports were exchanged, and orders moved down the line.
He looked at me like he was encountering a variable he had not planned for.
“Meghan.”
Not a greeting.
“Listen to me,” I said.
He started to say something about me returning to my quarters. I talked over it.
“This is a distraction,” I said. “The eastern assault. Look at what they’re sending—recently turned, barely coordinated, no siege equipment, no scaling strategy that has any real chance of working against that wall.
They’re absorbing casualties at a rate that makes no tactical sense unless casualties are not the point.
The commanders in the back aren’t watching their own assault.
They’re watching the other side of the fortress. ”
I paused for one second.
Skip looked at me.
He looked at the wall.
He looked at me again, realization flashing across his face.
Then he made a decision. The way he made all decisions—immediately and without visible hesitation.
“East wall. Hold and maintain,” he said to the soldier beside him, in the voice that did not require a second repetition. “You four, come with me.”
He pulled a short hook axe from the bracket on his armor.
It was a miniature version of the weapons mounted along the battlements—the same crescent blade, the same inward-curving hook, the same singular purpose. Only the scale had changed.
He looked at me. “Go back to your quarters.”
I held his gaze and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
He was not going to spend time on the conversation.
Without breaking stride, with the resigned efficiency of a man who had just lost an argument he hadn’t had time to make, he reached into a bracket on the wall beside the door and held something out.
A short hook axe. The same weapon he carried. The same crescent blade. The same inward-curving hook. The same singular purpose.
I took it.
It was heavier than I expected. Not unmanageable, but substantial in the way objects designed to separate heads from bodies ought to be.
“The only way to kill them is to take the head,” he said. “Don’t let one get close. If they cut themselves and get blood near your mouth, don’t swallow. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I said.
“Stay behind me.”
I intended to stay behind him. I had every intention of staying behind him. My prior weapons experience consisted primarily of opening online purchases with a box cutter. The purchases had been uniformly non-hostile.
Skip started toward the stairs, and I followed.
Between us and the western wall lay the courtyard.
***
Four vampires had made it into the courtyard.
This did not surprise me.
It did, however, prove more unpleasant to witness in person than it had been in theory.
These were not recently turned. They were older, faster, dressed in the fitted dark armor of the command layer. They had come over the low western wall. That was the gap that existed because everyone with a weapon was on the eastern wall watching the distraction.
Three of Skip’s garrison soldiers were already engaged. One of them hit the wall hard enough that I heard the impact from twenty feet away, slid down it, and did not immediately get up.
I had never seen anyone fight before. Not really.
I had read about it, studied it, analyzed it at the strategic and tactical level for years.
The mechanics of actual violence—two people trying to hurt each other in a small space—were something I had processed entirely in the abstract until this moment.
Skip was not abstract.
He moved through the courtyard like someone who had been doing this long enough that the efficiency was not effort anymore; it was how he was built. Sword in his right hand, hook axe in his left, managing two separate problems simultaneously with calm, expert focus.
One of the vampires had a garrison soldier on the ground and was drawing a blade across its own wrist with the calm, practiced efficiency of something that had done this before.
The blood welled up dark, the wrist lowering toward the soldier’s mouth with the patience of a process being executed rather than a fight being won.
Not a bite. A blood transfer.
The turning mechanism was clinical rather than dramatic, which, I noted, was more disturbing than the dramatic version would have been.
Skip covered the distance in four strides and brought the hook axe through in one committed arc, and the vampire’s head left its shoulders and hit the dirt.
The soldier on the ground was still breathing, and Skip did not stop moving.
The sword was for the other vampire.