Chapter Forty-Five Thera
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Thera
The last Nihlvarian warrior to die on the wharf was possibly the largest man Thera had ever seen.
Close to seven feet tall and broad as any bear, he seemed like a figure conjured from legend.
Fighting without benefit of a shield, he wielded a sapling-sized mace studded with iron rivets.
If she hadn’t seen him use it to such lethal effect on so many of her warriors, Thera would have found his stand admirable.
Yet, amid the urgent havoc of battle, she could allow no such sentiment.
Unwilling to expend any more lives assailing the giant, she ordered a path cleared to the spot where he stood, a bloodied, nightmarish figure surrounded by his fallen comrades and the Ascarlians he had slain.
A dozen or more arrows studded his armour and gore dripped from his mace as he brandished it at the enclosing ranks of foemen, snarling a wordless challenge.
Before turning to the Great Wolf, positioned with her stern jammed against the quayside, Thera reflected that personal combat with this man would do much to cement her own legend.
But then, she hadn’t lived so long by being a fool.
“Teylhar!” she called out, pointing the dreadaxe at the towering Nihlvarian.
Always a quick-minded fellow, the artisan was already working the levers to bring the bolt caster to bear.
He loosed the projectile only an instant later, the iron arrow streaking over her head to impale the red-faced giant through the chest. Incredibly, where other men had been sent tumbling like skittles by such a bolt, he continued to stand.
Flailing his mace, he tried to speak, though his words emerged as a torrent of red gore before, finally, he toppled face down to the wharf.
“Form companies!” Thera commanded, breaking the silence that followed. “Great Wolf’s crew rally to me!” She scoured the mass of milling warriors until she recognised a familiar face. “Aldeyn!”
“My queen,” he said, pushing his way to her side. His face was streaked with blood but she judged it not his own.
“Form up your Kast Gelders and advance along the city’s eastern wall,” Thera told him.
“Secure the gates and subdue any resistance.” She paused, once again beset by the memory of the Ironbones’ final moments.
Burn it all down… “Tell any townsfolk you see to return to their homes. If they offer no harm to us, they will receive mercy.”
He hesitated, knowing full well his uncle’s dying wish. But, instead of defiance, Thera saw mostly relief on the young Veilwald’s face when he nodded. “It shall be done, my queen.”
With companies formed, Thera set about organising the main advance into the city.
Having quizzed Achier and other freed slaves about the Citadel, she knew her principal target to be the sprawling great hall positioned on the hill in its centre.
She could see it now, easily marked by a tall tower.
According to her intelligence, the Vortigurn’s home had a defensive wall of its own.
It remained an open question how many warriors he held back for his own safety, something she would surely discover before the day was out.
She sent Skahlvyr westward at the head of the Aiken Gelders, commanding that he work around the great hall’s rear.
The rest of the companies she sent directly through the streets beyond the docks, divided into groups a few hundred strong.
Before leading the Great Wolf’s crew forward, Thera paused to regard the slender figure at the ship’s prow.
Lynnea was flanked by Ahlgrun and Kelvyrn, the brothers having received stern instruction not to stray from the Tielwald’s side, nor allow her to leave the ship without the queen’s permission.
Snaryk sat at her feet, the great hound panting with teeth bared in response to the scent of so much blood but held in place by Lynnea’s will.
Feeling the touch of her mind, Thera expected either words of encouragement or caution. Instead, the shared emotion was rich in fearful alarm. Something rises here, Lynnea told her, Thera seeing her face raised to the sky. Something terrible…
Following her Tielwald’s gaze, Thera saw the sky roiled with the onset of a storm. Yet the movement of the clouds was strange, the spiral they formed denser than seemed natural. What is that? Thera asked.
All I know is that it bodes ill, Lynnea responded. You must hurry. Kill the one who has summoned it.
Raising her axe in acknowledgement, Thera turned and ran for the nearest open street, calling out to the Great Wolf’s crew to follow.
For the first few hundred paces into the city, they encountered no other living soul save a few panicked rats and a ragged ginger cat hissing at them from an overturned fish stall.
All doors remained closed and every window shuttered.
Thera began to hope the people of the Citadel had collectively chosen the wisest course and shunned involvement in their king’s impending fall. Then she heard the voices.
They echoed from the streets ahead in a faint murmur at first, many throats issuing the same shrill, wordless keening that soon built into a feral howl.
It was punctuated by an overlapping series of hard clapping sounds resembling the discordant applause of a distracted audience.
Then she saw doors and windows along the length the street slamming open and from within came the growling mob.
Bearing knives, cleavers, clubs, or no weapons at all, the townsfolk immediately threw themselves upon Thera’s warriors.
They hacked, stabbed, and bit with animalistic fury.
She had scant time to issue the command to form a shield wall before all became a chaotic frenzied melee.
Thera fended off a matronly woman’s charge with a thrust of her axe then hacked down a spindly old man attempting to drive a short knife into her leg.
Nearby she saw a girl no more than fourteen scramble over Ragnalt’s shield to sink her teeth into his forearm.
Shouting in pain, he kicked her away, raising his sword for the killing blow, then hesitating.
Of all the lessons Thera had taught him, slaying an unarmed maiden was not one of them.
It was nearly his undoing, for the maiden immediately sprang at him again, forcing him to raise his shield.
At the same instant, another attacker, a bald-headed man bearing a butcher’s knife, lunged at Ragnalt’s unprotected flank.
Thera jabbed the points of the dreadaxe’s twin blades into the bald man’s neck then swung at the ravening girl, the blow nearly severing her at the waist.
“Do not spare!” she told Ragnalt. “Only fury will save us now!”
There followed a brief lull in which Thera advanced her warriors to another street corner only to be assailed by a second mob.
As she cut them down, she noted the manic bloodlust in their eyes and the incoherent, bestial expressions of violence that formed their screams. There was also no order to their resistance.
Once one group had been extinguished, Thera was able to advance along streets bare of barricades, unassailed by archers or stone throwers on the rooftops.
This was an utterly chaotic defence, unassisted by any plan or reason that she could discern.
Reaching a market square she found the crews of several ships embroiled in an intense melee with yet another mob of ravening townsfolk.
Bodies lay atop one another on the cobbles amid the detritus of destroyed carts, mostly unarmoured locals but Thera counted at least a dozen of her own among the dead.
Watching how these maddened people died, many still screaming inchoate defiance as blades pierced or hacked their flesh, she was forced to a grim but unavoidable conclusion: What could defeat such deranged souls other than complete destruction? Burn it all down…