Chapter 41
Forty-One
Cara
We smelled the eastern seawall before we saw it.
Smoke first, thick and black.
By the time we landed, we could smell the monsters, the ichor and the bitter scent and the saltiness of the sea.
And blood.
Fear landed fast, but he had slowed right before the descent. I was on my feet at once, with his hand on my back to steady me as I caught myself.
I drew my sword as he touched his shoulder, his sheathed sword materializing by magic.
He was already calling orders. He had worked it out in the air: where the pressure was worst, where to send each member of Bismyth, what opportunities the terrain would give, and what it would cost.
We were side by side. One day, we would fight as true equals. I wouldn’t need his arms to fly or his hand to steady me.
The city opened around us, built of old stone. The streets were wide near the wall and narrowed inward, the geography of a city built to funnel trade and currently funneling monsters instead.
The eastern wall was not quite a wall anymore.
Some monster had hit it hard enough to bring down a twenty-foot section, and dust still hung in clouds.
The breach spread damage outward; roofs partially collapsed, a fountain in the nearest square broken and leaking a spreading sheet of water over the cobblestones.
As we landed, the sea disappeared beyond the wall except if one had a view through where monsters had broken down the wall. Waves crashed against stone, the scent of salt threading through the smoke.
Bismyth was already moving. Fear and Anayla both called orders, taking different sides of the battlefield. Kiegan and Sera went left toward a cluster of defenders who had been pushed against a storehouse.
Asrael and Dairen moved straight toward the worst of the breach where Obsidian was fighting, hard-pressed and tired. Fear touched my shoulder, and I went with him, following Az and Dairen.
“It’s a Wrack,” he told me as we went toward one of the enormous sea monsters, a thing with a hard shell and nasty claws. “When it lunges for the kill, its neck is vulnerable.”
“For the kill,” I echoed.
“I won’t be killed,” he promised. “Watch for the opening. Go left.”
Obsidian didn’t acknowledge us. They shifted, making space in their formation without breaking it.
The Wrack turned toward Fear, as if it sensed the greatest threat. It lunged.
I drove my sword into the soft place behind the jaw. The Wrack let out a roar, turning on me, but Fear and the Obsidian shifters were faster than it was. I drew my sword loose, splattering blood as they went to work.
Then the Wrack was gone, and we moved on.
I intended to stay close to Fear, but I lost him in the chaos and smoke. I stopped, looking around, trying to figure out where to go next.
A young man with dark hair was being dragged by some multi-tentacled thing, part of his body already eaten, and an Obsidian shifter went after the monster, cursing. I ran to help, but the Obsidian shifter was already chopping off yet another tentacle by the time I reached his side.
“Help those two!” he barked at me, pointing.
A mortal woman with a pike and a low Fae were fighting another monster, the Fae bending shadows to make it look the wrong way while the pike came from the other direction. It was clever, and it was barely working.
I reached for Lightbringer, the reflex I couldn’t stop, the knock on the door that was always there, and found what I always found: warmth, banked and enormous and unhelpful.
Fine.
I had my sword and my Bismyth training and whatever madness had propelled me from Stonehaven to now.
When the creature turned from the mortal woman’s pike and lunged toward me. I met it with my sword.
I slashed at it roughly, barely better trained than this mortal to fight, but when it lunged at me, I caught it on my sword, my reflexes so fast that it amazed me.
The monster’s dull eyes seemed to meet mine, its claws reaching and spiny tail flickering toward me.
I pulled my sword loose and stepped back in one motion, fast enough to elude its attack.
I heard the mortal woman murmur distantly, “So it’s real. She’s not quite mortal.”
The creature went down slower than I wanted and took me with it in a way that was not elegant but ended with me on my feet rather than underneath it, so small mercies. My shoulder hit cobblestone. My head made intimate acquaintance with the road as well.
The world spun dizzily, and I thought for a wretched moment that the myth-in-the-making might vomit over the cobblestones.
The low Fae reached out a hand and grabbed my arm without hesitating, and I got up.
The fight kept going.
Near the breach itself, where the rubble from the wall was still chest-high in places, were horrifying fast monsters, small but moving in a pack so large they seemed one massive being as they swarmed over the wall.
Kiegan and Sera went to meet them, alone for a moment, and then there were Obsidian shifters on either side of them.
Kiegan took a vicious bite from one and reared back, the thing still hanging from his arm, and slammed it into a stone wall without hesitation.
“With me.” Fear materialized from the smoke, touching my shoulder as he came to my side, the same way he would anyone else in Bismyth, and the two of us ran together into the breach.
I hacked at small monsters. Fear and I closed up back-to-back to fight together so the small things could not get around us. We did the work of slashing one apart and then another. My arms ached, but I didn’t stop. I killed one, and it seemed there were two in its place.
I felt, for a strange moment, the echo of Stonehaven. The way I had been awed by them. I had stood within their protection and wished I was one of them.
I was part of it now. Part of Bismyth.
“Herd them together!” Fear shouted, and we worked together, following Fear’s lead and drawing them into a walled courtyard. Then at the right moment, he yanked me up with him as he flew.
“Fire!”
Dragons loosed flames on the gathered mass of monsters. The heat reflected off my face and bare skin, and I almost dropped my sword as the hilt went hot in my hand. I sheathed it as Fear and I moved on to the next monster.
I lost track of Fear again.
I tried not to. His instruction to stay close had been correct. I had vulnerabilities in a fight. But I kept finding myself pulled toward where the need was rather than where he was.
A few surviving fast ones found me in a side street off the main square.
Three of them were coming from different directions in the quick staggered sequence I’d seen them use against Kiegan.
The first hit was a feint. I didn’t take the bait and went instead for the second before it completed its pass and caught it on the end of my sword.
Two left. They were coming back.
Then something I could not see was behind me.
It was almost on top of me when I felt the vibration beneath my feet. Something big at my back and two monsters still ahead of me.
I had just enough time to understand I was in trouble.
“Left.”
I went left.
Claws swept through the place I’d just been. I felt the air pass over me, but I was already gone. My heart was beating horribly fast. “Nice of you to come. It’s quite the party.”
“You’re welcome,” Lightbringer told me. Ancient. Dry.
“I didn’t say thank you.”
She should really take more of an interest. If I died, she’d go back to the Dreaming without ever flying.
“You should have.” The voice was clipped. Informational. The tone of someone giving directions to a person they found irritating but had decided to assist anyway. “The monster has a blind spot on its left. It’s wounded and can’t see.”
I turned to face the monster that had almost killed me. It was enormous, all teeth and claws, writhing forward.
Lightbringer, more agitated, commanded, “Come from the left, child!”
I moved to the left. The monster’s head swung to follow me, and I rushed forward into its blind spot. When I struck, it was moving forward; the monster practically impaled itself on my sword. I pulled loose, ducking claws. It wouldn’t go down that easily.
“Don’t let it pin you against the wall behind you,” Lightbringer instructed, and I was trying to figure out where to go when she said, incensed, “Move forward and left! Into that open space before you get pinned.”
I moved.
The part of my mind not actively occupied with surviving registered, with distant incredulous amusement, that I was taking tactical advice from a dragon who had reached the limit of her patience watching my technique.
Lightbringer kept talking with the air of someone deeply inconvenienced by their own expertise. I kept listening, and somewhere in the press of the next ten minutes I stopped being startled that she was there.
I nearly ran into Maura.
We came around the same rubble pile from different directions at full speed, both pulling up at the last moment.
We stared at each other for one second.
She looked as dangerous and glittering and leanly graceful as ever, her braids whipping around her shoulders, the leather armor blood-streaked and ash-marked.
She had been fighting for hours before we arrived, and she looked terrible. She still looked extraordinary. Deeply irritating, both things simultaneously, and I had no time to dwell on either.
Relief crossed her face before she could stop it, quick and genuine. “Finally. Try to keep up.”
She looked beyond me.
“Fear’s here,” I told her, because it seemed relevant.
“I don’t care.” She took down something that had gotten too close to a cluster of mortal children being shepherded toward a building with a heavy door. “All I care about is that Obsidian isn’t dying today.”
“More monsters on the left.” I told her and reached out and grabbed her shoulder, tagging her in just the same way I’d seen Bismyth operate. “With me.”
“You’ve lost your damn mind,” she said, and yet, she still went with me.