Chapter 39

Chapter 39: Chapter 39

The pressure just went out of the line, all at once, like a rope let go.

The Snake and Turtle warriors in front of us stumbled back into the green mist, hauling their dead by the ankles. For a few seconds the whole right flank had nothing to do but breathe, and it did, badly — a wet, ragged sound running down the whole 5th Cohort at once, men remembering their lungs.

Beside me a recruit went down on one knee and was sick, blood in it, and swamp water, and didn’t seem to notice which was which.

I tightened my grip and wiped the sting out of my eyes with a wrist that wasn’t much cleaner than my face.

Something in me held back the relief. Broken lines don’t retreat like that. Broken lines run — every man for himself, weapons dropped, no shape to it at all.

This had shape. This was in step.

The drums started right as I worked that out, which is either good timing or bad timing depending on how you feel about being right.

Not the frantic, ragged pounding that had opened the day. This was slow. Even. A single deep note struck again and again, so regular you could have set a heartbeat to it, and it came up out of the mud and into my back teeth before it reached my ears at all.

They hadn’t been losing. They’d been clearing a doorway.

Out of the treeline on our right — the dead, silver stand of swamp trees, the flank the terrain was supposed to be holding for us — the shadows simply stood up and started walking. Thousands of them. Not scavenged leather. Scale, layered thick, and long hooked poles built for one job: catching a shield and tearing it sideways off a man’s arm.

"Flank!" Yuni was already turning, spear coming around. "Brace — brace up!"

I didn’t get to brace. None of us really did.

They hit us and then they didn’t stop hitting us — they kept coming until the line bent around them on both ends, and I understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the swamp air, that we were being folded in half.

The recruit who’d been sick never made it back to his feet. A hook took him under the jaw and the crowd simply swallowed the rest of it. I didn’t watch. I heard it.

The veteran to my left — I knew his face, I’d never learned his name, that’s going to bother me later if there is a later — took an axe across the collarbone. His pauldron folded like wet paper. The spray of it went hot across the side of my face and into my open mouth before I could shut it, and I spat and kept moving because there wasn’t a version of this where I got to stop and think about what had just hit me.

Fifty yards of perimeter became twenty. I couldn’t tell you exactly how — nobody could have stood at the edge with a measuring cord — but you feel it happen. The space you have to work in just keeps getting smaller, the way a room feels smaller with more people breathing in it, except the people are trying to kill you and the room is closing on purpose.

A hook came low for my legs. I stepped into it instead of away — the only trick that still worked at this range — and put the blade up under his arm where the scale didn’t reach. The rune caught, his chest locked, I ripped the sword free —

— and something hit me from behind that wasn’t aimed at me at all, just a body thrown by the crush, and the mud came up to meet me.

Boots went over my cloak. One caught my ribs. I don’t know whose.

I got up because staying down was the only wrong answer available to me. No clean parry, no five clever steps, just the sword coming up in a blind ugly arc that opened someone’s thigh and bought me half a second I spent getting my feet back under me properly. There was no room in that crowd for anything elegant. There was barely room to fall down correctly.

"Close it up! CLOSE THE GAPS!"

Kaelen’s shield had a dent in it the size of a fist and was slick past the rim. He put it into a skull hard enough that I felt the impact through the ground, and then a spear found the meat of his thigh from the side and put him down onto one knee, and for the first time since dawn I saw something that looked like fear cross a face built like a quarry wall.

Every second had a price on it now and the price was a person.

Men who’d walked out of the siege at Trivi with their names still known to the Empire were going down in this mud without markers, without time for anyone to say which of them it had been. The sky had gone the colour of an old bruise. The drums didn’t stop. They never once broke rhythm, the whole time the circle kept closing around us — as if somewhere behind that treeline, someone was counting down, quite calmly, exactly how long the 5th Cohort had left.

The perimeter didn’t break so much as come apart at the seams, one stitch at a time, until there was no perimeter left. Just mud, and men in it, doing the worst things men do to each other.

I stood with my sword up in high guard, arms shaking hard enough that the rune along the blade buzzed unevenly against my palm — not with power, just with the tremor in my own hands.

A shape came through the melee toward me, stepping over two Imperial dead without looking down.

He wasn’t carrying a shield. He had an axe in each hand, bearded iron, and his chest was bare under the mud and the blue tattoos, which struck me even then as a strange thing to be vain about in a swamp.

Three paces. I gave him a center of gravity, a weight distribution, an opening a man with two weapons always leaves down the middle because he can’t help it —

He didn’t walk the three paces. He came across them sideways, all at once, both axes already moving in loops that didn’t match each other.

I got my blade up in time to catch the first one. The shock ran up my arms and into my teeth. It should have thrown him back. It didn’t — he leaned into it, used the jolt like a springboard, and the second axe was already coming for my ribs before I’d finished flinching from the first.

I went backward into the mud. Felt the blade take the hem off my tunic on the way past. An inch, maybe less.

I got up because getting up was the only thing on the list.

Everything I knew about fighting assumed a man moved like a sentence — subject, verb, a beat to recover in. This man moved like weather. There was no rhythm in it to read, which meant there was nothing for me to read.

He came in overhead with both axes at once. I caught it crossways on my guard and felt my knees go, actually go, buckle under the weight of it, my whole body a strut taking a load it wasn’t built for. The static bit into his forearms and he didn’t seem to notice, grinning through it with his eyes gone somewhere far away from pain, and I understood I was maybe two seconds from my wrists breaking.

Off to the side, a spearman saw me pinned and came in for the easy kill along my exposed flank.

The axe-wielder didn’t even turn his head to check who it was. He simply tore his right axe free of my guard, pivoted, and put it into his own ally’s throat.

The spearman went down making a sound I will hear for a long time. Blood came across my face in a warm line.

The axe-man kicked the body out of his way without breaking stride and turned back to me, dragging the blade through the mud, and I understood, with total clarity and no time to be sick about it, that this was never a battle to him. It was a claim he intended to collect personally.

I didn’t try to understand a man who kills his own to keep a kill for himself. I just moved.

Feint high. Drop the shoulder. Sweep for the knees — a clean line, the kind of thing Miklas would have nodded at from across a practice yard.

My left boot went into a soft patch of mud that gave way under me exactly wrong.

The ankle rolled. The sweep died halfway through its arc and skidded off his greaves doing nothing at all, and my own momentum carried me forward, off-balance, my whole right side open to him like a door left swinging.

For one long, useless second I could see it happening before it happened. His shoulder gathering. The axe starting its rise. My blade too far away and too slow and no ground left under me to push off from.

The number came to me anyway, out of habit, out of nothing. Zero. There wasn’t a version of the next half-second that ended with my head still on.

Then something hit me from the side, hard, and the mud came up to meet me instead of the axe.

CRACK.

Wood, not bone — I registered that much before I even had breath to look. I hit the ground and rolled onto my back gasping, and looked up, and Yuni was standing over me where I should have been standing.

His spear was broken in two pieces. One axe was buried to the haft in his left shoulder, pinning that whole arm useless at his side.

The other axe had gone up under his ribs.

He didn’t make a sound. His eyes — I’d never once, in a year of him teaching me how to read a street in Trivi before it turned bad, seen anything get past those eyes — went wide with something that wasn’t quite fear. Just surprise, plain and complete, like a man realizing very late that the ground had run out.

Blood came out of his mouth in a slow line and fell onto my face, and I couldn’t move, and there was nothing to say and no time to say it in anyway.

The axes came out of him with a sound I’m not going to describe.

He went down beside me without any of the drama dying is supposed to have — no last words, no grip on my hand, just weight, sudden and complete, hitting the mud a foot from my head. His eyes stayed open, pointed at the sky, and there was nothing behind them at all. The man who’d taught a starving twelve-year-old which alleys not to sleep in was simply gone, between one heartbeat and the next, and the body he’d left behind didn’t look like him anymore.

The axe-wielder stepped over him without slowing down, raising both weapons again.

Shadow fell over me, and I still couldn’t move.