Darksoul. Anna Stephens
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delay the inevitable and the fourth wave carried him along, helpless but for the paltry protection of his shield.
Skerris had given him the quick version of scaling a wall – be quick. Galtas needed to be up the ladder as fast as the man in front of him, or he’d not only hold up those below, but he’d create a gap in the line of shields hanging from each man’s back and expose himself. As long as he stayed close, the shield of the man ahead of him would offer some protection from the arrows being loosed down the ladders.
If they stick with arrows. What if they use pitch and fire? Or boiling oil? Or fucking great rocks? What if they turn the stingers on us? Galtas wiped sweat from his eyebrows and sucked in a lungful of air, trying not to think about the portable catapults that shot arrows the size of horses. One of those down a ladder would skewer half a dozen men like a rabbit on a spit.
‘The Lady’s will,’ he said, loud and firm. It steadied him as he crouched beneath his shield among the rubble, waiting his turn to sling it on his back and begin the climb. A few others echoed his words, but Galtas recognised them as true believers. None of the forced converts uttered a word – the Dancer wasn’t listening any more and they refused to ask the Red Gods for aid. Bereft in the midst of a fucking battlefield while death rained from the sky. Galtas shivered, glad that his faith was strong.
Behind him on the sward, East Rank archers crouched and loosed from the paltry protection of moveable wicker barricades, aiming at the men at the top of the wall. Galtas didn’t look up, not wanting to see how many arrows were low, bouncing off the wall around the ladders, as much a danger to their comrades as the enemy was.
The line was moving fast. Galtas glanced behind him and by the time he looked back, a dozen men were on the ladder and there was a gap opening in front of him.
‘Shit,’ he grunted, stood and slung his shield on to his back, leapt forward and on to the first rung of the ladder. He climbed fast, hands slipping on rungs muddy from the boots of those who’d already ascended. A man fell screaming past him and Galtas fought the urge to freeze and cling to the ladder, forced his hands and legs to keep moving, keep climbing, the man in front of him getting further away with every second.
Galtas’s boot skidded on the rung and he stumbled, his foot flailing and catching the shoulder of the man below. The soldier grunted and swore at him, told him to hurry the fuck up or they were all dead, and an arrow whined past Galtas’s nose to emphasise his point. Galtas yelped and started climbing again, as fast as he could, breath whistling in his lungs and thighs burning. The noise of fighting and shouting got louder the higher he climbed, and then the ladder shuddered and slipped sideways, halted, and then slipped again. He chanced a look up – there was no one on the ladder above him, and there was no one defending its head. Four men in Palace Rank uniforms strained to push it away from the wall.
The men below him were still climbing, pushing at him, threatening to tip him off if he didn’t move. Everyone who went up here before me is dead. They’re just waiting for my head to rise over the parapet and they’ll cut it off. This is stupid.
Galtas looked down. ‘Stop,’ he yelled, ‘stop climbing. Retreat.’
‘Climb, you fucking coward,’ the soldier below him yelled. The man shoved at his leg, punched his calf. ‘Move or die, cunt.’ Galtas moved, starting the climb again. There was nothing else he could do, and the gods would protect him or call him to Their side if it was his time to die.
Please don’t let it be my time to die.
The ladder lurched again and Galtas saw himself falling, screaming, to the base of the wall, already littered with corpses and rocks and spent arrows. And then he was at the top of the ladder and he dropped his left shoulder fast so the shield swung from his back on to his arm. Galtas’s fingers fumbled the straps and he nearly lost it, caught the rim and jabbed it in the face of the nearest soldier, poked him back spitting teeth and leapt through a crenel on to the allure, dragging at his sword. Less than a second later another soldier joined him, then another and another as the East Rank poured on to the wallwalk and fanned out into a bridgehead.
‘Still alive,’ he breathed as a knot of soldiers charged him. Galtas laughed and waded into the fight, sword silver on the down swing and red on the way back up. ‘Still alive!’ he screamed.
The ladder to his right was less successful; Palace Rankers shoved it away with long hooked poles. Men clung yelling to it as it swung in a slow, elegant arc away from the wall and past the vertical. A man at the top of the ladder flung himself desperately at the wall; he missed the top by a stride’s length, slammed into the stone and slid all the way down.
The ladder picked up speed as it began its inevitable descent to the earth, and the screams of the soldiers faded with distance and were cut off on impact. But more men were climbing Galtas’s ladder, flooding into the space behind him and pushing the front rank further in both directions along the wall. They were spreading, taking more wall, killing the defenders. They were fucking winning.
Galtas fought alongside the Rankers, no time to look up and out and across to see how the Mireces fared, no breath in him to care one way or the other. It’d be the Rank that won this; everyone knew it. The Mireces were little more than bodies to throw on to metal, the sheer weight of numbers rather than skill securing any victory they might win.
He was closer to Second Tower than he was to the gatehouse, which suited him well. Without seeming to, he allowed small gaps to form that the Easterners hurried into, no doubt thinking him some untrained idiot for threatening their tenuous hold on the wall. Slowly they drove for the tower and Galtas fell back into their midst. He’d need to be well protected in the seconds it’d take him to effect his disguise. Though of course, once he had, he was at as much risk of being killed by his own side as he was by the defenders.
The Lady’s will, he told himself again. A defender over-reached himself, bursting through the East Rank’s front line into the space behind where Galtas loitered. Galtas grinned at the flailing defender, punched him in the teeth, swept his arm low and under the man’s knee, and hoisted. He went over the wall with a whooping shriek more of shock than fear, and then he was gone.
An arrow buzzed past Galtas on his blind side; it looked to have come from further down the allure. It reminded him to take off his eye patch; the first part of his disguise lay in removing the thing he was most well known for. He ripped it off his head and dropped it over the wall, ducked a slash and let the man next to him riposte, skipped behind a third’s shield and stabbed over his comrade’s head into their attacker’s neck where it met the collarbone, sword angled down so half its length vanished into the man’s body, cleaving lung and liver, maybe stomach. The man puked blood and Galtas ripped his sword free, scooped up a fallen shield and inched and killed his way towards the tower.
Still alive.
Fourth moon, afternoon, day twenty-five of the siege
East Rank encampment, outside Rilporin, Wheat Lands
She was under guard, of course, and had been for what felt like months. That’s because it has been months. There’s a comforting thought. But despite her gaoler Scell’s omnipresence at the other end of the chain and collar she’d worn all that time, the East Rank healers were too busy making her work to care that she was a slave.
I’m not a slave, she corrected herself. I’m a prisoner. There’s a difference.
And there was. Today was the first time they’d put her to work, whereas their slaves worked from the day they were captured until the day they died. More of a guest, really, she told herself. They like me so much they can’t bear for me to leave. She clanked the chain against her collar and snorted faint amusement.
Today though, the healers had finally admitted that the number of casualties from both armies had become too great for them to cope on their own.