Heast watched as Kye Taaira was pressed backwards by the misshapen creature who, having torn the sword from its head, swung in it vicious, violent arcs at him. His old sword met each blow, a strange light emanating from it, and on every third or fourth attack, the tribesman would use his defence to press forwards. Each time he did, the creature would dart around the Leerans who fought beside it. With its bloody head a hideous mask of violence, and the haunted a twisted, wretched thing caught inside it, it would further show its disregard for life by throwing the men and women before it as shields. Taaira met these attacks, but as he did, as he was forced to dodge, deflect or strike at the soldiers, the creature would dart out at him, its sword swinging in another wild arc, forcing Taaira to meet the blow.
Two of the soldiers from Refuge who had been fighting beside the tribesman had fallen. As a result, the edge of the line that they and Taaira held had begun to fold inwards.
‘Isaap,’ Heast ordered as he walked towards the battle, Anemone beside him. ‘I need you to hold that side. Don’t let the creature start to flank us. Anemone and I will help out the tribesman.’
The young mercenary nodded and, with a sharp whistle to his squad, began to run ahead.
‘I can hold the creature,’ the witch said, her exhaustion clear in her voice. ‘But not for long. Not like I have.’
‘We will only need a moment.’
Heast turned his gaze back to Kye Taaira. He was aware, as he did, that he was not the only with one eye on the fight. He heard Lehana – ‘Strengthen our right!’ – but the battleground Refuge and the Brotherhood were spread over was ugly with debris and bodies. As the creature pushed the Hollow, the Leerans reinforced the back of their line, suggesting that Eidan’s words had not demoralized them. There was simply not enough space for Heast’s soldiers to change their focus and make a reinforcement without weakening another part. Essa and the Brotherhood could offer little more, either. Beyond Bliq’s still body, Heast could see the Brotherhood fighting between two streets. The Leerans had pushed there as well, and they were swarming over the buildings to try and bridge the gap between them and Taaira’s side.
Ahead, Kye Taaira continued to be pressed by the creature and the Leerans around him. He held his sword in both hands and cut left and right and moved in both directions before he stepped back and around the creature’s wild strikes and the jabbing thrusts of the Leerans’ swords. As before, Heast was surprised by the way the tribesman fought. There was no give in him, no desire to retreat, but instead there was a savage joy, an almost primal sense of release that filled him. Yet, Heast could not deny the skill and control with which Taaira fought.
The Captain of Refuge watched as, after a desperate swing by the creature came crashing down to the ground, the Hollow spun on his heel and thrust between two Leerans, catching both their swords. Before they could react, his right hand dropped the blade and grabbed the front of one of the soldiers by their armour. With a surge, Taaira pulled him off balance and darted into the gap he made. He dragged his sword free as he did and, with the creature still of the belief that it was safe behind its human shields, Taaira plunged his sword into its ribcage.
The blade erupted with an old white light, similar to the twisted haunt within the creature’s chest, and it burst through the creature as if it were rotten meat, creating a nimbus around Taaira.
With a jerk, the Hollow pulled his sword out of the creature, and as he did, a blond man set upon him.
With startling speed, he darted through the Leerans and leapt onto the tribesman’s back, a knife flashing out. Before Heast’s gaze, Taaira staggered, and the swords of the Leerans turned on him.
But it was the man on his back, the blond man, Heast could not turn away from.
His knife plunged into Kye Taaira’s face, but not one of the attacks resulted in blood. As that became apparent, the man grabbed the tribesman’s head and, with an inhuman strength, wrenched it around, snapping it.
Heast drew his sword. Beside him, Anemone began to run forwards.
But it was Isaap and his soldiers who were there first. The Corporal and his unit ran hard into the Leerans, screaming, trying to draw attention to themselves as Taaira fell to the ground. It was in vain, for he fell badly. Fell, Heast knew, dead.
The blond man did not retreat as the creature had in the face of stronger force. Instead, he fell into a fighting stance and met Isaap and those with him.
The man – the creature, Heast corrected – wore black leather wrapped around him, but it had been cut open, revealing a bright, almost burning, haunt in his chest. In contrast to the other twisted haunts that Heast had seen, the one inside the blond man was still, as if asleep. With each movement the blond man made, each block of a sword from a Refuge soldier, each cut and slash, the haunt’s limbs moved with him. It was not that the haunt aided the man, Heast knew that immediately, but rather that it was trapped in a complete state of subjugation, as if the soul of the man had been so subdued that it was now nothing more than a slave to the creature that wore its skin.
He did not fight like any of the other creatures Heast had seen. Where they had all fought with a savagery, a primal violence that was the dark cousin to the joy Kye Taaira showed when he fought, the blond man had an elegance, a deadly simplicity that had been created by years and years of practice. With the Leerans rallying behind him, he tore through the face of the first soldier who reached him, ducked under the swing of the next before he drove his knife into the inner thigh of the same soldier, and blocked the blow of Corporal Isaap. The latter managed to slow the charge of the blond man, but only for one parry, one attempt at a thrust, before the knives of the blond man cut across Isaap’s face and he pushed the Corporal back into the Leerans before he broke free of the battle.
On instinct, Heast jammed his free hand into Anemone’s back, pushing her to the ground the moment before the blond man’s dagger plunged into his arm.
With one knife in his left hand, the man was on the witch before she could recover her balance. He cracked his free hand into the side of her skull, but before his dagger could plunge forwards, Heast drove his steel leg into the blond man. His sword snaked out after him, but it found only air as his opponent rolled backwards.
Heast took a step in front of Anemone as she shook her head and struggled to rise, his sword held in front of him.
The blond man darted forward and Heast blocked his attack and pressed forwards. He could not hope to match the man in skill, nor in speed: he knew his worth as a swordsman, and knew that it had only decayed as he grew older. He knew that he was slower than the other man. No matter the blond man’s true age, his body was young, and his skill clear.
Heast heard shouts erupting around him. Over the blond man’s shoulders, he saw soldiers from Refuge trying to beat back the Leerans that had charged with the blond man, saw swamp crows falling from the sky to peck and harry. He saw Isaap, as well, suddenly clearly through all the fighting, his face bloody, his body making a slow crawl for the fallen sword of Kye Taaira. Heast wanted to shout a warning, but could not: the blond man snaked forwards again and he was forced to block the blow. He only had to hold out until Anemone was on her feet, until she could issue the command to her kin. He shifted his weight, parried, moved to his left, the blond man’s knife still in his arm. When his opponent darted forwards again, Heast swung his sword, blocked the knife, and then suddenly jammed the blade down, hoping to pierce the man’s foot.
He missed, but the main gambit was the knife lodged in his arm, the knife he dragged out to jam into the blond man’s chest.
For nothing.
Ignoring the injury, the man’s dagger came arcing up—
‘Stop, Zilt.’
—only to do just that.
The blond man’s eyes – Zilt’s eyes – were wide with shock.
Heast took a step back, out of his reach, leaving the blade that he had plunged into the man’s chest. Around him the Saan were swarming into the street as the swamp crows did, rushing over the Leerans.
‘You cannot imagine my delight.’ The old woman who led the Saan walked along the street towards Heast, Anemone and Zilt as if she had no concerns. On her shoulder sat a slim but very black swamp crow. ‘In this battle I have found soldier after soldier with his and her ears stuffed with wadding to dull my voice out. It does not matter how high or how low they are in the chain. They have all blocked the noise of battle and drunk heavily of blood to gorge themselves. But then I hear that you are here. You, the old, cruel general, given life with the most pitiless of his soldiers. You who don’t have one piece of wadding in his ears.’
With a bloody hand, The Captain of Refuge helped Anemone to her feet. The witch moved unsteadily and he asked quietly if she was all right. She nodded, but leant on him, and as she did, Heast searched for Isaap among those who had fallen, hoping, wishing, that the young man had not reached Taaira’s sword, that he had given up and lifted his own blade. Unfortunately, he found the Corporal near Kye Taaira’s body, his hand wrapped around the hilt of the old, brightly glowing blade. His body looked as if it had been dead for weeks: it would break, Heast knew, when he lifted the young man.
‘I don’t fear you, Tinh Tu.’ Zilt had not moved from his pose, his dagger still held high. ‘I know you for the impurity you are.’
‘You’re a fool.’ The old woman flicked a part of his leather armour aside and gazed at the haunt in his chest. ‘But in that way, you are no different to any other zealot. You believe there is perfection in the world and you pursue it with such single-mindedness that you cannot see the horror of your vision. Instead, you pick up a sword, or a knife, or a mace, and you try to beat and cut the world into your vision, while never once noticing that change is the world, that to be imperfect is to be whole.’ Her hand reached up to his eye and pulled the skin beneath it down. ‘Do you see how small a man you are, Zilt?’
‘You cannot threaten me,’ he hissed. ‘You can do nothing to me.’
‘Take out your eye.’
With a deliberate and unhesitating hand, Zilt pushed the fingers of his free hand into the eye she had just examined, and scooped it wetly and bloodily out.
Heast took a step, ready to tell the old woman to stop, but Anemone’s hand tightened on his arm. ‘Grandmother says that you must not interfere.’
‘You should listen to your witch, Captain.’ Tinh Tu did not turn to face him, but there was a strange quality in her voice, one both compelling and repellent. ‘Now,’ she said, her tone focused on the man before her. ‘You see the world with one eye. You see it like a true zealot, Zilt.’
‘You are a coward.’ His voice was rough with pain and rage. ‘Release me and face me like a real warrior.’
Tinh Tu’s laugh was caustic. ‘Like the children you killed when you conquered this land so long ago? Was that the work of a real warrior? Cut the hamstrings in both your legs. Cut them so you fall to the ground.’ Before Heast’s amazed gaze, the blond man cut deeply into his own body and slumped to the ground. ‘Years ago, I found a book that described all the horrific things you did,’ she said. ‘In it, the author detailed an event outside a conquered city, where you did this to one hundred and fifty-eight children. Do you remember? They prayed to the God of War to be rescued.’
‘You have people who pray to Se’Saera,’ he spat back. ‘Have you not heard that the Lord of the Saan prays to her?’
‘And receives no answer.’ On her shoulder, the swamp crow fluttered and took off. ‘I am not concerned about Miat Dvir.’
‘You cannot kill me,’ Zilt hissed in response. ‘None of you can.’
‘You met my brother Jae’le, did you not?’ Heast’s gaze followed the bird through the battle taking place around him, the battle that he felt strangely disconnected from, though he had known its beats and flow just moments before. ‘You chased him through that wreck of a cathedral,’ Tinh Tu continued, ‘and he threw you down here.’
‘I killed him!’
‘My brother?’ Heast watched as the swamp crow settled upon the shoulder of a dark-skinned man in a green cloak, a man who walked through the lines of battle as if he could not be touched. It was, the Captain of Refuge thought, as if the birds were clearing a path for him, that they swarmed the soldiers before him. ‘No, Zilt. Don’t speak. Listen to me. My brother tossed both you and your kin down here. He did so because he knew the Hollow and his sword were here.’ With a gentle dip, the man with the bird on his shoulder picked up the glowing sword of Kye Taaira, as if it were nothing, as if the white light that flowed from it and onto him was but an illusion. ‘You think you killed him because you stabbed him with a knife, but you think that only because you are a fool. My brother is the first of us. The first to be touched by a god’s power. Do you know what god his power came from?’
‘No,’ Zilt replied through gritted teeth, the answer torn from him. ‘No, I do not.’
‘Ain, the God of Life.’
Around his right hand, the hand that held the old two-handed sword Kye Taaira had been given to return his ancestors to the Plateau, Jae’le’s skin peeled and broke, but healed itself again. It happened so quickly that Heast’s first thought was that he had imagined it, that it was caused by the light against the other man’s skin, but he saw the skin peel and split and heal again, as if the power of the sword, and the power of the man were in conflict.
‘You will die,’ Tinh Tu said to Zilt. ‘You will die as if you were nothing. As if you were but a child outside a city gate, caught in the violence of your betters.’
Taaira’s sword went through the blond man’s back without resistance.
The body fell apart in rot and Jae’le released the sword. The only sign that holding it had bothered him was the way he rubbed the hand that had gripped the hilt. As he did so, he turned, not to the battle taking place behind him, but to the cathedral. There, a thin line of fire could be seen, the arc of a light that had been trying to flare after the siege fire opened the crown. ‘The stairs are broken. I couldn’t get up there,’ he said, not to Heast, but to Tinh Tu. ‘Ayae is up there alone. Alone with Aela Ren.’ A sigh escaped him. ‘I fear that he will kill her before we can stop him, sister.’