Beckley Montcrief watched the invaders approach. From what he could see, the army was organized into three divisions, two separate divisions of foot soldiers in front, the first massive, the second only several hundred strong. In the rear were heavily armed mailed horsemen. Not that it mattered how many of them there were, not with the wall that surrounded the city. They would be able to pick off the intruders from atop it.
“What . . . what have they got on them?” a man standing beside Montcrief stammered. “The ones in front. What’s wrong with them?”
Montcrief raised his spyglass to his eye and focused on the front line of men. Indeed, there was something horribly wrong with the foot soldiers that marched so stoically. Their skin was dull gray, and their clothes, even their very skin, seemed to be decaying.
“Prisoners forced into service?” someone guessed. “They look half dead!”
Montcrief focused on one man in the front line and felt his confidence vanish. They did not look half dead; they appeared to be the living dead. For months, there had been ominous warnings from shamans and seers alike about an army of the dead that would attack and lay waste to a great city. Scores of the enemy began to drum in a slow, rhythmic cadence. Dum, dum, dudda-dudda-duh. Dum, dum, dudda-dudda-duh. He swallowed hard and felt a painful shiver travel the length of his spine.
“Why would they waste men on the beating of drums?” someone scoffed.
Montcrief lowered the spyglass, having seen the catapults at the rear. “They will send fire,” he warned loudly. “Prepare them below. We need every available citizen with a bucket at the ready. Have them fill barrels quickly. On the double!”
Men scurried about, shouting orders.
The drumbeat grew faster and louder as the army drew closer and Montcrief felt his heart pound to the same rhythm. “Have the first lines take position, but they are not to shoot until the enemy is within range. We’ll sound the order with the trumpet.”
“Give them some music of our own,” someone said.
Montcrief’s orders echoed and hundreds of soldiers began ascending the three hundred-foot ladders that led to the platform near the top of the wall, each man with a longbow or arbalest slung upon his back. Arrows and metal balls were already in place on the platforms. They were prepared and they would defend the city! But those blasted drums. They were fraying his nerves.
“I would say there are ten thousand of them, perhaps more,” Harold Penley said from Montcrief’s immediate left. “Do you agree?”
“Yes,” Montcrief replied curtly. “Is there any sign of the McKeaf? Does anyone know?”
“No, sir. And the couriers have not arrived back yet, so there is no way to know where they are.”
“Or if they’re coming,” Montcrief said grimly. He had not approved of Isolde’s position, and he felt certain the McKeaf would be infuriated by it. Rightfully so.
“The wall will stop them,” Penley voiced with more bravado than true confidence.
Montcrief put his glass back to his eye, but it was difficult to focus with his hands shaking as they were. He was no stranger to battle, but this was not an army he had ever faced or even imagined before. Exhaling slowly, he focused on the front line. One of them with a grotesque face and hollow-looking, black eyes filled his sight. It was a face that had known torment, and known it well. The omens were true, he realized, and the great city that would be laid to waste was their own. He thought of his wife and young son with a desperately heavy heart.
“Sir? They’re in range.”
“Sound the trumpets,” Montcrief replied without lowering his glass. He had to see the results. He had to know.
Trumpets blasted and a volley of arrows, stones and balls came raining down upon the enemy. A horse was hit. It whinnied and bolted in terror and pain before stumbling and collapsing—but the men in front did not stop advancing.
Montcrief’s hand gripped the spyglass tighter and stared more intently. There! He saw an arrow penetrate a man’s chest, stopping him. The man shook, as if his body was in great trauma, then he looked down at the arrow and pulled it out of himself. The wound. He focused on the wound, and it leaked something dark and sludgy. Not blood. His worse fear was confirmed. They were not human.
The foot soldiers reached the wall and their garish faces looked skyward. Their necks were bent at an impossible angle as they began clamoring upwards like human insects.
“What are they?” Penley cried in horror.
Montcrief could not utter a reply.
From atop his armored gray stallion, a hundred yards away, Nafino Zephyr lifted his arms, releasing his wolfmen. It was likely that Abaddon’s first realm was sufficient to terrify and subdue Nawllah, but the wolfmen were ready to go, and they would make quite the impact, not only on the enemy but on his own troops as well.
Franco De Medeiros felt the change begin. To panic was foolish, as there was no choice but to endure the transformation, and yet his muscles stiffened with fear and dread just the same. He dropped his shield and scorpion, a spiked whip, as the first shots of pain ripped through him. He screamed, although it did not sound like a scream.
The horsemen could not control their mounts despite the fact that the horses had blinders on. Like their masters, they sensed the presence of evil and raw terror on a primal level. The howling around them was unnatural, and the sight before them incomprehensible. The group of men directly behind the army of the dead, some three hundred or so, was becoming something else—something beastlike. Clothing was ripped at the seams as flailing bodies distorted. Men sprouted dark fur and long claws. Sharp fangs flashed, as they were bared in the throws of agony.
“What manner of evil is this?” one soldier called to another, his face aghast.
The same question was also being asked from atop the walls. The panicked soldiers of Nawllah drew back and attempted to flee but, in carelessness born of terror, ladders were tipped and men were sent flying to their deaths. Fire was flying, too, great balls of it, propelled by the catapults Montcrief had seen. They hit and ignited with great explosions. The noise from the explosions was deafening, maddening, and on top of that was the yelling and screaming from below.
When a hideous, death-distorted face appeared before Montcrief from the far side of the wall, he did not move, not even to flinch. He knew. His own death was imminent. The creature, whatever it was, reeked of decayed flesh. Its teeth were black and rotten; its eyes white and cloudy. It was the face of a man who had been to hell and back. His one consolation was that he would never become such a creature. He was not bound for hell. It was a surprisingly sweet realization.
The thing reached for him, and Montcrief felt its ice-cold grip through his clothes. He was jerked off his feet and hoisted over the wall. For an instant, he experienced the terrifying wonder of flight, but, mere seconds later, he was dead on the ground below, his body broken from the fall.
Rehan Isolde reined in his mount and turned back toward the city, still bewildered by the sight before him. It was devastating to the point of unreality. Flames and dark smoke engulfed his city as it was being sacked. But how could it be? He could not understand how it had happened. Not with the wall.
Even from this distance, he could hear the terrible sounds of the siege. He would never be able to forget the sound of the screams and the explosions. Never. And his poor father, who had been too ill to leave. There was little doubt that he would be killed, if he had not been, already.
“Sir, we must keep going,” one of his men warned.
Isolde turned back and continued on with his escort of twenty or so men, despite that fact that he felt dangerously numb.
“Stop,” Nafino Zephyr cried. “Hear me, I say!” His men had not let him in the gates as he’d commanded and now they were obliterating the city. It was not what he’d ordered or wanted. He’d wanted the palace intact, but his army was beyond recall or control. He trembled with rage and frustration. Only Abaddon’s first realm obeyed his dictates, standing perfectly still outside what was left of the city walls. In fact, they were facing it, reminding him of children having been sent to the corner. Only that was a whimsical analogy, when they were so obviously imprisoned in the bodies they’d inhabited as mortals.
The mortal soldiers were every bit as bad as his wolfmen, destroying what they could not carry off. Greed fueled them for the present, but, later, they would be frightened and revolted by all they had seen and experienced and taken part in. They would desert and spread the word about the evil that surrounded Nafino Zephyr.
There seemed to be no way of regaining his footing for the moment, so Zino resentfully endured the sacking. He found a ruined inn and a bottle of wine, and settled back to wait out his army’s crazed destruction. Hours later, Zino made his way past still burning buildings, past corpse after corpse, lying in every conceivable position. Loose limbs were strewn, having been ripped or sliced from bodies. Wagons were tipped on their sides, livestock was dead, once beautiful sculptures smashed to bits. Idiots! Fools! The same soldiers who had wreaked destruction would now have to repair and rebuild, not that they could recreate art.
The palace had sustained considerable damage, but it was not destroyed. As he walked the marble halls, not even bothering to step around the occasional pools of blood, he tried for a different perspective. This day had not gone as he’d foreseen, but he had possession of Nawllah, which had been the goal.
He found a suitable chamber in the palace and fell onto the bed, grabbing the silk covers in his fists and pulling them over himself. It was bitterly disappointing that the victory did not feel like victory. He had wanted control, prayed for control, bargained for control, and instead gotten servitude. However, self-pity, as well-deserved as it might be, was not beneficial at this moment. Not when he had to think quietly and formulate the next steps.
He would use Abaddon’s first realm a bit longer. They would be ordered west to get rid of the Leviathans, while his mortal army, bolstered by additions from the Nawllahian army, would go east and expand his domain all the way to the coast. His wolfmen would remain to guard Nawllah, while he would venture south into Vihlae Forest.
Admittedly, it was strange to be so completely alone on this night of military triumph, but alone he would remain—until he’d extricated himself from a certain sticky situation with the darkest of the gods.
Early the following day, Lucas McKeaf held his hand up to halt the men in the front lines when he spotted rising smoke in the north. He continued forward, as did several others, topped a ridge and saw Nawllah in the distance. Every man who possessed a spyglass pressed it to his eye, and the sight in the scope chilled the blood. There were gaping holes in the wall of Nawllah, and hundreds of green and white uniformed soldiers of Nawllah hung from the battlements. “Sacked,” someone exclaimed. “Somehow, they got through the wall!”
“But it’s quiet now,” Alexander Kievnall observed. “Too quiet.”
An unspoken question pervaded each of their thoughts; where had the invaders gone?
“A few of us should venture in to learn what’s happened,” Anthony said to his father.
David McKeaf gripped his spyglass tighter, having seen a strange animal. “What is that?”
“I see it,” Peter Bloodworth said, suddenly sitting taller in his saddle.
The thing looked as if it came straight from Greek mythology, part human, part beast. It moved on four legs, then rose up on two and seemed to become taller as it stretched to its full height. It had fur, but an almost human face. It rounded a corner and disappeared from sight.
“What was it?” Anthony demanded.
“I don’t know,” Peter returned, “but I will tell you what it’s not. It’s not human.”
Franco De Medeiros slunk down a dim, narrow alley, his head hung low. Blood had congealed in the cobblestones, and its scent was still strong in his nostrils, but he no longer felt crazed by it. Neither did he feel satiated from the flesh he’d consumed. There was not much human about him any longer and, soon, there would be nothing. Nothing human. Nothing humane. Perhaps it would be a relief to be free of this burden of shame and regret.
The covenant he’d entered—what had he gained? He could not recall. He had not understood nor appreciated that which he had bartered away. He wanted it back. More than anything, he wanted his humanity back. The right to die as a man. Who would have thought it held such value? Not that he deserved mercy. He’d been a fool, worthy of death. Forgiveness, he pleaded anyway. I did not understand. I did not know.
He heard something and turned to see a boy of perhaps ten years of age with a bow and arrow pointed directly at him. The boy, standing in a darkened doorway, whimpered with fear. Franco heard his breathing and smelled his fear. He turned away. He would not charge the child nor would he run.
“Shoot,” a female voice urged.
Yes, shoot, Franco silently begged. Before I turn again. Before I turn on you and rip you both apart. Shoot!
A moment later, he felt the arrow pierce his side, and the pain was intense. It stopped his breath.
“You got it,” the female said. “Shoot again. Be sure!”
Grunting softly, Franco fell and felt the cold, wet street as he had not felt it before . . . because his body was no longer covered in fur. He made another sound and it was human. When the second arrow hit, shattering ribs, and a third, in the center of his back, he knew he was mere moments away from death. Lying on the filthy, wet street, Franco De Medeiros had never felt such sweet gratitude.