Firemoon (28 page)

Katja held up her hand to put the rune up between them, but the snake circled with lighting speed and was almost upon her. She decided to handle this with steel and slashed, but again it moved with that blinding speed and evaded the blade.

A militia fighter drove an enormous logging axe in the back of the long body. The demon screeched and swatted him with the end of its tail. The man was thrown back, scratched by the sharp, constantly writhing little limbs. Katja hit the snake with a downward slash and a substance that had no name dribbled out. It tried to strike at her, but the wounds were slowing it down and the claws glanced off the mail without penetrating.

Katja cut the head off and turned back towards the big one. The Eagles had brought it down and decapitated it with two axes and a sword.

She lit the rune by another nearby monster, which staggered away from it and straight into the blades of Pine City soldiers.

“Come!” she shouted and the Eagles followed her to two monsters that were scattering a shield wall.

The chaos made getting to these foes somewhat difficult, but through superior numbers, the toughness of the Eagles and the Sentinel Flame, slaying them wasn’t much of a problem.

The fighting on the streets was brutal. Sometimes the demons managed to break through a shield wall, and sometimes they were met with readied weapons and were defeated. Some were caught between two companies and were cut apart without being able to make meaningful use of their strength.

Katja led quick, hard strikes on the demons she and the Eagles could get at, and in between she lit the Sentinel Flame for a moment here and there to give the men an edge.

Peter kept on summoning them, and the defenders kept killing them.

Katja fought like never before. There was no room for thought. She analysed a situation in a flash, and reacted to it as she had been taught. She dodged, slashed, stabbed, lit the Sentinel Flame and chose her next task with near-perfect efficiency. Her body was a weapon. A weapon that buzzed with excitement and a dark joy at this intense experience, and she wielded it with skill. She didn’t even think about the overall situation or how the battle was really faring. All her focus was on finishing one task and then finding the next.

Finally, when the distance between demons to kill had become far wider, she began to feel a strange droning in her forehead that cut through the battle trance. There was no demon within reach and she let enough rationality in to remember that she had felt this before. In the camp, earlier this day.

She also began to see the effect the droning was having on the mortals as it intensified. Many began to groan or shake their head, looking confused. Some stood still where they were, but others took hesitant steps in one direction, and then another.

Katja began to become aware of the casualties they had suffered, and she remembered that three Eagles had died.

The droning grew stronger yet, and had become truly unpleasant. This wasn’t the steady, almost soothing effect that had reigned in the camp. This was an attack.

Men began to fall to their knees, screaming, or tearing off their helmets and clutching or scratching their heads.

“What is happening?!” Lukas hissed through clenched teeth. He stood next to Katja, bloody, sweaty, and now bent over.

“Sorcery,” she replied.

Lukas’s question was repeated all over with variable wording, and for the first time tonight Katja began to feel a touch of fear. This she could not fight.

The occasional person began to fall wailing to the ground. The sounds were full of pain and confusion. She had once seen a madman acting similarly on the streets of Amerstan.

She wasn’t surprised to see a man tackle another and beat him in an insane frenzy. She heard metal hit wood and glanced at a man who was beating an axe into a comrade’s shield, while the latter tried to retreat and reason with him.

“Hold him and bind him!” someone said, and similar incidents seemed to be occurring in other spots.

“What can we do?” asked Needle, being one of those who remained relatively composed in spite of the drone.

He stared at her, his one eye squinting. He wanted a countermeasure.

Katja hesitated.

“Endure!” she then said. It was all she had.

She took her eyes off him and made sure not to look anyone else in the face. She stared at the steps up onto the wall. The rain of demons seemed to have ceased. Did Peter mean to win with this one measure? Was mass-insanity the cause of the battle din she had sensed?

No!
she said to herself.
I interpreted it correctly!

“Come!” she said to the Eagles, and hurried towards the wall. Needle grunted as if steeling himself and followed her, more upright than he had been. The others followed, in varying conditions.

Order and discipline declined with every moment. The demons had upset everything, and this strange assault seemed to finally break many a man’s morale, aside from having to handle their comrades’ strange fits.

Katja believed she understood Peter’s intentions. The demons would weaken their resistance, and then the northern army would attack and take the city.

They were at the stairs when those up on the wall began shouting about approaching enemies. Some tried to line the archers up properly, but with all the chaos they were having little luck.

“Ladders!” someone shouted, and some on the ground began struggling to get their bearings. Arrows flew out into the night, but that deadly choir wasn’t as loud and comforting as it had been in previous nights.

“Do we go up, or fight here?!” Borgo asked.

Katja closed her eyes, but only had a few moments before there would be dire need for action, and the damned drone would not let her focus. She couldn’t see where they would be most needed.

“Anna!” one of the Eagles implored.

“We go up!” she then said. Anything was better than inaction.

Valur tried to go ahead of her, but she slipped past him and went up, three steps at a time.

Things were not looking good. No few defenders lay up against the battlements with a distant, pained look in their eyes, brought down by Peter’s sorcery. Some tried to pull their comrades to their feet and scream at them that the city was under attack, but most focused on repelling the latest assault.

The ladders were put up against the walls, and the northerners climbed up like squirrels.

The first one Katja saw had fresh burns in his face, and the next one wore scorched clothes. They were even wilder than they had been during the previous battle, and their attacks were reminiscent of drowning men seeking a handhold.

The first ones hit the spears of the defenders almost on their own, and fell. It did nothing to demoralize the ones that followed, or the ones after them. At first it seemed to Katja that she and the Eagles really weren’t needed here, but the trickle quickly became a flood. Northerners rushed up the ladders and threw themselves at the defenders in desperation. The recklessness cost them dearly, but the constant pressure put a severe strain on Katja’s allies.

Katja and the Eagles sounded war cries and spread out to stand opposite two ladders. Katja ducked to avoid the arrow sticking in the arm of a man fleeing the fight, and slashed the leg of a man who stood up on the battlements.

The walkway beneath her feet was already bloody, even in the few places where it was possible to step on something other than bodies.

This was a blood-soaked, screaming massacre. The maddened northerners were more beasts than men, and in spite of the ever-growing pile of corpses the reinforcements were all that enabled the defenders to hold the wall. Katja slashed and stabbed whenever her comrades weren’t in the way, doing the same thing. People fought without any hesitation or fear, as there was no time for such things when holding back such an assault.

Katja began to sink back into the battle trance, and experienced her surroundings in great detail. She became hypersensitive to the movements of her nearest comrades, and how to best coordinate with them, but was only vaguely aware of further reinforcements coming up, or of the fighting being particularly hard to the south.

Hold the wall, hold the wall, hold the wall.

One exceptionally large man in heavy armour came up the ladder and shrugged off a spear-thrust to the shoulder. He threw himself down on the corpse pile with an axe in either hand and swung. One Eagle took an axe to the neck and fell up against his comrades. The large axe-man beat on shields and helmets, ignored two more thrusts and managed to claim more space for himself and the northerners on the wall.

Katja came at him from the right and slashed at his neck. He moved and the blade hit his helmet. The sword Serdra had given her broke.

The bruiser turned on her, but Valur landed a blow on his chest.

Someone grabbed Katja’s head from behind and she heard the choked, desperate groans that came from those who fell victim to the madness. This unexpected enemy pulled her head back with frenzied strength and she fully expected a lethal blow from some direction. She stabbed with the broken sword and hit the man in the belly. He fell off the wall and down into the city, taking her helmet with him.

Katja dropped the broken sword and drew both her moonblades.

The berserker still stood upright and swung, though his movements had slowed. She made it past one of his swings and slashed the back of his knee. His leg buckled and he screamed for a moment or two, before Katja slipped the other knife under the helmet and into his neck.

More allies came up on the walkway with long spears and began to help them restore dominance on the wall.

Katja retreated a bit to let them do their work, and then finally became aware of the sorcery. She looked to the south, where the fighting was the most brutal. The catapults had done the most damage there, and so the northerners had an easier time of getting up. The more intact bodies were beginning to rise, and more demons were entering the world. Men, monsters and mixtures of the two stood in a tight crush and were driving the defenders down into the city. That would mean defeat.

One of the demons, a heavyset beast with three arms, tore itself away from that fight and headed Katja’s way.

Katja put her hood up. Then she ran to meet it, raised her moonblades and channelled the Sentinel Flame into both of them. The curved blades glowed brightly as she drove them into the two arms the demon swung at her. She got up close before it could make use of the third one, and chopped wildly. The Flame burned the monster away.

“Follow her!” Borgo shouted behind her. “Follow the Firemoon!”

She lit the rune in the middle of the crush. The demons and possessed corpses shrank away from it and knocked their human allies off either side of the wall. Then she let the Flame back into the knives and charged with the Eagles at her back.

She turned her short weapons into an advantage and ducked and twirled past attacks and slashed legs, groins, armour gaps, faces and necks. She got right in the thick of her enemies, so they had a hard time of actually attacking her.

The Eagles followed with their spears, axes and swords, and widened the trail she blazed.

Katja stopped when there was no-one within slashing distance, and lit the rune between them and the crush. The demons retreated, but the men charged through without the support of their monstrous comrades and the Eagles cut them down. Katja charged again with the knives. Then she repeated the tactic.

She took claws to the shoulder, a spear to her side, a sword to a leg guard and fangs around her left arm for a moment before she slashed with her right. She ignored the wounds. She had never been so alive.

The defenders who had been driven back by this terrible force began to advance again, and as Katja nearly wiped out the demons, directly or indirectly, the fight became a slaughter. Madness alone could not prevail against spears coming from two different directions, and though they acted like demons the northerners died like humans.

They were driven to the damaged section of the wall and cornered there, then driven to the very edge and finally cut down in a merciless advance.

The northerners again began to struggle up ladders and ropes, and the defenders again began to kill them before they could mount a defence.

Then it stopped. As if a curtain had been drawn over the fighting.

Katja was rather surprised when a few moments passed without a helmeted head coming up out of the darkness. She had almost forgotten that this fight would end. Her muscles twitched with readiness but suddenly she had nothing to strike against. She took a few steps backwards and let the bloody knives hang by her sides.

“They are fleeing!” someone close to her shouted.

“The rats are fleeing!” another one announced, by the gatehouse.

Needle clasped Katja’s shoulders, looked at her with a grin that celebrated being alive, and shook her companionably.

“We did it!” he shouted.

Katja’s heart slowed down enough for her to feel individual beats, and she gradually began to feel pain again.

Jubilation began to break out on the streets and up on the wall, exultant joy and release of tension at having made it through this horror alive.