Blood Of Gods (Book 3) (10 page)

“Our princess is feverish!” Aully heard her uncle’s voice shout close to her ear. “Tired from the journey and delusional!” She bit down as hard as she could, drawing blood. Detrick shrieked and spun around, releasing her. She stumbled forward a few steps across the platform . . . directly into Carskel’s arms. Her brother spun her around and locked his hands around her waist, lifting her off the ground.

“You have been a bad girl,” he murmured, his hot breath moistening her neck. “And bad girls need to be punished.”

Detrick continued his pleading with the infuriated people of Stonewood Forest while Carskel spun Aully around and leaned against the thick hempen rail. The rope bowed outward so far that Aully feared it would break, sending the both of them plunging to the rock- and root-covered ground below. But the rope held.

“Look what you wrought,” he said, forcing her to look to where her people were huddled in the shadows. They were being beaten by their captors, the sounds of their struggle drowned out by three thousand hollering voices. Already one lay dead: Aaromar, her mother’s protector, kind, handsome, and now nothing but a corpse with an arrow pierced through the eye. Aully looked on in horror as Noni was brought to the front, her upper body bathed in darkness. Unlike the others, the ancient elf did not struggle, tight-lipped resolve on her wrinkled face. Ethir appeared behind her, grabbing her by both shoulders. Noni gazed up at the girl who had been her ward for fourteen years, and she opened her mouth to scream.

Aully never heard what her nursemaid had to say, as a moment later Ethir came down hard on the old elf’s head with a dagger. Noni’s eyes bulged, the dagger’s tip exiting below her chin along with a spray of pinkish blood. Her eyes rolled back and she collapsed, falling into Ethir’s arms like a fainting lover.

Aully’s entire body went numb, and she collapsed just as Noni had. Carskel held her tightly, carrying her across the walkway, deftly avoiding flying fruit and sticks. The whole while, Detrick continued his pleading, declaring Carskel’s innocence and Aully’s lunacy.

“You have been bad, my darling,” her brother said in a sinister whisper as they exited the walkway amid a mob of angry elves. Two of the Meln house guards appeared, shoving protesters aside.
Carskel
rounded the corner and began climbing the spiral stair back toward Briar Hall. “But all is not lost,” he said when no one was around to hear. “The people will come around . . .
you
will come around. Once I show you the cost of betrayal, you will have no choice.”

Aully stayed silent, allowing him to carry her. She had seen her father murdered right in front of her. She had suffered in a dungeon, lived as a refugee, and became a prisoner to pain. It’d have been easy to succumb to it all, but her loved ones had shown her the way, defiant even before the face of death. Because of Carskel, she’d suffered, she wept, and now she swore to the last breath in her lungs to never give the bastard what he wanted.

Not ever.

C
HAPTER

8

T
he bombardment began at sundown.

The ground shook with the force of an earthquake, rattling Patrick’s teeth. He slipped off the rock he sat on, whacking his elbow on the ground. His wineskin slipped from his grasp and spilled across the grass. Preston and the Turncloaks, who were with him around the fire, similarly lost their balance. Little Flick even teetered into the flames, scalding his meaty hand in the process. All around them, the defenders of the wall broke into panic.

“What the fuck?” Patrick shouted, turning his eyes upward, toward the wall and dark purple sky looming above him. Another massive
thud
then sounded, ringing in his ears. Bits of rock and dust misted down from the top of the wall.

“They’re attacking!” said Preston’s son Edward.

“They can’t be!” Joffrey Goldenrod said. “They haven’t finished their towers!”

“Climb the wall and see then!” shouted Tristan Valeson.

Patrick heard an odd whining sound and threw his arms around the closest man to him. “No, you dumb shits!” he said, collapsing on top of young Ragnar Ender. “Get
down
!”

A massive black shape soared over the wall, crashing against the upper parapets and sending large chunks of brick and stone careening to the earth. It was like a deadly rain pounding all around them. The black shape continued its flight, dropping ever lower until it smashed down a hundred feet away, right atop a small gathering of confused people, crushing bodies and hurling chunks of dirt into the air. Now unmoving and in the light of their fires, Patrick saw it was a boulder the size of a small hut, gray and craggy. Screams of pain erupted, filling the early evening with terror.

“The catapults!” Preston shouted. “They’re using the catapults!”

Of course they are,
thought Patrick. He should have known this was coming. It had been almost five weeks since the first failed assault on Mordeina’s walls, and the people within were beginning to grow careless. Since that day they had done nothing but watch from afar as the besieging army busied themselves with building engines of war. By last count, they had a dozen working catapults and four siege towers. Master Warden Ahaesarus surmised they would not bring an offensive until the entirety of their force was ready. After the last failed attempt, Patrick had thought Karak would just wait them out until their depleted food stores ran out completely.

They were wrong.

Patrick rolled to the side, grabbed his discarded helm, and threw it on his head. Luckily they had just finished supping and he hadn’t yet removed his mismatched armor. He hurried to his feet and spun around in search of Winterbone. The dragonglass crystal adorning its hilt sparkled in the light of the flying embers, and he snatched the huge, trusty sword in his mitts. This time, he wasn’t getting caught without his blade.

He could hear wailing in the background as he slung
Winterbone’s
scabbard over his shoulder and began to make for the wall steps, followed by the Turncloaks, the newly trained archers, and a large cadre of Wardens. The Drake spellcasters were nowhere to be found. Patrick’s insides rumbled, the wine he’d drunk jostling about in his belly. The scent of rot was much stronger than it had been five weeks ago, making bile rise in the back of his throat.
It’s only a reaction—I’m not truly sick,
he thought. Many had fallen ill from drinking the city’s water, despite Azariah’s best efforts to keep it clean. There were thousands of sick, filling each day and night with the sound of puking and shitting. It became a full-time effort for the healers, which now included Warden Azariah’s ever-growing army of students, to cure their sickness. Even so, there were many who succumbed to dysentery before having the chance to be healed. Their bodies were stashed in a small space to the right of the inner gate, heaped atop those who had died during previous assaults, to keep the settlement relatively free of further rot and disease. With every square inch of space required to keep so many people housed and fed, there was nowhere to bury the corpses. They would have to wait.

Ignore it,
Patrick told himself.
Think of Nessa instead of your
stomach
.

He did, and anger gradually cured his ills.

Still more heavy impacts rumbled as Patrick reached the bottom of the stairwell. Ahaesarus stood there, handing out bows to those who required them. Their eyes met and Ahaesarus nodded to him, as if he could see the fury burning behind his eyes. Patrick passed him by and led the charge up the stairs, his muscles not aching this time, though he could still feel a dull throb in his knees. Even the vibrations brought on by the collisions couldn’t shake him. Ever since that first assault, he’d dedicated himself to running up and down these stairs five to six times a day, getting his body used to it. Now it was easy, though his mismatched legs would always offer him at least a little discomfort.

Another boulder soared overhead while he was halfway up the stairs, this time missing the parapets and instead snapping off one of the rock-hard branches of Celestia’s tree a few yards to the left. The branch thumped off stone before falling into the narrow space between the inner and outer walls. More screaming reached his ears from down below, and a moment later he heard a sickening
thud
and elongated
crunch
. He wondered how many had perished this time, how many bodies they would have to clean up in the
aftermath
.

Too many if you don’t move your ass.

He fully scaled the stairs and dashed along the wall walk, weaving around the casks of purified water that had been placed along the wall for those whose duty it was to watch the distant army. Countless others followed on his heels. By then he had counted sixteen impacts. Patrick sprinted past the smashed merlons and ducked down, peering between the stones at the army beyond. Now at the top, with a cold wind blowing in his face, he could hear the shouts and chants coming from Karak’s followers, those fifteen thousand strong separated by nothing but a mile of dead, brown earth. Another dark and spinning object cut across the purple sky, forcing Patrick to duck once more.

“Incoming!”
he cried.

The new boulder struck the wall, and he heard a loud
crack
. The distant army roared.

Keeping his head down, Patrick counted to sixty before chancing to peer between the merlons again. He squinted, trying to force his eyes to adjust to the ever-deepening darkness. A strange sound came to his ears, like an infant’s rattle combined with countless twigs being snapped consecutively. He braced himself and stood in the nook between the two merlons for a better vantage point, but it was no use. All he could see was a black, shadowy blur on the horizon. No more boulders careened through the air.

Something isn’t right here.

The Turncloaks had taken their places to his right, three
Wardens
to his left. Behind him men and Wardens alike rushed about, some carrying thick lengths of rope, others lugging between them oaken barrels filled with pitch, while the archers took their places along the rear of the wall.
We could still use some spellcasters.
Patrick looked to his left and saw that the gangplank connecting the inner and outer walls was still intact. For a moment he considered dashing across it to get a better look.

A strong hand grabbed his shoulder, halting him in place.
Patrick
looked up into Judarius’s face.

“Best not,” the Warden said.

“Why? What do your fine eyes see that mine don’t?”

“Glowing red eyes, a hundred feet from our wall,” Judarius said. “It is the First Man. There are a great many soldiers alongside him.” The Warden scowled, then pointed toward Celestia’s tree. “And there, black shadows climbing along the outer wall, where tree meets stone.”

Jacob. That bastard.

“Give me fire!” Patrick shouted. One of the torchbearers came over to him, panting, fear making his eyes glisten. The youngster held the torch out to him. Patrick grabbed it and hopped off the wall, heading down the line until he reached the tree, ducking beneath branches hard as iron. Judarius and the Turncloaks followed behind him.

“What’s going on, DuTaureau?” asked Preston.

“The First Man is using dark magic to pulverize the weak spot in the wall,” Judarius answered for him.

When he reached the side of the tree, Patrick bent over the ledge and held the torch down into the darkness between the walls. Sure enough, he saw tubes of shadow, almost like smoke, winding in and out of the new cracks that had formed in the thick masonry of the outer wall. Heavy chunks of stone fell away, creating a bevy of holes that grew wider and wider as the shadowy feelers thickened. Soon those holes combined into one large opening.

“Shit,” Patrick muttered.

Tristan was at his side. “What
is
that?” the young soldier asked.

“Celestia’s tree may be harder than steel, but the outer wall is already weakened at the edges where the fireball first struck,” said an authoritative voice. Patrick turned to see Ahaesarus standing behind them, hands on his hips, looking godly in his own right with his impressive height and long golden hair. “The boulders chipped away at the stone, further cracking it. Now Eveningstar is using whatever new power he possesses to widen it.”

“How many soldiers approach?” asked Preston.

Judarius shook his head. “Too many. Five hundred, with at least half the army trailing behind. More than enough to overpower us.”

Patrick closed his eyes, and once more he saw Nessa’s face, green with rot, worms crawling through her empty eye sockets, her hair a nest of red hay. He squeezed his fists together, grinding his nails into his palms until they drew blood.

“They will
not
overpower us,” he growled. Rearing back, he tossed the torch into the space between the walls, the glow from seventy feet below like a lone firefly in an empty field. Yet the light was enough to show clearly the breach in the wall growing wider and wider. “They still have to destroy the inner gate . . . and they still have to pass though
there
. We have fire and weapons and height, and the breach is only wide enough for them to enter three at a time at most.”

As if to answer him, the slithering shadows tore another hunk of wall away, broadening the fissure.

“Will you stop that!” Patrick screamed. His rage reached its boiling point and everyone—Ahaesarus, Judarius, the Turncloaks, the archers—gave him a wide berth as he spun around and ran toward the interior edge of the rampart. He collided with the low wall, gazing out at the carnage the two falling boulders had caused. His eyes settled on Manse DuTaureau, sitting atop its high hill like a privileged child, surrounded by flickering torches.

“Damn you, Ashhur, you miserable excuse for a deity!” he cried. “Wake up already! What are you waiting for? Have you given up? Do you wish for us all to perish here?
Tell me!
”

There was no answer from the low stone building where the God of Justice had lain unconscious for well over a month, but there was from behind him.

“They’re here!” Judarius shouted, and the
clunk
and
clank
of steel and stone followed as the defenders of the wall took their position.

“Well, fuck,” Patrick muttered. He turned to see Ahaesarus ordering those who carried the barrels of pitch to cross the gangplank and douse the enemy when they drew near. Patrick watched them go, struggling as they hefted the heavy barrels over the thin slab. The rest of the men the Master Warden ordered to stand ready, to unleash all they had on the horde once they entered the breach.

Just then a strange, fluid sensation overcame him. Patrick wobbled, having to grab tight to the low wall to keep from falling. It seemed a beam of light washed over his vision and then vanished. The sound of wailing followed, definitely Jacob’s voice, splitting the night. It carried on for what seemed like forever, a raucous cry of pain.
Good. I hope you’re burning.

“Look there!” Ryann Matheson, one of the Turncloaks, exclaimed.

Patrick rushed to the wall and peered down. The bulging tubes of darkness writhed, catching fire and dissolving into the night. Jacob’s distant scream intensified. The crease in the wall had grown to fifteen feet wide, bits of mortar dropping from the rough stone in a trickle.
Celestia?
thought Patrick, lifting his eyes to the spot in the heavens where the goddess’s star would appear when full dark overtook the land.
Have you come to our aid when our creator will not?

The wail died away, and the rumble of booted feet grew all the louder. Arrows flew over the outer wall, striking one of the barrel bearers, causing him to fall backward into the gap between the walls. The rest stooped, avoiding the flying bolts. Those standing with Patrick on the inner rampart hid behind the merlons as steel tips bounced off the stone. The attackers shouted orders, words
Patrick
couldn’t quite make out. But Judarius did, and the Warden raised his voice to those manning the barrels.

“Light them and toss them over! Do it now!”

Torches lit long thatches of rope attached to the tops of the barrels, and then the bearers shoved them off the parapets. A series of explosions and bright flashes came from far below, seen through the gap in the wall. Patrick poked his head out from where he’d been concealed, and heard screams as the soldiers were set ablaze outside the wall.

“Burn, you motherless twats! Burn!”

It was a matter of moments before all six barrels were lit and thrown over the side, and with the advent of screaming from those doused with flames came desperation-fueled cheers from the defenders. Another barrage of arrows came a second later, ending those cheers with blood and sinew. Three more barrel bearers died, as did four of the archers standing behind Patrick. He heard metal scrape against rock.