The Gypsy Morph (39 page)

At one point, with the sun already sinking behind the mountains, Logan went looking for Catalya, thinking to speak with her again about searching for the missing children. But no one had seen her, and his efforts to ferret her out failed. After a long, frustrating hour searching, he was forced to admit the obvious. She had ignored his advice and once again gone out alone.

Darkness settled in, and watch fires burned all across the far bank, their glow visible for miles in all directions. There were so many attackers by now that the defenders were growing disheartened. These were tough-minded men and women, guerrilla fighters from outside the compounds, experienced fighters. But even these could be intimidated by what they were seeing. Logan went out with Helen Rice to reassure them, to point out that only so many of the enemy could crowd onto the bridge at any one time and there was reason to hope that they would get in one another’s way when they did so.

Afterward, he spoke alone with Helen about what to expect. She was not battle-tested, had never faced an adversary of this size, did not have the training in tactical combat that he had. Fortunately, some of her lieutenants did. They would take command of various units when the attack came. But even though Helen would cede authority on the battlefield, she would still be the one nominally responsible for deciding when it was time to give way. Logan would advise her, of course, would do his best to prepare her, but as leader of the camp the decision would be hers.

He stood down by the bridgehead after that, thinking through how the battle would be fought, searching for loopholes in his defensive plan, for possibilities he might have overlooked. Mostly, he decided, it didn’t much matter. He had so few men and women fighting to hold the bridge that if they could hold the demon army off even for a single day, it would be a miracle.

He thought, too, about that old man in the gray cloak and the slouch hat. The demon Kirisin had seen in his vision. The one Angel had fought against in Anaheim. The one that kept sending its minions to kill them. The one to which Logan had lost his family twenty years earlier. He could still see the old man’s face, smiling at him approvingly as he fired the Tyson Flechette into a horde of once-men attackers.

He had been promised a chance to right things with that demon if he fulfilled his mission to find and protect the gypsy morph. He thought he had done that. He had kept his bargain, and now he was beginning to wonder if the Lady intended to keep hers.

“Logan.”

His thoughts scattered as he heard his name called. He turned around to find Catalya standing behind him, holding Rabbit in her arms. She was a mess. Her clothes were torn and filthy, her face streaked with dirt and sweat, and her eyes haunted. Her cat was hunched down in the cradle of her arms, eyes wide with a mix of fear and readiness. Something had scared them both badly.

“We found them,” she said.

He knew at once. “The children?”

She nodded. “Rabbit and me. Rabbit, really. He led me to them. They were hidden behind some rocks and earth, half buried in a ravine. I might have walked right by them yesterday, but it was dark by then so I can’t be sure.”

“All of them?” He didn’t want to ask, but he couldn’t help himself. “All those that were missing?”

She took a deep breath, held it a moment, and then exhaled slowly. “I think so. They were in pieces, so it was hard to be sure.”

She waited for his reaction, her face expressionless. No, he decided suddenly, changing his mind, she wasn’t waiting for anything. She was in shock. She had seen something so terrible that she had been forced to lock down her emotions and retreat inside herself. It was taking everything she had just to stand there and talk to him in a composed way about what she had discovered.

“I’m sorry it had to be you,” he said, wishing she had listened to him about not going out alone. He gestured at her. “Did anything happen to you? Are you all right?”

She stared at him a moment, and then looked down at herself. “Oh, this. It’s nothing, Logan. I’m not hurt or anything. I just stayed long enough to bury them, to give them someplace to rest that wasn’t out in the open where they might be . . .”

She shuddered, shaking her head. “I didn’t have any real digging tools, and the ground was hard. It took me a while to get it done.”

“You did the right thing. It was brave of you to go out like that and then stay out.”

She shrugged. “I wasn’t in any danger. Not really. See?” She lifted her mottled face as if to demonstrate.

“Better go get cleaned up and get some sleep,” he told her. “Wash off, change your clothes, have something to eat. The demon army is here, across the river. They’ll attack at sunrise.”

She didn’t move; she just stood there. “I’m tired of all this,” she said finally.

“We all are. We all want it to end.”

She bent down and set Rabbit on his feet next to her. The cat moved over at once and rubbed up against her legs, a small cry escaping. “You’re all right, toughie,” she said.

“Let’s not say anything to Fixit right away,” he told her. “Let’s give it a day, get past whatever’s going to happen tomorrow. He doesn’t need to hear about this until then.”

She smiled bleakly. “He doesn’t need to hear about this ever,” she said as she walked away. “I wish none of us did.”

She disappeared back into the darkness, Rabbit hopping at her heels.

T
HE ONCE-MEN ATTACKED JUST AFTER SUNRISE,
just as Logan had known they would. They dispensed with preliminaries, eschewing any sort of effort at softening up the defenses with light-weapons fire or small cluster shells, and just threw themselves into the fray. They swept out of the fading shadow of the mountain range and through the glare of the morning sun in wave after wave of screaming, howling insanity. Some carried automatic weapons, but many had nothing more than rudimentary blades and lengths of pipe and wood. Weapons seemed of little consequence to them. Rational behavior was swept away by undisguised bloodlust. There was no coordination to the attack, no semblance of order or sophistication of battle tactics in evidence. It was primal and raw and bereft of anything but maddened determination.

Feeders followed in their wake, thousands strong, bounding across the terrain like wild animals.

The defenders did what Logan had ordered them to do. They crouched behind their protective barricades and watched. The first waves of attackers triggered the cluster mines and were blown apart. The second and third waves triggered the flamethrowers and were burned to ash. The next wave, struggling now just to get past the carnage that the first several had created, triggered the snap spikes. At the unmistakable sound of the spring traps releasing, the defenders opened fire on the attackers. Hundreds died in the five minutes or so that followed, bodies mounding up on the bridge floor in blood-soaked heaps, the whole of the bridge itself wreathed in smoke, the air rank with the smells of weapons fire and death.

The last of the attackers expended their lives under the withering crossfire of the entrenched defenders, and then as suddenly as the attack had begun it stopped. A deep silence settled over the bridge and the flats leading up to it from the south bluff, as if somehow all the attackers had been killed and the battle was over.

Logan knew better. Crouched down, moving quickly from position to position, he warned the defenders to be ready. “They’ll come again right away,” he told them. “When they do, trigger the flamethrowers first. That won’t stop them, but it will slow them. Fire into those who get past for as long as it takes them to reach the last of the snap spikes, then fall back to the redoubts.”

He could have ordered them to hold their positions, to keep the enemy from breaching the forward defenses. But he already knew that this would be impossible, that they wouldn’t last the day no matter what they did. He didn’t want them all killed when they were only delaying the inevitable. They would have to blow the bridge if they were to escape.

Helen Rice came up to him, crouched low, face stricken. She gestured at the carnage. “How much more of this can they take?”

“More than we can. These are once-men, Helen. They don’t feel anything the way we do. Dying isn’t a deterrent. They’ll keep coming at us until they break through.” He put his hand on her shoulder, steadying her. “I’m sorry, but we aren’t going to be able to hold them for long. Go back and tell them at the command post to stand ready to blow the bridge. When we fall back from the redoubts, I’ll give you the signal. When you see it, trigger the detonator.”

She fled back off the bridge at once, happy to be away from the killing field. Logan took up a fresh position at the center of the barricades. He peered out across the carpet of dead and wondered what the enemy would try next. He was already worrying that the bridge defenders weren’t sufficiently prepared to deal with it.

He was right. When the attack came, it took an entirely different form. While they were searching the far shore for signs of movement, dozens of skrails swept down out of the skies in long, looping lines and dropped canisters of flammables that exploded on contact. In seconds, defenders and defenses alike were engulfed in flames, and everything at the center of the bridge became clouded with roiling black smoke. As soon as that happened, the once-men attacked again, charging out of the flats and onto the bridge, clambering over the remains of their fallen comrades, rushing through the invisible, porous bodies of the ravening feeders.

The bridge would have been lost and most of the defenders with it except that the prevailing winds blowing down the canyon from the ocean cleared the smoke away in seconds. The fires continued to burn, and a handful of the defenders died in the conflagration, but the rest stood their ground, heeding Logan Tom’s orders and triggering the flamethrowers and firing their automatic weapons as their attackers closed. For the first time since the attack began, Logan used his staff, shattering the center of the enemy rush, leaving the wings to more conventional weapons.

Everywhere, the feeders leapt and dove among the dead and dying, joyful scavengers of the dark, terrible emotions expended.

Again, the attack was broken, leaving hundreds more of the once-men dead and dying on the bridge span.

But Logan had seen enough. The damage to the forward defenses was extensive, and the central portion of the bridge was a shambles. On the next attack, either the defenses or the defenders or both would collapse, and they would all be swept away.

“Everyone back!” he ordered them. “Take cover in the redoubts!”

They retreated at once, crouched low as they backed toward the half dozen redoubts, carrying their weapons with them. Logan went last, still watching the smoke-clouded south bank and the movement he could see taking place within. Another attack was coming, and it was coming sooner than he would have liked.

He took a quick head count of those missing, and then pulled out those too badly injured to do much good and sent them back to Helen and the command post. He redistributed the others so that the redoubts were as evenly defended as was possible. But they were down to less than fifty able-bodied men and women, counting those getting ready for the flight north, so he could count on no more than five or six for each redoubt.

It wasn’t enough. But then, what number would be in the face of this enemy?

He scanned the far bank once more, searching for something that would tell him what was happening. They wouldn’t use the skrails again; they knew the defenders would be looking for that. Something else, he thought. But what?

Then a dark mass pushed through the smoke and crowded onto the bridge. Dozens of Elves, chained together like slaves, their hands bound behind them, their ankles shackled so they could do no more than shuffle, were being marched in front of a fresh body of once-men. The Elves had a desperate, helpless look to them, faces stricken, eyes rolling wildly. He could hear them crying out, begging for help. He could see their terrible injuries and their blood-streaked limbs.

In the very center was Simralin.

Logan Tom experienced a moment of heart-stopping shock.
Simralin!
The once-men were using her—using all of the Elven prisoners—as a living shield.
If you want to kill us,
they were saying,
first you have to kill them.

For a second he was so stricken that he couldn’t think straight. They must have captured her in the Cintra. They must have forced her to talk, forced her to reveal that he was a Knight of the Word and in love with her. Otherwise, how would they know to place her right at the center of things like this? How would they know that this, of all possible tactics, would undo him? The choice he was being given was both horrific and impossible to make. The defenders surrounding him were yelling wildly, demanding orders, unsure themselves of what to do. He felt frozen by what had happened, unable to act.

How could he kill Simralin?

Then, eyes still scanning the faces of the Elves being marched toward them, he saw Praxia, too. For just a second, he thought he must be imagining it. But no, there she was—Praxia—her small, dark pixie-face unmistakable amid the other, lighter-complexioned faces.

But Praxia was . . .

He had buried her . . .

Then he noticed that there were no feeders among the prisoners, not one dark shape in all that hapless mass of potential victims.

He caught his breath. It was a trick.

“Fire!” he ordered at once. He levered his black staff and roared in fury and fresh shock. “Now! Fire!”

The defenders pulled the triggers on their automatic weapons and the Elven wall collapsed and then disappeared in smoke, gone in an instant, vanished completely. An illusion, as Logan had realized just in time—a trick to make the defenders think the Elves were hostages when in fact they were not. It had almost worked. Logan had almost been taken in by it. His feelings for Simralin had very nearly persuaded him.

That old man, he thought suddenly. That old man had found him out and used what he had learned—maybe from his spies, maybe from Kirisin—against him. He could still see the other’s cunning face, the knowing smile, the certainty that he owned an eight-year-old boy whose parents and brother and sister he had just killed.