The huntress cast another swift glance around, assuring herself that nothing approached the cave. She laid her bow across her legs and made to set the arrow aside on the ground so that she could rub her eyes to force herself further awake. Suddenly she froze in mid-motion, the blood congealing in her veins.
Lying neatly beside her leg on the rocky ground was the other of her black arrows, identical to the one in her hand.
The first of her priceless enchanted missiles had been destroyed in slaying one of the foul man-like creatures which had attacked her at dusk. The last of the three was still in her possession. This, then, was the one she had fired at Bellimar, which he had caught and kept.
She lifted the arrow and inspected it closely in the dim light. There was no trick that she could see; the fiend had returned the arrow undamaged, leaving her once again with two chances to slay him. She grimaced as she pondered the implications. The monster had slipped into the cave while she dozed, swift and soundless, and had come within inches of her to set the shaft at her side. Had he wished her dead, he could have torn out her throat with ease and been lost again to the darkness before her gurgling cry could bring the others running. Instead, he had restored a deadly weapon capable of ending his existence to someone who wished exactly that, though for what reason she could not begin to fathom. Was it a show of confidence, meant to intimidate her, indicating that he would swat aside any future attack as contemptuously as he had her first? Or did he truly wish to die?
Thalya recognized her fatigue and knew she should get someone to relieve her and take the next watch, but sleep was suddenly far from her thoughts. She made certain her quiver remained within reach, leaning against the cave wall beside her, and then she settled back as well and gazed out into the darkness. All around her the night stole onward in a hushed whisper as life struggled to endure beneath the spreading mantle of death.
The first breach of the mighty city wall surrounding Keldrin’s Landing came that night.
In the somber hours preceding the dawn, the cry rang out even as the city was preparing to release the collective breath it had held throughout the night. The wall-walk guards, having raised the initial alarm, watched in stunned silence as a seething wave of motion swept toward the city from the east. What had appeared at a distance to be a vast ripple of vegetation before a forceful wind soon resolved into something much more sinister: an advancing tide of dark, twisted creatures clawing their way over and past each other in their eagerness to reach the city and its people.
Huge, bulky things drew themselves up from the very ground and shambled forward amid the smaller forms, scattering them with spiteful blows when they got underfoot. Long, sinuous shapes carved through the mass, preying indiscriminately on the smaller spiked creatures even as the entire heaving mass crashed toward Keldrin’s Landing.
City guards gathered at the eastern gate, their faces and knuckles white as they clutched shaking swords, spears and halberds. The heavy gate doors stood closed and barred. These days, after the sun fell, they parted only to permit the occasional caravan or group of travelers bold enough-or foolish enough-to brave the landscape at night. In recent days, rumors had spread with greater and greater frequency from the guards patrolling the city wall. There were tales of strange things sighted beyond, sometimes approaching the wall to scrabble at its surface and shriek in outrage, or to gaze upward at the guards in hateful silence. There were also rumors of wall-walk guards and gate watchmen vanishing or being slain in gruesome fashion, but most people dismissed all these stories as fear-mongering, at least in the comforting warmth of the morning light.
Even if a portion of the tales were true, others reasoned, the perimeter of Keldrin’s Landing had been built to withstand a siege. What was there to fear?
There was no denying the approaching horde or its numbers, however, and now even the towering gate doors looked vulnerable. City guards with longbows raced to the wall-walk, sending volley after volley into the charging mass as it drew near, but they were unprepared for such a sudden onslaught and their initial numbers were few.
The horde struck the eastern wall with shrieking fury, clawing for purchase against the sheer wall and hammering into the gate. The great gates shuddered under the weight, and the captain of the guard, a square-jawed man named Borric, started at the sound. He knew the gates would have splintered under that first assault had the force been organized enough to concentrate on that point alone rather than spreading across the entire wall in haphazard fashion.
He raised his sword above his head and bellowed, drawing the eyes of his dumbfounded men to him. Borric shouted orders, shoving and cuffing the frozen men nearest him to get them moving. In a widening circle from his center, the guards sprang into action. Men carried forth huge timbers at a run, bracing the creaking gate doors. Barrels of oil arrived by cart and were swiftly unloaded beneath the gateway portico. Additional archers raced up the stairs to the crest of the wall, while those inside the courtyard below formed defensive squares that could move quickly as a unit in case the wall was breached at any point.
Atop the wall, longbows and crossbows thrummed in a frantic, disjointed symphony. Huge, heavy forms battered at the base of the wall, while the smaller spiked creatures swarmed over and around them to climb the wall like spiders. Blazing yellow eyes glared up at the guards as the creatures sank long, tapered talons into the stone and wormed their way upward. Their grip seemed precarious on the smooth stone, however, and a direct hit with arrow or bolt usually proved sufficient to dislodge one, even if it did not kill it outright. But the archers were few while the spiked creatures were many, and the attackers came onward with chilling determination.
In the courtyard, the gates shuddered under a steady rain of titanic blows. Captain Borric shook his head in disbelief. Stout hardwood doors as thick as a man’s arm was long, bound by iron, and still they threatened to fracture. He ordered his men back from the gate’s outer arch and directed them to lower the portcullis recessed in the inner arch. A massive curtain of iron bars, it may not hold when the doors had not, but it was another line of defense against which the attackers would have to hurl themselves.
As the portcullis rumbled down, a great splinter of the wood door shot into the courtyard, leaving a gaping hole through which the starry night sky beyond could be seen. A face out of nightmare filled the gap, leering through at the men behind a long muzzle that bristled with crooked fangs. The guards gasped and fell back, raising their weapons. The thing shot through the hole in the door, wriggling and undulating its way past the narrow aperture and under the descending portcullis like some great, hideous eel. Its legless mass struck the flagstones with a slap, and in a flash it was among the men. It thrashed about, its flailing bulk sending several men sprawling, and then it lunged forward like a striking snake and one of the men disappeared into its gaping maw. The hapless man’s scream was cut horribly short as the jagged jaws snapped shut, and the creature whirled and tucked its head back into its coils, gliding and flexing in some rapidly spinning complex knot formed of its own sinuous body.
The guards rushed forward, hacking and stabbing at the creature, and it keened in pain and fury. Whipping free of the knot it had formed, it lunged in a new direction, sliding out from under the sharp blades. Another guard vanished into its gullet, and again the vile creature convulsed into its eye-baffling knot of twisting flesh. The remaining guards converged on it with a vengeance, and in moments the creature sagged quivering to the ground beneath their attack before it could claim another victim.
High above, the spiked creatures clawed their way over the crenellations to drop among the guards like drops of ink spattering to the floor. More and more archers were forced to cast aside their bows and draw the swords at their hips to defend themselves against the slavering fiends. In turn, without the hail of missiles to suppress their advance, more and more of the bristling shadows worked their methodical way up the sheer outer surface of the wall. The men drew together into defensive islands against the encircling tide, fighting almost back to back as the creatures slunk toward them, shaking the glistening spikes on their bodies in an eerie, rattling chorus.