The unified cry of a thousand souls broke above the din of battle, and Patrick kicked a man in the face and turned around. It seemed Ahaesarus had decided a new strategy was necessary. Instead of waiting to be run through by the enemy, the massive throng of Paradise’s defenders had followed Patrick’s lead, hurtling past the dormant undead and into Karak’s soldiers. Bodies collided, steel crashed. It was absolute pandemonium.
Whirling back around, Patrick continued onward, determined to reach the castle walls. He fought the urge to check on the location of his mates; that would only slow him down. He kept bringing his sword down again and again, the muscles in his powerful arm singing with strength. Men died by the score, their flesh torn asunder, their armor no match for Winterbone’s gleaming edge. He sat high above it all, dishing out death in the name of Ashhur.
“DuTaureau!” he heard Preston’s voice call out from somewhere amid the chaos. “Horsemen!”
Patrick lifted his head and saw at least two hundred men on horseback appear from a pair of alleys on the right side of the road. They galloped toward him just as arrows began to fly from above, descending into the mass of humanity far behind him. He glanced up at the rooftops, only instead of disheveled women, he saw tall, elegant beings up there, launching arrow after arrow with quickness he had never seen before. Elves, he thought. Great. Patrick turned away from the sight of them, slashed through the helm of a soldier wielding a giant hammer, and charged toward the horsemen.
He never reached them.
A solid blow took his stallion out from under him, and the animal screeched as it toppled sideways, crushing two soldiers. Patrick fell from the saddle, landing solidly on a group of men, armor clanking. He rolled, avoiding stomping boots and plunging blades, before swiftly getting to his feet and pitching backward. A soldier’s face was crunched by his armored hump, and he snarled as two more soldiers turned to face him. He went to lift his sword, but it was snagged behind him somehow. One of them got in a good swing, his sword catching Patrick on the vambrace and sending a shudder through him that rocked his shoulder, but the other one didn’t attack. Instead, his eyes bugged out of his skull as the pointy end of a spear ejected from his neck. His blood splattered against Patrick, who freed his sword and ran it through the first man. He felt someone closing in from behind and whirled around, Winterbone leading. His blade met Preston’s with a resounding clang.
The old Turncloak grinned. “Not today, my friend.”
Patrick nodded. The two of them swiveled at once, their swords unlocking, and began scything their way through the soldiers. Sharp edges found gaps in his armor, opening what felt to be a hundred tiny cuts all over him, but he didn’t care. He noticed many others wearing the white-painted armor of Ashhur’s legion behind him, including most of the Turncloaks, and grinned. His people were with him. He could ignore his pain so long as that was the case.
When the horsemen entered the fray, crashing through their own brethren as if they didn’t care about their lives, Patrick went back to work. He sliced at the horses’ legs and sides, severing tendons and spilling intestines. His men followed his lead. Many of the horses toppled over, tipping their riders into the melee. After felling yet another horse, nearly severing the beast’s head with one massive hew, Patrick spun around and was almost run down. He fell straight backward, slashing out to the side with Winterbone at the same time. The blade cut through the horse’s front leg, snapping the bone and separating it just above the ankle. The horse crashed head over heels. Bones crunched, and more men screamed.
Someone helped him back to his feet, and then he felt himself being shoved from behind, carried along by his men’s rush. He bounced off soldiers, punching and stabbing at them, until finally he fell forward into open space. He tumbled, smacking his cheek on bloody cobbles, jarring his neck in the process. But there was no time to wallow in his pain. He shot to his feet, ready to face his next challenge, only to see that he now stood a mere twenty feet in front of the castle walls. There was nothing but the slate walk between it and him-no soldiers, no horses, no wrapped women, nothing.
He’d made it.
Before he could turn around and defend against the dangers behind him, he glanced up the full height of the wall. The top of the wall shimmered in the sunlight, drawing his eye to its horrors. He wanted to look away but couldn’t. Tristan had told him about the corpses that hung here, and though he knew the boy hadn’t been lying, a part of him still hadn’t wanted to believe him.
Yet there they were, bodies dangling from the wall, at least fifty of them. Some were fresher than others; those to his far left looked like they had been recently hung. Patrick stared at their faces, rotted and drooping, holding very little resemblance to the humans they had once been. The slate walk beneath them was stained black and a wretched shade of green. Patrick couldn’t help but gape at each and every one of them, men and women alike, not stopping until he found the one he was searching for.
Patrick’s heart shattered. He fell to his knees.
There she was, a decomposed husk of the vibrant girl she’d once been, now not much more than a skeleton covered with a thin sheen of gray, peeling flesh. The mane of curly hair, its bright red faded to a dull auburn, coiled around the eyeless skull and fell over the shoulders. Patrick leaned back, staring up at Nessa’s corpse. Her death hadn’t been real before; it had been a message from another-more rumor than fact, even if he’d believed it completely. But now, to see the proof directly in front of him. . something within him snapped. He threw his head back and howled at the sky, then scampered to his feet, breathing heavily as tears streamed down his cheeks. The din of conflict going on all around him seemed far away.
“Where are you!” he bellowed. “I know you’re here!”
When he turned, he saw that the entire square in front of the castle had become one giant battleground. Soldiers of Karak and Ashhur clashed with a frenzy, while elves, those strange wrapped women, and the Wardens were intermixed as well, killing and dying just as easily as everyone else. Ashhur, his beloved deity, was nowhere to be seen, swallowed by the horde, his undead swaying uselessly between pockets of combat.
That only served to further enrage Patrick, and he focused on that rage. When one of Karak’s soldiers ran at him, he drove his sword through the man’s face, kicked the corpse off the blade, and continued to rumble along the castle wall like a bull seeking a target to spear with his horns. There was one man that mattered, the one that had haunted his dreams with visions of his dead sister, the one he now blamed for everything that had gone wrong.
And then he found him: Jacob Eveningstar, the First Man who had betrayed Ashhur and cast all of Dezrel into war. He stood in front of the castle portcullis, flanked on either side by onyx lion statues, his eyes glowing bright crimson. A ring of soldiers in black armor protected him. His cloak billowed as if he was caught in a harsh wind, and his body was surrounded by swirling shadow. The man chanted, his hands in constant motion, fingers twisting into odd shapes, a look of pain on his face. Patrick never thought twice. His instinct was to let out a scream, one that contained all the rage and heartbreak he had ever felt, but he snapped his lips shut and simply charged.
One of the soldiers in front noticed his approach and turned. He wore a massive helm topped with a pair of horns, and stepped toward him. The soldier held before him a sword as hefty as Winterbone, with a curled black handle. Patrick snarled, kept his feet moving, lifted his own sword above his head, and chopped down as hard as he could when he was within reach.