One of the wraiths straddled a lad, his chest raked, throat torn. A fistful of claw was buried in his belly. It tore free, yanking out the most tender parts. The wraith’s face was covered in blood and gore as it spit at her, hissing and baring its teeth, protecting its meal.
The other was perched on the top of the stacked beds, also straddling something, but it was not slaking its hunger. It was satisfying another lust. It leaped up to the bed railing, claws digging into the wood. Its manhood swollen and bloody. Wings spread.
Kathryn held her sword up and gathered the room’s shadows to her cloak. She remembered Lord Ulf’s cold words, how he controlled his wind wraiths through seersong and will. Her lips hardened. Was this the manner in which he controlled them?
Behind her, fighting continued out on the stair. Screams, wails, and frantic orders echoed up and down the main spiral. Slowly they were losing levels, one after the other. Blood was spent in order to clear floors. Stormwatch was slowly being driven into ever smaller quarters.
The only advantage: The knights had less territory to guard, and the wraiths had fewer ways to strike them.
As a result, a balance was establishing. They had held this level for an entire half bell. The line was even firming. A glimmer of hope had started to sound in the growl and shout of the knights and masters.
It was such a feat that also allowed Kathryn to hear a scream behind this door. A squire’s lodging. She had opened the door to find this horror. How many other places in Tashijan suffered similarly?
The one atop the bed attacked first, screeching and diving at her, its wings wide. Kathryn shifted shadows in the room and vanished to its left flank. Her blade darted out, lightning out of darkness, blessed with dire alchemies.
The wraith noted her thrust for its heart. Though ilked, it was Grace-born, a creature of air. With the speed of a swirling gust, it ripped around, lashing out with a clawed foot.
Kathryn ducked between its legs, never dropping her sword. She shoved straight up, slicing open its belly, and rolled aside. It wailed and spun, spilling entrails and blood. It struck the wall, writhing, unable to gain its footing, wracked in pain, legs tangled in its own entrails. The more it fought, the more it gutted itself.
From the corner of her eye, movement stirred.
Kathryn swirled darkness and vanished away. The creature atop the table searched with one eye cocked, then the other. But it didn’t hunt on sight alone. Its head swung around, scenting her. It was ready when she folded out of darkness, sword swinging.
It lunged off the table-away from her, craven with the death cries of its partner. Kathryn chopped with her sword before it could fully escape. Her blade sliced through its leathery wing and bony shoulder, cleaving all away.
Now it was its turn to screech as it rolled off the table, off the boy, one wing flapping like a sail in a storm.
Kathryn vaulted the table and landed on the wing, pinning the wraith to the floor. Two-handed, she swung her sword low, cutting off its scream.
And its head.
The body convulsed once, then lay still.
Its head kept rolling.
Kathryn dropped her shadows. Her cloak fell about her shoulders like a death’s shroud, heavy with blood. She stepped back, stumbled away, over to the door.
A knight appeared at the entrance. His eyes above the masklin widened at the slaughter found inside. She pushed past him, sword still out. She clenched her fist on its hilt to control her trembling.
“Seal the door,” she ordered as she passed. “Bar it tight.”
Then she was out on the stairs. More calls and shouts echoed down from the main line. She ran the opposite way. Before hearing the scream from the room, she had been headed down to meet Argent. Now she had another reason to run below.
To escape the horrors of that room.
Around and around, she fled.
Finally she stopped, leaned a palm against the wall, and emptied her stomach on the stair. Her belly heaved again, sour and empty. She gasped for air. Her eyes ached with tears that refused to flow.
Not now…
She spat on the stone and wiped her mouth.
Not yet…
Straightening, she sheathed her sword and stumbled a step, caught herself, and continued down leadenly, a hundred stone heavier than when she had gone up to her hermitage.
She quickly reached the fieldroom’s level and headed down the hall to the open door. It was unguarded. There were no knights to spare for such duties. She entered to find the rally already under way.
She was surprised at how few were here. Argent held a dagger in his fingers and made deft instructions on the pinned map, cutting into the ancient vellum in his urgency and fury. He was instructing his second-in-command. Kathryn didn’t know his name. The former second had died during the third bell; there had been no time for introductions after that.
Hesharian stood against the back wall. Unmoving, eyes glazed.
Gerrod was at Argent’s other elbow, suggesting a few improvements with a bronzed finger. “They are particularly sensitive to loam. If we paint the stairs here…and here…with an alchemy of bile and loam, they should weaken before they hit the line.”
The warden nodded.
All their eyes lifted when she entered. Something in her face made them all straighten with concern.
“Did the line break again?” Argent asked.
“It holds,” Kathryn assured him, putting steel in her voice and hardening her face.
Argent looked relieved. Gerrod’s face was impossible to read, armored as it was, but he continued to stare at her.
She nodded to him, indicating she was all right.
It was a lie they all needed to believe for the moment.
There was only one other participant in the rally: the lithe and pristine figure of Liannora, Hand of Oldenbrook. Like Hesharian, she also stood to the side, her hands tucked into a snowy muff. For a moment, Kathryn could not make sense of it. Then she remembered the stone-casting among the Hands, the selection of a representative to the council.
Or rather two representatives.
Kathryn searched the room. “Where’s Delia?” she asked Liannora.
A flash of guilt wavered across her pale features before vanishing. The woman shook her head, indicating she didn’t know. Liannora must have been caught here when all fell apart. She must have felt safer here, leaving Delia to deal with all the Hands. No wonder the guilty demeanor.
Kathryn turned her back on the woman.
Argent spoke. “If the line is finally holding, then perhaps we have a chance.”
“We can’t win this war,” Kathryn said, not letting her steeliness drop, making it plain that it was not despair that prompted her words.
Argent, ever the campaigner, still bristled.
“She is right,” Gerrod said, supporting her. “We can hold out, but night will fall soon. The sun already sets.”
“So?” Argent turned his eye upon Gerrod. “Locked in our tower, what difference does it make if the sun is up or not?”
“You forget Eylan?” Kathryn asked. “What have we faced so far? Wraiths and stormfire.”
Argent frowned.
Kathryn continued. “Eylan came cloaked in an icy Dark Grace, impenetrable. Though the wraiths are fearsome, they can be struck down with steel and alchemy. What if he brings the same icy Dark Grace upon us again?”
Argent’s face grew troubled. She read the dawning understanding in the furrows of his brow. He was stubborn, but not beyond reason-if you could get him to listen.
“Perhaps Ulf weakens,” he said. “The storm must sap him greatly to keep it locked around our town for so long.”
“No,” Gerrod said and stepped to the window.
They followed.
The wide windows were shuttered tight. Gerrod pointed to an opening in the shutter, only a hand’s breadth tall but wide enough for all three to gather.
Kathryn searched outside. The day was indeed almost gone. The storm swallowed the world, but the gray clouds were darkening. They were losing the sun. Beyond the window, a sweeping view of fields and outer towers was shrouded in swirls of snow. Still, she saw shapes winging about and boiling and crawling amid the towers.