He reached into the small bag at this belt and withdrew the silk handkerchief Lena had given him to celebrate their fourth year of marriage. It smelled of jasmine and her favourite perfume, and he smiled when he brought it close to his face.
‘Sir,’ Kalen called. It sounded like a warning. Barandas looked up and saw Captain Bracka leaning on another soldier as he struggled to make his way towards them. One side of the officer’s face was covered in blood, which ran down his cheek to merge with the red of his beard, and he cradled his right arm in his left. Barandas could see bone protruding from the broken limb.
‘Captain, what has happened?’ he demanded.
Bracka’s eyes were haunted. He looked as if he had seen a ghost. ‘Monsters,’ he said dully. ‘Monsters clothed as women. They scaled the wall, killed three dozen men before we could react…’ His voice trailed off.
‘They came from nowhere,’ the young Watchman supporting Bracka interjected. His voice shook. ‘We received no warning.’
Barandas grimaced. The mindhawks had detected no sign of the pale women. Lord Salazar had warned him that the White Lady’s servants possessed strange abilities — he had witnessed their potency at first hand — but immunity to thought-mining was something even the Magelord had not foreseen.
‘There’s more, sir. The third company is on the move. The walls will be breached within the hour.’
Within the hour. That was too soon. He had to protect the city — at all costs. He turned to his Augmentors. ‘Men, draw your weapons. We go to Dorminia’s defence.’
The brightness of the day suddenly intensified as glowing implements of death sprang from their sheaths. Garmond slammed one gauntleted fist into another with a force like that of two bulls butting heads. ‘At fucking last,’ he snarled.
Barandas placed Lena’s handkerchief carefully back into the bag at his belt and drew his own sword. It whispered softly as it brushed against the scabbard, like a dying man’s sigh. There was no ostentation about the cold steel. No magical luminescence. The only magic he possessed was within the mechanical instrument pumping blood around his body. Lord Salazar had told him that he required nothing more.
With a final glance across the square in the direction of the Noble Quarter, he beckoned to his men and set off towards the western wall.
When they arrived, it was to behold a scene of carnage. Bodies lay strewn all over the cobbles, twisted and broken like discarded dolls. Fighting raged ahead of them as the city’s remaining defenders attempted to hold the sundered gates against the flood of dark-skinned warriors trying to force their way through.
Smaller pockets of fighting had broken out in spots just inside the wall. A group of Watchmen surrounded a pale-skinned woman and were hacking at her desperately. She was missing her left arm below the elbow, but the grievous wound did little to slow her. With stunning speed, the woman twisted out of the way of a sword thrust and flung herself on the back of one of her opponents. She reached around his neck as he tried to shake her off and almost yanked his head off. Barandas heard vertebrae snap as the man’s eyes rolled up into their sockets.
Setting his jaw in a grim line, the Supreme Augmentor strode towards the pale woman, who leaped from the soldier’s back as he fell lifeless to the ground. She sprang at him, almost got her hand to his throat before his sword cleaved her skull in two. Foul grey matter splattered over his golden armour but he ignored it, searching around for new enemies. He spotted two more of the pale women over by the left entrance to the gatehouse. They were standing at the centre of a heap of corpses, their white robes soaked through with blood.
One of the women noticed him. Her dead eyes revealed no surprise, no fear, no regard at all for the horror all around them. She pointed at him. Together the two pale women began moving closer.
His vision blurred for an instant as something fiery streaked across their path and then one of the women was hurtling backwards, a smoking hole in her chest. Barandas glanced to his right and saw Kalen drawing back his bow for another shot.
The ponytailed Augmentor gasped suddenly as the bloody point of a spear burst through his chest. His Sumnian killer was still trying to tug the weapon free as Garmond appeared, gore trailing from his gauntlets, and snatched the man up from the ground. With a sickening crack, he brought the southerner down over his knee, breaking his back.
Barandas tore his gaze away and focused on the unnatural creature approaching. The woman slowed a short distance from him and cocked her head as if surprised by something. ‘You have no heart,’ she observed in an emotionless monotone.
He gripped his sword more tightly, every muscle poised to spring into action. ‘I am more human than you, creature. Whatever you are.’
The woman’s lips curled into a smile, though nothing reached her eyes. ‘Then I will gladly fall beneath your blade, if you are worthy. I pray it is so.’
The smile faded.
As Barandas stared at the creature, understanding dawned. This… thing, whatever it was, wanted to die. He would do his best to oblige her.
She darted towards him and he rolled at the last instant, springing to his feet and twisting around to meet her as she pivoted for another attack. This time his sword caught her below the knee, causing her to stumble past him. Quick as a flash he reversed his swing and severed her spine. She stumbled to the ground — and then, to his horror, began pulling herself towards him with her arms, dragging her useless legs along the bloodstained cobbles.
‘Do it,’ she rasped, staring up at him with those soulless orbs. He nodded once, brought his sword up and back down, splitting her head like a melon. Whatever you were, I pity you, he thought. He watched the discoloured fluids draining out from the creature’s cranium. The thing was rotting from the inside; it smelled as if it had been dead for months.
Ragged cheering drew his attention. The arrival of the Augmentors had given the defenders a boost. As he surveyed the battlefield he saw most of the pale women were now dead or dying, though he had lost Kalen and, it seemed, his friend Varca, whose magical helm rested fifteen feet away from the Augmentor’s body. The severed head was still strapped inside the helm. Elsewhere the Sumnians had been driven back, and now the militia and the remnants of the Watch were pressing ahead, pushing them back further still.
Barandas raised his sword and gestured at the melee ahead of him, just outside the gates. ‘Forward!’ he shouted. His remaining Augmentors and the nearby defenders rushed to obey his command and together they surged into the enemy ranks. He turned away one spear, stabbed the owner through the guts and then yanked his sword free to behead another southerner.
A wall of shields suddenly loomed before them. The red-haired Augmentor, Jardwym, raised his mighty enchanted maul and swung it with all his strength. The shields exploded in a shower of splinters and the men holding them were thrown twenty feet backwards through the air from the force of the impact. Some struggled to their feet; others would never rise again.
Barandas’s eyes narrowed. Over there, on the hillock: a monster of a man, unimaginably tall, towering above even Garmond. He was naked from the waist up, his chest crisscrossed with old scars. This could only be the infamous general he had heard so much about.
The Supreme Augmentor made for the leader of the dark-skinned mercenaries. Cut off the head and the body will die. Lord Salazar was fond of that phrase — though he had done the opposite when he had massacred Shadowport…