Chapter 224: What Comes Across the Plain (2)

Chapter 224: Chapter 224: What Comes Across the Plain (2)

Chapter 224: What Comes Across the Plain (2)

They came at half past two in the morning.

CRACK.

Reina’s ice sheet reported them before anyone saw them, a long splintering line running west to east across the outer ground.

"Weight," she said. "A lot of it. Coming fast."

THWIP. THWIP. THWIP.

Natalie was already shooting. She had ranged that plain for four days and written every number down, and she started dropping targets at eleven hundred meters, in the dark, before a single beast entered the arc lamps.

Nine of them were dead before the crews below even understood the attack had started.

Then the front rank hit the light.

Wildlands beasts. Real ones. Rangy, gray-hided things built like starved dogs with too many joints, and behind them something heavier with a low flat skull that came in a straight line and did not swerve.

They were not a horde. They were not organized. They were terrified, driven animals that had been in cages for four hundred miles and had been let out upwind of the only food they had smelled in a week.

They hit two hundred meters of prepared ground.

Caltrops first, which broke the front rank’s stride and turned a charge into a stumbling mess. Then the berm, which funneled them. Then Reina’s second sheet, which took their footing entirely.

Then Aegon and Bram.

BOOM.

Aegon met the heavy one head on and did not move backward an inch. His spear went through the flat skull, out the other side, and he pivoted and used the carcass as a club on the two behind it.

Bram stood in the funnel mouth with his shield planted and simply did not permit anything to pass. He was not swinging. He was standing there, and things were breaking against him.

Lucien handled the flankers, moving so fast the crews saw him only as a blue line that appeared beside a beast and then beside a different one.

Nothing got within eighty meters.

Down in the trench line, two hundred and six people crouched behind a berm with iron knives in their pockets that they did not touch, and watched, and did not have to lift a single tool.

Odran, forty years a rigger, peered over the lip and watched a nineteen-year-old girl in a work shirt freeze a beast solid in mid-leap.

"Right," he said hoarsely. "Right. All right."

The second wave came twenty minutes later, exactly as Draven had said, and it was different.

There were eleven of them and they did not behave like animals.

They came in low and silent, and they ignored the berm entirely. They ignored the trench line, and the lamps, and the two hundred warm human bodies crouched forty meters away.

They went straight for the base of the tower.

Their hides were wrong. Blackened along the spine, veins standing out dark under the skin, mouths open too wide. They ran with a horrible even rhythm, all eleven in step.

"They are going for the housing!" Lyra screamed from the wagon. "They are going for the cradle!"

Bram got there first.

He crossed forty meters in three strides and put himself between eleven Miasma-fed beasts and the seat of a tower that had taken thirty hours and a leaf from a four-day-old sapling to build.

CRASH.

The first one hit him and he held it.

The second and third hit him together and he slid back a meter, boots plowing ash.

They were not trying to kill him. That was the thing he understood about two seconds too late. They were trying to get past him, all of them, at once, and one of them went low under his shield.

Bram dropped the shield.

He caught the thing bare-handed, tore it off the housing, and threw it, and while his arms were up two others opened his side and his left shoulder down to the bone.

He did not go down.

[Titan’s Anvil]

His skin went hard and gray and he set his back against the housing and let them come onto him, and he took every one of them himself, because the alternative was letting one reach the cradle.

CRUNCH.

Aegon and Reina hit the pack from behind eight seconds later, and eight seconds was a long time.

When it was over, Bram was still standing against the tower base with his arm hanging wrong and blood filling his boot.

"Housing is clean," he said. "Nothing touched it."

Then he sat down, very carefully, and let Sella and ninety-four healing draughts get to work on him.

Nyx had gone out at the first wave.

She crossed six kilometers of open plain through her own shadow and came up out of the ground behind the mercenary line inside the fog boundary, and she killed four of the seven before any of them registered that they were not alone.

The remaining three got their weapons up. It did not help.

The two Cultists knew.

They had felt her coming from a kilometer out, the way corruption always feels its opposite, and they were already moving when she surfaced.

The first one she took at the knees, put face down in the ash, and bound with a shadow before he could finish the first syllable of anything.

The second one turned and looked at her.

He was smiling.

"The Eclipse is patient," he said, and he put his hand flat on his own chest.

Nyx threw herself backward into the ground.

BOOOM.

The Miasma in him went off like a shell. The fog for sixty meters around him turned black and then burned off entirely, and where he had been standing there was a crater with nothing in it at all.

Nyx came up out of a shadow eighty meters away, patted out a smoldering sleeve, and looked at the hole with genuine irritation.

"Fine," she said.

Then she went to look at the cages.

There were nine of them, heavy iron, hauled on low carts. She crouched by the nearest and ran her thumb across the frame above the latch.

Stamped into the metal: a crest, a foundry mark, and a nine-digit serial.

’Capital issue,’ she thought. ’Requisitioned, numbered, and signed for by somebody.’

She stood up and tapped her comms.

"Draven. I have one Cultist alive, one hole in the ground, seven dead mercenaries, and nine iron cages with Bastion One stamps on them."

Dawn came up over fifty miles of open plain.

Sixty-one carcasses lay scattered across two hundred meters of prepared ground. Halvers had the crews out with hooks and sledges already, dragging them into a burn pile, because a foreman who lets people stand around after a thing like that is a foreman who loses them.

Two hundred and six workers had come out onto that plain.

Two hundred and five were standing. One had gone home on a transport two days ago and was probably still furious about it.

Nobody had died.

Petta sat on an upturned crate with her iron knife still in her pocket where she had put it eight hours ago. She had not taken it out once. Her hands were steady for the first time in three days.

"I did not do anything," she said.

"No," Odran agreed, sitting down beside her. "You did not."

"I just sat there."

"Aye. That was the job." He rubbed his face. "That was the whole job, lass. That is the best morning I have had in forty years."

Draven stood at the northern edge of the site.

Nyx had come back with the sunrise, dragging a bound Cultist by the collar and a cart with a stamped iron cage on it, and both of them were now sitting in the middle of a construction site in the middle of nowhere.

He crouched and looked at the serial number.

Nine digits. A foundry mark. A crest he had seen on a diplomat’s robes.

’Requisition, transport manifest, signature,’ he thought. ’Somewhere in Bastion One there is a piece of paper with a name on it.’

He looked at the bound Cultist, who was watching him with an expression somewhere between hatred and amusement.

Capital cages. Capital serials. Capital order.

And two men of the Church of the Eternal Eclipse standing in the fog line, sixty miles inside Capital-run Wildlands, embedded in a Capital operation that a clean general believed he was running himself.

That was not a scandal. That was not even an atrocity.

That was proof that the government of humanity and the doomsday cult trying to end it had run a joint operation against a civilian work crew.

Draven straightened up with the cage frame in his hand.

’When it fails,’ Isolde Renwick had said, ’I want no retaliation. Because I am not doing this to help you win. I am doing this so that two hundred people do not die in a field.’

Two hundred and five of them were behind him right now, dragging carcasses onto a burn pile and arguing about breakfast.

And he was holding the one thing in the world that could put an end to the Capital’s story.

Which was, he understood perfectly, the same thing that would start the war she had spent forty years trying to prevent.

"Load the cage," Draven said. "All nine of them. And the prisoner."

He turned and looked south, at the gray line of the Great Wall ten kilometers off.

"We are taking this to Lord Commander Helion."