EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (421 page)

He looked ready to argue, but she cut him off. “You can do this, Geveral. I’ve seen you perform a similar feat before. Block the tunnel and protect the adherents. Do that, and all our actions up to this point won’t have been in vain.”

She could see her plea had its intended effect. “All right, I’ll do what you ask,” he conceded. “But Eydis?”

He caught her elbow as she started up the ladder.

“Yes?”

He hesitated. “The First Mother go with you.”

“Thanks Geveral. You too. Better hurry now.”

Then he was gone, and she was left staring after him, wondering if she had said goodbye to her friend for the last time. But she couldn’t think that way now. There was a fight ahead, and she needed all the courage she could muster to get through whatever the day brought.

Scrambling up onto the wall, she looked for Orrick. He found her first.

“Take this,” he instructed, tossing her a short pike. She didn’t ask where he had come by the weapon. The seclusionary didn’t exactly have an armory on hand, so she was lucky he had found her anything at all. Torolf and his fighting men were well armed at least. One of them, Calder she thought Torolf called him, even carried a large crossbow. He had placed himself above the gates, where he would have a clear shot at anyone attempting to batter them down.

Ignoring the way the other defenders positioned themselves at intervals, Eydis stuck close to Orrick’s reassuring presence. She suspected he knew how to handle himself better than anyone here. Best not to remember her vision of him betraying her or his mysterious meeting with the strange assassin. To get through whatever came her way, she needed to shove her doubts aside and have faith in her companions and in the First Mother, who had led them all this far.

The enemy horde closed the distance until they were only a hundred yards away. It was possible to make out details of the individuals now. Eydis’s eyes were again drawn to their leader, whose expression was feverishly intense, his eyes seeming to glow with determination to claim victory for his dark master.

But there was something different about the army at his back. Something wasn’t right with them. Their movements were stiff, their clothing tattered, their bodies wasted. Closer and closer they came until she could see that pieces of their bodies, limbs, and faces were missing or decayed. Horrified, she realized aloud, “Those are no mortal soldiers. They’re reanimated corpses.”

Orrick looked unsurprised. With the superior eyesight of his race he must have noticed already. He said, “Aye, I’ve seen their kind. There were undead in the army that attacked us at Endguard. I’ve warned Torolf to spread the word among his men. There’s only one way to stop a living corpse—demolish it. Beheading is best, but if you can’t manage that, sever the limbs or put out the eyes. You can’t kill what’s already dead but you can obliterate its carcass.”

Eydis watched the approaching masses pick up speed. In moments they would crash against the wall like waves against a rock.

“I guess this is my last chance to tell you,” she heard herself say to Orrick. “In case you survive and I don’t, I want to keep my end of our bargain. About Arik the One-Eyed—”

But before she could finish, the horde below raised a loud battle cry that echoed over the seclusionary, freezing Eydis’s heart with fear.

She looked back over her shoulder and reassured herself the adherents were already disappearing into the safety of the escape tunnel in the courtyard. Geveral stood to one side, beneath the spreading branches of the great tree, motioning the women and children through the entrance. He was doing his part. She must do hers.

The enemy smashed into the gates, the barrier bulging beneath their combined strength. For the moment, it held. At Torolf’s shouted command, the bowman directed his arrows into the seething mass below. His arrows arced through the air as swiftly as he could aim and load, slamming into the bodies of the soldiers at the gate. But though Eydis saw many an arrow hit its mark, the enemy seemed almost unaffected by their wounds. They kept coming.

Some of the defenders had gathered heaps of rocks. They threw them off the wall now, the heavier missiles dashing in the heads of enemy soldiers. But the attackers spread out now, some continuing their onslaught against the gates while others brought out grappling hooks and tall ladders to breach the wall. Eydis saw one metal hook sail over the wall and snag on a ledge. Instantly, a string of undead soldiers began climbing up the line. One of Torolf’s men cut the rope and the climbers fell to their deaths. Others replaced them immediately.

Eydis kept her searching gaze on the horde below but she couldn’t spot their leader anymore. She had a vague idea that to destroy him and his amulet was the surest way to hurt the enemy. But the coward must be holding back from the fight.

With a heavy thud, a wooden ladder slammed against the wall near her, and a stream of soldiers began ascending. Eydis ran to the edge and tried to shove the ladder out but it was heavy with the weight of the soldiers. She couldn’t budge the thing. A second later, Orrick was at her side and, pushing together, they toppled it. The ladder had no sooner shattered on the ground below than another took its place further along the wall. Eydis would have run to that one too but was distracted by a deep groaning, splintering sound. The entrance gates, not built to withstand the battering they were receiving, were about to give way. Eydis couldn’t decide where to focus her attention. The assault came from too many fronts.

“Eydis!” She whirled at Orrick’s warning shout, narrowly avoiding the curved blade of a scythe that had been swung at her head. She didn’t know where the undead creature before her had come from, but it wasn’t alone. A small group of them had somehow made it onto the wall, unnoticed. The nearest enemy flailed at her again. She backed away from his sweeping blade, looking for a weakness in his defense, a chance to dart in with the sharp tip of her pike.

She was vaguely aware of Orrick engaging the other soldiers, but she had no space to think beyond herself and the enemy immediately in front of her. They might as well have been sparring alone. He continued his assault, and she deflected his blows with the handle of her pike. The steel of his scythe’s blade bit into the wood, sending chips of her weapon flying. If she let this continue much longer, her pike would be whittled down to a splinter. Seizing an opportunity, she ducked beneath her opponent’s guard and jabbed the spearhead of her weapon into the soft flesh of the creature’s belly.

The undead soldier looked down, surprised, at the shaft protruding from its belly. But the creature didn’t weaken and collapse. Instead, it grabbed the pike and, to Eydis horror, shoved the weapon further into itself, dragging Eydis nearer in the process. She dug in her heels, and the two engaged in a dangerous tugging match as her opponent tried to pull her within reach of its scythe. She couldn’t keep her distance without relinquishing her only weapon.

Suddenly a sword swept through the air, its blade cleaving through the undead soldier’s thick neck. The creature froze for an instant, then its head toppled to the ground, followed by its motionless body. Eydis looked up to find Captain Torolf standing over the body. Before she could thank the aging soldier for his intervention, a blade erupted through his chest, planted there by an enemy who had slunk up behind him. Blood fountained from Torolf’s wound as he slid free of the blade and fell in a lifeless heap.

With a scream of anger, Eydis snatched the dead man’s short sword and launched an assault on his killer. Under her furious onslaught, the creature backed away until a clumsily placed step sent it plunging over the edge of the wall.

Eydis paused now. Eyes stinging with salty sweat, she wiped her brow with her forearm and realized her elbow was bleeding from a minor cut. She couldn’t remember when she had got it. Looking around, she saw the sky was darkening and the wind picking up. Black storm clouds rolled down from the Arxus mountains in the distance. Thunder rolled and bolts of lightning streaked the sky, as if nature itself was turning against the defenders.

The wall was now overrun with undead. She saw the bowman, Calder, cut down by a pair of enemies. Another of Torolf’s men ran to avenge Calder, but he too was felled.

Then a deafening clap of thunder sounded and a blaze of lightning shot through the air, striking a cluster of enemy soldiers. Eydis could hardly believe her eyes when the flash was gone, leaving behind only charred corpses.

Before she could take in the freak accident, a commotion erupted below. Looking down on the evil army, she found them under assault from a new enemy. Giant fire scorpions, appearing seemingly from nowhere, stampeded through their ranks, stingers and pincers creating havoc among the undead. The same horde of scorpions that had created destruction at the millhouse a few days ago? Maybe. But there was no time to wonder what had brought the scorpions here or whose side, if any, they were on. Even these creatures could not turn the tide of battle.

There were only a handful of defenders left atop the wall, each of them surrounded and separated from one another. Only Orrick was within her reach. Seeing him ringed by enemy soldiers, she charged into the fray, decapitating one undead and kicking another off the wall. Orrick sliced the sword arm off another, and then Eydis was too caught up in the fight to count anymore.

At some point she found herself back-to-back with Orrick, both of them panting for breath, and she realized they were among the last surviving defenders. They were surrounded by more undead than they could hope to hold off, and it was clear the next clash would be their last. She sensed Orrick knew it too.

Swallowing, she asked him over her shoulder, “Any last words of advice?”

“Just one,” he said. “Tuck your shoulders and roll with the fall.”

She must have misheard. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Instead of answering, he spun around, grabbed her by the shoulders, and shoved her hard away from him. Then she was reliving her vision, different but the same. The look in the Kroadian’s eyes, the feel of his hands releasing their grip on her. Then the falling sensation as she plunged through the air, over the side of the wall. The world went silent as she fell, the stark figure of Orrick growing small in the distance as she dropped away.

She hit the ground at an awkward angle. A jolt of pain shot instantly through her hip, but her fall was otherwise cushioned by a pile of loose hay. After the initial shock and struggle to recapture the breath knocked from her, she made it to her feet and scrambled out of the hay. Ignoring the twinge in her hip, she limped to the base of the near wall and looked for a way to get back up.

But this section was smooth and unscalable, and she knew by the time she found a way up it would be too late. There were only three or four defenders left fighting, and when they went down, the wall would be breached and the courtyard flooded with enemy soldiers. They were already defeated, she realized in a daze.

Lightning flashed across the sky, silhouetting the clashing forms along the top of the wall. That was when she saw Orrick looking down on her from amid the melee. For an instant their gazes locked across the distance, and in that moment she suddenly saw the truth. Her betrayer hadn’t thrown her down to kill her but in an attempt to save her. It was no accident he’d carefully aimed her into that pile of hay. He turned away now and disappeared into the fighting, even as a deafening clap of thunder sounded overhead and rain began to fall.

Blinking against the rain, Eydis looked to the dark skies, bewildered. “I don’t understand,” she called out. “Why did you show me the future if it could not be changed? Why did you lead me here if only to fail me?”

For once the First Mother was silent.

Then a soft sound fell on Eydis’s ears, rising over the noise of the battle and the storm. A child’s crying. Whirling, searching for the source of the sound, she saw a small girl of not more than six years, collapsed on the ground a short distance away. The little one was alone, her face mud-streaked and a trickle of blood running from a cut on her forehead. She was near the escape tunnel but made no move to cover the remaining distance. In the confusion of evacuation, she must have been left behind by the fleeing adherents.

Eydis hesitated, torn between returning to the fight and helping the child. A soldier’s shout drew her attention back to the wall, where she saw another defender fall and a dozen undead soldiers trample his corpse to leap over the edge of the wall and into the courtyard below. The seclusionary was overrun.

Needing no further encouragement, Eydis hurried, scooping up the startled child and rushing with her toward the tunnel’s entrance. But she was too late. The mouth of the tunnel was shifting as the giant tree standing guard against the entrance trembled, its massive roots churning the earth and growing, spreading to cover the only way in. This time Geveral’s magic was working against them.

Eydis hugged the child to her chest and shoved past the writhing tree roots that snatched at them both like living claws, trying to block their path. She forced her way past and had no sooner set foot in the tunnel when the ground shook and the earth collapsed inward.