It was a hollow comfort to hear about the assault on Venka’s reinforcements. Ensharia’s captivity was stretching more by the day, and as of her near-execution it had finally taken the last scrap of dignity from her. She’d always liked to imagine she’d be brave, faced with death. Stoic, unflinching. Weeping as she had, crying and begging, was not the behaviour of a Paladin. It was the behaviour of a damned woman.
She’d been surprised and relieved to not find herself instantly killed by Venka upon Swick’s escape, and rather confused at being kept near the outer perimeter of the camp from that point on. Probably the General was planning to use her as bait and lure the pirate back in, probably there were more of his undead staring at her even then.
Well, they could stare away for all she cared. It wasn’t as if she was in a position to do anything about it one way or the other.
“I hear Venka’s men were attacked.” Garutan whispered, beside her. They were working, this time at the deed of hammering in palisade posts to set up the pickets of the General’s siege camp. It was difficult work, the kind where Ensharia’s strength left room for an increased rate of productivity, and so she was not permitted to simply rest by exerting a fraction of her might.
The first of each hammer blow she struck a post with sent them digging close to a foot deep into the dirt, and every subsequent one managed only inches. On average she took close to a dozen hits to fully impale the ground before moving onto the next. Her current quota was five hundred posts a day. Most of the others were only being told to manage thirty.
Distracting work, tedious work, painful work. It left hands blistered rather than calloused, eyes almost blinded by sweat. Ensharia hadn’t strained herself so hard since she’d been in training, wielding the heavy, lead-made practice blades to shape Vigour and build strength. It was almost impressive Venka had managed to find labour able to exhaust even her current self in such a way.
“Venka’s men are attacked a lot.” She whispered back, between grunting swings. The trick was not to use all her strength, Ensharia knew, because that would only bear the risk of snapping the post. They were thick things, made to let barded warhorses gut themselves without breaking, but her strength had become something new since meeting the Saviour. And if she destroyed one, it’d be her job to dig its remnants out of the ground. Ensharia paced her power.
“Not like this.” The orc insisted, hastily, driving his own post almost as deep as she did.
He might’ve been an elite, Garutan, a towering, strong figure who doubtless enjoyed no small measure of Vigour in his bulging musculature. He just didn’t have the heart for it. The poor dear was too nice, sweeter than sugar and more likely to start crying and apologise to a wounded enemy than finish them off.
Fortunately, he did not need to apologise to the fence posts.
“You always say it’s different from the last bouts.” Shargon huffed, to the other side of Ensharia. He was smaller than Galukar, but cleverer than most humans, let alone orcs. His grey skin was barely even moistened by sweat, muscles working shortly and economically. Stamina was his great boon, and it seemed at times he boasted more of it than any dozen other workers combined.
“This one is though.” Garutan pressed. His language had much improved in the last few weeks, as had all the orcs’. “I hear they were all most wiped out before they arrived, and yesterday I saw four undead heading to the camp. The Generl was promised a full fousand. They’ll probby arrive today or tomow, then you’ll see.”
Much improved, but still not great. Ensharia found her focus slipping from their conversation, considering the implications.
She’d seen the walls, of course, now surrounding Kaltan. They’d been the great point of discussion for much of the day, while everyone readied the camps. Everyone had marched expecting stone, because stone was simply what was used to build city walls. Those crafted by great magics might use rarer, denser, stronger kinds, but still invariably stone. And sometimes not even that.
It had taken quite some time for Venka’s scouts to properly confirm exactly what Kaltan’s outer defences and battlements really were made from, but it had been clear from even the horizon that it was no kind of rock any present was aware of. The reports came back eventually however. Ensharia had already worked it out herself before they did.
Bone. Bone. She almost laughed at the realisation, for more than one reason. Silenos had told her of bone’s remarkable strength once, how it dwarfed the strength of stone, and even exceeded steel if one measured by weight rather than volume. To find the city defended by that of all things was a very promising sign.
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The second aspect to her reaction had been more personal, however. Because Ensharia knew only one man who might have the knowledge, inclination and raw, shaking power required to clad so many miles of a structure in such a sheathe. Silenos Shaiagrazni was within Kaltan, then. Her joy at the fact had only been slightly diminished by Venka’s latest torturing session, which had boasted a new enthusiasm in light of her knowledge.
Apparently it was known she’d defended Elkatin alongside a Fleshcrafter, and the General had put two and two together. He got nothing from her, of course. Sometimes Ensharia wondered whether he even expected to, perhaps he simply tortured her out of habit.
Ensharia paused, letting the hammer hover for a moment. She drove it down quickly, not wanting to attract a workmaster’s ire, but found herself thinking a shade more jaggedly.
What was happening to her? She was acting like some cow, penned in and mindless to the fact. She’d just seen confirmation not a day ago that her ally was within viewing distance, and she was simply sitting around, working on the defences of the people who’d try and kill him?
I really am a coward. A beggar, a whiner.
She drove the thoughts aside, more for practicality than anything else, and made herself focus. Silenos Shaiagrazni was within the city of Kaltan, that much Ensharia was sure of. Even for him it would have been a great undertaking to work such a feat as she saw now, if his claimed mana reserves were accurate at least, and she didn’t see him doing that for a city he didn’t plan to stay in.
The Saviour was in Kaltan. Ensharia was staring at it. How many miles away? Less than ten, surely. Perhaps as few as five.
If she tried to run that far outright she’d likely be caught before making it, even if she wasn’t mistaken for a spy or enemy and shot dead by the city’s guards, but it was nonetheless a tantalising proximity. An invigorating one.
Ensharia would escape, and she’d help Silenos stave the bastard Venka off from taking that city. She swung her hammer, picturing now that it was the General her strength was aimed at rather than one of his posts.
The wood split in half, splinters and pulp blasting out in all directions, some even spraying into her mouth. The workmasters were screaming within moments.
Bugger.
Finlay had been more than a little paranoid when Silenos Shaiagrazni offered to strengthen his body and quicken his limbs. It seemed the sort of archetypal Fleshcrafter’s deal told about in the stories, inevitably turned against him as he found himself transmuted to a toad or rat, left to roam the world as a lessened thing and serve as a reminder to all the good little girls and boys about the dangers of evil magic and trying to rise above one’s proper place.
Funnily enough, the proper place of the people writing those stories seemed always to be within the ruling aristocracy. They had less appeal for the poor sods tilling fields and getting their brains cudgelled out in battle.
He’d accepted the offer shortly.
An orc closed in at him, quickly. Finlay fought on the walls, with his Rangers, but even with the new coating of bone the city had proven easily scaled for its new attackers. Orcs had hurled dark iron grappling hooks over it, hauling their bodies up while men tried in vain to cleave through the carefully wrought metal links chaining their equipment up. Within moments dozens had poured onto the walls, within minutes more, hundreds.
Finlay had not expected that, but he should have. It would have been the first thing he’d experiment with in a non-human unit, and yet his mind had slipped and he’d overlooked the possibility that his enemy had done likewise. Age, getting to him, dulling his wits, proving his best years of command already in the past? Perhaps he was just having an off day. He fought no less hard either way.
The orc was a big bastard, with an even bigger bastard of an axe. It towered a yard over Finlay, bigger than the elites he’d heard Venka used, and lumbering close and snarling. It brought its weapon down in a big, predictable swing which left the haft lined up just perfect for Finlay’s longknife to eat, letting splintered shaft and severed blade fall in separate directions. The other knife was no less precise, introducing itself to the orc’s brain by entering uninvited through the eye.
He twisted, blood and optic fluid steaming over his hand as a sticky, stinking mess. Bubbles of air formed and popped in the flowing leak, and the orc fell as a thrashing slab of meat at Finlay’s feet. He was already turning before its death finished, picking out another target from the chaotic melee.
A Ranger had fallen, slipped on blood by the posture of him, and a pair of orcs were readying to turn him into mincemeat. Finlay came flying at them without even thinking, surprising even himself with the strength of resisting wind against his face, and certainly surprising them as he took off meaty limbs. A bigger one lunged, and he caught their axe’s blade with that of his knife, expecting for a moment to be shunted back. Instead he held, then overpowered the thing.
Still, strength was not his specialty. There were easier ways to kill a creature five times his weight, and Finlay picked the simplest by abruptly sidestepping and opening its neck up down to the spine.
Rangers were scarce in this fight, now, having mostly been retreated from the melee to focus on poking holes in the orcs still trying to climb up and meet it. That meant normal men at Finlay’s shoulders. Normal, Vigourless, courageous bastards of no talent, standard training and fifty-ton balls of steel.
They were formed into lines, shields up and spears pointed out like the bristles of a porcupine, held steady while orcs tried to barrel past and stumbled back snarling and spitting from their weeping gashes. It was an immutable law of battle that men in a formation could and would hack apart many times their strength in unformed enemies, but orcs were not human. They had a physical weight and speed that jeopardised the cohesion of Finlay’s men, sending shockwaves rippling through their ranks each time one slammed into a shield. They’d break soon.
He moved in to stop that.
“BACKSTEP!” Finlay roared, giving his men a stride more slack in the tension of their defence, then falling upon their enemies from behind.
He was a hurricane, a pointy one. Wherever Finlay went, blood hurried after, painting limbs, faces, floors and battlement walls. He jabbed knives into the gaps of armour and the slits of visors, even smashing an orc’s eye socket in with his own forehead at one stage and taking another’s head fully off. He’d heard tell of the glory of battle, and it was just as bullshit an idea now as it ever had been, but for the first time he felt some measure of where the delusion came from.
How easy to make yourself think war was a hero’s business, when it felt like this. How easy to make yourself great when the choice of such carnage laid solely with you. Finlay’s musings were interrupted sharply as a pain lanced down at his side, and he peered at the source.
A spear, long, steely from tip to body. A carefully made Fomorian weapon, the sort that would go through both sides of a Knight’s armour and kill a second behind him. It was jabbed clean between Finlay’s ribs.
Clean through his heart.