Chapter four: At the barricades
Okay, so my old plot wasn't working for me. There's no way I could make it to 50,000 words if I stuck to it.
Which means I need to take things off in another direction.
And somehow still have it add up to the situation Dara is in in the prologue.
This is the kind of challenge that makes NaNo so interesting. :D
Chapter four
The carriage rumbled down the cobbled streets of Shadowed Citadel Demesne, the hoof-beats of the gargoyle horses echoing like thunder through the quiet city. It moved quickly, almost going up on two wheels every time it turned a corner.
"For the UniGod's sake, slow down!" Jalon pleaded. He was clinging to one of the stuffed seats, his eyes wide.
Dara was sitting opposite him, pressing her fingers together to keep them from trembling. Her jaw was clenched so hard that it ached.
"Not until we're safe in my home," she said between her teeth. "Mansuur can send literally anything he can imagine after us, and I want to be snug back in my own center of power before I face it."
Jalon looked out the window with trepidation.
"How can you even see where you're going?" he said. "Please tell me you're not just playing it by ear!"
Dara smiled grimly.
"I don't have to see where we're going," she said. "I'm good at this. My gargoyles aren't just puppets on invisible strings - when I animate them, they get a little bit of a brain to go with all that muscle. The horses know the landmarks along the way to my home, and they know how to turn at each one. They'll even weer out of the way of any unexpected obstacles." She paused. "Probably, at least."
Jalon hid his face in his hands.
"Can you guess which part of that I really wish you hadn't said?" he moaned.
"Be a little less afraid of carriage wrecks and a little more afraid of Mansuur!" Dara said. "How do you know him, anyway? What were you doing at his party?"
Jalon looked up and smiled weakly.
"Singing," he said. "It's what I do."
"He invited you, then?" Dara said. She scratched her chin. "That might be important. It seemed like it was your first time there, so if he wanted you there that particular night, then..."
"No... I sort of invited myself," Jalon said. He managed a feeble version of a cocky grin. "I have a certain notoriety, among people who care about music. When I show up at a party and offer to perform, people are usually glad to let me do it."
Dara supposed she could see why. Jalon might have talked like a loon later on, but on the stage he had sung like an angel.
"All right," she said. She raised an eyebrow. "So what was a nice boy like you doing at a place like that?"
"That's... complicated," Jalon said. "I knew something was going to happen, something important and bad. No... that's not right." He grimaced. "I didn't know, but..."
"You suspected?" Dara said. "Made an educated guess? Had reason to believe?"
"No... no..." Jalon laughed, looking a mix between sad and embarrassed. "You know how sometimes you hear a melody, and you know what note comes next, because that's the only one that properly fits?"
"Nope," Dara said.
Jalon shrugged helplessly, and Dara took pity on him.
"But all right, I see what you mean," she said. "If a man was in the garden a moment ago, and now he is warming his hands by the fire, then you don't need to have been watching him to know that he spent the intervening time walking from there to here. There are no other possibilities that don't require making some huge unnecessary assumptions, and therefore that possibility is almost certainly the truth. Yes?"
Jalon shook his head.
"No," he said. "That's just 'made an educated guess' again. It's nothing as... cerebral as that."
Dara winced.
"Fine, a better example, then," she said. "Who stole a tray of biscuits from the pantry, the venal Hedonist or the Ascetic who had just finished fasting for a month?"
"Both seem likely..." Jalon said.
"Exactly," Dara said. "Only if you have a good, long talk with each of them, and you ask around among the people who knew them, then eventually you know both of them well enough to know that in this particular case, one of them was vastly more capable, on this particular day, of this particular crime. It's not because of any one fact you get to know about them. It's because of the pattern that all the facts put together forms."
Jalon smiled.
"That sounds a bit more like it," he said.
Dara grinned smugly.
"Artists tend to think that Mystics have no appreciation for intuition," she said. "As a matter of fact, we use it constantly. We just don't romanticise it. Intuition is nothing more than the part of your mind at work that sees wholes instead of parts."
"I think I might be dealing with a little more than that," Jalon said. "A couple of months ago, I started hearing a song - not literally a song, you understand, and not literally hearing it, but that's the figure of speech that makes the most sense to me - in things that were going in the city. And then I started becoming able to fill in the missing notes. I can tell what is going to happen - not the details, only the general feel of it, and maybe a few fragments of fact."
Dara shook her head.
"That's called 'confirmation fallacy,'" she said. "If those feelings are so vague, then all sorts of possible situations would fit them - so whatever happens, you feel like your foretelling has come true. Add to that a bit of genuine brains and intuition - Mansuur has a bad reputation, so predicting that something nasty is going to happen at one of his parties isn't really a stretch."
"I thought that was all too, at first," Jalon said. He made a face at her. "Mystics tend to think that Artists are always swooning over their feelings, but we do actually use our heads, and we do know that not every thought that goes through them is divine inspiration. But then my girlfriend went to the National Archives and checked a few of my inexplicable insights against the family records there."
"What did she find?" Dara said.
"I wouldn't know," Jalon said flatly. "As far as anyone can tell, she disappeared off the face of the earth on her way back home from there."
"Well, maybe she was just looking for a way to get out of a relationship with a nut who thinks he has psychic powers - did you ever think of that?" Dara said, but she couldn't put much conviction in her voice. All of a sudden, she was stuck with a bunch of improbable possibilities - either Jalon was lying so well that her well-honed eye for such things could not detect it, or else he really had some kind of gift that no one had ever heard of before and some kind of dangerous people were interested in it, or else a number of extremely odd coincidences had actually, well, coincided, including at least one person going inexplicably missing at the exact time when she was looking into an apparent mystery. By Dara's own admission, finding yourself with a number of improbable possibilities meant that you had missed something along the way, and that annoyed her.
Ritual murders and government conspiracies aren't enough, oh no, she thought. Now we have to have psychics, too. I don't know what bothers me most - that this case is so dangerous and out of my league, or that it's so damn cheesy. What's next? Will someone turn out to be my long-lost father?
In the distance, a bell started to ring. Another quickly followed, and another, until there were so many of them crying out that the very air seemed alive with the sound.
"Did you foresee that?" she growled to Jalon, straining to be heard over the din.
"Don't we all foresee it?" Jalon said hoarsely. "Every day of our lives, don't we wake up wondering if it will happen today?"
DANGER! the bells of Shadowed Citadel Demesne sang. DANGER! ENEMIES AT THE GATES! DAMNATION COME TO TAKE US ALL! HIDE YOUR CHILDREN, HIDE YOURSELVES! DEMONS! DEMONS! DEMONS! DEMONS!
***
DEMONS! DEMONS! sang the bells, waking the city to defense. Rinabaar didn't need to be told, though. He knew perfectly well that the demons were here. One of them was chewing on his leg.
"Unhand me, ruffian!" he growled, and slashed down with his saber. Driven by his powerful muscles, the steel bit deep, almost ripping the creature's head - goat-like, but with a mouth filled with sharp carnivorous teeth - off of its naked, disturbingly human-appearing body. Black blood stained the Witch Stone of the battlements, but before it had come to rest, it evaporated into foul smoke, along with the rest of the demon.
Rinabaar stepped away from the wisp of stinking vapour that was all that was left of the demon, wincing at the pain in his leg. He didn't think the wound was deep, but he hoped that it wasn't poisoned - some demons carried venoms in their fangs that could kill you before a healer could get to you.
The demon wasn't dead, of course - such creatures could only be killed under a few specific conditions, all of which were very hard to create on purpose. It had simply gathered its savaged form and retreated back into the Nowhere, the dark place that demons came from. There, it would stitch itself back together again, and eventually be back. It might take minutes or decades, depending on how powerful the demon had been.
Sending a quick prayer to whatever version of the UniGod cared to listen, to the effect that it be decades rather than minutes, Rinabaar looked around to survey the battlefield.
They were fighting atop the western wall, the great Witch Stone structure that protected the city at one mouth of the valley it inhabited. It was several hundred meters long, and the battlements were large enough for two carriages to pass each other on it, if you could have somehow lifted them the thirty meters up to the walkway. It was lit by great bonfires at regular intervals, and all down its length, Soldiers and demons were dancing a deadly dance. Rinabaar saw steel flashing in the firelight, saw distorted heads raised to howl in victory over a kill.
The demons were a varied lot. Some were almost human, until you saw the eyes glowing yellow, and until they parted their lips to flash their fangs. Others had lost all human features, appearing as fat worms the size of cows, as many-limbed, skittering things that struck and disappeared between one hardbeat and the next, or as horrors of scales and claws and leathery wings. And they were many - as Rinabaar looked down from the battlements, he saw hordes of them climbing up the walls or milling about on the barren ground beneath. A lot of them seemed to be fighting each other over who would get the honour of attacking the humans first. Demons were creatures of madness and endless spite, not inclined to the orderly tactics and cooperation that humans employed. That was one of the few advantages the humans had over them.
Speaking of which...
"Sixth Squad, return to your post!" Rinabaar bellowed at a handful of soldiers who had gotten overly enthusiastic in pressing an advantage and was leaving their assigned spot behind. "Protect the witch as assigned!"
The witch was a little bald man in a white robe. His hands were clasped and his eyes closed as if he was praying, which only added to his monkish appearance - some witches, apparently in some reaction to always being feared and avoided, liked to make a point of appearing as pious and saintly as possible. Fearful as he looked, though, he was carrying his weight in the fight; every so often, a part of the wall that an especially large group of demons were scurrying up would collapse, dropping the wicked creatures in a heap on the ground outside. Rinabaar meant to make sure that that kept happening.
The witch did have three fearsome-looking gargoyles standing around him, but they were still as the statues they were - he wasn't powerful enough to animate them and turn the wall against the demons at the same time. In fact, there were hundreds of gargoyles along the wall, built into the battlements or even sticking out of the wall itself in relief, but most of them were similarly unused; witches were expected to come to the wall in response to the bells along with the Soldiers, but so far, only a few had appeared.
Ninth Squad was fighting an especially large throng of demons over by his right, and Rinabaar ran to join them, tearing into the demons with powerful strokes of his saber. He wasn't sure where his staff had gone - for the last ten minutes, he had been trying to exercise some control over this part of the battle by no more information than sharp eyes could give him, and no more signaling ability than a loud, booming voice could buy him. Things had become dangerously disordered.
"Where! Are! Those! Reinforcements!" he growled beneath his breath, punctuating every word with a swordstroke, as if demanding an answer from the demons he dispatched. The bells should be bringing all available troops running for the western wall, but if it took much longer, the defenders would be pushed back. Then there would be fighting in the streets, civilian blood on the ground...
Things could have been much worse, he told himself as the Ninth Squad surged forward, scattering the demon pack and sending many of the creatures back into the Nowhere. When he had gotten here with the small group of Soldiers that he had been assigned for the lawkeeping mission he was on - he thought it was perhaps half an hour ago - the human lines had already been threatening to collapse. Rinabaar had managed to shore them up in this spot, more by bellowing a lot and killing demons very effectively than by any kind of strategic masterstrokes, and it seemed that the lines had held everywhere else, too. Still, much more of this, and he thought that they were done for. They hadn't been nearly ready to face an attack of this magnitude.
Ninth Squad dispatched the last demon, and Rinabaar ordered a brief rest - "Two minutes, no more!" - while trying to get his bearings. He looked out over the milling throng of the attackers far below, searching for any sign that they were giving up. They were well within the repelling field generated by the Demesne - they must be in pain, some of the weaker ones even risking true death from what amounted to happiness-poisoning.
Rinabaar looked over his shoulder at the houses of Shadowed Citadel Demesne, willing the civilians hiding in those houses to be happier and force the demons away. Of course, he had to admit in the spirit of fairness, it was probably hard to be especially happy when the bells were roaring all around you, shouting DEMONS! DEMONS! DEMONS! until you wanted to scream in helpless fear. But still easier than when standing here covered in demonic blood and with a leg wound that was not, he could not help but notice, becoming any less painful.
There was a tremble beneath his feet. For a moment, Rinabaar thought that the witch had collapsed the wrong piece of wall, and that it would not collapse beneath him. Then, across at least fifty meters of wall, the gargoyles came to life as one.
Lizards and birds, monkeys and men, medusas and baroque horrors that looked like nothing natural - suddenly, they were no longer statues, but creatures of living stone. Driven by a single will, they lumbered towards the demons, swatting at them with arms and tails and wings of clumsy stone.
Rinabaar blinked and looked at the white-robed witch, wondering dumbly if the man had suddenly gotten a whole lot better. The witch just shrugged helplessly and gave him a shaky smile.
Then Rinabaar heard a familiar voice, snarling and out of breath, chanting arcane words. He turned to see Dara coming up the stairs leading down to the ground on the city side. She was flanked by a few Soldiers, and supported in her stumbling, distracted steps by a handsome young man wearing the tattered ruins of an elegant, pale-blue outfit.
"... eshta ma'raran kosh - kosh - kosh!" Dara snarled, and in several places, Witch Stone bricks flew up into the air and formed clumsy, vaguely humanoid figures that also attacked the demons. Her gargoyles, Rinabaar noted with distracted professionalism, weren't actually very good fighters - Dara could animate more of them at once than any witch he had ever seen, but she had never studied warcraft and so could imbue no fighting skills on her creations. It didn't matter terribly much, though. Even demons had trouble with an enemy that knew no fear, knew no pain, and kept coming at you even after you tore off its head or crushed its chest.
"Enough rest!" Rinabaar ordered his squad. "Onwards! Time to sweep the wall clean!"
***
About half an hour later, he returned to find Dara enjoying a cup of tea that some Soldiers had helpfully produced for her.
It had taken some doing, sweeping the wall clean. A single witch couldn't turn the tide of the whole battle, though she had certainly beaten back the enemy very efficiently along a short stretch of the wall. Still, the troops that had been freed by the securing of that short stretch had formed much-needed reinforcements for other parts of the wall, and slowly the whole thing had snowballed. The arrival of another regiment brought by the alarm bells had settled the matter entirely.
Rinabaar was tired and his leg hurt. His uniform was torn, he was covered in blood and gore, and of all the things he stank of, sweat was probably the most pleasant. He would have very much liked to avoid facing Dara like this. She was bound to see him, now, as an uncultured brute, a man of low nature who was not worth the attention of a brilliant, magnificent woman like her. Truth be told, there had probably never been much hope to the contrary, but he had enjoyed fooling himself that one day, he might be able to make himself so bold as to approach her for a social engagement. Alas.
The man she had arrived with was hovering around her, looking uneasy with the carnage he had witnessed. He, Rinabaar could not help but notice, did not look uncultured or brutish - his features were very elegant, in fact, and while his clothes were torn, they only gave him a look of a gentleman stoically enduring hardships with dignity.
"You asked to see me, Mystic Dara?" he said.
"Yes," Dara said. She got to her feet with a groan hinting at sore muscles and went to stand before him.
Rinabaar carefully fixed his eyes on her face. He had only ever seen Dara in those bulky Mystic's robes before, never in form-fitting silk like the dress she was wearing now. She was, it transpired, magnificently curvy - a fact that only made him more painfully aware of the blood-soaked nightmare vision that he presented.
"I want," she said, "to formally press charges against Mansuur of Ravenscar Hold, caste of Mystics. I accuse him of reckless endangerment, attempted assault, lewd conduct in a public setting, attempt to incite a riot, irresponsible use of witchcraft, and being too fucking creepy."
"I am not certain that that last one is a crime..." Rinabaar said.
"Well, it should be!" Dara said heatedly.
"What about those murders you mentioned?" the blonde man said.
Dara sighed.
"Oh, he's definitely guilty of those too," she said. "I just can't prove it yet. But there are something like a hundred witnesses to those other things. Me and Jalon here, for starters - and while the others seemed very chummy with Mansuur, once you have that many witnesses, some of them will always talk, and that will get the others talking."
"Very good, Mystic," Rinabaar said. "I will handle the matter as soon as I get a moment to spare. I'm afraid that things are looking a little hectic for the near future, though..."
"Look, it's important," Dara said. "I don't know what Mansuur is up to, but it looks like he's leading a deranged cult or something, even aside from the fact that he's killing people. You can leave the mopping-up to other people while you go and slap him in irons."
"I'm afraid that there is more to it than 'mopping up,'" Rinabaar said. "Before I came to see you, I heard back from the force that was sent to harry the fleeing demons. It appears that the demons may be fleeing, but not very far. They are setting camp some miles away from our walls - thousands of demons."
"A demon army?" Jalon said. "Are you telling me that it's a single pack, thousands strong?"
"No," Rinabaar said. "It is many different packs. They fought each other for supremacy even while storming the walls. They were fighting within the camp as our Soldiers surveyed it. But they are nonetheless here, all at once. It is as if they all spontaneously decided to come here at the same time."
"You're not going to press that as one of those theories that is improbable but must be accepted because it's the only possible one, are you?" Dara said wryly.
"No," Jalon said. His face was haunted, his eyes staring into space. "No, they were all called here. He is coming. And each and every demon wants to be here when he comes."
"For the UniGod's sake, who?" Dara shouted.
Jalon just shrugged.
Which means I need to take things off in another direction.
And somehow still have it add up to the situation Dara is in in the prologue.
This is the kind of challenge that makes NaNo so interesting. :D
Chapter four
The carriage rumbled down the cobbled streets of Shadowed Citadel Demesne, the hoof-beats of the gargoyle horses echoing like thunder through the quiet city. It moved quickly, almost going up on two wheels every time it turned a corner.
"For the UniGod's sake, slow down!" Jalon pleaded. He was clinging to one of the stuffed seats, his eyes wide.
Dara was sitting opposite him, pressing her fingers together to keep them from trembling. Her jaw was clenched so hard that it ached.
"Not until we're safe in my home," she said between her teeth. "Mansuur can send literally anything he can imagine after us, and I want to be snug back in my own center of power before I face it."
Jalon looked out the window with trepidation.
"How can you even see where you're going?" he said. "Please tell me you're not just playing it by ear!"
Dara smiled grimly.
"I don't have to see where we're going," she said. "I'm good at this. My gargoyles aren't just puppets on invisible strings - when I animate them, they get a little bit of a brain to go with all that muscle. The horses know the landmarks along the way to my home, and they know how to turn at each one. They'll even weer out of the way of any unexpected obstacles." She paused. "Probably, at least."
Jalon hid his face in his hands.
"Can you guess which part of that I really wish you hadn't said?" he moaned.
"Be a little less afraid of carriage wrecks and a little more afraid of Mansuur!" Dara said. "How do you know him, anyway? What were you doing at his party?"
Jalon looked up and smiled weakly.
"Singing," he said. "It's what I do."
"He invited you, then?" Dara said. She scratched her chin. "That might be important. It seemed like it was your first time there, so if he wanted you there that particular night, then..."
"No... I sort of invited myself," Jalon said. He managed a feeble version of a cocky grin. "I have a certain notoriety, among people who care about music. When I show up at a party and offer to perform, people are usually glad to let me do it."
Dara supposed she could see why. Jalon might have talked like a loon later on, but on the stage he had sung like an angel.
"All right," she said. She raised an eyebrow. "So what was a nice boy like you doing at a place like that?"
"That's... complicated," Jalon said. "I knew something was going to happen, something important and bad. No... that's not right." He grimaced. "I didn't know, but..."
"You suspected?" Dara said. "Made an educated guess? Had reason to believe?"
"No... no..." Jalon laughed, looking a mix between sad and embarrassed. "You know how sometimes you hear a melody, and you know what note comes next, because that's the only one that properly fits?"
"Nope," Dara said.
Jalon shrugged helplessly, and Dara took pity on him.
"But all right, I see what you mean," she said. "If a man was in the garden a moment ago, and now he is warming his hands by the fire, then you don't need to have been watching him to know that he spent the intervening time walking from there to here. There are no other possibilities that don't require making some huge unnecessary assumptions, and therefore that possibility is almost certainly the truth. Yes?"
Jalon shook his head.
"No," he said. "That's just 'made an educated guess' again. It's nothing as... cerebral as that."
Dara winced.
"Fine, a better example, then," she said. "Who stole a tray of biscuits from the pantry, the venal Hedonist or the Ascetic who had just finished fasting for a month?"
"Both seem likely..." Jalon said.
"Exactly," Dara said. "Only if you have a good, long talk with each of them, and you ask around among the people who knew them, then eventually you know both of them well enough to know that in this particular case, one of them was vastly more capable, on this particular day, of this particular crime. It's not because of any one fact you get to know about them. It's because of the pattern that all the facts put together forms."
Jalon smiled.
"That sounds a bit more like it," he said.
Dara grinned smugly.
"Artists tend to think that Mystics have no appreciation for intuition," she said. "As a matter of fact, we use it constantly. We just don't romanticise it. Intuition is nothing more than the part of your mind at work that sees wholes instead of parts."
"I think I might be dealing with a little more than that," Jalon said. "A couple of months ago, I started hearing a song - not literally a song, you understand, and not literally hearing it, but that's the figure of speech that makes the most sense to me - in things that were going in the city. And then I started becoming able to fill in the missing notes. I can tell what is going to happen - not the details, only the general feel of it, and maybe a few fragments of fact."
Dara shook her head.
"That's called 'confirmation fallacy,'" she said. "If those feelings are so vague, then all sorts of possible situations would fit them - so whatever happens, you feel like your foretelling has come true. Add to that a bit of genuine brains and intuition - Mansuur has a bad reputation, so predicting that something nasty is going to happen at one of his parties isn't really a stretch."
"I thought that was all too, at first," Jalon said. He made a face at her. "Mystics tend to think that Artists are always swooning over their feelings, but we do actually use our heads, and we do know that not every thought that goes through them is divine inspiration. But then my girlfriend went to the National Archives and checked a few of my inexplicable insights against the family records there."
"What did she find?" Dara said.
"I wouldn't know," Jalon said flatly. "As far as anyone can tell, she disappeared off the face of the earth on her way back home from there."
"Well, maybe she was just looking for a way to get out of a relationship with a nut who thinks he has psychic powers - did you ever think of that?" Dara said, but she couldn't put much conviction in her voice. All of a sudden, she was stuck with a bunch of improbable possibilities - either Jalon was lying so well that her well-honed eye for such things could not detect it, or else he really had some kind of gift that no one had ever heard of before and some kind of dangerous people were interested in it, or else a number of extremely odd coincidences had actually, well, coincided, including at least one person going inexplicably missing at the exact time when she was looking into an apparent mystery. By Dara's own admission, finding yourself with a number of improbable possibilities meant that you had missed something along the way, and that annoyed her.
Ritual murders and government conspiracies aren't enough, oh no, she thought. Now we have to have psychics, too. I don't know what bothers me most - that this case is so dangerous and out of my league, or that it's so damn cheesy. What's next? Will someone turn out to be my long-lost father?
In the distance, a bell started to ring. Another quickly followed, and another, until there were so many of them crying out that the very air seemed alive with the sound.
"Did you foresee that?" she growled to Jalon, straining to be heard over the din.
"Don't we all foresee it?" Jalon said hoarsely. "Every day of our lives, don't we wake up wondering if it will happen today?"
DANGER! the bells of Shadowed Citadel Demesne sang. DANGER! ENEMIES AT THE GATES! DAMNATION COME TO TAKE US ALL! HIDE YOUR CHILDREN, HIDE YOURSELVES! DEMONS! DEMONS! DEMONS! DEMONS!
***
DEMONS! DEMONS! sang the bells, waking the city to defense. Rinabaar didn't need to be told, though. He knew perfectly well that the demons were here. One of them was chewing on his leg.
"Unhand me, ruffian!" he growled, and slashed down with his saber. Driven by his powerful muscles, the steel bit deep, almost ripping the creature's head - goat-like, but with a mouth filled with sharp carnivorous teeth - off of its naked, disturbingly human-appearing body. Black blood stained the Witch Stone of the battlements, but before it had come to rest, it evaporated into foul smoke, along with the rest of the demon.
Rinabaar stepped away from the wisp of stinking vapour that was all that was left of the demon, wincing at the pain in his leg. He didn't think the wound was deep, but he hoped that it wasn't poisoned - some demons carried venoms in their fangs that could kill you before a healer could get to you.
The demon wasn't dead, of course - such creatures could only be killed under a few specific conditions, all of which were very hard to create on purpose. It had simply gathered its savaged form and retreated back into the Nowhere, the dark place that demons came from. There, it would stitch itself back together again, and eventually be back. It might take minutes or decades, depending on how powerful the demon had been.
Sending a quick prayer to whatever version of the UniGod cared to listen, to the effect that it be decades rather than minutes, Rinabaar looked around to survey the battlefield.
They were fighting atop the western wall, the great Witch Stone structure that protected the city at one mouth of the valley it inhabited. It was several hundred meters long, and the battlements were large enough for two carriages to pass each other on it, if you could have somehow lifted them the thirty meters up to the walkway. It was lit by great bonfires at regular intervals, and all down its length, Soldiers and demons were dancing a deadly dance. Rinabaar saw steel flashing in the firelight, saw distorted heads raised to howl in victory over a kill.
The demons were a varied lot. Some were almost human, until you saw the eyes glowing yellow, and until they parted their lips to flash their fangs. Others had lost all human features, appearing as fat worms the size of cows, as many-limbed, skittering things that struck and disappeared between one hardbeat and the next, or as horrors of scales and claws and leathery wings. And they were many - as Rinabaar looked down from the battlements, he saw hordes of them climbing up the walls or milling about on the barren ground beneath. A lot of them seemed to be fighting each other over who would get the honour of attacking the humans first. Demons were creatures of madness and endless spite, not inclined to the orderly tactics and cooperation that humans employed. That was one of the few advantages the humans had over them.
Speaking of which...
"Sixth Squad, return to your post!" Rinabaar bellowed at a handful of soldiers who had gotten overly enthusiastic in pressing an advantage and was leaving their assigned spot behind. "Protect the witch as assigned!"
The witch was a little bald man in a white robe. His hands were clasped and his eyes closed as if he was praying, which only added to his monkish appearance - some witches, apparently in some reaction to always being feared and avoided, liked to make a point of appearing as pious and saintly as possible. Fearful as he looked, though, he was carrying his weight in the fight; every so often, a part of the wall that an especially large group of demons were scurrying up would collapse, dropping the wicked creatures in a heap on the ground outside. Rinabaar meant to make sure that that kept happening.
The witch did have three fearsome-looking gargoyles standing around him, but they were still as the statues they were - he wasn't powerful enough to animate them and turn the wall against the demons at the same time. In fact, there were hundreds of gargoyles along the wall, built into the battlements or even sticking out of the wall itself in relief, but most of them were similarly unused; witches were expected to come to the wall in response to the bells along with the Soldiers, but so far, only a few had appeared.
Ninth Squad was fighting an especially large throng of demons over by his right, and Rinabaar ran to join them, tearing into the demons with powerful strokes of his saber. He wasn't sure where his staff had gone - for the last ten minutes, he had been trying to exercise some control over this part of the battle by no more information than sharp eyes could give him, and no more signaling ability than a loud, booming voice could buy him. Things had become dangerously disordered.
"Where! Are! Those! Reinforcements!" he growled beneath his breath, punctuating every word with a swordstroke, as if demanding an answer from the demons he dispatched. The bells should be bringing all available troops running for the western wall, but if it took much longer, the defenders would be pushed back. Then there would be fighting in the streets, civilian blood on the ground...
Things could have been much worse, he told himself as the Ninth Squad surged forward, scattering the demon pack and sending many of the creatures back into the Nowhere. When he had gotten here with the small group of Soldiers that he had been assigned for the lawkeeping mission he was on - he thought it was perhaps half an hour ago - the human lines had already been threatening to collapse. Rinabaar had managed to shore them up in this spot, more by bellowing a lot and killing demons very effectively than by any kind of strategic masterstrokes, and it seemed that the lines had held everywhere else, too. Still, much more of this, and he thought that they were done for. They hadn't been nearly ready to face an attack of this magnitude.
Ninth Squad dispatched the last demon, and Rinabaar ordered a brief rest - "Two minutes, no more!" - while trying to get his bearings. He looked out over the milling throng of the attackers far below, searching for any sign that they were giving up. They were well within the repelling field generated by the Demesne - they must be in pain, some of the weaker ones even risking true death from what amounted to happiness-poisoning.
Rinabaar looked over his shoulder at the houses of Shadowed Citadel Demesne, willing the civilians hiding in those houses to be happier and force the demons away. Of course, he had to admit in the spirit of fairness, it was probably hard to be especially happy when the bells were roaring all around you, shouting DEMONS! DEMONS! DEMONS! until you wanted to scream in helpless fear. But still easier than when standing here covered in demonic blood and with a leg wound that was not, he could not help but notice, becoming any less painful.
There was a tremble beneath his feet. For a moment, Rinabaar thought that the witch had collapsed the wrong piece of wall, and that it would not collapse beneath him. Then, across at least fifty meters of wall, the gargoyles came to life as one.
Lizards and birds, monkeys and men, medusas and baroque horrors that looked like nothing natural - suddenly, they were no longer statues, but creatures of living stone. Driven by a single will, they lumbered towards the demons, swatting at them with arms and tails and wings of clumsy stone.
Rinabaar blinked and looked at the white-robed witch, wondering dumbly if the man had suddenly gotten a whole lot better. The witch just shrugged helplessly and gave him a shaky smile.
Then Rinabaar heard a familiar voice, snarling and out of breath, chanting arcane words. He turned to see Dara coming up the stairs leading down to the ground on the city side. She was flanked by a few Soldiers, and supported in her stumbling, distracted steps by a handsome young man wearing the tattered ruins of an elegant, pale-blue outfit.
"... eshta ma'raran kosh - kosh - kosh!" Dara snarled, and in several places, Witch Stone bricks flew up into the air and formed clumsy, vaguely humanoid figures that also attacked the demons. Her gargoyles, Rinabaar noted with distracted professionalism, weren't actually very good fighters - Dara could animate more of them at once than any witch he had ever seen, but she had never studied warcraft and so could imbue no fighting skills on her creations. It didn't matter terribly much, though. Even demons had trouble with an enemy that knew no fear, knew no pain, and kept coming at you even after you tore off its head or crushed its chest.
"Enough rest!" Rinabaar ordered his squad. "Onwards! Time to sweep the wall clean!"
***
About half an hour later, he returned to find Dara enjoying a cup of tea that some Soldiers had helpfully produced for her.
It had taken some doing, sweeping the wall clean. A single witch couldn't turn the tide of the whole battle, though she had certainly beaten back the enemy very efficiently along a short stretch of the wall. Still, the troops that had been freed by the securing of that short stretch had formed much-needed reinforcements for other parts of the wall, and slowly the whole thing had snowballed. The arrival of another regiment brought by the alarm bells had settled the matter entirely.
Rinabaar was tired and his leg hurt. His uniform was torn, he was covered in blood and gore, and of all the things he stank of, sweat was probably the most pleasant. He would have very much liked to avoid facing Dara like this. She was bound to see him, now, as an uncultured brute, a man of low nature who was not worth the attention of a brilliant, magnificent woman like her. Truth be told, there had probably never been much hope to the contrary, but he had enjoyed fooling himself that one day, he might be able to make himself so bold as to approach her for a social engagement. Alas.
The man she had arrived with was hovering around her, looking uneasy with the carnage he had witnessed. He, Rinabaar could not help but notice, did not look uncultured or brutish - his features were very elegant, in fact, and while his clothes were torn, they only gave him a look of a gentleman stoically enduring hardships with dignity.
"You asked to see me, Mystic Dara?" he said.
"Yes," Dara said. She got to her feet with a groan hinting at sore muscles and went to stand before him.
Rinabaar carefully fixed his eyes on her face. He had only ever seen Dara in those bulky Mystic's robes before, never in form-fitting silk like the dress she was wearing now. She was, it transpired, magnificently curvy - a fact that only made him more painfully aware of the blood-soaked nightmare vision that he presented.
"I want," she said, "to formally press charges against Mansuur of Ravenscar Hold, caste of Mystics. I accuse him of reckless endangerment, attempted assault, lewd conduct in a public setting, attempt to incite a riot, irresponsible use of witchcraft, and being too fucking creepy."
"I am not certain that that last one is a crime..." Rinabaar said.
"Well, it should be!" Dara said heatedly.
"What about those murders you mentioned?" the blonde man said.
Dara sighed.
"Oh, he's definitely guilty of those too," she said. "I just can't prove it yet. But there are something like a hundred witnesses to those other things. Me and Jalon here, for starters - and while the others seemed very chummy with Mansuur, once you have that many witnesses, some of them will always talk, and that will get the others talking."
"Very good, Mystic," Rinabaar said. "I will handle the matter as soon as I get a moment to spare. I'm afraid that things are looking a little hectic for the near future, though..."
"Look, it's important," Dara said. "I don't know what Mansuur is up to, but it looks like he's leading a deranged cult or something, even aside from the fact that he's killing people. You can leave the mopping-up to other people while you go and slap him in irons."
"I'm afraid that there is more to it than 'mopping up,'" Rinabaar said. "Before I came to see you, I heard back from the force that was sent to harry the fleeing demons. It appears that the demons may be fleeing, but not very far. They are setting camp some miles away from our walls - thousands of demons."
"A demon army?" Jalon said. "Are you telling me that it's a single pack, thousands strong?"
"No," Rinabaar said. "It is many different packs. They fought each other for supremacy even while storming the walls. They were fighting within the camp as our Soldiers surveyed it. But they are nonetheless here, all at once. It is as if they all spontaneously decided to come here at the same time."
"You're not going to press that as one of those theories that is improbable but must be accepted because it's the only possible one, are you?" Dara said wryly.
"No," Jalon said. His face was haunted, his eyes staring into space. "No, they were all called here. He is coming. And each and every demon wants to be here when he comes."
"For the UniGod's sake, who?" Dara shouted.
Jalon just shrugged.