The torches went up along the wall walk in pairs as the light dropped out of the sky, and Harold stood on top of the gatehouse and looked at what they had.
The ballista towers were still going up behind him — he could hear them, the knock and creak of timber being seated into iron brackets, crew chiefs calling adjustments in annoyed professional voices. Two towers up, third coming. The crews had been working since midafternoon, and they were doing their best to get the towers up.
Out in front of the wall, the ditch was two feet deep across the north and east faces, not finished yet, the scraped earth banked up against the wall base in a rough berm that added a yard to the effective height and steepened the approach. It wasn't what Harold wanted. It was what a few hours of labor could produce, and it would do more than nothing.
The logs were better. Hale's people had pulled timber from the treeline in sections and laid them across the three-hundred-yard approach in overlapping angles, leaving channels between them that funneled toward the wall face in lines the towers could reach cleanly. The lizardmen would have options when they came out of the trees — go over the logs and slow, or come through the channels and compress — and both options ended at the same place: in range and grouped for the artillery.
The archers were already on the wall. Harold had walked the full east and north faces twenty minutes ago and watched them settle in — crossbowmen in sections, longbows at the elevated positions near the corner towers, every third or fourth man with a short axe laid against the inside parapet for ladders and hook lines. He'd given the order himself and watched the legionary quartermaster produce axes from somewhere Harold didn't ask about.
Burning sand was being prepared at the gatehouse — iron cauldrons on braziers, the sand already smoking, the smell of it dry and sharp against the night air coming off the treeline. Medics had their stations set below the wall walk, out of the fall line. Supply runners knew their routes.
Harold turned and looked at the wall walk behind him. One cohort, three centuries in rotation — the others were staged in the courtyard for relief and reserve. The legionaries on the wall had their standard kit plus the axes, and the low sound of preparation moved through them in the way it always did before something: straps checked, quiet words between men who'd been standing next to each other for months, the particular murmur of people who were nervous but had learned what to do with nervous.
Except for two of them.
"Alright, here's the question." Elroy had clearly been sitting on this one for a while. "One year in prison for something you didn't do. Or two years for something you did do — but what you did was so funny that everyone laughed. Even the judge laughed."
Jenkins chewed on that. "What did you do?"
"Doesn't matter."
"It absolutely matters."
"The crime is hypothetical, Jenkins."
"But the time is not, Elroy."
Ren, two steps back: "I’m taking the innocent year. You walk out, people feel terrible for you, you get free drinks for a month, girls think you're sensitive."
"Two years," Elroy said, like he'd been waiting for someone to be wrong. "Two years, you've got a story. You did something and got some cool tattoos. It was funny. Girls love a guy who's done time for something hilarious — it shows character."
Jenkins snorted, "What kind of character? I need to know what you did before I buy any of this."
"It's a hypothetical."
"Is this about that horse you were talking about?" Corwin said, from further back.
"I haven't said horse," Elroy said quickly.
“You just did,” Ren said dryly, chiming in.
"In the context of denying —" Elroy stopped. "Jenkins. Did you tell them about the horse?"
"I didn’t tell anyone about the horse," Jenkins said. "That's on you."
"I've been to prison," Elroy said, pivoting with dignity. "Briefly. I know what I'm talking about."
"How briefly," Carter said, from Harold's immediate right.
"Two days."
"Elroy," Ren said. "That's not prison. That's a bad night."
"It had a cell."
"Was it for the horse?" Jenkins said.
"It was for a situation that involved, peripherally, a horse, that was fine, that went home, that no one was hurt by —"
"I'm taking the two years," Carter said. "You did something worth doing. Innocent years, you've got nothing. Just bad luck and a grudge and maybe a couple black eyes."
"Thank you," Elroy said. "Finally."
"What do you reckon Lord Henri would do?" Jenkins said. "Innocent year or two years."
"He'd demand a private cell," Corwin said.
"He'd surrender on day one to whoever looked most important," Elroy said,
"He'd ask for a baguette," Ren said.
"Oh, he'd get one in prison," Carter snorted.
"Elroy," Churchill said, from directly behind Harold's left shoulder.
Everyone went quiet and still.
"There are five thousand of them." A pause. "Whatever you did with a horse. Keep it to yourself."
"It was funny," Elroy said, quieter. "The judge laughed."
Harold pressed his lips together and looked out over the parapet at the dark treeline, trying to hold in his laughter. Carter, to his right, had turned to face the approach and was doing the same thing.
"My lord." Henri appeared at Harold's left shoulder. He had been somewhere along the wall for the past hour. Harold had asked him to work the wall and get him among the normal legionaries.
“Your legionaries are ready.”
"Good," Harold snorted and looked back at the treeline.
Henri moved off without acknowledging it. Carter watched him go with the skepticism of a man who had decided the jury was still out.
Hale came up the stairs at the east end and walked the wall toward Harold with his hands behind his back, looking at the positioned centuries with the flat unhurried assessment of a man who had checked everything twice and was checking it again because that was the job.
He stopped beside Harold at the parapet and looked out.
"They'll be out of those trees in about an hour," Hale said.
"Reserve century's are staged at the stairwells," Harold said. "The gate is still the weak point but we can cover it from the towers if they look like they are going to breach it."
Hale looked at the approach for a moment. "Channels are going to compress them nicely." He turned back toward the stairheads. "Ballista range is clear from the towers, kill lanes are good, and the ammo is staged if we need it."
The torches along the north face flared in a gust off the treeline, and the shadows between the logs shifted, and Harold looked out at the three hundred yards of cleared ground and waited listening to the soft murmur of conversation and laughter around him. Everyone seemed relaxed as they waited for the assault. It was reassuring that the Legion was about to go into battle, and they were so relaxed about it.
Suddenly, the treeline moved.
The trees at the edge didn't shift, just the dark below them changed texture, and Harold's hands found the parapet. Along the wall, the low murmur cut off as men felt it too.
Harold turned to Ren and Corwin. "Banner."
Ren had it out of the case before Harold finished the word, the pole socketed into the parapet bracket with a practiced two-handed twist, and the banner caught the torchlight as it unfurled — the colors of the Landing snapping in the night wind, bright against the dark.
Carter saw it first. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, sharp and carrying, then cupped his hands. "Come on then, you ugly bastards!”
It spread down the wall fast — someone in the second century yelling that their mother-in-law was scarier, someone further along offering to give them directions back to whatever swamp they'd crawled out of, two legionaries near the east tower getting into an argument about whether lizardmen could even understand insults.
Harold let it run for ten seconds, then put his voice over it, his aura ensuring his voice was heard, carrying it down the wall in both directions.
"Listen up."
The noise dropped.
"Out there —" he pointed at the treeline, "— is everything that wants this world to go back to the dark. Monsters, nests, things that see your family as a meal and your home as a den." He paused. "We don't get to be scared of that. We don't get to lose to that!" His voice dropped a register and hit harder for it. "You are the reason the lights stay on. Every torch in that town behind you — every kid asleep in there — is alive because you're standing on this wall." He looked down the line in both directions. "So when they come out of those trees — and they're coming — you kill them! Every last one! You kill them, and you push the darkness back into the hole it came from!"
He held it a moment.
"That's the job, and maybe we can have a beer after."
The wall was quiet for a breath, and then someone in the third century started banging a shield rim against the parapet, and it picked up, and picked up, and the torches lit the wall bright enough that whatever was coming out of those trees could see every one of them standing there.
The lizardmen coming out of the treeline couldn't hear the individual words. The torches on the wall lit the legionaries well enough — helmets, shields, the banner snapping above — and the sound carried fine.
Harold stood at the parapet and let it run.
"Runners," he said, under the noise, to Hale.
Along the wall, four legionaries with dark vision potions in their systems were already calling positions back — distance, spread, movement pattern — their voices cutting through the noise in flat professional cadence while everyone else just kept shouting.
The first shapes came out of the trees in a low, fast line, at a crouch and spread wide, too far apart for a single volley. Forty of them, sixty, spreading wider as they cleared the treeline. They were fast. Harold had known they were fast, but the speed was still different in person, the way they covered ground in a sustained forward lean with their legs driving, eating the approach in long, low strides.
They hit the logs and the formation fractured — some going over, some around, the gaps pulling them into clusters, and Harold watched the clusters flow toward the channels between the log lines the way water finds low ground.
Hale's arm came down.
The volley came off the east and north faces together, crossed the approach in a half-second, and the first rank came apart in a ragged line — most went down, some twisting away, some taking bolts in the shoulder and the leg and still coming, still covering ground, and Harold watched the second volley loose and watched three of them reach the wall base before the burning sand came over.
The sound they made would give some people nightmares.
He looked back at the treeline and turned to Hale. "Send up the flares. Light the whole approach."
Hale put two fingers up, and the runners went, and thirty seconds later the first flare cracked off the northeast tower — a hard white burst that hung over the approach and turned three hundred yards of cleared ground into noon. The second went up off the southeast corner before the first had faded, amber and wide, and the third from the gatehouse, and between the three of them, the channels and the logs and the ditch berm and everything moving between the treeline and the wall was lit clean and flat from one end to the other.
Their main body was moving.
They came out of the trees in a mass; there was no formation or order to it. Bodies with siege equipment moving through the center, scaling ladders horizontal on their shoulders, hook lines coiled, battering logs held between a series of heavier-looking lizards. The log channels compressed them on both flanks and broke up the assault as they went around and over the large trunks, and Harold watched them pour into the lanes as the towers came online around him.
The mangonels fired together — all four of them, a half-second apart — and the cluster shot came down in a spreading arc, river stones and iron scrap bound in cord that broke apart mid-flight and hit the approach in a forty-foot scatter. The nearest battering ram took it across its body and shed three of the eight lizardmen pushing it. The second cluster landed short of the next one and bounced through a compressed knot of bodies in the channel.
The day's ranging shots had been thorough. The crews weren't guessing.
They sent up two more rounds while the archers worked the approach — crossbows quartering the open ground, longbows picking the channel openings where lizardmen were navigating the log gaps and had to slow. A steady toll, bolt after bolt, taking their time. The main body kept moving anyway, pushing through the losses, closing the ground, and Harold watched the third ram go sideways from a direct stone hit, and the fourth kept going regardless.
Then the lead elements hit the wall base, and the ladders went up, and the archers couldn't depress enough to reach them anymore, so they shifted to firing down the flanks.
Hooks cracked along the east face — four, six, eight in the space of a minute — ropes snapping taut, and the axe crews went to work. Two hooks were cut, but a third held, hook seated at a bad angle, and Harold watched the first lizardman reach the top and come over the parapet fast and low, two short blades moving.
The last flare burned out.
The walk went dark except for torches and Harold drew breath to call for more light — and two flares cracked up from the corner towers simultaneously, green-white and amber, somebody on the crews already moving without being told, and the approach came back.
The fight was on.
They were stronger than Harold had expected. Faster too for their size — he'd clocked the speed in the runner wave — but the ones coming over the wall were built heavier, broader through the chest and shoulders, and they hit the legionaries like something with real weight behind it. The first one took two spear thrusts and kept moving until the third put it down, and the second was already over by then. Shock troops. The runners had been built for ground coverage. These were built for the wall.
The legionaries handled it. Harold watched a man take a blade across the forearm and get pulled back by a medic runner, a potion pressed into his hand before he'd reached the stairhead — but they handled it. Axes and short swords were working the ladder tops, burning sand pouring down at the base around the gatehouse, and the wall was holding.
Except for one section.
Harold saw it before Hale called it — the southeast stretch of the east face, where three ladders had gone up inside a minute and the axe crew had cut one down before running out of angles, and now four lizardmen were on the wall walk and the optio's section was giving ground. They were still fighting, but giving ground, and that was how a breach started.
Harold glanced at Henri.
Henri was already watching it.
"Take a couple of my guards," Harold said. "Sort that out."
Henri's jaw tightened. The refusal wasn't available to him, and they both knew it.
Corwin was already moving up beside him. "Come on then, your highness." He clapped Henri on the shoulder with cheerful violence. "We'll make sure nothing touches your baguette."
While another fell in on Henri's other side. "Wouldn't want to ruin the outfit."
Henri looked at them both with an expression that could have stripped paint, then turned and walked quickly toward the breach, the two guards flanking him.
Harold and Ren watched them go, then turned back to the awaiting lizards.
The main body was still feeding ladders to the wall. They were stacked up outside the wall waiting to go up the ladders. They had more ladders than they had axes; the wall was holding because Bram's people had done their work: the stone face was sealed smooth at the base and reinforced, and they couldn’t sink their claws into the reinforced stone enough to just climb up. Without that, they'd have been over in four places already.
He owed Bram a drink.
The men had found their rhythm — ladder up, crews work it; if it holds, the axe crew takes the climbers; if something gets over it, it meets a spear or sword. Wounded went back, got patched, came back up if it was manageable. Harold watched a legionary climb the stairs with a bandaged shoulder and a short sword in his off hand and retake his position without being told.
Then the noise from the southeast section cut through the rest, and Harold turned.
Henri moved through the breach as he reinforced his body. He came in at an angle that put one lizardman between him and the second, let the first swing wide, stepped inside it, and drove the rapier through the side of its neck and kept moving so the body didn't pin the blade. The second turned to track him, and Ren hit it from the flank with a full shoulder and drove it into the parapet. The other took the third off the wall walk entirely — Harold couldn't see how from here but he saw the explosion of mana.
The fourth backed against the parapet with its blades up, and Henri looked at it for half a second, went through its guard, put the rapier through its eye, and stepped clear of the fall.
The optio of the section — a compact man named Draven — looked at Henri as he’d just been saved by someone he wasn't expecting. "My lord. Thank you." He glanced at Ren and the other knight guard. "All three of you."
Henri looked at him. Then back at the optio, and he mumbled something back before speaking up.
"Resume your position," Henri said and walked back down the wall.
He reached Harold, stood beside him, and looked at the approach without speaking.
Harold let it sit a moment.
"Feels different, doesn't it?" Harold said. "Honest work."
Henri said nothing. He grimaced slightly, but his eyes stayed on the lizards.
Harold turned back to the wall.
The noise was already settling, men stepping back from the parapet, passing water, checking their kits. He turned to Hale. "It's been about fifteen minutes. They're getting settled at the base pretty well." He looked down at the packed shapes below the wall, shields up against the archers, compressed and dense and going nowhere. "I think it's time to let them have it."
Hale's face did something that wasn't quite a smile but had all the same teeth. He turned down the wall and filled his lungs.
"Pattern Red! Pattern Red!"
It went down both faces at once — the call picked up by section leaders, passed along the walk in both directions — and from each squad two soldiers reached into kit bags and pulled out clay orbs, round and rough, nothing like the slim glass vials the potions normally came in. These were heavier. Sealed with wax over a thin clay plug that separated the components.
It was Finn's work. Harold had watched him make a dozen of them in the inn the afternoon leading up to the Thresher King for exactly this. And the clay orbs had come out of his hands looking almost ordinary, which was the part that should have worried everyone more than it did.
The soldiers pulled their arms back and threw.
The explosions were not like the standard issue. The standard-issue alchemical potions cracked and flashed, effective against the smaller kobolds and goblins. These ones went off like someone had relocated a piece of the sky — a deep concussive thud that Harold felt in his back teeth, then the pressure wave, and the base of the wall came apart in fire and noise, and the packed lizardmen who had spent fifteen minutes getting their shields up and their formation tight and their ladders staged suddenly died.
Where they'd had a solid line, they had scattered bodies. Where they'd had shields up, they had gaps. The formation had been the threat; in about four seconds, it was gone, and the ones still standing were stumbling, blades up, with no idea which direction was up.
Harold looked at Hale and nodded.
Hale looked at the runner. "Open the gate. Send them out."
The gate hinges groaned, the timber doors swinging wide, and before the lizardmen nearest to it turned towards the gate, Parker's knights came through it at a run — two centuries of them, mana running hot through their bodies, large weapons already moving, and they hit the scattered remnants of the formation like something dropped from a height. The knights didn't hold formation — they didn't need to, that wasn't what they were for — they fought individually, spreading out, each one inside their own bubble of destruction, mana blades trailing light as they swept through two and three bodies at a stroke.
Behind them came the cohort.
They came out in formation, shields up, dressed to the right, moving at a controlled pace, and where the knights were chaos, the cohort was geometry. They wheeled left out of the gate, found the flank of the largest surviving lizardmen cluster, and hit it.
"Hold! Push!"
Shields slammed out together — a wall of iron and mana-hardened wood driving forward, creating space — and the legionaries behind the shields worked the gaps, short swords finding the seams between scales, most blows landing, some glancing off the thicker patches on the shoulders but enough finding purchase that the lizardmen were losing ground one step at a time and couldn't stop it.
It wasn't a clean slaughter. Lizardmen were strong and some of them had gotten enough of their sense back to fight with real intent, and Harold watched three legionaries go down in the space of a minute — one bad, two bad enough — and watched the medic runners reach them before the cohort had moved another ten feet, potions going in, wounds getting assessed, the two bad-enough ones back on their feet in the time it took the line to advance thirty yards.
The remainder broke.
A few held until they couldn't, a few sprinted for the treeline the moment the gate opened — but once the cohort started pushing and the knights were working the flanks, there was nowhere sensible to stand, and the lizardmen who still had the ability to make decisions started making the one decision that made sense.
They ran.
The knights let them go, and the cohort pushed to the edge of the cleared ground, dressed the line, and held, and the three hundred yards between the wall and the treeline was quiet except for the torchlight and the sound of the optio’s doing their job.
Harold looked out over the parapet at the approach lanes and the broken siege equipment and the bodies and the scattered shards of clay where Finn's orbs had gone off.
"That’s the first wave," Hale said beside him.
"Hmm, they were stronger than the base lizard men. Their regulars are a stronger strain." Harold said.”
He turned to Hale, " Let's start the clean up. We don’t have time to let the boys rest. Let's keep digging that ditch and preparing this ground. The next wave won't be so easy.”