The near-dawn air was brisk, thin enough at this height that Harold's breath came out in a faint mist, and below them the mountain face dropped away in a series of shelves, talus slopes, and sheer drops that added up to something slightly under half a mile of controlled falling. The shelf was still dark — the sun wasn't above the ridge yet, just the grey pre-dawn pressing in from the east, lightening the sky without illuminating anything.
Harold looked down at the fortification. From here, the lizardmen's wall looked like a seam in the rock, the torchlight along its upper edge small and steady. The ritual circle was lit. A deep red glow pulsed from behind the second fortification, slow and rhythmic, like something breathing.
"Timer?" he said.
Carter looked at the light cresting the horizon. "Seven minutes, give or take. Drums should start soon."
Fitch was crouched at the edge of the ridge with controlled alarm. Dalen stood beside him with both hands in his pockets and his chin tucked, staying warm. Henri had his arms crossed and was watching the ritual circle with unusual attention.
Jack was sharpening his axe.
Harold turned to the group and pulled the vials from his coat. Twelve of them, in a padded roll, and he set them out on the nearest flat rock and let the group look. The solution inside was a pale gold — not the clear gold of a proper featherfall, but something murkier, with a faint suspension that moved when the vials tilted.
"These are the featherfall potions," Harold said. "I taught Finn to make them, but they are not the best." He picked one up and turned it between his fingers. "They are not, technically, real featherfall potions."
Elroy's hand went up. "Question, sire, a simple query if you will — what does that mean, technically?"
"Means the fall rate reduction is about fifty to sixty percent instead of ninety, and the duration's shorter, so if you hit a rock face at the wrong angle, trust me, you'll feel it." Harold set the vial back down. "The descent is manageable. Hit the ledges with your knees bent, use your mana on the longer jumps, and don't try to land standing up."
Jenkins wrote this down in the small field notebook he kept tucked in his chest pocket.
Carter looked at him. "What are you writing? He said three things."
Jenkins looked up without a trace of embarrassment. "Ah, Guard Commander Carter. Glad you asked." He held the notebook up slightly. "I'm taking notes for the book I'm writing. It's come to my attention that we live exciting lives and the common people deserve to share in our experiences."
"Inspiring the masses," Elroy said, nodding with great solemnity. "We feel it's our responsibility."
Ren turned to Corwin. Corwin was already looking at Ren. They both started quietly laughing at the same time. "Ah fuck, they're gonna be famous."
Henri leaned six inches toward Dalen and said, very quietly, "I don't think I can do this."
Dalen watched Jenkins tuck away his quill. "Stay here then; I'm sure you can redeem yourself guarding the top of this mountain," he said.
"What's the good news?" Fitch asked, still working to control his grin.
Harold rolled his eyes. "The good news is that our bodies can take landings that would kill a normal man, so we have a meaningful margin for error." He looked at the group. "The bad news is we're still going to feel it." He pocketed the vial roll and began distributing. "Knights, you've already got your potions — keep your bows until it's unsustainable. When you're out of arrows, you drop to swords and follow us down. No heroics on the rock face. This is not the time to discover your mountaineering instincts."
From the valley below, faint but definite, came the first bass beat of the legion drums warming up.
Everyone went still and listened to it carry up the mountain.
"There it is," Carter said.
Harold looked down the mountain. "Let's go."
The first drop was a twelve-foot ledge onto a talus slope, and Harold took it with his knees bent the way he'd told everyone else to, hit the slope rolling, and came up moving with loose stone skittering under his boots. Carter landed two feet to his right a half-second later, took one step, and steadied. Corwin came down last on the first ledge and hit at an angle that sent him sideways along the skree in a controlled slide that ended with him on one knee and a colorful string of profanity under his breath.
Jack landed on the same ledge without apparent effort, already scanning downward for the next route.
The next section was a mix — a diagonal crack in the rock face that could be traversed sideways with hands and boots, opening onto another small ledge, then a twenty-foot drop that Harold took running, felt the potion engage as mild resistance against his fall, and still hit the slope hard enough to jar his teeth and bounce him forward onto both hands. He pushed up, moving and kept going. Beside him, Elroy had landed in a seated position and was making his way down the skree on his backside with committed dignity.
From somewhere up the slope, Henri made a sound Harold had never heard from him before — a brief scream of fear that Dalen stopped him from continuing.
They were two hundred feet from the shelf when a loose stone under Carter's boot cracked loose and skittered down the face, bouncing twice, and disappeared into the dark below with a sound like a dropped pan.
The lizardman on the shelf edge turned its head.
Harold had a single second of watching it look up, and then the first arrow from the ridge came down and took the creature through the neck — a mana-enhanced shot from two hundred feet above that dropped it before it finished raising the alarm — but it had opened its mouth, and whatever sound had started coming out of it had carried the four feet to the nearest patrol, and those ones looked up too.
"Down!" Harold yelled and jumped.
The landing was rough — he hit the shelf floor at a run, stumbled two steps, got his footing, and came up with his sword already drawn. Beside him, the rest of the ground force was landing in a ragged line, boots on stone, some of them better than others. Fitch came down clean and already drawing a javelin.
From the ridge above, the knight archers were working. Arrows hammered down into the shelf at angles the lizardmen on the ground couldn't easily cover — variant lizards first, the bigger ones with the banded scale, then anything giving orders. The arrows hit hard. Most didn't penetrate the heavier scale and armor the way Harold's mana quality would have, but they punched through lighter hide, split the gaps, knocked creatures down, and created confusion.
Harold's arm came forward and he threw his first javelin into the mass of lizardmen scrambling to form a response forty feet ahead, and the men around him threw theirs a half-beat behind, and over a hundred javelins hit a scrambling mass of lizardmen at close range, and they stopped existing. Into that gap, Harold pulled the first explosive vial from his coat and threw it sidearm into the widest cluster he could see while most of the knights behind him did the same thing. Any resistance around the fortification disappeared as lizards were tossed around like leaves in a tornado.
The concussion hit him in the chest, but he was already pointing. "The circle! Let’s move! Knights to the wall!"
Carter fell in on his right shoulder without being told. Ren and Corwin spread wide and forward, opening the lane. Elroy and Jenkins were already ahead, diving into the dispersed formation with abandon.
Then Harold saw the bodies before the smell hit him.
They were arranged around the outer ring of the circle in rough stacks — just thrown down like refuse. Men and women, children, some in Legion armor, some in plain clothes, bound and positioned. Multiple stacks of hundreds of humans drained of their blood for the lizard's spells.
The blood magic hadn't been subtle about what it needed. Dalen came up on Harold's left, and he could feel his anger without looking at him. Henri turned and started to violently puke.
The five ritualists inside the circle were in motion — the four outer ones in their plain robes turning from their positions as Harold's force came across the last thirty feet, and the fifth, the center one, not turning at all, still facing away from them toward the circle's interior with both hands raised, her headdress catching the red light in its carved bone and hammered metal. The ritual dagger in her right hand was moving in a slow, deliberate arc, and the circle's pulse had quickened.
Then the spell went out as they were rushing the circle.
Harold felt it leave before he saw it — a wave of pressure, not directed at him, passing through him and over him and beyond, outward across the shelf in every direction. Under his boots the stone vibrated with it. The lizardmen around them, scrambling and disorganized from the javelin volley and the explosives, straightened and steadied like someone had grabbed them by the collar. Their movements sharpened. The ones on the ground getting up moved faster than they should have been able to.
The four outer ritualists stepped out of their positions and came forward with their daggers, and the fifth didn't move at all.
"The ritualist buffed them!" Harold raised his sword and channeled mana through the blade — the bright, dense quality — and in the grey pre-dawn dark the blade lit the shelf like a lamp, white and clear, and he could see every face around him sharpen in the light of it.
"For the Empire!"
He didn't push his aura out. He just stopped holding it back.
It came off him like heat from an opened furnace, the thing he kept tamped down and tried to forget because of the memories it brought with it. Years of a locked room and an alchemy bench, years of choosing to get up off the floor every time he didn’t want to, years yelling no no NO NO nO. It wasn't hope. He didn't have a name for it, actually. It was less polished than hope — the decision he made again and again in the dark, that he wouldnt let these bastards win.
His men felt it in their chests like a second heartbeat, and they straightened and let out their own battle cries, and the lizardmen in front of them felt the inverse: the part of Harold that had, at some point in a locked room, stopped sorting things into people and started sorting them into useful and not, and the lizards were so firmly in the second column that the indifference came off him like frozen water, some of them hissed and some of them stumbled, and all of them understood, somewhere in their spines, that whatever this was, they were not going to outlast it.
They fought through it. Of course they did. But they were fighting through mud.
Jack moved first, slipping inside the lead ritualist's dagger reach in a fluid step, and when the dagger came around in a fast arc that should have opened his flank, Jack turned his hip a fraction and let it pass and redirected the arm at the wrist with two fingers, and the dagger's momentum carried the ritualist's arm out and away and left its neck open, and Jack's axe made one short economical arc that dropped the ritualist. He was already turning to the next.
Carter, Ren, and Corwin hit theirs in a pile — Corwin catching a dagger across the thigh early, hissing through his teeth and driving forward anyway, Ren getting an arm around the creature's dagger hand while Carter stabbed into it. It was an ugly, close brawl, and it took longer than any of them would have liked.
Elroy and Jenkins were weaving a complicated dance with the last outer ritualist as they both tried to put the thing down, weapons connecting but glancing off scale while they both took slices from its dagger — until Elroy laid into it with a haymaker that knocked it down and Jenkins stabbed it in the face. "Fuck that guy," they said at the same time, Elroy putting a set of brass knuckles back into his pocket.
Harold was moving to engage the center ritualist.
She turned when he was six feet out, and the headdress caught the light from his sword and threw fragments of it across her face — carved bone, hammered copper, a dark red gem at the center polished to a mirror. Her ritual dagger came up in a guard, and Harold smiled as he moved; he was going to take her apart and find out what she was made of. There had to be a couple of good ingredients in her.
Her first strike came low and fast and he angled his hip into it, let the dagger skate off the plate, grunted when it found the gap anyway and bit into his side, and he drove forward into her space before she could pull it back, hilt coming across her face hard, and she rolled with it and came out the other side already moving, the buff running hot enough in her that he had to force mana into his legs just to keep up. He pushed it through his limbs with the familiar pressure that was half pain and half exultation, and kept moving.
She went for his armpit on the second exchange and he dropped his elbow and caught her wrist on the plate and shoved her wide, following with his sword as she quickly dodged. She went for his throat on the third, and he pulled his chin and took it on the gorget, and the impact rattled his teeth — the dagger was sharper than it had any right to be. Something interesting, when she was dead, he could look at it properly. The headdress too. Something in the ritual construction of her, the way the mana ran through her, reminded him of a compound mid-reaction. Very interesting.
He left the inside of his right arm open on purpose, hesitated just long enough, and she committed — driving hard for the elbow joint, certain she'd found it — and he let her come while his shoulder dropped and his blade came around and his mana sang white-hot through the steel, and his sword went through her torso and kept going.
The red light in the circle went out like a snuffed candle.
The upper fortification was taken, but barely.
The knights had taken it and opened the gate, and the lizardman archers who'd been ranging on the legion forming below had pivoted and were firing on the knights instead, and from the shelf Harold could hear the sustained crack of arrows against stone and the occasional cry of one of his men. The counterattack coming from the shelf was organized and violent — variant lizardmen leading it, the defender-type with layered scale and tower shields moving in squads, and behind them the berserker-variants duel-wielding short blades.
Harold's group hit them in the flank and bought the knights a minute of breathing room, but the buff was still running in the lizardmen's blood, and the numbers on the shelf were ugly, and every engagement cost more than it should have.
Ren caught a shield-edge across the shoulder that spun him hard enough that Harold felt the impact through the stones, and Ren went down on one knee and stayed there for two full seconds with his arm hanging wrong before he stood up and switched his weapon to the other hand and kept going.
Fitch took a dagger through the gap under his arm and went down with a shout, rolling clear of the press and getting a knee under himself and pressing his hand into the wound, blood dark between his fingers. He looked up at Harold with his jaw clenched, and Harold looked back, and Fitch downed a potion with his free hand, and Harold watched his color partially come back, and Fitch got to his feet and went back in.
Corwin was bleeding from a cut across his face, the blood sheeting his chin, and he upended a vial and swallowed it in one motion, and Harold caught the wince when it didn't take the way it should have, and then Corwin was back in the press without a word, still bleeding, hitting harder because of it.
The gatehouse became the focus. They fell back to it to stop the gate from closing, and Harold's world compressed to twenty feet of stone floor around it, his guard holding the stairs while the lizards came up in waves.
A berserker took an arm from a knight two yards to Harold's left — clean through the armor at the elbow — and the knight made a sound Harold wished he hadn't heard, and the knight's partner drove his sword through the berserker's neck and caught his partner before he could go down and dragged him back from the press. The knight who'd lost the arm had his jaw locked into a scream and was pressing his stump into his chest with the other hand. He looked at Harold from the ground with his eyes clear and furious, and Harold held his look for a second and then turned back to the stairs because there was nothing he could do about it, and they both knew it.
A defender launched its glaive at a knight on the wall — the knight deflected it with his shield and sent his own spear thudding into the lizard's body, only for it to bounce clean off the scale, and the knight picked up the glaive without pausing and kept fighting with it, figuring out the weight of it mid-swing.
A portion of his men had broken off to fight at the gate mechanism itself, their shouts of effort carrying over the combat, and one of them was laughing, a high, strange, overtaxed sound that Harold recognized as a man running on empty.
Then, at the edge of his vision, a gap in the press where there shouldn't have been one — a shadow moving wrong against the gatehouse wall — and Harold started to turn, already too slow, and the blade that should have opened his throat got a hand jammed in its path instead, Elroy's left hand closing on the lizard's wrist with a violent grip and Elroy's right fist hit the stealth-lizard in the face hard enough to bounce its head off the stone wall, and the lizard went down with its head at crushed at an angle.
Elroy looked at Harold. He was breathing hard, bleeding from somewhere under his chin, and grinning.
"That'll be one beer, my lord," he said.
Then his grin dropped off his face.
Harold turned to follow his look. Jenkins was down on one knee across the gatehouse floor with a berserker-variant on top of him, and Jenkins's weapon was somewhere else, and he was holding the berserker's sword arm with both hands and it was descending. Elroy was already moving, launching, crossing the distance in strides, shouting something Harold couldn't make into words — and he hit the berserker from the side and they went down together and it got ugly fast and Harold couldn't see Jenkins under it and then Elroy came up bleeding and hauled Jenkins up by the collar and Jenkins's hands were shaking and Elroy had two fingers in Jenkins's face immediately, checking his eyes, talking fast, and Jenkins grabbed his wrist and nodded and they both turned back to the fight without looking at each other again.
Harold's guard was holding the stairs. Barely, and at cost, and the count in the back of Harold's head was negative, but he kept fighting.
Then, from somewhere below the gate, he heard it.
The chant came up the throat of the gatehouse passage in a wave — boots on stone in perfect time, shields knocking rhythm, the legion's marching call rolling ahead of it like a bow wave. Harold's head came up. Around him, without being told, the knights picked it up — two first, then four, then the whole ragged bloody lot of them on the wall, cutting through the combat noise.
The lizardman counterattack pressed one more time, hard, and then the prime century came through the gate at a jog with their shields locked and hit the lizards in the flank, and the whole mass of it buckled.
Harold straightened, blood on his sword arm and his side aching where a spear had found a gap, and breathed.
Then Jack grabbed his arm and pointed.
A lizard warleader was coming through what remained of the lizardman formation, seven feet of heavy-scaled lizardman in banded plate, carrying a warhammer that would have taken two normal men to lift, and it was carving through the legion's prime century like they were furniture. Its motions were efficient — it hit the shield wall at a diagonal, driving into the formation, stalling their advance — and the century that had been solid was scrambling, the centurion shouting commands while they tried to hold.
Harold looked at his guard.
Carter, bleeding from a cut above his ear, jaw set. Corwin, still open across the bridge of his nose, the blood dried now to a dark sheet down his chin, watching the warleader with the flat expression of a man doing math. Ren with his arm still hanging wrong at the shoulder, rotating it carefully, seeing how far it goes.
"I need you all to get me and Jack to their warleader," Harold said. "That's it. Just get us there."
Carter's grimace tightened. He'd done the same math as Corwin. He nodded once.
Ren unslung the banner and shook it out — the Landing's colors snapping in the dawn wind — and held it over his head with his good arm, because if you're going to do something stupid, you might as well announce it.
Corwin looked at the warleader and then at Harold. "Who wants to live forever," he said flatly, then he was moving.
The lizardmen between them and the warleader weren't a mob — they plugged gaps for each other the way soldiers do, and Carter's group wasn't cutting through so much as grinding, every step bought with something. Harold kept his aura directional and low but he knew it wasn't working the way he wanted. He was running down. They all were, their mana nearly spent, and the bodies beaten, the greatest fighters the Landing could field hitting lizards in plate and nearly bounced, pushing through with stubborn screams as they drove deep into the formation. Their path was cleared by one of his guards who was whipping his axe around in a complicated pattern that cut limbs off crushed helmets.
Above them, on the second wall, the legion archers had found angles and were shooting down into the mass, their first volley cutting down enough lizards to give them room to advance, and it was the only reason they were still moving forward.
The warleader saw them coming when they were thirty feet out — a hole opening in its forces where no hole should be — and it turned to meet whatever was making it.
Harold hit the clearing at a sprint and felt the warleader's aura come out to meet him like a wall, something vast and old, and it hit his own, and the contest of it sent his vision white at the edges for one full second before his feet found stone and he pushed back, pushed his mana into the space between them, crushing the lizards and kept going.
Two arrows hammered down in quick succession from the ridge — the best archer-knights he'd brought, mana-enhanced, both of them hitting the warleader on the upper back and both of them glancing off the banded plate with sparks, sinking maybe a quarter-inch before the scale stopped them. The warleader noticed and turned its shoulders to put the thicker dorsal plate between itself and the angle.
The first warhammer swing came wide and horizontal and Harold ducked under it and drove forward, getting inside the arc, his blade coming across the warleader's midsection and skating off the banded plate without finding a gap, and the backswing caught his pauldron and tossed him back several feet into his guard's press and the impact ran from his shoulder down his spine and his vision darkened at the edges, the pain immediate. He ignored it and kept moving.
Jack came in from the right in the half-second the warleader spent on Harold, finding the shoulder joint where it had to allow movement, and his axe went deep into the junction, with the mana-penetration potion behind it — and the warleader's left arm dropped, hanging limp and wrong. The warleader bellowed and rotated, putting the bad shoulder back, and resettled its grip on the hammer and came at Harold again.
Harold set his feet. This was the work Jack had been drilling him on for months, trading hits in the sparring circle with a man who didn't pull his swings, and Harold had spent most of those sessions on the ground, and this was the same problem with higher stakes and less padding. He pushed mana into his legs and moved into the warleader's swing instead of back from it — felt the wind of the hammer, the displaced air, and drove his sword into the armpit as the warhammer carried the lizard's arm across its own body.
"Shiiit," he muttered, pulling back, because his sword had barely sunk in and he knew he'd need more next time.
Above, another pair of arrows hammered down, finding the thinner hide at the warleader's flank, driving a few inches deep, and the warleader bellowed and reached back toward the shaft with its bad arm on reflex, and the shoulder popped wrong with a sound Harold heard.
He closed the distance in that moment alongside Jack, both of them attacking from opposite angles, forcing the warleader to choose — it chose Harold, turning into him, and Jack drove his axe deeply into the rear of its knee, nearly cutting through, and the warleader's leg buckled under it, and Harold drove two steps in and shoved his sword upward through the gap at the neck joint, pushing every grain of mana he had left through the steel, the blade going white-hot, and twisted the blade as it sank in.
He pulled his sword free and stepped back, watching the blood spill from its neck, and the warleader tried to bellow one more time, and the sound came out as a gurgle, and then it threw its warhammer at Harold with the last of what it had.
Harold saw it too late, took it directly on the chest plate, and went down hard.
He lay on the stones for a moment, breathing, staring at the sky going pale above the ridge. Around him the lizardmen were breaking — nowhere to retreat to, the century giving no quarter — and the sounds of the fight were changing, the quality of it shifting from desperate to conclusive.
Boots on stone beside him, and Jack crouched down with his axe across his knees.
"Supposed to dodge those, my lord," Jack said.
Harold stared at the sky. "Fuck you, Jack," he said, and kept breathing.