Chapter 270: Sandwiched

Chapter 270: Chapter 270: Sandwiched

The blood rose again, and this time Rowan was ready for it.

Four hundred ribbons lifted from the field at once, a vast, trembling forest of crimson spears hanging over the killing ground like a second sky. Ysolde Thrane stood motionless at its center, with her bare feet in the river and her red eyes fixed on the hill. Her lips moved. She was counting.

"Everyone behind the wall," said Rowan, very quietly. "Now."

The hundred obeyed. They had been waiting for the word. A shiver of movement ran along the rampart as men and women dropped into the trenches and crouched behind the shields, and the hill, for a moment, looked abandoned. In the silence, Rowan stepped to the center of the crest alone, planted the hoe in the soil, and lifted his left hand.

[Summon Earth Elemental]

The ground answered with a roar.

They rose along the rampart in a long, rippling line, a dozen vast, patient shapes of packed clay and gold, each one taller than a house. Moss grew along their shoulders. White asters bloomed in the hollows of their chests. At their head, with a crown of clover and a face as blank and gentle as a river stone, stood Aster, who turned its great head, looked down at its master, and bowed.

"Hold the sky," said Rowan.

They raised their arms.

Ysolde Thrane smiled, and let the spears fall.

They came down in a single, glittering wave, four hundred shafts of living blood, curving through the air in long, graceful arcs. They struck the elementals first. They burst against the clay in sprays of red mist, and the great figures staggered and held. A spear passed through the gap between two of them and kept going, aimed at the trench beyond. Another curled around Aster’s shoulder, thin as a thread.

"Seraphina!" shouted Rowan.

"I have them!"

She stood at the foot of the rampart with her arms spread and her water elemental rising behind her like a wall of clear, shimmering glass. It was twice her height now, a graceful, flowing column, with a faint, pale glow in its depths. She flung out both hands, and it moved.

The water lashed out in a hundred thin, silver tendrils, as fast as striking snakes. Each one caught a spear in mid-flight. Each one wrapped around it, and pulled, dragging the blood into itself, diluting it, spreading the crimson into a pale, harmless pink. The spears shuddered, thinned, and fell apart in pieces, raining down as a fine red drizzle on the stone.

"It works!" cried Lena Ostermann, from the second row, her face wet with tears and spray. "Lady Vane, it works!"

"I know," said Seraphina, through clenched teeth. "Do not stop."

"There are too many," whispered Clara. "There are too many."

She was right. For every dozen spears Seraphina’s elemental swallowed, a dozen more slipped through, curving around the edges of the wall, sliding through gaps. They struck the elementals. They struck the rampart. A few found flesh, and the screams rose again, sharp and short.

"Mirei!" bellowed Caelen. "Now!"

She did not shoot at the woman in the river.

She shot at the sky.

Mirei stood on the highest bastion with her bow drawn to her ear and Zephyr whirling about her in a bright, restless storm. She loosed a single arrow, and her wind elemental caught it, spun it, and flung it outward in a long, shrieking curve. A second arrow followed. A third. They did not fly toward any target. They flew through the spears, in a great, sweeping arc across the whole span of the crimson forest.

And every spear they touched came apart.

Wind is not strong against blood. But it is quick. Zephyr’s cutting edge sliced through the red threads like a scythe through spiderweb, shredding them into drifting mist before they could strike. The arrows carried the elemental’s will into the thickest clusters, and where they passed, the sky cleared.

"Left flank!" she shouted. "Barney! Fire!"

"On it!"

Barney was already moving. He had dropped to one knee at the base of the wall with his hammer planted and his bracers blazing, and the little fire elemental on his shoulder had grown, swelling in a rush of gold and orange until it stood as tall as a man, a living column of flame with two burning coals for eyes. He lifted both hands, and the elemental threw back its head.

It roared.

A wave of white-hot fire rolled across the front of the rampart. It did not burn the spears. It did something better. It boiled them. The blood hissed, bubbled, and flashed into a vast, scalding cloud of red steam, and the shafts of crimson that had been glittering in the sun were simply gone, dissolved into a thick, pink fog that rolled across the field like the breath of a dragon.

"Hah!" bellowed Barney, with ferocious joy. "Try that, you pale, bloodsucking..."

A spear took him in the shoulder.

It came out of the steam from nowhere. Barney grunted, staggered, and went down on one knee. The elemental on his shoulder flared in alarm.

"Barney!" screamed Mirei.

"I’m all right!" He tore the thing free with a snarl, flung it aside, and rose, gripping his hammer in his good hand. His left arm hung useless. A thin, dark thread ran down his sleeve. "I’m... all right. It’s a scratch. Seraphina!"

"Hold still!"

Caelen did not wait.

He had stood at the center of the line since the first spear fell, with his shield raised and his sword in his fist, and every blow that came near him had turned aside. The cloak had warned him. Every time a spear dipped, every time a thread of red curled toward his guard, he had known before it landed, and moved.

But he had counted the numbers. And he understood, with a sudden, cold clarity, that this was not a battle that could be held.

She will not stop.

A spear whipped past his helm, so close that it parted the hair at his temple. Another struck his shield and glanced away. A third found the gap beneath his arm, and drove through the leather, and out the other side.

He did not cry out.

He looked down at the wound. A long, shallow gash ran across his ribs, bleeding freely. It was not deep. It was not dangerous. But something stirred in his chest at the sight of it, a slow, dark, rising heat, like a coal catching fire.

Berserk.

The word rose from somewhere beneath his thoughts. It was not a command. It was an answer.

He drew a long breath.

[Berserk]

The pain came first. It hit him like a hammer, sharp and bright, and he welcomed it. The cut on his ribs, the bruise on his shoulder, the dull ache in his knee from the long night: he gathered them all, one by one, and poured them into the red glow behind his eyes. The glow brightened. His blood ran hot. His muscles swelled. The cloak snapped around him like a storm cloud, and his sword, in his hand, began to hum.

"Caelen," said Mirei, in a thin, frightened voice, from the bastion.

"I’m in control," he said.

He did not look at her. He did not need to. He was looking at the field, at the long, red, trembling forest of blood-spears, and at the pale woman standing beneath it.

She cannot be allowed to do this again.

He vaulted the rampart.

He crossed the killing ground in nine strides.

It should have been impossible. The ground was soft and treacherous, and a thousand spears were falling around him. But Rowan’s spikes had gone back into the earth, and the soft ground had firmed beneath his boots as though the hill itself were holding him up. He ran, and the world slowed around him, and every spear that came for him seemed to hang in the air like a drop of honey.

He cut through them.

His sword moved in a long, silver blur. Each stroke severed three, four, five spears at once, and each time the blood fell away in a spray of red. He took a wound in the thigh. He took another across the back. He did not stop. Every cut he suffered poured another measure of strength into his arms, and his blade rang louder, and the humming deepened.

"Thrane!" he roared.

Ysolde Thrane raised her head.

For the first time, the smile faltered. She saw the man coming through the red rain with his sword blazing and his eyes burning like coals, and she flung up both hands, and the whole forest of spears turned.

They came at him in a single, thundering wave.

He met them head-on.

Something struck his shoulder. Something struck his ribs. He went down on one knee, and came up, and took another step. A spear passed through his thigh, and he kept moving. A spear grazed his temple, and the blood ran into his eye, and he laughed, a short, wild, terrible sound. The blade in his hand burned white.

"Caelen!" It was Mirei, from very far away. "Caelen, come back!"

He did not hear her.

Ten paces from the river, a wall of red rose up in front of him, thick as a house, shimmering and solid. He gripped his sword in both hands, and swung.

It was at that moment that the sky went quiet.

Not silent. Quiet. The roar of the battle fell away, and for the space of a single breath, every sound in the valley seemed to hold itself in. On the hill, Rowan lifted his head. On the river, Ysolde Thrane’s smile died. All across the field, the survivors of the Court and the Deepwatch looked up, in the same instant, toward the east.

Something was coming.

It was not a sound. It was not a sight. It was a pressure, a slow, cold, creeping weight that rolled across the basin like the shadow of a cloud, and wherever it passed, the grass turned gray.

"Oh," said Clara, softly, in the trench. "Oh, no."

They came over the eastern ridge in a long, silent line.

A hundred figures, in plain gray robes.

They did not run. They did not shout. They walked, with unhurried, even strides, spread across the whole width of the valley in a loose, graceful arc. Their faces were calm. Their hands were empty. They looked like pilgrims on their way to a shrine, or gardeners walking out to their rows, and the silver ring on the first one’s finger glittered in the sun.

The Old Throne had come.

They fell on the rear of the Court and the Deepwatch like a scythe falling on wheat.

It was over before it began. The reserve force of the Crystal Court, fifty warriors in transparent plate, who had been standing guard at their own Beacon, saw the gray line approaching, and raised their shields, and formed a wall. It was a good wall. It was the finest in the Cycle. It had held through a thousand years of war.

A gray-robed woman stepped up to it, and laid a single hand against the crystal.

The shield dissolved.

It did not break. It did not shatter. It simply came apart, in a quiet, fine, glittering powder, falling from the warrior’s arm like salt. The man behind it stared at his empty hand. Then the woman touched his chest, and he fell, and did not rise. She stepped over him and walked on.

"No," whispered Thessaly, at the edge of the killing ground.

She had turned. All of them had turned. The forward force of the Court and the Deepwatch, the hundred who had marched on the hill, stood frozen in the open, with the blood of their own dead soaking into the grass, and watched their reserves die at the hands of a hundred silent strangers.

"Ilyen Vael," breathed Marrow Venn, in a voice like a drowning woman’s. "He has not come for the weak. He has come for us."

Rowan watched it from the crest of the hill.

He did not move. He stood at the top of the rampart with the hoe in his hand and the wind in his coat, and he understood, in a single, cold flash, exactly what he was seeing.

A sandwich.

The Court and the Deepwatch were trapped. The hill, with its wall and its thorns and its hundred defenders, lay to the west. The Old Throne, with its gray, silent, unstoppable line, lay to the east. Between them, in a long, narrow, bloodstained strip of grass, the forward force of two great worlds was caught like grain between two stones.

We have the wall, he thought. They don’t.

And the Old Throne doesn’t care about us. Not yet.

"Boss," said Barney, hoarsely, at his shoulder. He was clutching his wounded arm, and his face was gray. "Boss, what do we do?"

Rowan did not answer at once.

On the river, Ysolde Thrane had flung her arms wide, and every spear of blood in the sky had wheeled, as one, toward the east. They struck the gray line like a hailstorm. They did nothing. A woman in a gray robe raised a single hand, and the spears turned to rust and fell.

"They are coming for them," said Seraphina, in a small, shocked voice. "And after them..."

"After them, us." Rowan lowered the hoe. His voice was calm. "But not today. Not before they’ve finished." He glanced at the field, where Caelen was still on his knees ten paces from the river, swaying, his sword trembling in his fist. "Mirei. Go. Get your brother."

"Boss..."

"Go. *Now.*"

She went.

She dropped from the bastion in a swirl of wind and ran, silent and swift, across the killing ground, with Zephyr streaming behind her like a banner. She reached him in thirty heartbeats. She flung her arms around his shoulders, and dragged him upright, and said something fierce and low in his ear. His eyes cleared, slowly, like a fog lifting. He sagged against her, and the red glow behind his gaze faded.

"I’m all right," he rasped. "I’m all right."

"You idiot," she sobbed. "You complete idiot."

"I’m all right."

She half carried him back up the hill.

In the black void above the arena, the Administrators watched in silence.

"Ah," said the Administrator of the Old Throne, in a voice of soft, delicate satisfaction. "There it is. The pincer closes."

"They have been caught," said the Deepwatch, in a thin, rippling whisper.

"They have been removed." The white-robed figure leaned back in his chair. "It will be over by sundown."

"My Court," said the Crystal Court, in a low, ringing, broken chime. "My Court..."

"Will be remembered."

At the end of the arc, a small, ink-black silhouette tilted its head, and looked down at a hillside, and a wall, and a man in a straw hat watching a hundred gray figures walk across a field.

"Interesting," it murmured.

And far below, in the thin gold light of the afternoon, the Old Throne’s hundred reached the river, and the screaming began.