Chapter 116: I will start

I lifted my other hand and cradled her jaw. Her skin was hot under my thumb. She leaned into my touch with a small, helpless sound, and her eyelids fluttered.

"Barry," she whispered. It wasn’t a protest. It wasn’t anything I could name. It was just my name, soft as a prayer.

I bent my head. She tilted her face up to meet me. Our noses brushed, and I felt her lashes flutter against my cheek, and the whole room narrowed down to the inch of air between our mouths.

Closer.

Closer.

*BOOOOOM!*

The whole house shook.

The window blew inward in a shower of splintered wood, and a blast of hot air tore through the room, snuffing the lamp out like a candle. Dust and straw rained from the ceiling. Somewhere very close, a woman screamed, and then a bell began to ring, wild and frantic, tolling over and over without pause.

Qing Yan was out of the bed in a heartbeat.

She snatched her fans off the table and spun toward the broken window, her robes flaring around her. The flush on her face was still bright, but her eyes had gone sharp as knives, and when she looked back at me, every trace of softness was gone behind a wall of fierce, trembling fire.

"That is not dawn," she said.

"No," I said, already on my feet, the weight of my aura spilling out through the dark. A red glow lit the sky beyond the shattered window, and I could hear the distant roar of a thousand throats. "That’s an early arrival."

She looked at me for one more second. Her cheeks were burning, her chest still rose and fell too fast, and I knew she was thinking of what had almost happened. So was I.

"This conversation," she said, in a voice that shook only slightly, "is not finished."

"I wouldn’t dream of finishing it now," I said, and gave her my crooked grin. "Ready, Fire Empress?"

"Do not call me that."

But she was smiling, a small, fierce, dangerous smile, and she snapped her fans open with a bright clean crack. Then We ran out into the burning night.

The sky over the northern ridge was the color of a forge. I stood on the porch, watching the veil go. It had looked like heat shimmer that afternoon. Now it looked like ice on a river in spring.

Beyond it, torches. Thousands of them, strung along the mountainside like a necklace somebody had thrown down.

"They marched through the night," Jiang Wei panted, skidding to a stop in front of us with his compendium under one arm and his sword in the other hand. His hair was standing straight up. "The patrol bodies, someone found them hours early. They didn’t camp. They just came."

"How long does the veil hold?"

"I don’t know. It’s been hit by something, a ram or a spell. Every time it rings, it loses a layer." He swallowed. "The Lord’s on the roof of the hall."

I looked. Han Shuo was against the red sky, standing on the ridge of the long timber hall with his hands folded in his sleeves. He wasn’t doing anything I could see. But every time the veil rang, his shoulders took the hit, a small, steady flinch, like a man holding a door closed against a crowd.

"Right," I said. "Where do they come in?"

"The north pass. Reaper’s Throat. It’s the only road wide enough for an army." Jiang Wei pointed. "Everything else is cliff."

"Then that’s where I’ll be. Get the villagers moving to the south end. Anyone who can’t fight goes first. Anyone who can fight goes to the pass, but they hold the slopes and the archery posts. Nobody goes into the road itself."

"Why not?"

"Because the road is where I’m going to be standing," I said, "and I don’t want to step on anyone."

He stared at me. Then he nodded and ran.

Qing Yan had come out behind me, fans already open. She didn’t look at me directly. The color in her face hadn’t entirely gone down.

"Stay close," I said.

"I intend to." She snapped Dusk shut against her palm. "Do not think the earlier matter has been forgotten."

"I wouldn’t dare."

"Good."

....

The Throat was a notch in the mountains about two hundred paces wide, with sheer walls on either side and a dry streambed running down the middle. The villagers had been busy. Somebody had strung rope across the lower slopes and hung bundles of oiled brush from the ledges. Archers crouched behind boulders. The scarred woman from the gate, whose name turned out to be Captain Ru, was walking the line with a bow in one hand, saying very little to anyone and somehow settling them all.

She saw me coming and didn’t waste time.

"How many?"

"Ten thousand," I said. "Maybe more."

She nodded. "We have four hundred who can shoot and about the same who can swing a blade. The rest are children and grandmothers."

"I’ll take the road. You keep the slopes. Don’t waste arrows on anything armored. Aim for the eyes and the joints, and kill the ones carrying torches first, because the dark will make them hesitate."

"Why?"

"Because it’s what I’d do if I were attacking from the dark and somebody kept putting out my lights." I shrugged. "I’m a bad person to be fighting. I think like a thief."

She studied me for one second longer, then gave a single short nod and went back down the line.

The first demons came around the bend in the road a minute later.

They weren’t the wolf-lizards from the slave line. These were something else: broad, low-slung things on four legs, with plated hides and mouths that opened vertically, like a pair of shears.

"Hell hounds", Qing Yan said quietly. They were running at the head of the column and there were hundreds of them, a flood of black armor pouring down the dry streambed, their paws striking sparks off the stones.

"I’ll start," I said.

"Barry—"

I stepped out into the road. I don’t use speeches in battle. Mostly because I can’t remember them. I just let my aura come up from my core and spread it out in front of me like a hand, and when the first hound leapt, I caught it by the jaw and slammed it into the ground so hard the rock cracked. The next two went down under my fists. The fourth came in low and I stepped on its neck.