Chapter 337: Infected [3]

Kane looked at the bitten man’s hands.

Under the blood, the veins along the wrist and forearm had begun to darken, thin black lines pushing under the skin like ink spilled in water.

The tribesman’s eyes were still his own, barely, but the corruption was already past the wound and running the network of his nerves.

Kane didn’t ask another question.

Mjoldr rose and fell in one clean motion.

Slash.

The head came off. The body dropped. Black-tinged blood pooled on the gate stones.

No one in the arch spoke.

Thora’s jaw tightened once.

Misha’s face stayed flat.

Kessa only exhaled through her teeth.

The elven watchers looked away and then back to the shaking gate, where the yellow-eyed wave was already climbing over its own dead to reach the wood.

"Watch towers," Kane said.

"Now. I want eyes on the full approach and every angle they can use to flank the bars. If anything bigger than a man is moving in that tree line, I want it called before it hits."

They ran.

Stone steps took them up into the nearest wall walk.

Elven archers were already loosing in controlled volleys.

Below, the corrupted tribes pressed the gate in a mindless, focused mass, shouting, clawing, jumping on each other’s backs to gain height against the timbers.

They weren’t scattered, predators.

They were a single intention wearing hundreds of ruined bodies.

Bone charms still swung at some throats, useless.

Paint ran with blood and dirt.

Yellow eyes never blinked.

"Loose!" an elven captain shouted.

"Eyes and throats! Do not waste shafts on the ones already down!"

Arrows punched into the press.

Bodies fell and were climbed over without pause.

A second rank of elves along the wall raised their hands and cast mana flares that burst into white-hot sheets over the front of the wave.

Corrupted flesh caught and burned.

The smell rolled up the stone, thick and wrong.

The burning ones didn’t stop.

They kept clawing at the gate with their hands on fire, mouths open in screams that had nothing human left in them, trying to prize the bars by pure mass and refusal to feel pain.

Kessa leaned over the parapet, gauntlets braced, ears flat.

"They don’t break. Fire, arrows, the ones you already killed, nothing turns them aside. They only want the door."

"Because something on the other side of those stones told them the door is the point," Kane said.

He tracked the tree line while he spoke, Mjoldr resting against the wall walk.

"The charms were never protection. They were markers. The teachers used the bands until the bands were ready to be spent."

Thora’s compact axe sat in her hand as it had always been there.

"Then we spend them first. How long do the bars hold if this is all they send?"

An older elven warder answered without looking away from his next cast.

"Against men? Hours. Against this, against bodies that do not care if they burn, less. They will pile themselves into a ramp if we let them."

Misha’s voice cut across the wall, sharp and practical.

"Rotate the casters. Do not let the same line empty their reserves on the first wave. Firlia—signal the second ring and the Queen’s guard. This is no longer an outer-post problem."

Firlia was already moving along the walk with a signal banner, green hair plastered to her neck with sweat, mouth set in a thin line.

Below, the burning front of the wave finally collapsed under its own fuel.

The press behind it simply climbed the smoking corpses and started again.

Yellow eyes. Torn hands.

The same flat hunger for the gate.

Then the forest made a different sound.

A high-pitched roar tore out of the tree line: too big, too close, wrong in the same register as the warm stones.

Elves along the wall froze for a fraction of a second between volleys.

Kane’s head snapped toward the noise.

The elephant that broke from the brush was larger than any living animal had a right to be.

Its hide was dark and thickened into overlapping plates.

Its tusks were the color of old blood.

When it screamed again, the yellow-eyed tribes in front of the gate scattered from its path without any other sign of self-preservation, as if even the corrupted recognized a heavier piece on the board.

"HURRY!" a guardsman on the far tower screamed.

"All shafts on the beast—now!"

Archers shifted.

A storm of arrows hammered the elephant’s head and shoulders.

Most of them sparked off or hung in the thickened skin without finding depth.

Mana flares burst against its side and left scorched patches that did not slow it.

The animal put its head down and ran.

It stomped through its own allied dead without noticing.

Bodies burst under the weight. It hit the gate like a siege engine that had learned to hate.

BOOM!

The crack was enormous.

Timber screamed.

The left bar bent.

The gate half-opened in a twisted wound of wood and iron, wide enough that the yellow-eyed flood immediately tried to pour through the gap.

Elves on the ground level shouted and shoved the backup braces into place. Kane was already moving toward the stairs.

"Second hit incoming!" Griselda called from a higher perch, wings half-spread.

"It is lining up again!"

The elephant backed up through the press, turned, and charged a second time.

This impact finished what the first had started.

The gate blew inward in a spray of splinters and broken hinges. The corrupted tribes poured through the opening in a screaming yellow-eyed tide, climbing over the wreckage, leaping onto the nearest elves, biting, clawing, dragging bodies down into the yard.

Screams rose inside Sylvander, not only from the gate, but from the nearer streets as the first civilians saw what had come through the wall.

Kane hit the yard stones at a run.

"Hold the arch!" he shouted.

"Do not let them reach the inner lanes! If it looks at you wrong, end it! Thora, with me on the breach! Kessa, take anything that climbs the side walls! Misha—get the casters off the open walk and onto the second ring before that animal decides the towers are next!"