Page 28 of Into the West

His heart clenched, then raced, and he blessed the foresight that had led him to strap on his crossbows and quiver this morning along with his sword and dagger. “I am responding! Tell the guards in the back third to arm up, and form on me at the tail,” he said, turning Arial on her heels and sending her back in the direction he’d come from at a canter. “If they have horses, use them. If they don’t, get running. Brief Isla and Hakkon, set reserves, get some Mage-gazes on the situation and advise. Sound horns in the tail quarter, and get me more information!”

His heart pounded in his ears, keeping time with the drumming of Arial’s hooves. She had entered the particular intensity that made her so prized by Kordas. She wasn’t just “running,” she was running selectively, actively planning steps yet to be taken. She wasn’t compliant, she was determined to get wherever she was pointed. Kordas felt Arial switch up to her “spark” by the rapid, subtle swings of their center of gravity as horse-and-rider, as her hips and withers moved to their fastest route for each stride. Kordas and Arial were a single unit made of man and mare, surging ever faster. To Kordas, his lower back felt like he was rowing while also being the waves; all the momentum flowed, and the wind bowed before them.

His “Guard,” for the most part, consisted of his own personal guardsmen and farmers and hunters who were at least on conversational terms with weaponry. They didn’t really have uniforms at this point, but they at least knew each other. It wasn’t an impressive force by Imperial standards, but it probably passed for an army here.

And if they were lucky, sheer numbers would overwhelm whatever had alarmed the villagers so badly.

A group of about forty guards, mixed between mounted and foot, had gathered for him when he arrived at the end of the convoy, and Arial reared upward when she rounded to stop. Pacing and punching his fist in his palm, with them was the agitated blacksmith and a young lad, who looked ready to promise the moon for some kind of aid. As soon as the blacksmith spied Kordas, he bellowed “You! Come on! We need ye!” and pelted off in the direction of the village.

“You heard him!” Kordas shouted to the hearteningly responsive would-be fighters, about half of whom were mounted. “Move out! Foot, follow him at speed!” Barely slowing by half, Kordas held his crossbow high and shouted, “Engage by heart!” a phrase known by educated soldiers that meant, “Use your best judgment and compassion.” It was a command guiding how soldiers should react to what they were about to see, as well as a reminder that they were going to be seen doing so. At this moment, too little of the situation ahead was known for him to give any more specific orders. The cry bolstered morale immediately. It told soldiers and guards that their senior commander trusted them, and that led by him, theirs was a righteous cause. The sound of senior soldiers repeating “Engage by heart!” fell away behind Kordas, and his heart surged. It was the first time he’d ever given that command outside of games, and it felt right.

Kordas and the mounted guards overtook the reluctant blacksmith and passed him, leaving him to serve as a guide for those on foot. By horse, the distance was trivial, yet Arial already outdistanced the escorting riders. Bad form, for several reasons, and Kordas noted, hopefully not as a last thought, that a field commander being the first upon a battlefield was never likely to end well. The village was just over a hill, and Arial answered his urging with her best speed again. He’d be there in a heartbeat.

Screams met his ears as the village of rock-built cottages came into sight, and he drew the compact, deadly light crossbow and cocked it by the lever of the pommel. He had a bolt nocked and locked before he saw the cause of those screams.

With a belly-twist of revulsion and horror, what he saw, he instantly knew, were no natural creatures. His first impression was that they were voids, an absence of light, not just “black,” but like light wasn’t allowed to be near them. When they moved, the things didn’t hold a definite outline. Their edges stuttered in and out randomly, as if they were sun-shimmers tearing the air itself. Mages like Kordas were more used to otherworldly and horrific things than nearly anyone except, maybe, the rare Summoner, and these things were unnerving to Kordas. The stone in his stomach told Kordas that these had never even been natural creatures.

Oh no, no, tell me we didn’t open up a demon pit. Tell me it’s not an overrun. Tell me we didn’t cause this.

These unnatural foes they faced were a pack of . . . leaping, dodging, vanishing things. Things that looked like the bastard children of a snake and a greyhound, by way of a demonic midwife, with enough of a mastiff to make them enormous. They didn’t so much run as flow through each other’s paths with those shuddery, waving silhouettes only adding to their menace. In color they were a smoky black, with skin that gave an impression of smooth scales rather than hair when it gave up some light. Reactant to their movements, strobes of colored light in vaguely geometric designs lit up and moved down their bodies. The skin displayed afterimages of the creature’s background or others of their kind every second, or darkened to make fake shadows. Sometimes the lights flared and dazzled, but added up, the main effect was to make these things horrifically hard to keep track of. The things had long, long necks, too long by far, and arrowhead-shaped heads that were an uncanny mingling of viper and canid, with yellow, pupilless eyes that actually glowed. The teeth in those narrow muzzles were needle-sharp, too numerous, and as long as a man’s thumb. They had bodies like greyhounds as well, but the legs and tails seemed unhealthily stretched, and the bodies unnaturally flexible.

They swarmed along what passed for a lane among the cottages, attacking, nipping at, and attempting to drag off anything they saw. Three of them had faced off against the prize bull, two more challenged the young stallion, and one had seized a screaming, half-grown pig by the hind leg, and the pig was swiftly losing the battle to get away. The villagers attempted to fend the creatures off with anything they had at hand, but the things merely ignored adult humans in favor of livestock. Some of which—no, most of which—were the animals from the passage deal.

Kordas made arm gestures and his guards set themselves in short lines and made ready for archery, and the horseborne fanned out behind them, bringing up assault bows. In rushes of releases, arrows and crossbow bolts filled the air between them and the pack of those unholy things. All the shots were carefully aimed. He saw them aim.

He saw the shots fly true. He expected shrieks or howls when the arrows found their targets; instead, there was nothing. No sound of reaction. The shafts that outright missed the creatures made normal thwap noises when they hit, but the few that struck the creatures made no noise at all—nor did the creatures. It dawned on Kordas what this would mean if the creatures weren’t out in the light like this. You couldn’t see them coming, or count them once they were in your presence . . . and you couldn’t hear them close in. Not even running around do they make noise, and they should still have made some kind of yelp when they were struck. Wait, maybe they did, but we couldn’t hear it. Yes! I bet that is it! When they trip or crush something and knock things over, we don’t hear that either. It’s not just that they are silent, it’s that they’re stopping sound.

Arial froze stock-still, refusing to come any nearer to these creatures than she was now. Kordas saw that of the scores of shots taken, only the few heart-shots had been effective. The other wounded creatures paused just long enough to chew off the shafts before looking for the source of their pain.

“Heart-shots!” he shouted, and he nocked another bolt, firing it as soon as he got the crossbow cocked. “Center of the chest! Heart-shots!”

Disturbingly, the monsters’ worrying at the livestock all stopped in the same instant, and they wholesale ignored the villagers. They fixated on Kordas and the soldiers, and to Kordas’s dread—they multiplied.

The creatures oozed and slunk around buildings, climbing over carts and under fences to gather into a roiling mass of shadows, half-bodies, and shimmers. Each of the creatures appeared to split and expand, though it was almost unfollowable how quickly or how many they might be by the moment. Scores of pairs of yellow eyes turned in unison upon the archers as the creatures massed together. The exact size of this mass of darkness wasn’t even clear, because groups of the things would dodge and leap in and out in knots of movement, making the eye follow them. Then there were hundreds of yellow eyes, all moving in pairs, with more joining into the deepening darkness all the time. They were all ignoring their previous prey. All getting closer.

How many are there? Were there hundreds that have been invisible? Were they there all this time, or waiting to arrive? What is this? We can’t fight this many—anythings.

The hypnotic, fear-provoking gathering of creatures split into two slow flows. One mass fixated on Kordas. The others closed in on the ground troops, and the tension finally broke. With a slithery sort of sigh, what looked like thirty or more masses of the things came at the defending guards, closing ground as a pack, and moving faster than any canid Kordas had ever seen before. And still eerily quiet. It could make you think they weren’t even really there.

Like they were illusions.

Kordas didn’t actually think; a decade and a half of Imperial training in war games dictated his change in tactics. His gut knew, before his mind said a thing.

He gathered his power within himself, reached for the nearest ley-line, stabbed his anchor into it, and just as the pack leaders got within two barge-lengths of the front lines, he threw up a curtain of fire right at their noses, between them and his guards.

The weirdling beasts ran straight into it, and despite being entirely hairless, somehow caught fire. Kordas sent the flames roaring upward, and pushed the conflagration against the rush of the creatures. Harm spells could be “mixed,” and his fire wave had been mixed both to cause physical burns and to dispel the cohesion of any illusions.

That should have broken their illusions, so now we can pick off the real ones.

And still, the creatures made no sound as they broke and ran in all directions, biting at their burning flanks, shaking their heads and pawing at their eyes. They rolled on the ground, trying to put themselves out, or thrashed around, felling hedges and stacked-rail fencing. The fire only made discerning their shapes more difficult, and hundreds of pairs of eyes looked out from the darkness while they regrouped.

They—weren’t illusions. Oh, what have I done? All those eyes—they’re still there. They weren’t illusions. My best shot was maybe two-thirds wasted breaking illusions that weren’t there. I was so sure. Now they’re closing, and I used the wrong spell.

By this point the blacksmith and the guards afoot had largely switched to hand weapons, and the blacksmith screamed at the top of his lungs, “Ware the bite! Ware the bite!” as he charged toward one of the things and swung his sledgehammer at what appeared to be its head. The blow connected well enough that the thing’s head was forcibly deformed two handsbreadths to the left from the rest of its body. There was no sound except for the huff of exertion the blacksmith had put into it.

Ware the bite? What about the bite? Biting, attack . . .

“Poison fangs!” Kordas shouted—even if that wasn’t the actual truth, it was close enough to make his people watch themselves. Horse troops maneuvered themselves into hit-and-run attrition on the creatures, succeeding in kettling many of the things, then chopping them down in waves of weaving ride-by attacks. The foot troops and the villagers formed into back-to-back defensive lines, with crossbow reloaders in the middle, and edged toward Kordas. They were soon enveloped, but held their own. These creatures preferred to nip at their targets, presumably to make use of their toxic bites. Amidst the expanding, shifting battlefield around him, Kordas saw the unfortunate creature the blacksmith had clocked in the skull stagger away from its pack. Toward Kordas. It ultimately dropped a horselength away from Arial, and still afire, it expired on its side right before him. Some of its skin had charred to ash. To Kordas’s momentary shock, he saw that the whole surface of its body that wasn’t burned had eyes. Pairs of glowing eyes looking outward, squinting, and peering around, while the body that bore their images died.