Page 90 of Into the West

“Hey! Hey—nice! Yeah, let’s have more of that! More of that!”

And up beyond the wall—the Veil began to glow, a pale blue light that rippled like the surface of a Gate coming into lock.

He ran back up the stairs to see Jonaton standing as still as a statue, arms spread above his head, also haloed in a faint blue light. What—

“Kordas!” Jonaton shouted, not turning his head. “Get back to the front gate. I’ve got the Veil! We can hold the thing off back here!”

As if to affirm that claim, a whipping branch soared up into view, hit the Veil, and—disintegrated.

He can’t hold alone! Not for long—

But it appeared that he could. Or at least, he would die trying.

“Saver!” shouted Pebble. “Gate! Gate! Gate!”

He didn’t stop to think. He just moved.

At least by this point, the animals still remaining above ground were all in hiding, probably huddled together in the center of the Vale, not running about in a panic. He should be able to sprint—

Just as he thought that, a Doll came running up to him, pulling a panicking horse along by main strength—the horse wasn’t bridled or saddled, in fact, all it had was a hackamore, but that was all he had ever needed. He tapped into his levitation abilities, vaulted onto the gelding’s back from the lower stairs, grabbed the reins, and gave it a smack on its heavily sweating rump. It took off at a barely controlled gallop, carrying him around a tightly packed mob of mixed animals, cutting directly across picturesque, winding paths, veering around little groves and homes among the trees, and ending him up at the front gate.

He leapt off the back of the poor beast and it immediately ran away. He didn’t blame it. The cacophony was worse here than it was at the rear; he sprinted up the stairs, taking them two at a time, past stationed Dolls to where Delia, Sai, and the loading team stood. The Veil glowed here, too; Sai stood in a pose nearly identical to Jonaton’s, as the tree branches thrashed just out of touching range of the Veil.

Delia was still hard at work, mouth set in a grim line, exploding canisters as fast as she could Fetch them into the Forest. Sai glanced at Kordas, then turned his attention back to the trees. “Pebble?” he asked brusquely.

“Pebble,” Kordas confirmed. “How long can you hold?”

“Until I drop,” Sai confirmed. “And then—it won’t matter how much power Pebble feeds us, because we won’t have the strength to use it. But this has bought us some time.”

“Ye—” Kordas began.

He stopped speaking as a high-pitched whistling sound—like nothing he had ever heard before—made him whip his head around to the left.

Just in time to see a ball of fire a hundred times bigger than anything he could produce hurtling out of the sky to land in the midst of the trees.

The sound it made when it hit wasn’t as loud as the thunder accompanying the weather mages’ lightning, nor as loud as the canisters exploding, but it was more than enough to make everyone on the wall wince and instinctively drop behind the parapet.

The Veil flickered a moment, but Sai and the rest popped back up and went back to work reinforcing it. “What in the hell was that?” Sai shouted.

“Damn if I know!” Kordas shouted back, taking over from Delia in shooting the canisters so she could concentrate on Fetching them. “Whatever it is, it’s on our si—”

And another fireball came arcing into the Forest on his right, with similar results.

It was difficult to tell for sure, between the POOMs of the canisters and the crash of thunder, but he thought he heard more of those fireballs hitting somewhere out of sight, to the left, the right, and the rear. But were they making a difference?

He felt a tiny, tiny bit of hope creep into his heart. Where that fireball had hit in front of them, there were trees actually engulfed in fire, there was a hole among them showing the bare earth and rocks, and nothing was throwing snow on the fires. Of course, that could be because by this time the ground had been branched free of snow. But—wait! The trees nearest the ones engulfed were trying to beat the flames out. And getting set on fire themselves for their trouble.

It was a good thing those fireballs were taking long, leisurely arcs to get where they were going, because he heard another one coming in that sounded—well, too close—and he had just enough time to scream “Duck!” at the top of his lungs and grab Delia’s shoulder and throw her beneath the parapet when the incoming fireball landed right in front of the closed gate.

The wall shook under them, and even though he managed to clap his hands over his ears at the last minute, once again, he was deafened.

Fortunately the reinforced Veil deflected most of the flames away, but when he cautiously looked back up again, the ends of Sai’s eyebrows had little wisps of smoke coming up from them, and his face was distinctly redder. He hadn’t ducked. He hadn’t fallen, either. They are my heroes, I swear, Kordas thought.

He had grown so accustomed to the waves of rage coming from the forest that at first he didn’t notice when they intensified. But when Delia abruptly put both fists to her temples and dropped to her knees, and the exhausted Healer that stumbled over to her did the same, a moment later he got hit in the face by the brutal anger, and nearly went to his knees, himself. He fought the alien emotion back, clinging to the parapet, and surveyed the battlefield, his eyes burning and watering with the effort—and from the smoke that billowed over the wall from the burning trees.

That gave him a little more hope—until a gust of wind blew the smoke away, and he saw that the trees had closed in all the holes that had been blown in the forest, and the smoke was because they had stopped burning and were only smoldering.

Wait—