The highlanders didn’t even slow. That was when Sergeant Gamble knew they were in trouble. Two archers and a wytch peeled off from the group and began looking for him, but all the other men proceeded across the bridge. As the archers drew their arrows, the wytch touched each and fire attached to each arrowhead.
Gamble slid down the roof and dropped into the yard as two burning arrows sank into the thatch. The fire spread unnaturally fast. By the time he unbarred the door, there was already smoke pouring out of the inside of the barracks.
“What do we do, sir?” one of the men asked as they crowded around him.
“They can’t take us all at once, so they’re trying to separate us. I’d guess there’s two, maybe three hundred of them. We gotta get to the lower barracks.” There would be two hundred men there. That would be even odds, at least, not that Sergeant Gamble thought even numbers would even anything, not against Khalidoran highlanders and wytches.
“To hell with that,” a young guard said. “I’m not dying for Niner. We still got East Kingsbridge. I’m outta here.”
“You head for that bridge, Jules, and it’s the last thing you’ll do,” Sergeant Gamble said. “This is what they pay us for. Anything less than our duty is betrayal, just like Conyer locking us in the barracks to die.”
“They don’t pay us shit.”
“We knew what they paid when we signed up.”
“You do what you gotta do, sir.” Jules sheathed his sword and turned confidently. He started jogging for the bridge.
Every man of his thirty-nine was looking at Sergeant Gamble.
He drew, whispered a prayer for two souls as the string touched his lips, and sent an arrow through the back of Jules’s neck. I’m turning into a regular war hero, aren’t I? Skilled at killing women and my own men.
“We’re going to fight,” he said. “Any questions?”
Kylar sprinted through the servants’ quarters unseen. Still no soldiers had come running. Things had to be bad somewhere for the soldiers not to have organized any resistance.
Abruptly, he was on a fight. At least one detachment of highlanders must have come in another way, because twenty of them were busy slaughtering twice as many Cenarian soldiers.
The Cenarians were on the verge of breaking, even as their sergeant was bellowing orders at them. The sight of the man’s face stopped Kylar. He knew that sergeant. It was Gamble, the guard who’d come into the north tower the day of Kylar’s first kill.
Kylar joined the fray and killed Khalidorans as easily as a scythe cuts wheat. It was simple labor. There was no joy in killing men who could barely see him.
At first, no one noticed him. He was a smear of darkness deep in the bowels of a castle constructed of dark stone and lit with flickering torches. Then he saved Gamble’s life, beheading one Khalidoran and eviscerating another as they cornered the officer.
Kylar didn’t even slow. He was a whirlwind. He was the first face of the Night Angels; he was vengeance. Killing was no longer an activity, it was a state of being. Kylar became killing. If every drop of guilty blood he spilled might blot out a drop of innocent blood, he would be clean tonight.
The feeling of mail parting, of leather parting, of flesh parting along the icy judgment that was Retribution was the best feeling in the world. Kylar was lost in a madness, a kind of bizarre meditation, spinning, thrusting, lunging, cleaving, piercing, battering, smashing, ruining faces, snuffing futures. It passed all too quickly. For in what couldn’t have been more than half a minute, every last Khalidoran was dead. None was even dying. The killing wrath was nothing if not thorough.
The effect on the Cenarians was monumental. These sheep-in-guards’-armor stood, gaping, at the ragged darkness that was Kylar. Their weapons weren’t even raised. They didn’t stand in ready positions. They just marveled at Death’s avatar among them.
“The Night Angel fights for you,” he said. He’d already paused too long. Logan could be dying right now. He ran deeper into the castle.
All the doors were closed, and the halls were eerily quiet. He could only assume that the servants were huddled in their rooms or already fleeing.
The pounding of many footsteps keeping time brought him up short. Kylar sank into a shadowed doorway near a corner. He might be safe from the eyes of men, but there were things more dangerous than men in the castle tonight.
“There must be a good two hundred of their soldiers trapped downstairs,” one of the officers was saying to a man whose narrow build gave him away as a wytch even though he wore armor and a sword. “It’ll hold for maybe fifteen minutes, meister.”
“And the nobles in the garden?” the wytch demanded.
His answer was lost in the tramp of the highlanders’ feet as they wound past Kylar and into the distance.
So the nobles were trapped in the garden. Kylar had never been to the garden before—indeed had avoided the castle as much as possible—but he’d seen paintings of the garden, and if the artists hadn’t taken too much license, Kylar supposed he could find it. He guessed that was as good of a place as any to look for Logan and Durzo.
As he wound deeper into the castle toward the garden, dead men began to clutter the halls, their blood slickening the floors. Kylar didn’t even slow as he ran past. The dead were mostly nobles’ guards.
Poor bastards. Kylar didn’t have much sympathy for men who took up the profession of arms and then didn’t train themselves, but these men had been massacred. Well over forty guards were dead and dying, kicking and frothing in pain. Kylar only saw eight highlanders dead.
Following the blood and the corpses led Kylar to double doors of walnut, barred from the outside. He lifted the bar and eased the door open.
“What in the hell?” a gruff voice with a Khalidoran accent said.
Retreating from the crack to stand behind yet another picture of Niner standing in a heroic pose, Kylar saw several highlanders guarding a room full of nobles. There were men, women, and even a few children in the group. They were disheveled and frightened. Some were crying. Some were throwing up, poisoned.
Footsteps tapped across the floor from beyond Kylar’s line of sight, and the highlanders he could see readied their weapons. The point of a halberd hooked the corner of the door and pulled it open, revealing a squat Khalidoran officer as thick as he was tall.
The officer pulled the other door open with the halberd, then he beckoned and two men jumped into the hall, back to back, swords raised. They looked right at the statue, right at Kylar, who’d pressed himself against the statue’s back, putting his arms behind its arms, his legs behind its legs.
“Nothing, sir,” one said.
Inside the garden, which wasn’t nearly as grand as it looked in the paintings, were ten guards and forty or fifty nobles—none of them armed. Mercifully, the highlanders had no wytches with them. Kylar assumed wytches were too valuable to be wasted guarding prisoners.
The nobles included some of the highest in the land. Kylar recognized more than a few of the king’s ministers. That they were all here meant that Roth believed he would take over the castle quickly, and he wanted to be able to personally decide whom to kill and whom to add to his own government.
The men and women looked dazed. They didn’t seem to believe what had happened to them. It was beyond their comprehension that their world could turn so completely upside down so quickly. Many were obviously ill. Some were torn and bloodied, but others were absolutely untouched. Some ladies whose hair was still perfectly coifed wept while others bearing gashes and torn skirts seemed poised and calm.
Behind Kylar a soldier said, “Bleeding mercy, Cap! It didn’t just unbar itself!”
“We’re here to guard this room, and we stay here.”