The pike lines formed out of mist, an illusion that hardened—rows upon rows, heads under helms, white enamel flashing like teeth. Officers shouted into the fog, making speech sound like metal. Drums struck, not fast but exact; the tempo men use when they want to believe they are machines.
Rakhal lifted two fingers. His line answered with movement, not noise. The orcs in the front rank planted their spears so the butts kissed stone and the points spoke to the morning. Behindthem, a staggered rank: Maidaners with crossbows stolen from the keep armory and repaired with love and string; fisherfolk with billhooks polished by age; a boy with a kitchen knife tied to a broom handle as if a weapon might be persuaded by earnestness. Shazi stalked the left wing like a friendly catastrophe. On the right the twins from Silver Gate were chalk ghosts, eyes bright and unimpressed with the day’s desire to matter.
The Shadow inside Rakhal woke with dawn not as a man does—with confusion—but as a predator does: forward and certain. It pressed along his nerves, delighted, like a hound that has nosed the door and smelled the hill. He let it lift its head. He didn’t let it run.
“Hold the first press,” he said, voice even. “Break nothing you don’t mean to break.”
Pikes came on.
The Ketheri had dressed the front rank with veterans; the way they set their feet told him that. The second rank wavered a fraction, a hair, a breath; the third rank already wanted to be home. The fog stole depth from distance so that the enemy seemed to step out of nowhere into clarity and then back into myth as they moved.
“Shields,” Shazi called, and wooden doors lifted—the same warehouse planks Liron had fashioned for the gatehouse, now drilled and rope-lashed into honest work. Crossbow strings creaked; the sound was the same in any language: not yet, not yet, now.
The first contact was ugly. It always is—no clean blade, only wood and bone in an argument the world doesn’t want to have. A Ketheri pike found a Maidaner’s shoulder and lifted him as if to ask the sky a question; an orc shoved a spear haft into enamel and learned the lie of that shine. Rakhal watched the line tilt andcorrected it with a word, a gesture, the way you correct a horse when it thinks you’ve forgotten you hold the reins.
The Shadow slipped down his arm like ink poured along a quill. It wanted his hand on a throat. It wanted his heel on a helm. He opened his palm.Not yet,he said, and it laughed without a mouth.
Pike against spear makes a music that has no listeners. Rakhal stepped forward to where the press was thickest. He didn’t strike first. He put his hand on a spear haft, altered its angle half an inch, and the Ketheri who had committed to killing a man no longer in the place he expected went off-balance. Rakhal used the butt of his blade to take the breath out of that man and make room for a Maidaner to stand in. He moved like that—weight, pressure, the small mathematics of gait and guess.
The Shadow watched his economy and turned impatient. It began to move before he moved, anticipating, adding its own punctuation to his grammar. A pike thrust. The dark swelled and met it like a tide shouldering a rotten piling, turning metal into thought, thought into nothing. On the left, a Ketheri sword swung for Shazi’s ribs and met a curtain of night that did not wait for Rakhal’s call to fall. The man staggered backward, hands clutching at a blade that no longer knew it was steel.
Easy,Rakhal said, under his breath,easy, you thing that makes a man easy to kill.
It took ease as license. The next time a Ketheri officer opened his mouth to shout, the Shadow poured into it and took the shout away. The man gagged, eyes bulging, and fell in a map of white enamel and red breath.
Azfar’s voice blew through Rakhal like a draft through a shuttered house:Mercy binds you. Lose it, and they’ll follow the dark instead.
The old man had told him once, long before Maidan, that the Shadow could rouse more than fear.If the day ever comes whenmercy fails,Azfar had said,the city’s dead will answer the call that living mouths can’t.Rakhal had never decided whether that was warning or permission.
He set his feet harder. He felt the bond-mark’s thread through his breastbone—a tug as faint as a hair, as sure as a path walked too many times to forget. It didn’t pull. It reminded. It made room inside him for the wordno.
The Ketheri adjusted. They were arrogant, not stupid; arrogance is a tactic until it’s a ruin. The front rank locked, braced, and drove pikes in a slow bull’s push meant to grind the line. Rakhal let the shove come and bled it into the stone, one shoulder at a time. “Breathe,” he told his men, and they breathed. The dark in him tried to breathe for him. He refused its lungs.
“Right! Step!” Shazi shouted. The line shifted one pace. A pike-tip skittered along the parapet and sparked. The smell was iron and panic and something sweet—the scent of enamel when it’s broken and remembers it used to be sand.
“Now,” the twins said together, and three crossbow bolts stitched into the gap their sister’s call had made—a neatly spaced seam across the Ketheri second rank’s thighs. Men folded. The third rank stumbled over them and became a tangle. The fog made mercy of chaos, hiding which eyes were closed because they’d learned to, which because they’d been shut.
It should have turned there. It would have, if the battle belonged to men alone. But the Shadow had seen a line fall and believed it had done good. It took the sight as proof.
Before Rakhal lifted his hand, the darkness swelled and slid along the bridge, knee-high, hungry. It cut a corridor of night through the pike-block as if the world had discovered a new way to remember absence. Men went down without wounds—only the wrongness of being in a place light had left behind. Aspear clattered and threw the sound away. Rakhal felt the dark’s pleasure—it’s always simple; it has so few ways of being happy.
Stop,he said, and the word was level and useless. The Shadow moved with his thought, not his will. No—worse; it moved with the intention inside his thinking, the quick’s-quick part of choice. When he saw a man’s heel catch, the darkness moved to make it catch. When he read a shield’s weight wrong, the darkness made that reading be right.
He wasn’t ordering death. He was describing it, and the description became deed.
Azfar,Rakhal said under the crash and cry. He did not need the old man’s face; he needed the distraction of his disdain. He needed a voice to fill the part of him where fear could dig a hole.
The river answered with its old voice. Azfar did not.
The press at the center slackened; the Shadow had torn the knot open. Maidaners surged. Rakhal reached for restraint and found his hand closing around the dark itself. It felt like holding smoke underwater. It fought as if drowning were a confession it couldn’t bear to make.
On the right, a Ketheri standard-bearer recovered his nerve and his flag. He lifted the lion and opened his mouth to sing courage into his row. The Shadow pulled his breath out without asking, and the man went down clawing at air that had once liked him.
Enough,Rakhal said, and his voice had to cross the space between man and thing.Enough.
It heard and didn’t care. Not hatred; indifference—the insult the powerless can’t pay for.
Shazi swore, not at him but near him, the way a friend swears at the weather that’s about to ruin your plans. She lunged into the slack, turned a spear with her forearm and made the same forearm into a hammer. “Left! Follow me or don’t, I’m not yourmother—” Her laugh cut the fog: a promise:I will not let you be alone in your disaster.
