The man to his left is bleeding from a cut above his eye, the stink of his sweat still mixed with the wet of the sea.
He grins madly at Shroudweaver. ‘They’re coming again!’
He’s not wrong. There’s a ringing in Shroudweaver’s ears as he sees the dead of the Empire charge down the street once more, trying to force the survivors back and over into the pit.
Time slick as butter. He can feel the hammer of his own heart, a hundred times faster than the feet rushing towards him. Terror flicks his neck like a rope.
‘Shields up!’ shouts one of the captains, a brute of a man, silver hair bright against his dark-skin, his voice rolling like a shore tide. The shields lock with a shout.
It takes him about that long to realise he doesn’t have a shield.
The woman on his right leans in as their bodies press forwards, her short hair red as blood. ‘Duck your skin behind here, weaver.’
He slips behind the curve of her shield, and the man to his left locks the rim of his own against it. ‘We’ve got you.’
The dead are a couple of meters out, close enough for Shroudweaver to feel the drumming of their feet, too many for him to halt completely. But maybe that isn’t necessary.
He tries to hold his nerve as they thunder closer, focuses on the small details. The yellow sheen of their bared teeth, the twitch of flies drinking at their eyes. The faded hint of inked designs, chipped paint on nails.
Shroudweaver feels the bodies either side of him tense. The stink of those last few moments, piss and sweat and blood.
He watches the Empire’s dead tumble forwards towards the shields held protectively in front of him. Reaches out to the ragged souls of their front line, and pulls.
The first line of the dead drop as the life is wrenched fromthem. Shroudweaver reels backwards, the silver thread on his wrist burning like fire as unleashed essence thunders into his chest. He falls into the mud with a force that pushes the air from his lungs. The charging soldiers are nimbler than he expected, vaulting over their fallen comrades. The man on his left reaches down to help him, and then the lines hit.
The marines stagger back. A dead man’s mace takes his new friend in the side of the skull. The man’s face crumples around the socket, and his body lists sideways, his strong hand going limp.
He lands on Shroudweaver. A mess of muscle and armour and sticky fluids. Shroudweaver flails, rolls clumsily from underneath as the red-haired soldier takes the mace-wielding corpse in the neck with a wicked hook blade.
Its head detaches slowly, suspended on strips of dry flesh. Around them, the line buckles. The weight of bodies is relentless. They don’t lose many, but with every soldier that drops on the Hesper side they’re pushed back towards that terrible pit which used to be the town square.
Shroudweaver can see the remnants of the vanguard scrabbling around down there. Heaped up on each other in a desperate effort to get out, but the sheared walls of the pit are too sharp. The stench of their pain is overwhelming. Silver soul threads fraying and tangling around bodies that yell for help. Help’s going to be slow in coming. If they turn their backs for a second on the advancing army, they’re all dead.
On the other side of the pit, he can see Shipwright swing like a wrecking ball into the centre of a knot of dead warriors. Maces shudder into splinters as they arc towards her head. Her punches drive through ribcages and detonate spines. The air is cut by the high, thin whine of her spinners, already driven beyond fever pitch. The marines with her cluster in her wake, back-to-back. She can’t keep them all safe forever.
A chunk and screech from above, as ballistae fire rains down into the ranks of the dead. The bolt-men have finally, mercifully, managed to take up positions on the twisted battlements. Most of the dead go down if hit squarely, but enough lumber forwards,pinned through shoulder and legs with hideous black barbs.
Shroudweaver ducks another swipe from his right, dodges low and kicks out, scything the legs from under his attacker. Brings that beautiful mace down to crush a skull. Tries not to dwell on the eggshell sound.
Another sound under that, tremors dancing lightly around the edges of his bones and teeth like the first murmurs of a landslide. Trumpets on the south side of the pit, and Arissa’s there, still atop the charger, swinging round towards Shipwright’s flank on the east. A cohort of marines with her, javelins arcing out to hit the side of the charging dead. As they near the press, she rises up in the saddle and shakes her arms. From her silvered gauntlets blades flow downwards like water. She leans forwards and scythes out. Heads and limbs tumble. The horse rears, and hooves thunder through shield and bone. For a moment, they have respite.
‘Weaver!’ the red-haired soldier yells and his attention snaps back to their own line. Holding, surprisingly. They might be trained as soldiers, but the men and women here grew up on back-alley squabbles. Shivdancers and blackjack babies the lot of them.
The redhead’s having a time of it though, two howling corpses pressing them hard.
Shouts rise from the pit at Shroudweaver’s back, and part of him thinks about the ready supply of souls just feet away. He could turn the tide right now. His red right hand twitches.
‘Weaver!’ the redhead screams again, and he turns from the pit and runs towards the sound, bodily tackling one of the dead to the ground.
Shroudweaver turns his shoulder to it as it falls, hears its ribs creak. Its head rolls madly, jaws gnashing, hollow, shrivelled eyes lining its sockets. He catches a faint smell of the perfume it must once have worn. Mouths an apology as he drives his head into the bridge of its sunken nose.
Too close, too frantic to get a grip on its soul. But he’d learnt a thing or two in Hesper, and in the Aestering before that. As its head lolls back, he swings a fist in from the side and cracks itsskull against a cobblestone. It goes limp, and he staggers upright to see the small redhead dusting themself off.
‘Bit tardy, Weaver.’
‘Sorry,’ he smiles.
‘Still alive to complain,’ they grin, a slight shake in their voice. ‘Maybe not for much longer though, eh?’
