his ribs. One was stuck under his helmet’s chin strap and made the skin of his opposite cheek bulge.
There was no way the man should still be alive, but he’d held on. Ferkudi took him in his arms and lay him on the ground.
He whispered praises and a blessing in the man’s ear, and when he raised his head, the man’s eyes were glassy, unseeing. They left him there, only taking the time to array his limbs somewhat and beg the groom to take care of him.
Then they saddled up and rode, hard.
He had no compunctions about taking four horses out of he didn’t know how many. His was the farthest assignment away from the escape-chain disembarkation point. They avoided blockades the defenders had set up, asking questions and cutting through strange narrow alleys, with the sounds of muskets and fighting everywhere growing more intense.
When they reached the wall near Overhill, it became plain how desperate things had gotten here.
“Where the hell’s the rest of the Seventh?” Ferkudi asked a poor woman struggling to beat out the sparks that had landed in her family’s thatch roof.
The woman slapped a sopping-wet dress against the spreading flames. “Half those bastards took some nobles’ coin to defend the walls near their own houses up south. Commander here done nothing to stop ’em when they left.”
Without a word, Ferkudi spurred his horse onward.
At the wall, he leapt out of the saddle and slapped the stallion’s flank. “Good boy!”
No need for him to die, too.
As he mounted the wall without so much as being challenged once, he saw the wan terror on the defenders’ faces. He knew this music here. This was what people look like right before they break.
He reached the top of the wall with his Mighty hard behind him.
A hellscape greeted him.
The red bane was a charred landscape that broke open in red seams everywhere it folded over, some of them afire, the rest ever threatening to take fire. The whole seemed to have the rigidity of a beached jellyfish that somehow yet moved, oozing up the shoreline toward the wall.
One of the Mighty said, “How do we invade that?”
Thousands of drafters and wights were surging from its surface toward the walls.
From the Prism’s Tower, Ferkudi had seen how Kip had set this whole bane afire by throwing the sub-red lux storm against it. From the charred bodies, it was clear that hundreds and hundreds of the enemy had died in that attack—but there were still so many more, and while the mundane soldiers had died in droves, the drafters and the wights had survived.
Now, whatever the reds’ original plan had been, they attacked without any discernible plan at all—and they attacked with rage to spare. They had no siege engines, no siege ladders, instead merely throwing themselves against the walls and using red luxin to clamber and stick and boost themselves as well as they could. It was stupidly inefficient, even insane, as the Chromeria always said.
But the numbers were on their side, and as fast as the few defenders atop the wall could pick them off with arrows and musket balls, still the rest climbed faster, heedless of their own dead, heedless of all but rage.
“We wait for our chance,” Ferkudi said. “Corvan Danavis is gonna give us a distraction. Maybe that’ll be it.”
“And until then?”
Some of the attackers had torn up still-burning trees and had flung them against the walls as makeshift ladders. The defenders couldn’t dislodge them.
“Until then we keep these poor bastards alive. We defend the wall,” Ferkudi said, hopping up and sprinting. His men ran hot on his heels along the top of the wall. They were spotted instantly, and soon missiles spitting flames were crackling past their heads.
They rammed into a tree and hurled it back from the wall, astonishing the scrawny defenders—surely the worst of the city’s worst—who’d been unable to move it at all.
But it wasn’t enough. Somewhere a hundred paces down some reds burst into view on top of the wall and lit into terrified defenders.
Ferkudi and his men cut through those fleeing.
His axes sent limbs spinning. As each of his axes got stuck—one in a Blood Robe’s shoulder joint and the other pinched between a screaming wight’s ribs—a wight popped into view over the top of the wall, and Ferkudi butted his bear helm into the thing’s face, sending it flying off the wall.
The next minutes passed in that odd blur of fighting—every moment lasting an eternity and every minute gone