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