Page 77 of Traitor Son

It was not a constant stream of the creatures; not yet. They burst through gaps in the palisade or the wide open stretch in the middle of the east wall, a gap that was shrinking every day, but not quite fast enough. The diggers were working frantically to advance the deep trench, which was nearly as good a barrier as the wall itself would be.

There were the torch towers, discouraging the devils from the hills and slopes. There were shield walls on the ridgelines, shoving the devils onto lower ground, where they were slaughtered in their dozens. Knowing the devils could not be kept out of Tresingale altogether, Remin had arranged the defenses to allow them strategic entry, and placed himself at this critical juncture, a place where the land sloped down between two hills, and the road rose toward the cluster of buildings around the cookhouse, including a certain small cottage.

The devils were not going to go that way.

“Ortaire, push the line forward! Move the wolf toward the archers!” He boomed, half the command lost in the deafening howl of another approaching wolf demon. It was accelerating toward them, shouldering ghouls aside as it charged the lines of armored men.

But for the heavy wolf demons, Remin had invented therestratiformation,named for the multilayered fishing nets that Capricians usedon the Amati Sea. Instead of blocking the wolf demon, the line of soldiers folded inward to isolate it, shields smashing into its sides to slow it down rather than facing the full force of its charge. Behind them, the second rank of soldiers slowed it still further, enough that the third rank could slash out with their swords, leaving the crippled monster to limp into range of the archers.

Even as Remin watched, the rest of the remaining devils reached the open, well-lit killing ground behind him, and there was a whirring chorus of heavy beechwood arrows, slamming into the survivors. The squires moved among them with their own swords, mopping up.

All the defenses of Tresingale operated on this principle. Slowing the advance of the waves of devils, blunting their momentum, winnowing them down so none of them reached the soft vitals of the town: the masons in their cloth tents, the craftsmen and laborers sleeping in fragile wattle-and-daub cottages, or the princess that would be mother to House Andelin. Remin could not see their house from where he stood, but he felt her presence as keenly as if she were sheltered directly behind his own shield.

“Good, good!” Ortaire called from the line, the voice of a young man who was still not entirely confident in his own command. But he was getting there. “There’s a break in the devils ahead, my lord, should we thin them out?”

“Left rank, right rank, forward!” Remin ordered at once, and the two shield walls moved inward, narrowing the gap until the remaining devils were scrambling over top of each other. The spears plunged inward, and the devils died on a hundred points, churning the earth to mud with their blood.

And then, silence. On the distant palisade, torches winked, signaling that all was clear.

Devils tended to come in mobs. And though the night was quiet now, the howling tide of ghouls and wolf demons was only cover for the stranglers, who could eel through the thinnest slices of shadow, as evidenced by the constant threat to the torches. It was hard to credit them with aplan;Remin had never heard any evidence of intelligence in the creatures, only malevolence, a hatred of lights and men and men’s things, a determination to kill. They came in mobs because they were strongest in numbers, and even wolves had the cunning to hunt in packs.

“Get some weight on the bases of those torches,” he ordered, taking advantage of the lull to shore up the defenses. “Ortaire! Have your boys clear those carcasses out of the way.”

“Yes, my lord!”

They swapped ranks in the lull between the devils, letting the first rank rest and the second step forward to take the next wave. The rear ranks were not idle. There were archers that needed more arrows, fresh torches to be lit, and the rear ranks swept back through the shadows to make sure nothing was creeping in the dark. They turned up a dozen stranglers that might have otherwise come on them unaware, and Remin almost stepped on one of the creatures himself, crouching in a clump of bushes. His sword lashed out on pure instinct, severing that loathsome head from its neck.

“I’ll take it, my lord,” said one of the soldiers behind him, dragging the corpse away to be counted with the rest of the devils.

Every night, they counted the dead. The corpses would burn by daylight, all evidence of the creatures blazing away into ashes, and they mustknowif there were more of them, to better prepare for the following night. Every morning, the last thing his soldiers did before they sought their beds was to quarter every inch of the village, combing the fields and forests to make sure they had accounted for every single devil.

It was grueling work, and all too soon, the torches waved in a different pattern from the palisade, signaling that another wave of devils was coming.

Hour after hour. Night after night. Remin stood watch at the east wall, on the palisade, on the hill by the north gate. His men began to fall in twos and threes as the number of devils swelled, cutting away sections of the line and overwhelming them with sheer numbers. Men in armor were hard to kill, but wolf demons could take off a whole limb at the joint, and cackling stranglers dragged the downed men out of the light, yanking at their gorgets with long, thin fingers until they found the bare throat underneath.

“Seven wounded, two seriously,” said Jinmin when they convened at Remin’s command tent one morning in the gray light before dawn. “Two dead. Stranglers.”

“One dead on the east wall, two wounded,” said Tounot, ducking under the front flap of the tent and pulling off his helmet. His curly hairwas matted to his head with sweat. “And the masons were pitching a fit again as I went by. Could be they’re hoping to renegotiate their contracts.”

“I don’t think that’s it this time,” said Miche, sighing. He was as bloody and sweaty as the rest of them, his long blond hair caught back in a messy ponytail. “They’ve been grumbling amongst themselves for a few days, and it’s not just the masons. They don’t think the camps to the east are getting as much protection as the ones to the west. Maybe a few nights of personal attention from the Duke of Andelin would quiet things down.”

“That will cost them you and Tounot,” Remin replied, his shoulders jerking with irritation. His commanders were every bit as capable as himself, so this looked to him like an irrational indulgence, but Juste was continually reminding him that the craftsmen did not have three years of experience with devils.

“They ought to count themselves lucky,” said Huber, who had been listening quietly. The copper in his eyes flickered. “I wonder how well the rest of the valley is sleeping at night.”

That was the real question, and it had been gnawing at all of them. It was one thing if the devils were just appearing a little early; that was inconvenient, but easy enough to overcome. But all those small villages had nothing like the defenses of Tresingale, and no trained, armored men to guard them in the night. Huber had been all over the valley during the war, commanding the mounted scouts that had been Remin’s eyes and ears, one of the most effective warfighting tools in his arsenal. Huber had stayed in those villages. He knew better than anyone else what they were facing.

“It might just be us,” said Tounot into the silence. “I saw devils pass a small camp if there was a larger one nearby during the war, and more than once. There are more people in Tresingale than in the rest of the valley combined. I expect the devils can sniff us out all the way from the Berlawes.”

“Send word to the border forts and have them look in on Raida,” said Remin, his black brows lowering in thought. “It’s just as well we’re supplying them by sea. Where’s the map of the Medlenne? We might get a fair distance by river.”

“Not for much longer,” said Tounot reluctantly. He oversaw most of the supply to the rest of the valley. “The water level will be dropping by now,and there’s long, rocky stretches. Here,” he said, tracing the section of river on the map as Miche spread it out on the table. “You’d have to drag the boats out of the water off and on for about fifteen miles, and I wouldn’t swear that the bottom is deep enough to keep the devils off at night.”

“And this is solid marsh for four or five miles,” said Huber, tapping another place further downriver. “Fucking nightmare, that was. We lost two wagons and almost lost a horse in that bog. You might get a man or two to Isigne or Selgin, but then they’d be just as trapped as everyone else.”

It would be the same in all the other villages. The old roads of the Andelin were overgrown, and most of the bridges had been destroyed in the many wars. The remaining villages had survivedbecausethey were inaccessible.

“A small party to each village is better than nothing,” said Miche.

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