Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Sixty Seven: A Siege

Then he saw the Death.

It hovered near the breach in the wall, unmoving. Up close, it seemed no more substantial than it had the first time he'd seen it on that nightmare job weeks before, but he saw details he hadn't noticed on that brief glimpse; the scabby hands, the faint suggestion of a head among the mists, the slithering mass of its other organs suspended beneath its glowing heart. It didn't move as he skidded to a stop three feet short of it, but the rune path ran right past it, and Jordan was going to have to leave the path for the last couple of yards to get through the breach.

He looked back, but could no longer see his tutor or Nika. Other Unspoken were around, but he didn't dare call out this close to the demon. Not for the first time, he wished he was further ahead with his training, at least so he could summon a distraction if needed, or signal to someone else for help. Yddris had made him promise not to use magic, however, and things were bad enough without trying to do something he already knew he couldn't.

He made himself put one foot forward. The quiet tap of his boot on the ground echoed in his ears. The demon didn't stir, except for the strange curls of its misty form caught in the breeze. The second step was a little more confident; Yddris had said the bigger demons would be stunned by the blast, and he hardly wanted to hang around to see how long that lasted. He tiptoed past the Death, and as he passed close by it, he felt a terrible cold. It stopped him short, as he had become so accustomed to never feeling cold. Near to the demon, it was like life itself shrank to a little pinprick of warmth. All he could see was the demon, for several awful seconds, before someone behind him shouted. The cold was blown away by an inferno of green roaring past his shoulder. If it had been normal fire it might have burnt him as it passed. Ren growled in his ear; he blinked and regained control of his limbs.

"I said go, boy!" Yddris was shouting, somewhere behind him. Breath like rot touched Jordan's face and made his eyes sting, and then a scabby hand twitched in the mist.

"Fuck," he said, and then ran. He hadn't known he was capable of running so fast, but the breach was behind him in seconds, and then he was brought up short by a chain-link barricade across the castle courtyard, studded with wooden posts and panels inscribed with runes. He had never seen it before, but guessed this was the gate for the second defence wall. It was rusty, and scrape-marks on the cobbles suggested it had never had to be used. It looked terribly flimsy. Guards stared at him through the links with varying degrees of relief and suspicion.

He glanced over his shoulder, but nothing had pursued him. He could sense that some battle was being waged out of sight on the other side of the wall, and occasionally the night would flash a brighter green. Someone cried out, and Jordan fervently hoped it wasn't serious.

"As many of the guild are here as we could find," he said to one of the guards, who stepped forward to greet him. "I'm supposed to come inside. Not qualified." His half-hearted joke fell on unreceptive ears, so he quickly added, "I'm Yddris's apprentice."

The guard blinked and stood to attention straight away. "Entrance is at that end. We'll unlock it for you."

Jordan hurried along the fence, running parallel to the guard, to a locked outbuilding on the edge of the makeshift defence. Behind the back wall of the outbuilding, the castle's second wall rose sheer and sturdy-looking, and it was hard to believe they had built it with such a large weak point. The courtyard itself was warded, but even that seemed insufficient in the face of the horde outside.

The guard opened the building from the inside, and Jordan stepped into the sweet musty warmth of a stable. There were no horses inside, but droppings littered the aisle between the stalls, suggesting they had been moved further inside recently. Jordan was already too tired to pick his way through the masses of dung, and it hardly seemed like such a bad thing after running through a pile of a dead demons. He kicked it off on the wall on his way out.