Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Sixty Nine: Battlefield

He pressed his eye to a tiny gap in the wooden door, trying to work out how close the nearest demons were. He didn't dare try and access his magic again until he was outside, and even then only when he absolutely had to.

He stepped back, grinding his teeth with indecision. If he opened the door, the net would break, and he'd be the only one holding the breach until the net linked back up again – and how would he tell when that was? Last time he had come through here, the demons had all been stunned or killed; now they were active and angry and growing in number.

He opened the door and slipped through before he paralysed himself with fear, and it was like stepping into another world. His nostrils were assaulted by the rank scent of blood, and the cobbles were slippery with it; black and viscous, oozing from countless demon corpses. He put his back against the stable door, viewing the scene as if in a dream, blinking, stupid, trying to work out what to do now.

A shriek; a thin demon with a sagging sack of skin under its jaws and bulging eyes noticed him and bounded across on all fours. Jordan threw up his hands, and the demon went down in a blaze. His breath left him all at once when he realised that he had just notified every demon in reaching distance that he was here. Time slowed.

Something bit into his leg, and he cried out and shook off the small wight that had been trying to scale it. It clung on, so he grabbed a fistful of soft flesh and yanked. It was dense and heavy; he only managed to haul it a couple of feet away before it recovered and came at him again. He ran, frantically scanning the chaos for another Unspoken; and there. He pushed towards the blaze of green a few long, long yards away.

Something heavy tackled him from the side. He had been so focused on reaching the other Unspoken that he hadn't seen the Listener coming, and he experienced a horrifying sense of déjà vu as its weight crushed the breath from him. Ren squeaked and tumbled from his hood, disappearing into the mass of feet, but he barely had time to notice. He wasn't sure if he screamed. He thought he might have. His nose hit the cobbles with a crack as the demon grabbed his head, and the white-hot pain was so intense he was sure for a minute that the blow had killed him.

Choking on blood, he tried to reach for his magic, only to have it slip from him as his focus veered away. The demon's claws raked at his clothes, trying to get at him. It was trying to eat him alive.

"You fucker," he groaned, and then screamed again as it shifted its weight. Something in his abdomen made an ominous scraping noise. He prayed; he prayed with genuine feeling for the first time in his life.

The weight was gone, suddenly. The back of Jordan's cloak was heavy with the demon's saliva, but the demon itself had vanished.

His face throbbed. Blood poured from his nose in a torrent, and his ribs ached like they were cracked. Every breath was a struggle. He turned himself onto his back, and began to cry as pain shot through every nerve. Then he realised the air above him was green; everything around him was green. He was surrounded by fire, and he knew whose it was.

"Yddris," he croaked.

"You had better have a damn good fucking reason for being out here, boy!" his tutor roared from somewhere above him. "A damn. Good. Fucking. Reason!"

The static in the air was so intense it was almost unbearable, and through the agony Jordan struggled to remember what his reason for being here was. He could barely remember his name.

"There..." He stopped, spitting blood to the cobbles, and then stared in disbelief as Ren reappeared, scrambling onto his chest and growling. "There's another one! One of those things that killed Kolter! They're here in the castle!"