Faerie Knight 171

171 - The Horde

I have ordered the priests to seal what remains of the city away, so that no one can ever get to that damned gate again.  Nothing good can come of that place – it is a festering sore on the flesh of the world.

• The Campaign Journals of General Aurelius, volume V

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17th Day of High Summer’s Moon, AC 297

“I do not have time for this,” Trist shouted, lunging forward with the blade of ice in his hand.  The daemon Balan reared its heads back, each on their own long, serpentine neck, so he pivoted on his boot and turned the stab into a whirling cut, slicing into the place where a shriveled and burnt wing joined to the back of the gaunt bull.

The bull’s flesh parted easily beneath the edge of the winter blade, shearing ribs as easily as muscle, and the sword came out as smoothly as it went in.  Tithes sparked and jerked their way into the sword, but none of them entered Trist.  It was a jarring change to a sensation that he’d otherwise become very familiar with over the past three moons, and Trist had a fairly good idea of what it meant: the sword was designed to channel power directly back to the faerie who had made it, sharing nothing with the wielder.

At the moment, Trist’s immediate discontent with that idea was less important than the fact that he needed a weapon in hand to deal with the starved daemons that were swarming him.  If he’d only been fighting one or two, he was certain he could have managed the trick of slipping into the right frame of mind to focus on multiple locations at once, but the tide of monstrosity was simply too chaotic for him to keep track of.  As a result, the idea of cutting them all down with a single swing, coming from half a dozen places, was just unworkable.

Instead, bereft of the greater part of the strength and speed he’d come to rely on as an Exarch, Trist was left with little more than his own skill with a blade, honed over years of training and months of desperate combat.  

He slid back away from the winged bull in time to evade the charge of a horned stag with little more than a scrape, but then had to throw himself aside again when a bolt of lightning shot down from gathering clouds in the sky above the city.

A daemon with the head and wings of an owl swooped down on Trist from above, slicing at his head with a sword, but that was at least something familiar enough to be quickly dealt with.  Trist set the cut aside, stepped inside the monster’s guard, and sliced half a wing off, causing it to tumble down onto the broken streets.  There was just time to thrust his new sword through its heart before Trist had to pull the blade out and roll out of the way of a second stroke of lightning.

He was going to have to deal with whatever was calling the storm; his fights against Vinea had taught him that.  Trist was fairly certain that it was the winged stag daemon, because of the smell that lingered in the air around that creature, and the way the hairs on the back of Trist’s arms had stood on end when it first charged him.

Trist lunged past a bird made entirely of fire, moving fast enough to only be burned a bit on his left side, knocked the stag’s horns aside and slit its throat.  To his immediate gratification, the dark clouds above stopped rumbling and began to clear, which meant that he’d guessed correctly.  The flaming bird swooped at him again, and the sword of ice met it with a hiss of steam that caused the daemon to shriek in pain and wing away.

The problem was that the longer Trist was distracted by this attack, the more time Camiel had to kill people back in Lutetia.  The horror that had once been the Angelus of War had already killed Sir Cynric, and Yaél was far too close to the fight for Trist’s comfort.  The squire was liable to do something foolishly brave, and the thought of returning just in time to see her die filled Trist with the same raw panic he’d felt when Vinea had threatened his wife.  Trist wasn’t certain precisely what it would feel like to have a child, but he thought he had the beginnings of an idea.

All of that added up to the reality that Trist couldn’t waste any more time fighting in Vellatesia.  The daemon-bird of fire was fleeing, and he was going to take that as a victory and let it escape.  Someone could always hunt it down later.  He’d struck down the winged stag and the owl-daemon, which left him with Balan, the serpent being the only thing here he knew by name, and three other daemons.

The first was a wolf with a serpent’s tail which, instead of leaping for Trist’s throat, breathed out a gout of flame that forced him to dive aside.  The angle of the fiery breath steered him directly into the path of a daemon with the face of a great wildcat, and the wings of an eagle, which tried to clasp Trist in its arms and bear him to the ground.  Trist warded it off with a quick flick of his blade and withdrew, desperately trying to keep distance so that he wouldn’t be grappled.  Another wildcat, with eyes that burned like coals, growled from behind, and Trist found himself surrounded by the four remaining daemons.

For a moment, they circled him, Balan and the rest, and Trist did his best to turn with them, trying to keep all four in sight without letting any one of the daemons get behind him.  It was an instinct trained into him by long practice with John Granger, his brother Percy, and his father, from the time he was a child, and it was impossible to maintain.  Sooner or later, one of the daemons would get behind him, and then it would be over.

What the daemons didn’t know was that Trist didn’t need to see them to fight them.  

He was certain they could see the bandage over his eyes, of course, but the entire fight had played out over the course of only a few moments, which was not a lot of time for anyone to make careful observations.  Worse for the daemons, they’d all been starved for centuries, bound here in the torment of their hunger.  Trist doubted they had much patience for anything but the opportunity to feed on him, at this point.  On top of all that, he didn’t fight like a man who was blind, which meant they weren’t thinking of him that way.

They were also now giving him just enough time and space to do what he’d wanted to do before, but hadn’t been able to manage in the crush of bodies during the initial assault.  With the mob of daemons thinned out to a more manageable number, what had been impossible then was much easier now.

Trist shifted his focus just behind each of the four daemons and swung.  For the space of a heartbeat, he existed in four places at once, and the winter blade of a faerie queen passed neatly through the necks of all four daemons.  In the wake of the sword’s passing, four heads, each coated in a thin layer of frost, like grass on a winter morning, fell to the streets of the ruined city and rolled away.  Tithes jerked through the sword, but Trist didn’t have time to focus on that.  Instead, he shifted his perception back to Lutetia.

This time, instead of splitting his focus, Trist did something different.  Acrasia had explained it to him by drawing circles, and asking him to stand with a foot in each.  But there was no reason he needed to keep a part of himself here: he’d done everything he needed to do in this city.  The only thing that had kept him before was exhaustion, and the fact that he’d never attempted this in the past, but it was clear that leaving a part of himself behind, at the mercy of hungry daemons lurking in the ruins, was going to continue to be a problem.

Instead of a foot in each place, Trist stepped from one to the other.

It was nothing like using the Boon he’d stolen from the Serpent of Gates.  That felt like tearing a hole in something; this was just a step - a step that shook the world around him, true, but not a thing that harmed by its very nature.  Trist moved from Vellatesia to the battle at the capital, and the world allowed him to, as easily as it let a horse ride through tall grass.

He hadn’t known quite where Camiel was; a few moments was a lot of time, in a pitched battle, and a lot could happen during that time.  Trist appeared only a few paces from Sir Cynric’s body, and the sight of the dead man made him wonder how many others were dead or dying.  How many of them he knew, had shared a meal with.  It was time to put all of this to an end, before anyone else died.

The roaring of the monster led him to the clash.  Guiron must have still been buried under the collapsed building, or at any rate too wounded to get back into the fight, for Trist did not see him.  Cynric, he’d left dead three streets back.  Lorengel was with Clarisant, dead or alive, and Trist couldn’t spare a thought for that now.  Only Margaret and Bors remained and, to Trist’s horror, Yaél.

The left side of Bors’ face had been laid open by what looked like a vicious claw swipe, one that had shattered the man’s helm and left part of it half-submerged in the muddy water that covered the street.  Nonetheless, the older Exarch fought on, and Trist imagined the harvest of Boons he’d taken from Adrammelech at the pass had something to do with his endurance.

Margaret’s glaive was shattered, so she’d had to get closer in than someone using such a weapon would normally prefer.  Her left leg was soaked in blood, though Trist couldn’t see exactly where she’d been wounded, and the injury was slowing her down.  If they didn’t get her help in the next few moments, she was probably going to die from the loss of blood.

Yaél had Guiron’s other sword - she must have scooped it up after tossing the winter blade to Trist.  She was hovering about the edges of the fight, only darting in when Camiel was thoroughly focused on one of the Exarchs, and that must have kept her from gaining its focus until now.  As Trist ran toward the melee, however, Margaret’s leg collapsed.

Before the monster could finish her off, Yaél leapt in front of her, standing over the Exarch with Guiron’s arming sword raised into a plow guard.  Even without being able to see her eyes, Trist knew what Yaél was thinking.  She was going to protect Margaret if it killed her.

Trist refused to let that happen.

While Camiel was entirely focused on Yaél, swinging a claw in to tear the girl’s stomach out, Bors gave a shout behind it.  He was bringing his flail down, but a chain weapon like that wasn’t the kind of thing you could parry with, and he’d long since lost his shield.  Even if the man killed Camiel with his strike, it wouldn’t be quick enough to stop it from gutting Yaél.  Margaret screamed at her to run, and tried to force herself up off the ground, but her leg simply refused to carry her weight.

Trist stopped running.  He exhaled, and just before the monster’s claws touched his squire, he appeared to their side.  The winter blade made a crooked cut, taking Camiel’s hand off at the wrist.  Splitting his focus, Trist appeared in half a dozen locations all around the twisted, tormented thing that had once been an Angelus, and thrust a half dozen blades of ice into its emaciated body.

Camiel screamed once more, and then the ice-blade jerked as all the power that had pushed the abomination forward was torn out, and sent away to the faerie queen of the north.