Meek

The last time Eli heard bells ringing like that, he hadn't been paying attention. He'd thought they were sounding for a wolf or a funeral. He hadn't known anything was wrong until his mother scooped him up from where he'd been hiding from his chores.

But this time, he knew.

Angelbrood.

The concomitance was here.

The civilians at the gate were racing for the sanctuary of the Keep--of the Church. And the guards were letting them in, tradesfolk and laborers along with the gentry who lived nearby. During a concomitance, nothing mattered but saving lives.

"Vale," he spat.

"They need me at the wall," Pym told him, a hint of hope in her voice. "Me and my guards."

Eli knew exactly what she meant: the history of the valley was replete with tales of mortal enemies declaring a temporary peace to face the brood together, with battlefields abandoned to fight the common threat. Of course, the scribe in Eli knew of the less-heralded moments in the history of the valley when one side of a conflict had taken advantage of a concomitance to backstab a foe.

"Yeah," he said.

Pym slowly lifted a hand toward the knife at her neck. "So?"

"So maybe I'll get lucky," he said, "and one of them will kill you."

Then he lowered the knife and pressed five sparks into the ground. He leaped upward and backwards. He flung himself above the rear rank of guards, ten feet in the air, and two more sparks dug into the crook of a tree and pulled him sideways into the branches.

Crossbow bolts speared the leaves around him, thunked into the trunk--and embedded in his arse, which blessdamned hurt.

"Let him go!" Pym shouted. "Let him go. Get to the wall! Ty, I need numbers and sightings of the brood, then get inside and guard mother!"

"I won't stay behind."

"Yes you will," she snapped. Captain, move!"

The captain of the guard shouted orders above Ty's objections while, in the branches of a tree across the park, Eli pulled the bolt from his ass.

Still bloody hurt. At least this was the perfect excuse for letting Pym live--and the perfect distraction, too. He could drop off the plateau without anyone noticing. Meet up with Lara outside the city and head back to Leotide where--

Lara.

Eli felt a flare of fear for her ... but no. Lara was capable of fleeing from angelbrood, in a city with this many people. A city she knew this well. And the chance that they'd target her, of all people, was tiny.

Unlike the crowd at the gate, which was clearly being targeted even as Eli rubbed his aching arse. His highest spark heard them screaming, heard the fear and horror and helplessness. Which reminded him of when his father and sister died.

"Well, blight," he said to himself.

Still, he couldn't miss this opportunity to run. In this long war against the Celestials, the humans hadn't even been trying to win battles. Instead, they'd been trying to weather them. To survive them. And every eruption of violence like this concomitance simply made people more determined to keep their heads down. But what Eli had learned from Brazinka was, they needed to stop focusing on the battles, even in the rare cases when they could win them.

They needed to focus on the war.

His part of that started with the Killweeds. He didn't know where it ended, but taking them down would deprive the Celestials of ... of elite troops, or powerful saboteurs. And Brazinka's part started with convincing the throne to unify, using money as bait.

So this wasn't his fight. Not yet, not here.

He lowered himself from the tree and loped across the park toward the edge of the plateau. He looked out over the city, and ... didn't see much panic. Actually, he didn't see any, and his sparks' vision pierced the dusk.

Which meant what? There weren't dozens of angelbrood rampaging through the city. The assault on the Keep was localized. Just focused on a few thousand people, whose screams he still heard, whose panic he still heard, and--

Screw it.

He ran back the way he'd come. He crossed the park toward the Church, toward the crowd pressing forward. The choir, still in their robes, stood outside the Church doors, calling for the terrified people to enter. A few priests pushed against the tide of people, spreading across the square, ringing bells and praying fervently.

Trying to extend the sanctuary of the Church before the brood arrived.

As Eli approached, he saw a grandmotherly woman holding a wailing child in one arm while dragging an older one along. An expensively-dressed family helped a man in a baker's apron push a teenager and some elderly folk in a wheeled cart. Two men flanked a pregnant woman, keeping the panicked crowd from knocking her down.

Then he noticed that the choir members weren't calling for everyone to enter. They were directing the young men to the sides of the building instead. One last line of defense.

"Vale," Eli murmured, and his sparks helped him shove through the crowd.

On the other side of the flagstone path, a guard who must've missed Pym's order took a swing at him but he just knocked her backward and kept running.

The crowd noise faded behind him as he threw himself onto a shed roof and then the roof of an outbuilding. He raced across, toward the inner gate of the Keep. Some kind of reserve armed force was taking shape within the inner walls. A quartermaster's assistant was handing out spears to footmen and gardeners and bootblacks, and even a few members of the gentry. They were holding the weapons pretty comfortably, so they'd had at least some training. What they didn't have was armor.

Or a single blighted chance against angelbrood.

The panicked crowd pressed through the inner gates, packing the courtyard while soldiers attempted to keep order. When Eli tossed himself from a peaked roof to the top of the inner wall, he saw that other side of the gate was even worse. Hundreds of people were crammed together on the road that ran across the bailey toward the outer gates and the city beyond, desperately trying to shove through.

"Who the halo are you?" a guard on the wall snarled at him.

"A guy who can kill angelbrood. How many are there?"

"Get off the blessdamn wall."

"Yesmir," Eli said, and jumped off, toward the outer gate.

The guard shouted behind him. His sparks caught him before he landed on a cobbled street. He avoided the crowd pushing forward, letting two high sparks guide him through the buildings of the bailey toward the outer wall. Doors slammed as he jogged past. Wealthy families were locking themselves inside their well-built homes, in cellars or strong-rooms, to weather the storm.

But most people didn't have that choice. A stream of commoners poured toward the inner gate--and then, despite the screaming and the weeping and the scuffling, a new sound carried to Eli.

Humming.

A dissonant, repetitive tune that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

Even if he'd forgotten everything else from the day his father and sister died, he'd never forget that.

The crowd noise swallowed the humming immediately, but he was already veering closer. He darted between two buildings that faced the main road in the bailey, angling through the crowd toward the outer wall. Children wept, parents gasped. Wild eyes stared and trembling hands shoved. Some were bleeding, most kept looking over their shoulder and--

Eli stopped short. There, just a few feet in front of him, was a face he recognized. The acne-pocked cheeks of Junior Scribe Hurm, from the archives. Hurm looked directly at Eli without the faintest trace of recognition, then staggered past.

So he kept moving. When he reached the stairs leading to the top of the wall, two guards stepped forward to stop him. They didn't recognize him, he didn't think. Well, they didn't attack him. Still, they didn't see any reason to allow a half-naked man, half-covered in blood, onto the wall.

Fair enough.

He pushed them aside with sparks, ran halfway up the stairs, then launched himself fifteen feet to the wall-walk to avoid the guards coming down to stop him.

The main gate was to his left, past a tower that rose ten feet above him. He looked over the parapet into the city and saw a mass of people shoving toward the Keep.

Behind them, he saw a quiet road. Empty blocks leading through the city--empty except for the dozens of corpses that lay torn apart on the ground, and tossed onto fences and into yards.

More than dozens.

The angelbrood were behind the crowd, herding them forward like sheepdogs--and killing anyone who lagged behind. No. Killing the rearmost people, if they lagged or not.

Eli's sparks counted four of them, but they didn't looked like the ones from when he was a kid.

They were bigger.

Twice as big.

Maybe four times, though they'd clearly been human once. Maybe just an hour earlier. Now they'd swollen and deformed. Their skin had spit and their bones had jutted through, with edges and spikes.

One had jaws like mandibles, and scythes instead of forearms. Another one's black-veined face was embedded in its chest, which now sprouted four arms. A third was prowling on its hands and feet, each 'paw' the size of a round-shield, with spikes like meat-cleavers jutting from its spine.

And the final one, the skeletal one, leaped ten at the crowd on backward-jointed legs. Jumping ten yards like it was nothing, then piercing a black-haired woman with dagger-like fingers.

The skeletal brood flung her aside, knocking down everyone nearby. Then the other angelbrood pounced on the fallen, tearing into them, humming all the while.

On the wall, Eli kept the guards away with his sparks as arrows and crossbow bolts whipped into the brood ... and didn't pierce them. The arrows snapped and the bolts ricocheted off the broods' thick hide and bony spurs and only rarely even left a furrow behind.

The four-armed brood lifted an old man into the air by the ankles before ripping his legs off and--

Eli leaped from the wall.

He punched two sparks into the ground below him, two behind and two ahead, moving them like a waterwheel to propel himself forward. His sparks picked among the crowd as he flung himself over their head, narrowly avoiding a clothier and two kids fleeing from the brood.

After he crossed the street, he snagged the eaves of a building with three sparks. He swung above the crowd as if on an invisible rope and landed on the stone overhang of a fine upper-city home, with his back to the Keep.

The crowd shoved and wept, pushing up the road toward the gates. The angelbrood slashed and hummed, mutilated and murdered, and drove the helpless people forward.

Eli swung from building to building until he was level with the brood--then he kept going. One of them turned toward him, but returned to its bloody work when he sped past.

He dropped into the corpse-littered road ten yards behind them. When he landed, he was on the same level as the brood for the first time, and for the first time got a visceral sense of their size. Which was blessdamned big.

He stalked toward them anyway.

One of his sparks spotted the body of a guardsman by the side of the road. He sent that one to flick the guard's shield toward him. The shield flew in an arc across the road, spinning wildly. Eli steadied it with more sparks then caught it without looking as he ran forward.

He rammed three sparks into the mandible brood's back with everything he had. He heard a crack--halo, he felt the crack--but the brood didn't fall.

It spun and hummed and spread its scythe-arms.

He punched sparks into its face and knees and drove it to the ground.

For a moment.

Then it rolled toward him in a blur, with a clattering of bones. He rammed three sparks against its side and only moved it two feet. Not far enough. It swiped with one scythe to cut off his ankles but a spark gave him warning.

He leaped over the scythe and brought his shield against the brood's head while four sparks hammered its other scythe arm and cracked the bone.

The brood's hum became deeper, almost guttural, and half of that scythe shattered. Shards skittered across the ground and Eli growled in triumph.

Then the brood blurred with a sudden burst of speed, and stabbed him in the calf with a spur that jutted from its ankle.

Eli grimaced and tore himself free. He blocked its unbroken scythe from chopping off his head--then its broken scythe stabbed him through the stomach.

Angeldamn that hurt.

And seeing a shard of bone emerging from his skin beside his belly-button wasn't exactly pleasant, either.

The brood tossed him aside, taking him for dead.

Mistake.