David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

The last man down the passage wore priestly robes. “ Kill him! ” Carus ordered in Garric’s mind.

Garric wasn’t sure what he’d have done if the Blood Eagles had simply knocked the priest out of the way. He’d killed when he had to, but the ease with which Vascay slit a man’s throat for expedience was foreign to Garric’s nature.

The question didn’t arise, because the Archa warrior following the priest caught him in the doorway. The insect’s forelimbs chopped down, cutting the neck to the spine in both directions. The priest toppled, his head lolling loose.

The Blood Eagles tried to stop, shocked by the sudden apparition. The man in front of Garric lost his footing. The soldier’s legs skidded out in front of him, sending him crashing down on the pavement.

The Archa bent at the joint between thorax and the bulbous abdomen below. A spearpoint glanced off its chitinous chest as the creature slashed at the fallen man’s legs. Garric cut off the Archa’s head, but its saw-edged forelimbs continued to hack until another spear thrust brought the creature down.

Garric drew his dagger. He leaped the fallen man and the decapitated monster, meeting face on the column of Archai coming up the passage from the sanctum. Attaper and three Blood Eagles were at his side. The warriors made a shrill chirping, so loud as it echoed that the stone walls quivered.

“Leave it to the men, Sister take you!” Attaper shouted, cutting through the head and half an Archa’s thorax with an overhand stroke. Neither he nor Garric carried a shield. “This isn’t your job!”

Garric stabbed an Archa through the junction of neck and thorax. It was good to use the straight sword he and Carus had trained with, though the curved blade he’d taken from Ceto had served well enough. His steel grated into the chitin, crushing it like eggshell.

Pale ichor gushed, but the warrior’s forelimbs hacked at him anyway. Garric blocked the right with his dagger, but the left arm clanged on his helmet’s earpiece, then the shoulder plate of his cuirass. The saw teeth scarred the bronze, and the weight of the blow brought Garric to his knees. His arm was numb, and he wondered if the creature had broken his collarbone.

Attaper sheared off the forelimb and cut deeply into the insect’s thorax. It fell sideways. Garric stood, dragged his blade free, and lurched forward again.

Carus wouldn’t have let others fight this battle even if Garric had wanted to. The king, tortured every night since he’d taken Garric’s place, grinned with a white rage that wouldn’t be denied its offered revenge.

But Garric had his own nightmares to appease. He remembered Metron screaming at him while Tint’s bones crunched in the serpent’s throat…. Killing Archai wouldn’t give the beastgirl her life back any more than killing the serpent had; but it was something he could do, to help cushion the memory of the thing he could not change.

The soldier to Garric’s left went down. Another man took his place and fell immediately. The Blood Eagles had never fought the Archai before. They hadn’t learned as Carus had in past ages that the insect warriors were much easier to kill than they were to stop.

When the Archai fell, they continued to slash at the soldiers’ legs below the studded aprons. A wounded Archa could be more dangerous than one still standing at shield height.

Garric struck the warrior in front of him, then jumped and was saved by a reflex his ancient ancestor had honed. A toothed limb whistled beneath him, the dying stroke of an Archa with a spearpoint all the way through its thorax.

Garric blocked a cut with his sword, brought the ball pommel of his dagger down in a hammerblow on a triangular skull, and then kicked. His hobnails and the thick leather sole of his boot took the stroke that would otherwise have severed his leg. His foot went cold to the ankle, but he could still walk on it.

“ There’s no room in the world for these and men both! ” Carus shouted in his mind. “ They had their time. They will not have ours! ”

Garric took another step. He was out of the passage, into the huge domed vault of the sanctum. For an instant, he and the three soldiers with him faced a score of slashing warriors.

Two men went down. A limb smashed Garric’s helmet, breaking the chin strap so that the rim slipped half over his eyes. He struck left and right by instinct, feeling his blades cut deep. Blood Eagles pushed past; Attaper dragged him back against the wall beside the passageway.

Garric gasped, bent forward to draw another breath, and would’ve toppled onto his face if he hadn’t stuck his dagger point down onto the floor to brace him like a steel cane. His cuirass constricted him; he couldn’t breathe as deeply as he needed to. A wave of dizzy nausea swept through his body…and passed as it always did, as it had many times before when he’d worked in the pride of his strength beyond what mere bones and muscles were meant to stand.

“Are you all right, your highness?” Attaper gasped. Like Garric, he was bracing his buttocks against the wall behind him. Soldiers crowded excitedly into the sanctum, their shields raised.

“ They’re forcing the bugs back ,” Carus observed critically, “ but they shouldn’t be taking so many casualties. Archai are sword work, not for spears .”

Both Garric’s arms and the front of his cuirass were covered with the insects’ purplish ichor. It smelled like sour wine and made his skin prickle. When he moved, the dried slime pulled hairs from his arms like a coating of glue.

“I’m all right,” Garric muttered to Attaper. He straightened to give himself a better view of the battle. “I should’ve told the troops to leave their spears outside and go in with swords. Holes in these bugs don’t put them down quick enough.”

As he spoke, a spear flew from the oculus in the center of the dome. He looked up. The heads of a squad of Blaise armsmen peered down from the thirty-foot opening. One knelt on the edge as Garric watched. He flung a spear and took another handed him by a comrade out of sight.

“Sister take the fools!” Attaper fumed. “They’ll be hitting our boys if they keep that up! They’re a hundred and fifty feet up!”

A yard-square piece of gilt bronze sailed through the oculus: the soldiers on the roof were tearing off the metal sheathing for missiles. From the way the sheet fluttered, it could have been cloth—but it clanged like a dropped anvil when it hit.

“Hey!” cried a voice from above. “There’s people holding out on the back wall!”

“If it’s the priests who started this,” said Attaper, “the bugs can save us the trouble of killing them. Not that I’d mind the trouble.”

“ It can’t be priests ,” said Carus, his expression in Garric’s mind sharp with surmise. “ Priests wouldn’t have survived this! ”

“Hold me!” said Garric, no longer conscious of fatigue. He rammed his sword home in its sheath and used Attaper’s shoulder to lift his body, his right foot braced at waist height against the wall. The molding there was very slight, but the marble lip gave his hobnails purchase.

The vault was as wide as it was high, or at least it was too close to tell the difference without a chain. A seething mass of Archai was climbing out of the pool. On the opposite side of them was a wall of warrior bodies, spreading as more Archai climbed to the top and died there.

Even raised a few feet from the floor, Garric couldn’t see who was on the other side of the mounded corpses. But—

An Archa reached the top; a quarterstaff slammed it at the junction of thorax and abdomen, breaking off a leg. Garric only knew one man that strong.