We move out the next morning, and I force Keris and her machinations from my mind. If I can rout Grímarr’s forces—or at least weaken them—before they get to Antium, she’ll lose her chance to take Marcus down, and I’ll be the hero instead of her. The Karkauns are twelve days from the city, but my force can move faster than theirs. My men and I have five days to make life as hellish as possible for them.
Our smaller force allows us to ride swiftly, and on the evening of the third day, our scouts confirm that the Karkaun force has, as Dex reported, gathered at Umbral Pass. They have Tundaran Wildmen with them—that’s likely how Grímarr figured out the way through. Those women-hating Tundaran bastards know these mountains almost as well as the Martials do.
“Why the hells are they just waiting there?” I ask Dex. “They should be clear of the pass by now and out into open country.”
“Waiting for more men, perhaps,” Dex says, “though their force doesn’t seem much bigger than when I saw it.”
I send my cousin Baristus out to recon the north end of the pass to see if, indeed, more Karkauns are joining the main body of the army. But when he returns, he brings only questions.
“Bleeding strange, sir,” Baristus says. As Dex, Avitas, and I gather in my tent, my cousin paces back and forth, agitated. “There are no more men coming in through the northern passes. Truly, it appears they are waiting, but for what I cannot tell. I thought it might be weaponry or artillery for their siege machines. But they have no siege machines. How the bleeding hells do they plan to get past the walls of Antium without catapults?”
“Maybe Keris promised to let them in,” I say. “And they don’t yet realize how devious she is. It would be just like her to play both sides.”
“And then what?” Dex says. “She lets them lay siege for a few weeks?”
“Enough time for her to find a way to get Marcus killed in the fighting,” I say. “Enough time for her to sabotage the birth of my nephew.” Ultimately, it is the Empire that Keris wishes to rule over. She will not let the capital of the Empire fall. But the loss of a few thousand lives? That’s nothing to her. I’ve learned that lesson well.
“If we rout the Karkauns here,” I say, “then we kill her plan before it draws its first breath.” I examine the drawings the aux has given me of the layout of the Karkaun army camp. Their food stores, their weaponry, the locations of their various provisions. They’ve buried their most valuable goods in the very heart of the army, where they will be almost impossible to reach.
But I have Masks with me. And the word impossible has been whipped and beaten out of us.
My force strikes deep in the night, when much of the Karkaun camp is sleeping. The sentries go down swiftly, and Dex leads a force that is in and out before the first flames rise from the Karkaun food stores. We hit perhaps a sixth of their supply, but by the time our enemies sound the alarm, we have retreated back into the mountains.
“I’ll come with you for the next assault, Shrike,” Harper says to me as we prepare for another. “Something feels wrong to me. They took that attack lying down.”
“Perhaps it’s because we surprised them.” Harper paces nervously, and I put a hand on his shoulder to still him. A spark jumps between us, and he looks up in surprise. Immediately, I let him go.
“I—I need you with the rear guard,” I say to cover my awkwardness. “If something does go wrong, I’ll need you to get the men back to Antium.”
Our next assault comes just before dawn, when the Barbarians are still scrambling from our earlier attack. This time, I lead a group of a hundred men armed with arrows and flame.
But almost before the first volley flies, it is clear that the Karkauns are ready for us. A wave of more than a thousand of them on our western side breaks off from the main army and surges upward in orderly, organized lines that I’ve never seen in a Karkaun force.
But we have the higher ground, so we pick off as many as we can. They have no horses, and these mountains are not their land. They don’t know these hills the way we do.
When we’ve exhausted our arrows, I signal the retreat—which is when the unmistakable thud of a drum thunders out from the rear guard. Avitas’s troops. One deep thud—two—three.
Ambush. We worked out the warnings ahead of time. I spin about, my war hammer in hand, waiting for the attack. The men close ranks. A horse screams—a chilling and unmistakable sound. Curses ring out when the drum sounds again.
But this time, the drum is unceasing, a frantic call for aid.
“The rear guard is under attack,” Dex calls out. “How the hells—”
His sentence ends in a grunt as he parries a knife that comes flying out at him from the woods. And then we can think of nothing but surviving, because we are suddenly surrounded by Karkauns. They rise up from well-hidden traps in the ground, drop down from trees, rain down arrows and blades and fire.
From the rear guard, we hear the unholy howling of more Karkauns as they pour down the mountain, from the east. Thousands of them. More still approach from the north. Only the south is clear—but not for long, if we don’t clear this ambush.
We’re dead. We’re bleeding dead.
“That ravine.” I point to a narrow path between the closing pincer of the approaching forces, and we make a break for it, sending arrows back over our shoulders. The ravine follows the river, leading down to a waterfall. There are boats there—enough to take the remaining men downstream. “Faster! They’re closing!”
We run full force, grimacing at the screams of the rear guard dying swiftly as they are inundated by our enemy. Skies, so many men. So many Black Guards. And Avitas is up there. Something feels wrong to me. If he’d been with us, he might have seen the ambush. We might have retreated before the Karkauns attacked the rear guard.
And now . . .
I look up the mountain. He could not possibly survive that onslaught. None of them could. There are too many.
He never told Elias that they are brothers. He never got to speak to Elias as a brother. And skies, the things I’ve said to him in moments of rage, in anger, when all he did was try to help keep me alive. That spark between us, extinguished before I could put a name to it. My eyes burn.
“Shrike!” Dex screams and knocks me to the ground as an arrow cuts through the air, nearly impaling me. We scramble up and stumble on. The ravine finally appears, an eight-foot drop into the remnants of a creek. A hail of arrows comes down as we approach it.
“Shields!” I shout. Steel thunks on wood, and then my men and I run again, years of training pushing us into neat rows. Every time a soldier is picked off, another moves to take his place so that when I look back, I can count almost exactly how many are left.
Only seventy-five—of the five hundred Marcus sent.
We hurtle down the path beside the falls, and the thunder of the water drives away any other sound. The path curves back and forth on itself until it drops into a dusty flat where a dozen long boats are beached.
The men need no orders. We hear the chants of the Karkauns behind us. One boat launches, then another and another.
“Shrike.” Dex pulls me toward a boat. “You have to go.”
“Not until the rest of the boats launch,” I say. Four hundred and twenty-five men . . . gone. And Avitas . . . gone. Skies, it was so quick.
The sounds of swords clashing echoes from the path above. My hammer is in my hand, and I am racing up the path. If some of my men are still up there, then by the skies, I will not let them fight alone.
“Shrike—no!” Dex groans, draws his scim, and follows. Just beyond the entrance to the path, we find a group of Martials, three Masks among them, battling the Tundarans but being inexorably shoved back by the sheer number of them. A group of auxes supports a fourth Mask, blood pouring from his neck, from a wound in his gut, from another in his thigh.
Harper.
Dex grabs him from the auxes, staggering under his weight as he carries him down toward the last boat. The auxes arm their bows and fire over and over until the air is buzzing with arrows, and it is a miracle I am not hit. One of the Masks turns—it is Baristus, my cousin.