Well, perhaps not entirely unwitting, Clay amended, as the giant’s next earth-hammering stomp killed all five of the Skulks at once. But what the hell can we do? Killing a giant was possible, sure, but it took time, and proper planning, the right weapons, and a fair bit of good fortune. You just can’t …
The giant’s throat suddenly bristled with half a dozen shivering crossbow bolts. The brute looked as confused about that as Clay was, but then several more barbs sprouted amidst a spray of misting blood. The giant’s eyes glazed over in death and it sagged thunderously to its knees.
Clay craned his neck to gape at the skyship soaring ponderously overhead, now banking, so that even though they were too far off to read clearly, Clay knew at once the bold white words stamped along the dreadnought’s hull.
Larkspur had come to Castia.
Chapter Fifty-one
The Autumn Son
The mind, Clay had learned long ago, could witness only so much carnage before it ceased to comprehend. You saw it, still. You heard it raging like a rainstorm against a closed window, but it simply did not register. His capacity for slaughter was overflowing, like a cup filled to the brim with wine, or water. Or, more aptly, with blood.
Everywhere Clay looked was pandemonium. He saw Tushino the Wicked deflect a lightning bolt with his sword before cutting an arm off the warlock who’d cast it. The Reavers were chopping at the trunk of a faltering treant as spriggan archers spilled from its eaves. Neil the not-so-Young-anymore hurled a bale of fire into the gaping maw of a great wyrm. The thing exploded, and since half of it was buried, the ground above it ruptured, hurling kobolds like clods of earth behind a galloping horse. Deckart Clearwater pummeled his way through half a hundred undead and broke the skull of the crypt fiend compelling them. The ghost-blue fires in its eyes went out, and the rest of its shambling soldiers crumpled in an instant.
Elsewhere things weren’t going so well. Clay saw Merciless May Drummond trampled by a boar and the Dreamers go down beneath a pile of steel-helmed grimlocks. The Blind Tiger was killed by an arrow he almost certainly did not see coming. A stooping cyclops reached beneath the steel-plated argosy and tipped it over. The great machine floundered like a beetle on its back, fire and smoke spouting from either end.
Clay’s eyes roamed the battlefield, hoping to determine Lastleaf’s whereabouts, but there was simply too much chaos. He looked to the frenzied sky for sign of the wyvern matriarch, but he couldn’t pick her out from so far away.
The Dark Star soared overhead, mist streaming from its tidal engines. Rot sylphs bounced from its prow. Bats scattered from its path or were burned to ash by its storm-wracked sails. The same pitch bombs that had laid waste to The Carnal Court were now unleashed upon the Horde, a hedgerow of thumping explosions that vaporized hundreds at a time.
At last the daeva and her red-robed thralls came spilling over the sides, gliding toward the battlefield below. Her minions were more numerous than Clay would have figured, and he was wondering if she’d left any on board when the dreadnought’s inevitable course became apparent.
So, no then, he thought—or hoped not, anyway—since the Dark Star, its prow ostensibly crammed with more of those volatile bombs, ploughed straight into the second giant’s face. The resulting explosion lit the sky like a second sun, a flash of blinding incandescence followed by a BOOM that rattled Clay’s teeth in their sockets.
For a heartbeat, as scraps of burning skyship rained down, every soul on the plain stood struck by horrific expectation. The giant tipped forward, and the mercenaries trapped within its shadow looked up in despair, but then it rocked onto its heels, toppling backward, an avalanche of flesh and bone crashing down into the midst of the Horde. The battlefield heaved; men and monsters bounced like bowls on a table struck by a god.
Clay was thrown from his feet, and for a moment he simply lay on his back, gazing up at a sky that already seemed brighter absent the looming threat of two rampaging giants, until a glossy black feather drifted above his eyes. He rolled to his knees, surged to his feet, preparing (if not the least bit prepared) to bear the brunt of Larkspur’s vengeance.
Her thralls hit the ground first, red robes fluttering as they tumbled through a tribe of wild orcs. They wasted no time joining the fight, hands and feet a blur as they secured a space in which their mistress could land in safety.
The daeva’s wings fanned as she descended. Her armoured toes aimed like a nail at the earth below. The scythe in her hands gleamed dully, white as a winter sky, and Clay’s newborn hand itched at the sight of it. If she bore any lasting injury from being impaled by one of Barret’s bolts, it wasn’t evident at the moment. Larkspur touched down, folded her wings, and made straight for Ganelon.
“Took you long enough,” said the warrior.
“Fuck yourself,” she snapped, and drove the butt of her scythe into the ground like a conqueror coming ashore in a heathen land.
The kiss that followed was sudden as lightning, fierce as a storm at sea. She seized his throat with an iron claw. He clasped her hair in a mailed fist, and Clay saw her bite down on his lip.
When they finally wrenched themselves apart, Gabriel loosed a loud sigh. “Spring Maiden’s Mercy, I thought I was the dramatic one. If you two are finished …?”
“For now,” said Larkspur. The look she gave Ganelon was that of a torturer setting bloody instruments aside.
Ganelon’s grin was flecked with blood. “For now,” he agreed.
Gabriel hefted his sword. “Good, now we need to find—” Lastleaf, he’d been about to say—Clay was sure of it—except Lastleaf found them first.
The wyvern matriarch hit the ground like an anchor dropped into shallow water, splashing blood and bodies in every direction. Ashatan’s black wings thrashed to either side, spines and talons shredding mercs as though they were stuffed with straw. Her tail lashed out, punching into the chest of one of Larkspur’s monks and lifting him from the ground. The poor man screamed until venomous foam came boiling from his mouth, and the wyvern shook him loose with a snap. She had another of the daeva’s thralls pinned to the ground with her snout, and Clay watched, repulsed, as her jaws burrowed into his gut. The man was dead by the time she raised her head, pulling entrails from the steaming ruin of his chest.
To their credit, or at least as testimony to the potency of Larkspur’s preternatural charm, her remaining thralls positioned themselves between their mistress and the matriarch. The area cleared by the daeva’s arrival earlier remained wide-open, since Grandual’s mercenaries were more than willing to pick fights elsewhere, and Lastleaf’s minions cowered instinctively from the great black wyvern and the man upon her back.
Lastleaf, the Autumn Son.
He no longer wore the Duke of Endland’s tattered longcoat. Now he was clad for war in a suit of skirted, silvergreen scale. His left arm was sheathed in overlapping plates of red metal that joined seamlessly with the pauldron on that shoulder, and he was wearing, of all things, a helmet: sleek and steely green, like his armour, with flared casings for his backswept ears. A crest running front to back was plumed with what looked like long, red-orange leaves.
Truth be told, it wasn’t the worst helmet Clay had seen. He might even have said it suited the druin in a splendid-sylvan-prince sort of way.
“Gabriel,” Lastleaf called down from the wyvern’s back. He gestured with a pale hand at the battle raging everywhere but their immediate vicinity. “I assume this is your doing?”