Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1085: Attack and Defense

“Can’t you go any faster?” Lightning hovered at the cab window, her hands wanting to push. She knew, rationally, that even Maggie couldn’t move something this massive with her bare hands. That did not stop the wanting. “More coal in the boiler — anything—”

“Burst the boiler at this pressure, girl!” The conductor had silver hair and the kind of broad, unhurried face that belonged to a neighbor who grew vegetables, not a man threading an armored train through a demon attack at maximum speed. He shouted back over the din of the engine, the relentless clanking percussion of iron on iron. “Settle down. The First Army has been through worse than this.”

Lightning pressed her lips together and said nothing.

She had found the Blackriver in less than a minute — the train was too large to miss, and the Realm of Silence had still been in her bones when she’d overtaken it, that clean roaring quiet of absolute speed. The arrival had startled every man aboard. She’d identified herself, spoken to the conductor directly, and he had listened and turned the train around without theatrical delay. That part had gone exactly as it needed to.

It hadn’t made the rest better.

Sylvie’s report, once Lightning had gotten her on the sigil, had been precise in the way only Sylvie’s reports ever were, spatial and calibrated and leaving no room for wishful interpretation: the demons had caught the First Army offguard, and their main force was converging on the camp from two axes — east and south. Without artillery reinforcement, the defensive line was going to fail. The timeline had not been generous.

The one good thing: Maggie had found Lorgar. Nana had treated her. She was no longer in danger.

Lightning held that. She let it be the thing she was certain about while everything else was uncertain.

“It’s noisy out there and you’re just hovering in the cold,” the conductor said, pulling a long draw on his pipe and leaning out to look at her with something that was not quite amusement but was adjacent to it. “Come in. It wobbles but the boiler keeps it warm.”

“I’m fine.” She glanced at the dashboard — its gauges and levers, the conductor’s ease with all of them, the deep mechanical intimacy of someone who knew this machine the way a rider knows a horse. “Thank you.”

“Still worried about the camp?”

“Yes.”

“So am I.” He stroked his beard, untroubled. “Two people specifically.”

Lightning had assumed he was the kind of old man who worried about no one, or had made peace with all of it. She recalibrated. “Family?”

“Three children made it past King Wimbledon’s time. Two sons, a daughter.” He tapped his pipe against the window frame. “My sons used to be as weak as wet rope — scrawny things, both of them. Joined the First Army, both of them. Different now.” He said it the way you say something you keep returning to and it keeps being true. “An army that can change men like that doesn’t fold to a night raid.”

“And the third?”

“Right on this train.” The conductor nodded toward the forward compartment. “The lookout who spotted you coming. He’s the one who called it in.” A pause, and the quiet pride in it was unperformed, old, earned. “His Majesty changed this town. I wanted to give something back. Mining got boring. When they needed engine operators I applied for conductor — and they took me, and here we are.”

Lightning was opening her mouth when the telephone on the control panel rang.

“Father, I can see Tower Station No. 1 — there’s fire, there’s fighting—”

“How many times do I have to tell you: not Father in the army.” The conductor’s roar blotted out the rest of the sentence. “Eyes front. Keep watching the track. I’m signaling them now.” He slapped the receiver down, yanked the cord, and looked at Lightning with something satisfied and warm underneath the stern. “See? They’re still standing.”

He pulled the whistle.

Seven minutes later, the Blackriver let out a long, low groan and slowed into Tower Station No. 1.

Stone needles came out of the dark and hit the locomotive’s flanks and shattered. Where black stone met grey steel, sparks flew in long arcing sprays — red and orange, raining down the locomotive’s sides in the dark like something festive and lethal. The demons who stepped onto the track to block it were not blocking anything. The train gathered them and ground them under and kept moving.

No living thing could stop a train. That was simply a fact about trains.

The machine guns at the forward and rear turrets opened up as the Blackriver slowed and found its arc of fire. Tracers cut the dark in flat bright lines. The demons caught between the two converging streams had no geometry available to them — nowhere to shelter, their bone spears landing against the locomotive’s armored skin and sliding off. The Blackriver was indifferent to bone spears.

Lightning had already dropped into the turret.

“Sylvie — where’s the target?”

“Thirty-three hundred meters, bearing north-northwest.” Sylvie’s voice came over the sigil clear and immediate, as if she’d been watching the train’s arrival and simply waiting for the question. She began calling parameters — elevation, windage, the particular patient efficiency of someone doing what she was built for — and the gun crews moved without ceremony.

The train rolled to a stop.

The Longsong Cannons spoke.

Sylvie could see the enemy’s main force entering effective range.

Five thousand demons, roughly — less than the Northbound Slope by a significant margin. Loose formation, almost careless, the way a mob advances rather than an army. The First Army held the perimeter at every point. The situation was bad and then it was less bad and then the Blackriver arrived and changed the arithmetic entirely.

She was tracking the field, cataloguing, adjusting firing coordinates.

Then her Eye stuttered.

Not a glitch — not the way a God’s Stone disrupts the Eye, that clean absence, the neat clipped boundary of suppression. This was something else. A darkness had risen from the ground ahead, not distance-dark but wrong-dark, opaque in a way terrain wasn’t opaque, in a way that made the Eye bend around it rather than pierce it.

She’d seen God’s Stone interference. This was not that.

A God’s Stone produced an edge: here you see, here you don’t, precise and geometric. This blackness had the shape of something metabolic — its boundary shifting, breathing, the seam between visible and invisible moving in tiny increments the way a living thing moves when it thinks no one is watching.

It had not been there a moment ago.

Everything the demons had done tonight — the spider bombardment, the pillar deliveries, the two-axis approach — all of it had issued from behind that black zone, from whatever hid behind that particular darkness.

The Eye of Magic had met something it could not see through.

Something alive. Something different from anything she’d catalogued.

Sylvie held the data and kept calling firing coordinates, kept adjusting, kept the guns on target. She did not have language for what she was seeing yet. But she filed it away with the precision she brought to everything, and she did not look away from the dark zone again, and she waited to see if it would move.

It did not.

It breathed.

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