Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 312: War of Mortals (Part 2)

Mortals cannot defeat the Devils, Isabella thought. That’s why the Church created the God’s Punishment Army.

They stood apart from ordinary soldiers the way stone stood apart from clay — not in shape, but in what would happen to them when the rain came. They felt nothing. They feared nothing. They could not act without direction, but in organized battle that limitation became almost irrelevant; there was always a commander, and commanders were what the Church produced in abundance.

Against them, a garrison of mortals had no effective answer. Especially not with their walls broken.

The Army of Judges poured through the main gate, golden light cascading into the city’s interior, filling the streets with the sound of iron and boots and the particular human noise that followed when men who had trained for one kind of fight met men who had trained for another. The God’s Punishment Army came over the rubble like weather — not rushing, not slowing, simply present, advancing, the defenders who threw themselves at the flow disappearing into it.

“Do you want to go and help them?” Isabella asked.

Zero yawned. “No. My ability has limits. I need to save it for significant targets.”

“You could just use a sword. Or a crossbow. They wouldn’t be able to stop you.”

“If I go, they win easily. If I don’t go, they still win easily. There’s no point in going.” Zero settled her weight. “So I won’t.”

“All right,” Isabella said, and changed direction. “Why did you do what you did before?”

“Why?”

“The Bishop’s face was stone the whole time you were playing with those prisoners. He’s the most likely candidate for the next Pope. When that moment comes, you’ll have problems.”

“The reason Excellency Mayne gets angry,” Zero said, “is only that he hasn’t yet been to the library at the top of the Pivotal Secret Temple. Once he goes there, he’ll understand that what I do is precisely what pleases God.”

Isabella waited.

“Playing with,” Zero said, almost gently. “God has never descended into the world. He has never protected anyone. The only way to maintain followers is through an illusory objective — if you believe you can reach it, you keep running. But whether the objective is achievable, whether it’s even real, whether any of it is anything more than the raving of desperate people — none of that is guaranteed.” She ran her fingers through her hair, sorting the windtangle. “Doesn’t that resemble the trial I just conducted? I at least offered him a real objective. Something God never does.” She made a small sound of appreciation. “The most thorough game there is.”

Isabella studied her counterpart. She had learned long ago that she could not always follow Zero’s reasoning, and had stopped trying to judge it. “Have you been to the library yourself?”

“No. These were things His Holiness O’Brian told me. He isn’t a witch — his lifespan is nearly finished. When mortals approach their end, they tend to want to speak to someone.” A pause. “He has asked me to swallow him before he dies.”

“You cannot —”

“Obviously not. Excellency Mayne would never permit it.” Zero cut across her with a simplicity that made it unclear whether she found the constraint reasonable or merely unavoidable. “I know exactly what I’m allowed to do and what I’m not. Although—” a smile moved across her face—“if I were to lose sometime, I could always offer my body as a gift.”

“If you lose, I think nothing will happen.”

Isabella let it go. Zero was what Zero was — a product, she suspected, of the accumulation she carried. All those swallowed people, their experiences layered into a single consciousness: after some number of them, ordinary pleasures lost whatever hold they’d once had. Only the unusual variety still registered. Only things that had not been felt before.

She brought her attention back to the battle.

A group of soldiers had materialized from a gap in the collapsed wall — men who had given up on formation and were throwing themselves at the God’s Punishment Army with the specific desperation of people who had run out of other options. Most died quickly. A handful slipped through. The sound of explosions followed: the new alchemical weapons, the ones she’d first seen during the last siege. Quite powerful, she noted. Against ordinary troops they would be decisive. Against the God’s Punishment Army, they were at most a nuisance, and the men brave enough to approach close enough to use them were the most exposed men on the field.

On the road through the city gate, fire suddenly blocked the passage — a line of flames that cut the soldiers who had entered from those still outside, trapping a section of the Army of Judges inside and leaving the others pressing at a wall of heat. Several men caught in the leading edge rolled in the dirt and did not rise.

“The concentration of God’s Stones of Retaliation has increased considerably behind that gate,” Isabella said. “Two high-quality stones. Someone significant has come to the wall.”

“Then let’s go end it,” Zero said, and stretched, languid, as if rising from a comfortable chair.

“The high readings aren’t from the Wolf King or the Queen of Clear Water,” Isabella said. “The strongest signals are still inside the castle.”

“The army is having trouble.” Zero tilted her head. “And winning badly is not the same as winning well. I should help His Holiness O’Brian reduce losses.” Her tone was earnest. She appeared to mean it. “Just as I said — I serve the Church wholeheartedly.”

By afternoon, Wolfsheart’s defensive line had broken.

The God’s Punishment Army controlled the city gate. The Army of Judges was moving through the streets in organized columns, clearing resistance section by section with the methodical quality of men who knew they would finish before dark.

“The targets are moving,” Isabella said. “Toward the river dock.”

The two men who had organized the wall’s defense were the Wolf King’s sons. Zero had absorbed them in succession after the gate fell, and through what she’d gathered from them, she confirmed what the God’s Stones of Retaliation had already suggested: the two moving signatures with the strongest readings were their primary targets. They had also found and dealt with a witch among the defenders — a woman dressed and marked in the manner of a different tribe. After her death, the militia units willing to approach the God’s Punishment Army had thinned sharply.

“They want to leave by water,” Zero said, with a quality of enjoyment that had nothing to do with the outcome and everything to do with the anticipation of what came next. “Let’s complete the mission His Holiness gave us.”

Their targets were cautious. They changed their route twice, abandoned the main road, arrived at the pier by a path that took them through parts of the city that were already quiet. At the dock they did not board one of the large vessels with black sails — they chose a merchant sloop, small, anonymous, the kind of craft no one would watch leaving. Twenty guards had arrived ahead of them and were positioned on deck.

Isabella watched all of this through her ability. She watched the two targets board. She watched the guards’ hands go to their weapons the moment they recognized the approaching pair.

The guards jumped down from the vessel and came at them.

Zero took the closest man’s sword from his hand in a motion too fast to reconstruct afterward. What she did with it after that was not a fight in any ordinary sense — it was a demonstration performed with someone else’s material. She moved through the guards the way a current moved through reeds: bending them, leaving them down, continuing. Fourteen men. One sword, borrowed. One minute. When it was over, Zero stood in the cleared space among the bodies, and the Wolf King came at her with the blade at his own hip.

“Isabella,” Zero said.

“I know.”

Isabella’s ability reached out. In her inner sight the domains of the God’s Stones of Retaliation on the dock were visible — discrete fields, each one vibrating at its particular frequency, rippling like the surface of water struck in different places at once. She adjusted her own field to match them, then connected the two. The ripples met. Canceled each other. The domain went still and flat.

In that window, Zero became light.

The Wolf King shuddered, changed, and was Zero. The Queen of Clear Water stood three paces away, staring.

“How can you use your power around the God’s Stones?” Garcia said. Her voice had gone very level, which was not the same as calm.

“Because the God’s Stones are not what you believe them to be.” Isabella continued working her frequency, holding the cancellation steady. “But there isn’t much point explaining it to you now.”

She paused.

“Your end has come.”

Zero crossed the space between them, and the Queen of Clear Water ran out of dock.

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