Rewrite That Witch
CH048 · Rewrite
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Chapter 48: Assembly

The horn.

Roland stopped mid-sentence. One long note, then two short — the patrol signal that meant we cannot handle this alone.

He and Carter looked at each other, and then they were moving.

The horses were already saddled outside the backyard, the guards having heard the horn a breath before they did. Roland mounted without ceremony and they rode hard for the western wall, the town streets empty around them, the cold air hitting his face like a hand.

The militia was already on the wall when they arrived — all of them, every section manned, a bristling row of pikes against the grey sky. Roland felt something loosen in his chest. The drills had held.

Iron Axe met him at the parapet. “Your Highness. The group approaching — they’re behaving oddly.”

“Oddly how?”

Iron Axe pointed northwest. Across the white expanse: a mass of shapes, twenty or more, moving with collective purpose. “Mixed species. I can see wolves and bison together. Animals that would kill each other in any normal season.” He paused. “They were killing each other a quarter hour ago. Now they’re not.”

Roland studied the advancing shapes. A mutation of behavior, not just of body. The demonic beasts were supposed to be less organized than their animal predecessors, not more. He stored the observation and said nothing.

Van’er’s palms were wet.

He switched his pike grip to one hand, wiped the other against his thigh, and switched back before the Hunter Captain could notice. He’d been a militia vice-captain for a month. He’d faced small groups of beasts twice before, and both times the hunters had handled them before they reached the wall. He’d started to think of himself as a tested soldier.

He understood now that he had not been tested.

The group was close enough to resolve. Running at the front: a bison-shape, massive, the horns thick as his forearm, the coarse hair along its spine raised like a cloak in the wind. Behind it: wolves, loping in the bison’s wake, using it as a moving wall.

Van’er could feel the vibration before he heard it — a low thrum coming up through the stone parapet and into his boots.

“Steady,” the Captain said. “Deep breaths. Wait for the command.”

Van’er breathed. His heart ignored him.

The bison hit the wall.

It did not slow. Did not turn aside. It drove its skull directly into the stone at a full run and the impact sent a shockwave through the parapet — Van’er staggered — and then the bison was simply there, collapsed at the base of the wall, neck broken, black blood spreading into the snow, and two wolves were already in the air above it, using the body as a launch point, clearing the wall’s height.

“Thrust — thrust!”

Van’er’s body moved before his mind did. He thrust with the pike, hit something, pushed back, and the wolf skidded off the edge of the parapet and went down the outer face. The second wolf was not heading toward him and he thrust anyway, twice, because stopping wasn’t something he could convince himself to do.

The second wolf landed on the wall.

Inside the perimeter. Behind the pike line.

“Hold your positions!” The Captain’s voice cut through. “Front line holds! Do not turn!”

Van’er did not turn. He stared at the approach below and gripped his pike and did not turn. His back felt very exposed.

He heard it — a gunshot, and a crash, and a single snarl that cut off in the middle.

Iron Axe’s voice: “The wolf is dead. Front line holds.”

Van’er breathed.

The next wave came: more wolves, and behind them a boar that hit the crossbow barrage and kept going until it had enough bolts in it to look like something else entirely, and finally went down two yards from the wall. The hunters worked with the mechanical efficiency of people who had decided what they were going to do and were simply doing it.

The militia was less clean. Thrusts came at the wrong times, or twice when once was enough, or not at all until someone shouted. They were not hunters. They were farmers and laborers who had been holding a pike for four months.

They held.

“My stomach—” The voice behind Van’er was high and strange. “My stomach—”

He caught it in his peripheral vision and did not look directly: a man down against the inner wall, both hands pressed to his abdomen, blood between his fingers. The wolf that had gotten through.

“Help me—”

Van’er pulled his attention back to the parapet and immediately wished he hadn’t had to. “You two—” He pointed without looking. “Carry him to the medical center. Now. Move.”

His subordinates hesitated — the man on the ground looked like a man who was going to die, and carrying dying men took effort that could be spent elsewhere.

“Now.”

They moved.

Order returned to that section of the wall. It hadn’t taken long — the whole assault had lasted perhaps half an hour — but Van’er felt emptied out, like something had been poured out of him onto the stone and he’d have to find a way to refill later.

The hunters were shooting the last of the scattered beasts. The snow below the wall was black in patches.

Van’er allowed himself to exhale.

The lookout’s voice, from two sections east: “What in God’s name is that—”

Van’er looked north.

Even at distance, in the flat winter light, the shape was wrong. Wrong in size — he found himself trying to stack animals on top of each other to arrive at the scale and running out of animals. Wrong in shape, too, though he couldn’t name the wrongness at this distance.

Iron Axe stood very still beside him. That, more than anything else, made Van’er’s throat go dry.

“Hybrid,” Iron Axe said, quietly enough that only the nearby men heard. He was already reloading. “The militia is going to have trouble with this one.”

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