Rewrite That Witch
CH065 · Rewrite
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Chapter 65: Ominous Sign

The horn had sounded before — each time, a wave of beasts coming at the wall in numbers that the militia had learned to handle with the systematic efficiency of people who have practiced a difficult thing until it becomes orderable.

Roland reached the wall expecting the same. He stepped out of the fog at the base of the stairs and came up to find the militia at their positions, loaded and ready, and Iron Axe standing very still at the north outlook with both hands on the horn and the horn not raised.

Not the usual thing.

“What is it?” Roland asked.

Iron Axe pointed. Far out on the plain — far enough that the white was uniform, far enough that Roland had to look and then look again before he found what he was being shown — a dark point. Unmoving.

“Hybrid,” Iron Axe said. He swallowed before he continued, which was not a thing Roland had seen him do before. “I’ve seen it once. Six years ago.”

Six years ago. Roland looked at the dark point and thought about what it meant that this specific creature was still alive. Hybrid species were the ones that broke through; they were the ones that had ended border towns before. But every hybrid he had seen had come directly at the wall, driven by the animal logic of taking the most direct route to the prey. They did not stop at range. They did not consider the enemy.

This one was considering the enemy.

It stood at the edge of crossbow range and did not move. The militia watched it. It watched the militia back, or gave the impression of watching, which with four eyes was more impression than most things gave.

“Is this normal for the hybrid type?” Roland asked Iron Axe quietly.

“No.” The word was as short as Iron Axe ever got, which meant it was doing a great deal of work.

The beast took one step to the left, slow and deliberate. Then another. The militia tracking it shifted, and it stopped and watched the shift, and then it moved right — back past its original position and to the right, a pendulum test, watching how the men on the wall moved in response.

Roland’s mouth was dry.

He had built his defense against animal instinct. Against creatures that knew their environment and their prey but did not reason about what they saw. Against things that were dangerous the way weather was dangerous — powerful, implacable, patterned. This thing was watching him the way he watched it. Looking for a pattern. Looking for a gap.

It found one.

The move was sudden — a leap left, wings spreading from a body that looked like a lion with four eyes until it spread its wings, at which point it looked like something larger. It went airborne in three beats, cleared the barrier line, and banked west along the wall at a height the militia’s crossbows couldn’t comfortably reach.

The western section of the wall. The unmanned section — the stretch past the breach that was still in the process of being repaired, where the carapace-plug held but the guard rotation was sparse.

It knew.

Roland was already at the edge of the parapet, watching it disappear behind the wall’s angle. He turned and found Carter at his elbow.

“First unit,” Roland said. “With me. Second unit holds the wall.” He did not add if it comes back, because saying it would change nothing and he did not want the second unit to spend the next ten minutes wondering what if it comes back would look like. “Iron Axe. Hunter squad.”

They moved.

Inside the old district, the streets were what they always were in winter: narrow, snow-packed, shadowed between the houses. Roland was aware, moving through them at a jog, that his field of view was approximately six feet in any direction. That the thing that had just demonstrated it could reason about defensive gaps was somewhere in these streets, inside the perimeter, and he could not see it.

He thought about the twenty minutes he’d spent this morning evaluating Lightning’s altitude and sightlines and thinking reconnaissance and sometime soon.

I should have said today.

He could hear people ahead — not screaming, not yet, the sounds of people who have heard something wrong and are deciding whether it is wrong enough to scream about. Then screaming.

Carter found the turn by ear; the militia knew this district better than Roland did, which was the right way for it to be. They came into an alley behind a cluster of market stalls and Roland saw the man on the ground — what was left of the man — and heard the militia around him doing what trained people do when they see something terrible, which is to keep their eyes on the tactical situation and deal with the rest later.

“There.” Someone’s arm went up, pointing right.

The hybrid species came through the wooden wall of the nearest hut like the wall had been made of parchment. It was larger at close range than it had looked from the wall — the lion’s body scaled wrong when you were standing on the same level as it, the shoulders taller than they should have been, the wingspan folded against its back making it broader. It had a militia man in its forepaws and was shaking him with the casual violence of a cat with prey, and blood was going everywhere, and the men nearest it were backing up the way people back up when something demonstrates it is bigger than their current plan for it.

The militia reformed because they had drilled for this kind of backing up, and pulling back was in the drill, and the drill was working. Iron Axe was already moving — not toward the beast, but sideways, reading the angles, looking for a line that didn’t have people in it. The other hunters were climbing.

The beast dropped the man — not out of mercy, but because the man was no longer of interest — and reared up on its hind legs, scanning. It made a sound that Roland would not try to describe. Then it launched itself at the roofline where the hunters had positioned, which meant it had assessed that the humans on the elevated position were the highest threat, which meant—

Multiple shots. The black flowers that bloomed in the fur were not small-caliber damage — these were the full-bore flintlock rounds the hunter squad used, and they found the beast’s side and flank and leg, and the beast screamed and came down wrong and turned toward the sound of the guns.

Iron Axe was already there.

He had waited for the beast to turn — waited for the angle that gave him the shot, the line that ran through the skull rather than the fur. He was two yards away when he pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash singed the beast’s face. The ball went through one of the front eyes and into whatever was behind it.

The beast went down.

The sound it made going down was large and final, the sound of something very heavy becoming entirely without tension.

Roland stood in the alley and let his breathing normalize. Somewhere behind him, two men were working on the militiaman who had been shaken — he was alive, from the sounds of it, which was something. The rest of the squad was checking the body of the man in the alley, which was not something, and someone was going to have to tell someone about Iron Fork, and the man’s face was going to stay with at least three of the militia for the rest of their lives.

He looked at the beast’s body. At the four eyes, two of them open, one of them not. At the wingspan still partially extended against the snow.

“Six years,” he said quietly to Iron Axe.

Iron Axe looked at the dead beast, and then at the gap where the wall had been visible from it. He didn’t answer immediately, which was normal. He said it when he had the right words.

“The Months of the Demons are getting longer,” he said finally. “And the beasts are getting—” He stopped. He looked at the body again.

“Smarter,” Roland said.

Iron Axe looked at him, just briefly, with the expression of someone who had been carrying a thought they didn’t want to say aloud and was relieved someone else had said it first.

“Yes,” he said. “Smarter.”

Roland looked at the dead animal and felt the thing he had felt on the wall — the foreboding that didn’t have specific content yet, just a direction, just the sense that the situation he had been planning against was a smaller version of the situation he was actually in.

He let himself feel it for the necessary amount of time, and then he put it away, because the alley needed clearing and the man at the end of it needed someone to account for him and the militia needed to know what they had just killed and what it meant and what they should do with that knowledge.

He thought: The wall won’t be enough. It was never going to be enough.

He thought: I need artillery.

He turned to Carter and said, “Let’s get our people home.”

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