Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 66: Battle of Hermes

The rain was cold enough to be almost sleet, and it diluted the blood on the stone until the gutters ran pink.

Alicia didn’t have time to think about the gutters. She had her sword up and was breathing through her mouth because the air had too much in it — smoke, blood, the specific smell of entrails that she had learned too young and had never been able to unlearn — and to her left, two soldiers who had been in her company three hours ago were now unrecognizable as soldiers.

She had never seen the walls fall.

In fourteen years of service to the Church, she had defended the New Holy City through nine Months of the Demons. She had lost people she knew, healed from wounds she didn’t think she’d heal from, stood in rain that was colder than tonight’s and held a line. The walls had never fallen.

The walls had fallen.

The hybrid species had come out of the ground. Not the face of the cliff — out of the ground itself, heaving the stone pavement apart as it emerged, and the first anyone had known of it was the scream from the soldier standing where the ground had been, and then the thing was rising against the glacier cliff face, climbing with its bone-claws, dragging its body upward toward the parapet with the patient certainty of something that had chosen this direction and would not reconsider.

When it reached the top, its lower body still hadn’t cleared the ground.

When it opened its mouth, the beasts came out.

The count had been wrong. Not dozens — hundreds. They had poured from the hybrid like water pours from a broken cistern, and the wall that had been a defense became a killing floor, and the horn that signaled retreat was followed almost immediately by the mangonels beginning to fire from the Cathedral, granite blocks the size of men dropping into the defenders still on the walls without discrimination, because the order had been to clear the walls and the order was being followed.

She had seen her captain hit. She had seen the shape of him afterward.

She did not think about that now.

“Captain! What do we do now?”

Alicia looked at the eleven faces around her. The eleven that were left from a hundred. Some of them were still bleeding through their bandages. One of them was crying without sound and had probably not noticed.

She bit her lip until she tasted iron. The iron helped.

“North Gate,” she said. “We fall back to the North Gate and hold the inner city.”

They ran. She led them through streets where the fighting had moved past, through blocks where the doors were barred and the windows shuttered, through the particular silence of people who were inside and had decided they were going to stay inside and were correct to have decided this. The sounds of combat fell behind them, and the cold rain came harder, and when they reached the North Gate she found two things she had not expected: a crowd of survivors from other units, already assembled, and the gate open.

The drawbridge was down.

A man in the red robe of a Presiding Judge was managing the flow across the bridge, calm and methodical in the chaos, with a face she would remember. She put herself in front of him, pressed her fist to her chest.

“Fourth battalion advance, Captain Alicia Quinn. Why is the drawbridge down, Presiding Judge?”

He looked at her. He had a kind face, which was not common in his position. “Tucker Thor,” he said. “Defense of the North Gate. Your squad still has strength?”

“Eleven. Some of them need treatment.”

“Across the bridge, to the left — the medical assembly point.” He read her expression correctly. “I know what you want to ask. The gate is down because there are still people coming in, and I am not going to close it on them.” He paused. “It won’t be needed much longer.”

“Presiding Judge, with respect — the beasts are on the walls, they’ll push through the inner city—”

“Captain.” His voice was patient in the way of someone who knows something the other person doesn’t. “You’re cold. Do you have your pills?”

She reached for her vest pocket and found that the pills had broken — crushed in the fighting, the powder absorbed into the cloth. She had not noticed. She held out her palm and showed him the staining.

He took a pill from his own supply and held it out.

She didn’t argue. She took it.

The pill went down wrong — the taste was not what she expected, something between fish and old blood, with a burning quality that moved from her throat downward in a spreading heat that was either the pill working or something going wrong, and then the cold lifted away from her all at once, like a coat being removed, and she could feel her toes again.

“The God’s Army of Punishment is coming from the Cathedral,” Tucker Thor said. “When they arrive, the beasts won’t get through this gate. Take your people across. Get them treated and checked — make sure they all have their pills intact.”

She went.

She assembled her eleven at the west side of the assembly area, near enough to the gate to see what came through it. Two hundred, perhaps two-fifty survivors had gathered here, from a defense force that had numbered in the thousands. Some of them were standing in the rain with the fixed expressions of people whose processing had not yet caught up to events. Some of them had sat down on the wet stone because standing was not something they could sustain. A small number had organized themselves into a disciplined line, facing outward, weapons ready.

“For Hermes!” someone shouted, and the answer came back from two hundred wet throats: not unanimous, not neat, but present.

Then someone else shouted, “The God’s Army!”

She looked.

They came through the gate at a controlled run — not a sprint, not the irregular scramble of soldiers under fire, but a measured pace, silver armor under the rain, red cloaks, each of them carrying different weapons. She counted quickly. A hundred, a hundred and twenty. They crossed the bridge and spread.

They did not form a line. They did not group into squads. They went individually into the space between the North Gate and the oncoming wave of beasts, and they fought it as individuals, which was either catastrophically wrong or catastrophically right, and she was about to find out which.

One of the soldiers near her moved forward, and a hand on his arm stopped him.

“Stand back.” The man who said it had a “I” on his sleeve and under it the words God’s Army of Punishment. He was not large; he did not look like what she had expected from the name. He looked like someone who had decided something difficult and was at peace with it. “If you go in, you’ll drag them down.”

The soldier pulled against the hand. Alicia put her own hand on the soldier’s other arm and pulled back, because she had looked at the man’s face and believed him.

She watched.

The Fallen Angel hybrid came down out of the clouds at the soldier it had chosen — vertical drop, wings closed, claws forward, the attack pattern she had learned to dive away from because no shield held against it. The silver-armored warrior it had chosen did not dive. He planted his feet and raised his hands and caught it — the claws, the speed, the full mass of the thing coming down — and the sound of impact was something she had no word for, and the warrior’s arms bent in a direction arms did not bend, and he held it.

Another warrior threw a javelin.

Silver flash. The beast’s head shattered at the moment of impact.

The first warrior let the twitching body fall, picked up his weapon from the ground, and moved to the next beast. His arms were broken. He used them anyway.

She watched for ten minutes. She could not look away.

Tucker Thor appeared at her elbow. She realized she had been crying and was not sure when she had started.

“You didn’t know,” he said quietly. Not a question.

“I’ve heard of them,” she said. “Rumors. I didn’t—” She stopped. “Your brother is in the Army?”

He looked at the field. His expression was not quite pride and was not quite grief and occupied the space between them steadily.

“Yes,” he said. “He is.”

The line of red cloaks moved through the beasts, and the beasts fell, and the New Holy City’s gutters ran pink in the cold rain.

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