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Chapter 923: A Deliberate Provocation

A shrill alarm split the air.

“Woo — woo — ”

The sound hit before anyone moved. Then everyone moved at once.

The highest alert.

Wendy was the first to recover. “Your Majesty, retreat to the castle. Now.”

But Roland didn’t move. What held him was Tilly — she and Ashes had closed the distance in seconds, Ashes planting herself in front of them and Tilly seizing Roland’s wrist. He looked down. The ring on Tilly’s finger was casting a cold blue light. She was ready to fly him down into the mining area at the first sign of escalation.

Her grip was cold. Metal-cold.

He forgot, for a moment, about the alarm.

He had long since made his peace with Tilly’s particular kind of distance. She wasn’t Nightingale. She would never be Nightingale. She was too perceptive to be deceived, and whatever the original Prince Roland had done to her in the palace — the memory and the debt both belonged to a man who no longer existed — he couldn’t explain that to her. So he had stopped expecting anything. He had lied when necessary and kept his demands small. What he had hoped for, in his more honest moments, was simply not to be treated as an enemy.

And here she was. Holding his wrist. Blue light on her finger.

He found that he’d already won something he hadn’t known he was trying to win.

“Your Majesty, the city wall is too exposed from here — ” An official’s voice cut through the noise. “Guards! Clear the way for His Majesty!”

The voices stacked on top of each other, indistinguishable, feeding the chaos. The alarm kept sounding.

Roland let himself be moved. As they descended the North Slope, a separate question was already running: Sylvie is on watch. The alarm can’t be a false positive. Frontier guards won’t trigger the highest alert for a flock of birds. The demons have been quiet — they should still be dormant. Unless new Red Mist supplies reached the Taquila ruins recently.

He wanted to go to the wall himself. He gave up the idea. Nightingale and the main force of the First Army hadn’t arrived yet. Putting himself on the parapet would complicate the defenders’ task without adding anything to it.

He pulled Wendy aside as they reached the foot of the slope. “Whatever news comes from the wall — send it to me the moment you have it. No filtering, no delay.”

“Yes,” she said. Her face was composed. He had learned to read that particular composure: it was the one she wore when she was frightened and had decided not to be.

Sylvie counted them the way she counted stars. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Six Devilbeasts in a horizontal line, moving toward Neverwinter across the open sky. Her Eye of Magic stripped away the distance. Every detail came clear: scale, posture, the shapes strapped to the backs of two of them — bone vessels, slightly humped, with a familiar deep red shifting inside them like liquid light.

Red Mist tanks. This is a long-range raid.

But why now? The demons should be conserving, pulling close to the God’s Stone vein at Taquila, waiting for the Bloody Moon. Why now?

She set aside the question. The frontier guards had already reacted — cannon covers off, crews at their positions. If the demons continued on this heading, they’d enter cannon range in seven or eight minutes.

“Miss Sylvie.” The guard at the telephone — one of two Roland had assigned to her, along with two God’s Punishment Witches as protection — looked up. “Command wants to know: direction of approach, and if they enter the city, which streets are they likely to cross?”

Roland had moved the wind-up telephone prototype from the North Slope backyard to the wall specifically for moments like this. One end of the line ran to the Third Border City entrance. Sylvie pressed her Eye of Magic wider, mapping the trajectory.

“Road Five or Road Nine,” she said. “Possibly the square as well. There are still civilians in the market.” That thought closed around her like a fist.

The guard relayed it.

“Wait.” Sylvie raised her voice. “They’re ascending.”

“Planning to fly over the wall?”

“Slower, though. They’ve decelerated. The sentries on the wall should be able to see them directly now — ”

Gunshots. Faint through the telephone, then not faint.

She watched the soldiers work. They were elites — veterans of the snow mountain expedition, steadied by what they’d already survived. They fired in rotating teams, keeping the rate deliberate, preserving ammunition. She respected the discipline.

But the angles were wrong. Everything about this engagement was wrong for ground-to-air fire. Low bore pressure limited the rifles’ reach. There was no proper tripod, no aiming tool calibrated for moving targets overhead. The Devilbeasts could drift, adjust, rise and fall, and the defenders had to track them manually and guess the angle of intercept.

After several volleys, nothing had been hit. The Devilbeasts were perhaps a hundred and fifty meters out, staying well above a hundred meters high, forcing every barrel on the wall to lift at a steep angle. Accuracy dropped. Rate of fire increased in compensation. Still nothing.

Then the Devilbeasts stopped.

Hovering.

The Mad Demons’ arms began to swell.

“No.” The word came out before she meant it to. “Tell the guards to pull back from the wall. Now.”

“Pull back?”

“Now.”

Too late. Four white beams came down in a line, and the sound of their impact reached her a half-second after the light. The stone Lotus had laid in the walls could stop most things. Not attacks from directly above.

The guards who were hit didn’t move again.

Sylvie held her position. Watching. Unable to look away.

The Mad Demons’ arms shrank back as the tissue dissolved and regrew. No second volley came. Instead: a sound she couldn’t categorize — a noise like no animal she knew — and then the demons reached into the pouches strapped to their bodies and threw something down.

Animal skins. Falling slowly, turning end over end in the air.

Then the Devilbeasts wheeled and flew west. Within minutes they were gone past the horizon.

The fallen skins caught the wind and drifted down to the wall. The soldiers who were still standing retrieved them.

Sylvie made herself look at the city wall. The dead men lay where they’d been standing. Blood pooled beneath them in the afternoon light.

Among the animal skins, one drawing stood out immediately — a wolf, large and unmistakable, rendered in simple lines.

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