They came at dawn on the third day.
Philip heard them before he saw them. The sound of two hundred horses came from the eastern road across the cold air in a low, building thunder, and then the torches, a line of orange fire cresting the hill above the east gate, already moving at full gallop when they cleared the ridge. The column did not slow. The gate captain had the sense to open rather than challenge and the lead riders came through at a pace that scattered the Unfinished clustered at the base of the wall in every direction, hooves finding whatever they found, torches swinging out to the left and right.
The approach had been cleared. Philip had ordered burning oil poured from the wall walk an hour before, and Christine had stood above the gate with a torch, dropping it into the slick at the moment the column crested the ridge. The Unfinished at the base of the wall had withdrawn from the fire — not in fear, simply redirecting, moving away from the heat by whatever instinct the Usurper had built into them. It had opened a lane wide enough for the column to come through.
A few undead came through with them anyway, but it was over in less than three minutes.
Philip stood at the east wall and watched the aftermath. The riders were wheeling and reforming. Someone who knew what he was doing was shouting commands in a voice that expected to be obeyed and was. Two hundred elite knights, the best trained outside of the nine, who had ridden through the night because a rider had reached them and they had not waited to be asked twice.
Wardyn appeared at his shoulder. He was still not quite himself following the expulsion. He moved more carefully than before and wore out more quickly. He had not said anything about it and Philip had noticed.
“That’s enough to start clearing,” Wardyn said.
It was not enough to clear quickly. But fighters who had been holding the same doors for two days could be relieved. People could sleep. The undead did not need to.
They came from Faerlong Dell on the fifth day, and Yselle came first.
She arrived in the night, no announcement, no approach from any road. Philip was on the keep roof with Chenguer when a shape crossed the face of the second moon, too big and too deliberate for a bird, and he watched it descend in a long arc toward them. She landed, breathless.
She looked at Philip for a long moment.
“I’ve seen them from the air,” she said. “There are so many.”
“I know.”
“I mean outside the walls.” She paused. “I flew the perimeter. I wanted to see it before I came in. There are three times as many outside.”
Philip said nothing.
“I thought we might need reinforcements. I spoke to the Urukesh and the Aelvaeni. They are on their way.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
The others from Faerlong Dell rode in through the north gate before dawn. Amira first, Senna close behind, Aldric bringing up the rear.
Christine had stood above the north gate as they came through. The oil and torch method had worked on the third day, but the north approach was narrower and the Unfinished were denser there — the oil lane would close before half the column was through. She had looked at the gate, and at the mass of bodies pressed against it, and then she had done what she had done in the Wyndmere courtyard, except this time she knew she was doing it. The fire came from her hands in a directed sweep rather than the courtyard’s explosion — smaller, more deliberate, running out from the gate on either side in two walls of heat that drove the Unfinished back and held them there long enough for the full column to come through.
She stood above the gate afterward with her hands still warm and said nothing to anyone.
Amira came through first. She walked a short way into the street beyond the gate and stood there looking at what five days had left of the outer ward — the scorch marks, the barricades, the fighters moving in the grey light with the economy of people who had learned to conserve. Then she turned to Philip.
“Who’s running triage?”
“Scarlet.”
Amira went to find her without another word.
All nine Sunblades were now inside the city. Philip had not let himself think about what that meant until it was true. The city was still fighting, and the justices were needed.
On the seventh day, Drogoth lost control of Sunfury. It lasted forty seconds.
Philip was two streets away when he heard it — not a sound exactly, but a cessation of sound that followed a release of Sunfury at full force. He was moving before he understood why.
When he rounded the corner to the south gate, the space within thirty feet of Drogoth was empty. Unfinished, certainly. But one fighter as well, a young man from one of the house guard companies, down on the cobblestones at the edge of the clearing.
Scarlet was already kneeling over him, Lifegiver moving through her hands. She had beaten Philip there by seconds.
Drogoth stood in the middle of the cleared space with Sunfury at his side, unsheathed. He was looking at the place where the fighter had fallen.
The south gate was holding. The battle was continuing along the wall in both directions. Everything was proceeding as it should, except for this thirty-foot radius of silence in which Drogoth stood alone and did not move.
Philip stopped at the edge of it.
He was trying to think of something to say when Scarlet finished. She stood, looked at the boy once, then took the situation in — the cleared space, Drogoth, Philip at the edge, the ongoing fight at the wall.
She did not look at Philip. She walked straight across the cleared ground and sat down on the cobblestones next to Drogoth’s feet. Not standing beside him. Not a hand on his arm. She sat on the ground, which brought her to approximately the height of his knee.
She did not say anything.
Drogoth looked down at her for a moment. Then he sat as well.
Two people on the cobblestones, thirty feet from an active battle line, while the city’s fighters navigated around the cleared space with the instinctive deference of people who understood, without being told, that something was happening here that required a perimeter.
Philip remained where he was and watched the wall.
Eleven minutes later, Drogoth stood up. He put out a hand to Scarlet, which she took, and he brought her to her feet.
He picked up Sunfury, which he had set on the ground beside him, and sheathed it. He looked at the wall. He walked back to the south gate and took up his position.
Scarlet and Philip exchanged a look. Neither of them said anything. She went back toward the keep. He went back toward the river road.
The pilgrimage docked on the eighth day.
Philip was at the harbor with Drogoth when the ship came in — a deep-water vessel out of Drakkaris, salt-stained to the waterline. The harbor approach had been thick with Unfinished since the second day. Christine cleared it before the gangway went down, standing on the dock wall and working the fire outward in a widening arc until the water’s edge was clean. She was getting faster at it. More precise. The arc held its shape now rather than expanding past the edges of what she intended. The people who came down the gangway looked like they had been in transit for a season and had arrived where they always meant to arrive, and now intended to get to work.
Then they heard it — the ongoing sound of battle beyond the harbor district — and several of them stopped on the gangway. One of the Water Aelvaeni said something sharp in a language Philip didn’t know.
He counted approximately fifty. The Water Aelvaeni were surprising enough this far from the coast. But it was the Oroquai that held people’s attention. A dozen of them, blue-grey skinned, large, marked from shoulder to wrist in patterns that had not been put there carelessly. The crowd went quiet. The rest were a scattering of humans from several nations, and one or two faces Philip couldn’t place at all.
Last to disembark came an Oroquai man, larger than most Philip had met, a single dark feather tucked behind one ear. He stepped down onto the dock and paused, taking in the harbor, the smoke beyond it, the sound of fighting. He did not react.
“Durgen,” Drogoth said. They embraced. “May I introduce Sir Philip Beckwith.”
The man looked at him without surprise. “Sir Philip,” he said, the way someone said a name they had been expecting to say for a while. “I believe you know why we are here.”
“Tell me anyway,” Philip said.
“When Helios was unshrouded, the light reached further than the mountains.” He looked past Philip toward the city. “We were already at sea. We came as quickly as the wind allowed.” A pause. “It appears you could use our immediate help.”
“I am glad you are here.”
Durgen nodded, turned, and said something to the group behind him. They began to move.
The first Urukesh army arrived on the ninth day from the northeast.
Chenguer saw them in the web before the wall-watch saw them on the road — four hundred points of warm living light in the overlay, moving in formation, coming fast.
“They’re here,” he said.
The commander’s name was Ghan. Compact, grey-horned, short declarative sentences. He brought his column through the northeast approach at march pace, not slowing when the first Unfinished turned toward them, because the Urukesh had been dealing with the Unfinished in border territory for three seasons and had already worked out that stopping was the wrong response.
For the first time since the Rising, the outside force was caught between two pressures.
Chenguer watched it happen in the web. The outside threads, which had been diffuse and steady and patient for nine days, changed. Something moved through the network — a ripple, a pressure — the threads pulling, clusters that had been holding position beginning to compress.
“They feel it,” he said.
“What do they feel?” Wardyn asked.
“Uncertainty,” Chenguer said. He watched a moment longer. “They’ve never been uncertain before.”
“I thought they didn’t think.”
“I’m not talking about their uncertainty. I’m talking about his.”
The Earth Aelvaeni came the same morning as Ghan’s army, from a direction that was not a road.
They arrived at the south wall from below — a section of cobblestone in the outer approach simply opened and a battalion of small, stone-skinned figures emerged into the daylight with the composure of people who had been underground for three days and found it unremarkable. Their shapers numbered perhaps forty among the two hundred. What the shapers did was not dramatic and was completely effective: they unsealed the ground beneath massed formations of Unfinished, and the Unfinished, which had no purchase instinct, fell into the resulting cavities, which the shapers then sealed above them.
The Fire Aelvaeni arrived on the tenth day. Their shapers followed heat rather than roads, and the heat of the city had been drawing them since the third day. They came through the south gate, clearing themselves with fire, although Christine helped from the top of the wall. Their senior shaper, stepping through the opening, stopped and looked back at her on the wall above.
He said something in Aelvaeni to the shaper beside him. The second shaper looked up at Christine and nodded.
They spent an hour with her that evening on the keep roof. Philip didn’t know what passed between them and didn’t ask. What he saw the following morning, when the south gate opened for the first sortie, was Christine clearing an approach three times the width of anything she had managed before, the fire moving in controlled sheets rather than arcs, precise at the edges, the Unfinished retreating from it in a straight line rather than dispersing in every direction.
The Fire Aelvaeni joined Drogoth’s front at the south gate and what happened there afterward was not subtle. Philip could see the orange light from the keep roof.
The second Urukesh army arrived that afternoon, four hundred and fifty strong. Chenguer’s web reported their effectiveness within the hour.
“The outside force is down to four thousand,” he said.
Eight days ago it had been six thousand.
The Air Aelvaeni arrived on the eleventh day, two days of sustained flight. Yselle met them at the north wall and flew a circuit with their senior shaper in the afternoon light, two small winged figures above the rooftops, before they came down and Yselle spent an hour explaining the terrain by pointing at things.
What the Air shapers discovered was not planned. One of them, clearing a western alley, released a pressure wave in an enclosed space. The Unfinished did not fall. It lost coherence — the flat affect broke briefly into something that looked like confusion, and the reaching stopped.
The shaper stood in the alley and looked at the result. Then she did it again. Same outcome.
By the following morning, every fighter working the enclosed western streets knew about it.
Philip, Amira, and Wardyn held council in the keep that evening. Drogoth was there, and Chenguer. Scarlet arrived late, wiping her hands on a cloth, and did not apologize for the lateness.
“The inside force is down to twelve hundred,” Chenguer said. He had Constellation across his knees. “The outside is holding at roughly six thousand.”
“The outside is the longer problem,” Philip said. “We can clear the inside with time and discipline. The outside will simply wait.”
“Then we have to go to them,” Wardyn said.
“On our terms. We control the gates. We choose when the outside fight happens.” Philip looked around the room. “The Unfinished retreat from fire. Torches direct as well as destroy. We build the sortie around it — two gate openings daily, timed to maximum light, torches on every fighter in the advance column, Wentworths at the front because the drain doesn’t touch them.”
He looked at Amira.
“Sunrise works behind the advance,” she said. “Not at the front. A fighter drained to half will lose everything before sundown. Scarlet and I restore them behind the line and they go back. That’s worth more than what I can do at the front.”
“Your call on placement,” he said.
She nodded once.
On the night of the eleventh day, Senna heard shouting from the old quarter.
Then she felt the ground move under her feet.
She reached for Sunflare.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.