Daughters of the Moon Pt. 06

One of the corpses opened its eyes, they were milky white all the way through. It blinked rapidly as it stared at the cloudy night sky. A few more opened their eyes and soon they were awakening everywhere.

The corpses were getting to their feet. One of them snarled and started moving toward the blood barrel. A carter smacked it across the face with a club and Gwen saw teeth fly.

"You ever think about having a childe?" asked Gwen.

"Me? Oh yeah, I'd like to. I'm at that age, same as you. My family's really been on me about it, just like Sophia was on you. But it's hard for me. Being a Savon is a tough deal. Most of my family just throws some poor soul off the deep end and it's sink or swim, but it's not something I want to put on someone that can't handle it."

The carters started herding the twitching corpses into rough ranks. The larvae hissed and snarled and scratched at the carters and at each other. The carters snarled back. They used clubs and catchpoles to drive the larvae forward.

"If I do find someone I hope they're as good for me as Carla is for you. Seeing you and her together sets a high bar."

"Ah, that's so sweet."

One of the larvae shuffled past Gwen. It's milky white eyes met hers.

"Mama, it hurts."

Gwen recoiled, "I thought they don't have minds."

"Oh, they don't. Some of them just keep repeating the last thing they said before they died. It's one of those weird things."

Another one walked by, "Please, leave my wife alone."

Will tilted his head, "Though who knows. Maybe there is still something of them left, deep down. That'd be pretty awful."

The larvae were eventually herded into a large, disorganized group. They snarled and cried and sniffed the air. There was a soft murmur of conversation, like a crowd at a country dance, but if you listened carefully it became clear it was just the same few phrases repeated endlessly.

Will turned to Gwen, "Well, I guess we should get on with it. Good luck out there."

"You too."

...

As midnight approached they started making preparations. Gwen separated the skeletons into ten squads, each one directed by one of her revenants, giving them the flexibility they needed to respond to changes on the battlefield. Gwen went over the skeletons' commands with her lieutenants and did a few drills to make sure they were all up to speed. Helena left her mercenaries' preparation to the captain. He was a bald headed man with a scraggly goatee who looked like he had been fighting since before his voice changed. Christoph's preparations seemed to involve a lot of drinking and singing with his pack of half- bloods.

They returned to the village at midnight, Once again they were arrayed in front of the stake wall. Gwen was dressed in her bright steel mail. It had a red sheen because it had been infused with her blood when it was forged. Her blood made it light as cloth when she wore it and she could repair it with her blood as if it was part of her body. Christoph had put on some blue war paint, and Will was in a leather jerkin with some bits of metal sewn in.

Gwen stood behind her block of skeletons. Will was in front of her troops with his mob of snuffling horrors and Christoph and the mercenary captain were to her left and right. Behind them all Helena was with her attendants, fussing with the Tempest engine. The engine was a block of brass about the size of a small chest covered in runes with pipes woven through it. It was raised to waist height by a dark, iron tripod. The attendants were pouring blood into the intake and the runes etched into it were beginning to glow a sharp, actinic blue.

Helena raised the dragon banner, signaling she was ready to proceed, Carla nodded and her revenants raised the crescent moon banner. Will raised a hand and one of the carters raised the banner of the bloody wheel, and the larvae began to shuffle forward with Will at their center.

When they reached the maximum range of the muskets Gwen saw Will raise a hand again. His body began to waver and flicker as if he was a mirage or was caught in a heat distortion. Gwen got a chill when she realized Will had unleashed the Millstone, the Savons' power over fear, illusions and nightmares. She heard the villagers start crying out in alarm, some of them screaming. Their shouts were agonized and they refused to fire as the larvae slowly shuffled closer. Gwen couldn't see what Will was doing but she had no doubt it was horrible.

Then she heard Patrick's voice cut over the field. "It's a trick. It's an illusion. Fire now." His gun was the first to fire but the other villagers quickly followed his lead. As soon as the guns started thundering the host of larvae howled in a horrific chorus and broke into a mad sprint for the stake wall. At that moment Gwen ordered the skeletons forward and she broke into a jog. In front of her the larvae were flopping to the ground as the musket fire blasted holes through them, cutting them down. But some of them fell, twitched and got back to their feet. Others took bullets to the liver or kidneys, hits that would have dropped a man screaming, and only stumbled slightly before resuming their sprint. Bullets started impacting on her skeleton troops as well. She heard pings like stones on a roof as the bullets smashed into the skeletons' armor. She saw one or two go down as a lucky bullet shattered a key binding. But most of the fire was trained on the screaming, snuffling wall of flesh and fangs at the front of the army, leaving the rest of them untouched.

Then there was a ripple in the air above. Gwen and she looked up to see a wave of lightning traveling through the clouds, forking and merging in complex patterns. Then there was a tremendous crash, loud enough to fill Gwen's ears with ringing, and a curtain of lightning smashed downward into the stake wall, blasting a huge section of it to splinters. There were screams from the villagers as the shockwave of the lightning made them stumble back and the shrapnel lacerated them. The screaming intensified as the front of larvae crashed onto the disoriented pikemen. Only about half of the larvae reached the pikes, but they never broke and ran like humans would have if faced with that much death. Dozens were impaled as steel pierced through their backs, but they kept coming, pulling the pikes down with the weight of their bodies, forcing holes in the line that other larvae pushed through. There were scattered screams as the larvaes teeth found flesh, as they started gnawing limbs and cracking bones.

Then Will reached the front line, and this time Gwen saw him unleash the Millstone. The silvery heat waves enveloped him. Making the outline of his body waver and flicker, it almost looked like he was dancing. Through the distortion Gwen could see his body was covered in insects, carpets of wasps and spiders and corpse flies and all things that stung and bit writhed on him like a carpet. Will brought his raised hand down in a throwing motion and the ripples rolled out from him in a wave. The men started screaming as they felt the bugs swarming over them. The villagers scattered from the horror Will unleashed and a whole section of the line collapsed.

Gwen raced forward through her troops and the skeletons shifted perfectly to let her through. Then she was at the front, at the hole Will had opened with his nightmares. She drew on her blood, burning it in the furnace of her soul and called on the Moment. She didn't use her full power, that would have used too much blood, but she slowed things enough for her to trace the movement of each villager, the wavering of each pike. She danced in the spaces between men, watching as flashing steel drifted idly by her. She didn't bother unsheathing her sword, she didn't need to. Instead, she used her sheathed sword like a club; shattering sword arms and breaking ribs, smashing helmeted heads so that eyes glazed over and men began drifting to the ground like falling leaves. Existing in the Moment, she moved into the mass of men at a steady pace, leaving a trail of bodies on the ground, either unconscious or screaming as they clutched shattered bones. Caught up in the Moment, the rest of the battle became an abstraction to her, something that was happening in a room down the hall. Her world narrowed to her sword and her body and the men in front of her. But occasionally she would glimpse her friends and allies. Like music drifting in from another room.

She glimpsed Callie, flanked by two skeletons. One skeleton took a blow on its shield and Callie sliced the villager in the ribs with a movement Gwen had practiced with her for hours. Gwen felt a fierce surge of pride as she watched Callie exalt herself in her first battle.

She heard a howl, low and deep and saw an enormous creature, part bat and part wolf, that was the size of a cart. The blue warpaint covering the creature identified it as Christoph. Christoph picked up a screaming man and tore his head off with one enormous claw, then he put the stump of the body's neck into his gaping mouth and squeezed. Blood deluged over him, washing away some of the war paint as the body deflated and pulped. Around him the men fled screaming.

There was a cry to her left and Gwen saw the priest with a symbol of the father raised high. Blue light shined out of it that made her eyes burn and her head ache. She heard her girls screaming, and around him the skeletons began to crumble. The brass of their bindings dimmed and their bones splintered. She started moving toward him but before she could get there a bolt of lightning struck from the sky, as if the god's judgment had been turned against its servant. There was a single crash of thunder and the world went white for a moment. When her eyes cleared the priest was a smoking pile on the ground. The villagers recoiled in shock from the loss of their priest, and her skeletons and battle sisters, shaken but still standing, pressed the advantage.

Then Gwen's focus shifted to her immediate surroundings as more villagers came for her. She spun around a sword thrust that was slow and clumsy to her eye, leaned her head back as a club passed in front of her head. The breath whuffed out of her as a spear grazed her ribs, cutting her armor but not reaching flesh. She smashed one of the villagers with the flat of her blade, kicked one in the hip and felt it snap. She felt the hunger opening in the pit of her stomach as she burned through more of her blood. She skipped to the side of the last man as he tried another clumsy slash. She put an arm around his neck and sank her fangs into him. She tried to keep her anger in check because a bite made in anger caused terrible pain, and she was proud she succeeded because he only moaned as her bite filled him with numbness and despair. Caught up in the Moment his moan was strange to her ears, unnaturally deep and slow. Gwen drank in huge gulps, taking as much in seconds as she normally would in minutes. The man's moans stopped as the blood loss made him pass out. She stopped before she took enough to kill him. Her hunger sated for now, she licked the wound and let him drop. He began drifting slowly to the ground as she moved on to her next opponent.

She had just shattered a man's knee when she looked up and saw Will. He was surrounded by the remaining larvae but there were only about twenty left. The bodies of the fallen creatures littered the ground around him, many still twitching slightly. The power of the Millstone pulsed from him in waves; the men around him screaming in terror as imaginary insects tore at their flesh. They dropped their weapons to swat at bugs that weren't there, and the remaining larvae took the opportunity to pull them down.

Then she saw Patrick Fireeyes striding toward Will. He ignored the waves of nightmare Will sent at him and cut through the larvae with a polished ax, barely pausing his even stride. When he got close, Will swung at him with a club hammer, but Patrick dodged nimbly and then sank his ax into Will's side. Will screamed and went to his knees, and the waves around him vanished as the illusion collapsed. The men around him were rising to their feet and shaking off the terror as they cut down the last remaining larvae. Patrick pulled the ax out of Will with a wet slurp and raised it overhead.

Gwen drew on more of the blood and called on her full power, slowing time to a crawl. Now droplets of blood and sweat moved through the air at a glacial pace and the men and skeletons were statues. She raced forward, weaving among the statues between her and her prey. She unsheathed her sword for the first time that night and made a single cut. She felt the slightest tug but that was all. She let time restart and Patrick's axe flew high in the air, still gripped in his hands. The hunger burned bright in her, a ball of pain and want and lust that begged to be filled. She looked at Patrick, who was staring down at the stumps of his arms, and in an instant she was on him. Her fangs found his throat and his blood was in her. She tasted his strength, his passion and the small sparks of his magic as she took it into herself, banishing the snarling emptiness inside of her. His blood sang a song of his strength and she loved him for it even as she took it from him. Her throat worked, making huge gulps as she burned a little of the stolen blood to pull him down faster, to take everything he was. In less than a minute he was dead in her arms. She gently lowered him to the ground as she took the last of him.

When she looked up, licking the last of Patrick from her lips, she saw the villagers were running, throwing down their weapons and fleeing to get away from her, to get away from the horror around them.

She was still a little hungry. Patrick's glorious blood had helped but she had used even more than she had taken. She still burned some of what she had and called on the Painted Eyes. She raised her voice and it echoed across the battlefield. Everything came to a stop as her voice pulled at friend and foe like the sound of trumpets.

"Lord Fireeyes is dead. It's over. Throw down your weapons and you will be spared. Everyone stop. It's over."

The sounds of battle died off and the sound of metal hitting the ground filled the battlefield. Some fell to their knees, eyes hollowed from despair. Her girls gave the full stop order to the skeletons and they all instantly stood at attention. The Dracul mercenaries and the half bloods listened to her as well, breaking off their assault and standing awkwardly in the moment when a battle shifts to an aftermath.

Will got to his feet and took a deep breath, rotating his shoulder as the wound in his side closed up. He stretched, made an uncomfortable noise, and then looked at her.

"Thanks for the save."

"Sure, no problem."

She couldn't put any warmth in her voice as she surveyed the battlefield. It was littered with bodies, dead for both the first and second time, and the cries of the wounded. She looked back and saw her path across the battlefield like a line on a map. Men lay strewn about, clutching shattered bones and crying in agony. Farther back she saw where the skeletons, half bloods, and mercenaries had cleaned up after her. Men with throats torn open by claws, blackened wounds from her skeletons' necrotic axes, and people clutching wounds to stomach and limb, slowly bleeding out. The mercenaries were already swinging into action, finishing off villagers that couldn't be saved and, on Helena's orders, binding the wounds of the ones that could.

Then she saw the women of the village enter the field, looking for fallen husbands and sons. There was a new round of crying, in concerned relief and despair, depending on what state their loved ones were found in. Gwen took in a deep breath and smelled the fading, sharp ozone Helena's lightning, the rot of dead larvae, and, above it all, blood. Always blood.

Gwen sighed, feeling that small, lost feeling she always felt right after a battle was over, and went to find Callie and get the skeletons squared away.