Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1 - Chapter 69: Chapter 69

The world outside the castle was unrecognisable, even from the hour before. Jordan squeezed through the gap reluctantly opened for him by the soldiers at the doors, and was confronted with a war zone. The breach in the rampart wall was now a yawning hole, and the battle had spilled into the courtyard. Unspoken scrawled runes across the night, and demons seethed around them, bounding over the corpses of others. The chain-link of the patched-up secondary defence rattled and swung alarmingly under the assault, and the sky glowed. His thoughts were instantly full of static from the amount of ambient magic in the air.
A Wight hissed and threw itself at the net when it saw him, rebuffed by a green flash. It took every ounce of self-control he had not to explode into flames. He had promised Yddris; but he had a sinking feeling it would prove hard to warn anyone without breaking that promise.
He was tempted – so tempted – to run back inside and hide in the kitchens with Grace. The Unspoken were all out here; the killer would have to make it past the demons to reach them, and how would they do that without having the Gift themselves?
But it wasn't worth the risk. If someone died because he'd failed to warn anyone, he couldn't live with himself. This was his chance to help, when he couldn't in any other way.
He just wished it didn't make him want to piss himself.
He hurried along the fence, flinching every time a demon noticed him and attacked the barrier. He could smell them; animal sweat and rotten breath. If death had a smell, this was it. His legs trembled, only moving because he wouldn't stop; if he stopped, they'd fold. He had never known a heart could beat so quickly and so loud. Ren fidgeted in his hood and he jumped, having nearly forgotten she was in there, and gratefully stroked her for the reminder. It wasn't as effective as it was when it wasn't a case of life and death, but it was something.
The cordoned-off section of the courtyard was deserted aside from him, and the closed castle doors were a weight at his back. He didn't know if he would be able to get back inside, but he forced himself not to think about it.
There – he spotted a cloaked figure fighting in the melee. He could tell from where he stood that it wasn't Yddris, but they were the closest, and closest was good enough for him.
"Hey!" he called, but his voice was drowned out by demon screams. "Hey!"
He cast around for a solution, and came up empty. The figure fought on, oblivious, and Jordan caught himself enraptured by the sleek agility of the fight; the Unspoken moved like water, drawing runes and dodging attacks like it was art. He watched as another wight – small, dark grey, and incredibly ugly – rush up behind the figure, deflected by a smooth kick to take it off balance and a jade arrow straight through the head to kill it.
"Fucking hell," he said hoarsely, and then blinked. He flexed his fingers, gritted his teeth, and turned on the tap.
A bolt of green, far less refined than the Unspoken's, shot through the air and hit another demon between the eyes. Somewhere in the back of his mind, hovering bizarrely between a thought and a tangible feeling, Jordan found something he had never encountered before and which he didn't have a name for, and pushed. To his disbelief, his magic stopped when he told it to. He almost forgot what he had come out to say in his shock.
The Unspoken turned, and he gestured urgently. They began to come towards him, but almost immediately became engaged in another fight, this time with three Bone Wights that appeared out of the crush at just the wrong time. Jordan groaned in frustration. His eye caught the stable door leading to the rest of the courtyard.
"Fuck," he whispered.
He ducked inside. It was deserted and cold, and echoed with the sounds of the battle outside. The smell of blood mingled with that of hay and horses, nauseating him.
He pressed his eye to a tiny gap in the wooden door, trying to work out how close the nearest demons were. He didn't dare try and access his magic again until he was outside, and even then only when he absolutely had to.
He stepped back, grinding his teeth with indecision. If he opened the door, the net would break, and he'd be the only one holding the breach until the net linked back up again – and how would he tell when that was? Last time he had come through here, the demons had all been stunned or killed; now they were active and angry and growing in number.
He opened the door and slipped through before he paralysed himself with fear, and it was like stepping into another world. His nostrils were assaulted by the rank scent of blood, and the cobbles were slippery with it; black and viscous, oozing from countless demon corpses. He put his back against the stable door, viewing the scene as if in a dream, blinking, stupid, trying to work out what to do now.
A shriek; a thin demon with a sagging sack of skin under its jaws and bulging eyes noticed him and bounded across on all fours. Jordan threw up his hands, and the demon went down in a blaze. His breath left him all at once when he realised that he had just notified every demon in reaching distance that he was here. Time slowed.
Something bit into his leg, and he cried out and shook off the small wight that had been trying to scale it. It clung on, so he grabbed a fistful of soft flesh and yanked. It was dense and heavy; he only managed to haul it a couple of feet away before it recovered and came at him again. He ran, frantically scanning the chaos for another Unspoken; and there. He pushed towards the blaze of green a few long, long yards away.
Something heavy tackled him from the side. He had been so focused on reaching the other Unspoken that he hadn't seen the Listener coming, and he experienced a horrifying sense of déjà vu as its weight crushed the breath from him. Ren squeaked and tumbled from his hood, disappearing into the mass of feet, but he barely had time to notice. He wasn't sure if he screamed. He thought he might have. His nose hit the cobbles with a crack as the demon grabbed his head, and the white-hot pain was so intense he was sure for a minute that the blow had killed him.
Choking on blood, he tried to reach for his magic, only to have it slip from him as his focus veered away. The demon's claws raked at his clothes, trying to get at him. It was trying to eat him alive.
"You fucker," he groaned, and then screamed again as it shifted its weight. Something in his abdomen made an ominous scraping noise. He prayed; he prayed with genuine feeling for the first time in his life.
The weight was gone, suddenly. The back of Jordan's cloak was heavy with the demon's saliva, but the demon itself had vanished.
His face throbbed. Blood poured from his nose in a torrent, and his ribs ached like they were cracked. Every breath was a struggle. He turned himself onto his back, and began to cry as pain shot through every nerve. Then he realised the air above him was green; everything around him was green. He was surrounded by fire, and he knew whose it was.
"Yddris," he croaked.
"You had better have a damn good fucking reason for being out here, boy!" his tutor roared from somewhere above him. "A damn. Good. Fucking. Reason!"
The static in the air was so intense it was almost unbearable, and through the agony Jordan struggled to remember what his reason for being here was. He could barely remember his name.
"There..." He stopped, spitting blood to the cobbles, and then stared in disbelief as Ren reappeared, scrambling onto his chest and growling. "There's another one! One of those things that killed Kolter! They're here in the castle!"
Was that his voice? He sounded like he was speaking through a vacuum; his words gurgled, croaked. He had never been in so much pain, and the stink of the demon was all over him. With another surge of revulsion, he leaned over and threw up.
Yddris cursed behind him as he wiped his mouth with shaking hands. "Can you get up?"
"I don't know."
Slowly, juddering all over, Jordan got up onto his elbow. He peered through glazed vision at the emerald wall surrounding him, like frosted green glass. It was no longer fire; Yddris had built a wall around them made entirely of magic. Beyond it the battle raged on.
"Another assassin, you said?" Yddris asked, leaning down and hauling Jordan the rest of the way up. "Where?"
"The castle," Jordan said. The world span around him, and he blinked, trying to focus on Yddris. His nose was still pouring blood, and he could feel it on his lips and teeth. He felt around gingerly with his tongue and winced as he encountered a large crack in one of his front incisors. "I don't know how many. I...." He stumbled, and Yddris caught him. "My nose is broken."
"I could tell from the voice," Yddris muttered. For the first time Jordan had ever seen, the man was out of breath. "Need to get that treated, boy, and you need to get inside in case it swells so much you can't see. I can't hold this up for very long."
"I needed to warn you." He spat more blood onto the floor at his feet, grimacing. Each breath ached. "You'll tell everyone else, won't you?" He gripped Yddris's arm hard and leaned in, even though there was no chance anyone would overhear them. "The Devils are here too."
Yddris stiffened. "Have you spoken to them?"
"Yes."
"They don't suspect anything?"
"It didn't look like it."
"Okay. Okay, here's what I want you to do, boy." Yddris paused, as if gathering himself. The wall of magic wavered and flickered back up again. "Find Harkenn. Tell him about this. Don't tell him the Devils are in his castle yet, because you never know when they're listening. And...and tell him to pull back his men and have them search the place. I'm going to send all our best warders back to reinforce the fence so he can do so. You got all that?"
"I got it." Jordan repeated it to himself in his mind, focusing on it with ferocity to keep his thoughts off the pain.
"And when you've done that, get your nose reset." It was no illusion; his tutor was gasping for breath. "Now go, boy. I've got to put this thing down."
His emerald wall collapsed, and Yddris gave him a rough push back in the direction of the stables. A glance over his shoulder revealed the Unspoken following him at a distance, keeping the demons at bay. With every breath, blood bubbled on his lips. His thoughts were slowly filling with air. He repeated Yddris's instructions to hold onto his focus, and added a fervent prayer that he wouldn't faint. His midriff burned with pain; he clutched it with one arm, trying to hold it all in one place as he ran. With his other, he buried his fingers in the fur of a gently growling Ren, trying to keep himself present.
"Through, through." Yddris came up right behind him, swinging the stable door wide and shoving him in. Jordan cried out and stumbled inside, every part of his body protesting, but before he could look back to ask what Yddris was going to do now, the door had closed.
He stood still for a moment, panting. Visions of the battle he had just come from flashed before his eyes. He eyed the empty stalls, not trusting the quiet.
It was harder to keep moving once he'd stopped. He limped along the stable aisle as fast as his ribs would let him, spattering blood and spit across the floor as he went. The protected side of the courtyard was now populated by a small unit of guards who stood to attention as he hobbled through.
"Please open the doors," he gasped when he reached one, recognising him from earlier. "I have a message for the lord."
"We can pass it along..."
"I wasn't fighting, you berk," Jordan snapped, pushed past his limit. "I had to give a warning. And now I have to return one, and I'd like to do it before I faint."
He pulled off one of his gloves and wiped his face with one hand, showing the gleaming crimson to the guard. It even pulled him up short; was there supposed to be so much of it?
"Yes..." the guard blinked. "Yes, of course."
Soldiers stared as he entered through the narrow gap that the guard had persuaded them to open for him. His nose was swelling quickly, and their faces blurred together, all except for Harkenn's. The lord stood behind the ranks, pale face a head above anyone else's.
"My lord," Jordan muttered. His knees knocked together, but he managed to stay on his feet. "I have a message from Yddris."
"He took you out in that?" Harkenn snapped, and Jordan was glad he at least couldn't see the lord's glare anymore. "What was he thinking?"
"He didn't. I went out. There's another killer in the castle; like the one who killed Kolter. My sister saw them. I went...to warn them."
Harkenn's face was too blurry to see an expression, swimming like a moon among the dark of the castle interiors, but his sharp intake of breath was clear enough.
"Yddris asked me...to ask you..." He blinked hard. "To have the frontline men search the castle, because..." He swayed. "He's sending back his best warders to hold the line."
"Very well." Harkenn's voice boiled with fury, but Jordan didn't think it was directed at him or Yddris. He didn't need to see the lord's face to feel his anger. "Why are you swaying like that?"
"A Listener almost crushed me to death, my Lord," Jordan said faintly. "It smashed my nose."
The next moment, he was on the floor. He didn't remember getting there; his thoughts were a void between speaking to Harkenn and blinking at the ceiling, watching the chandelier sway nauseatingly from the buffeting of magic on the defences. His nose no longer felt like a nose, only like someone had stuck something large and obstructive on his face. He grabbed at it with heavy limbs, but someone pulled his hand away just before the ground disappeared from under him. He startled, and took a long moment to realise that two guards had put him on a stretcher and were carrying him off. In the distance somewhere, Harkenn was yelling orders. Ren had moved onto his chest at some point, and lay there like a tiny sphinx, whining and gently kneading the front of his cloak.
"Grace," he said, grinning as his sister's face swam into view above him. She repeated his name, sounding like she was underwater, and then slowly came into focus.
"I need to take his hood down," she was telling someone. They replied. "What do you mean, oaths? He didn't tell me about any stupid oaths!"
"What's going on?" he tried to ask, but his mouth filled up with hot fluid. He choked, and leaned over to spit onto the floor. He didn't recognise the flagstones under him. He was lying on a counter, rather than hovering in mid-air like he'd deliriously first thought.
Someone grabbed his hood from behind and yanked it back. Grace shrieked.
"What happened to your face?"
"A demon tried to eat me," Jordan mumbled. He laughed. It really was quite funny in hindsight, in a horrifying kind of way.
"That's not funny, Jordan," she squeaked. Her hands fluttered over him. "Oh my god, there's blood all over you."
"Out of the way," an imperious voice said. It was male, familiar from somewhere, but Jordan's thoughts were too fuzzy to work out who it was. He tried to frown, but only succeeded in making his entire skull echo with pain. Someone prodded at him with cool fingers, and it was like they were pressing at putty stuck to Jordan's face rather than his skin, unless their touch passed over a bruise. "Broken nose, broken teeth," the man muttered as he worked, "possibly a cracked jaw, certainly some nasty scrapes.... Are you hurt anywhere else?"
"It sat on me," Jordan said. "My ribs."
Someone unclasped the front of his cloak with efficiency and then his jerkin, finally tugging up his shirt and continuing the inspection there. Ren growled, lunging at the hands. Jordan quieted her with a gentle stroke, pulling her back by the scruff of her neck.
"Cracked," Jeorge said, just as Jordan finally managed to dredge the name from his murky thoughts. "But I don't think there's any organ damage in there. Somebody grab me all the herbs you can find in that pantry. I also need some salt, I need wax, I need sterile glue and I need moss. Does the lord keep starlight moss here?"
"Some," a woman said apprehensively. "He'd have my head if I took any."
"I think his future household Unspoken might take priority over a plant," Jeorge snapped. "I'll also need bandages and wood for splinting."
"You a doctor?" Jordan slurred. His mouth was filling with blood again.
"I'm a physician, yes. Medical scholar more accurately, but I assure you I have plenty of field experience."
"Can you do anything about his teeth?" Grace asked, voice cracking. "They look terrible."
"They'll have to come out if they can't be sealed," Jeorge muttered. "Or he'd better hope Harkenn feels generous enough to pay for a trip to a dental surgeon."
"They have those here?"
"They did in Caelum," Jeorge replied, and left it at that.
"They do," Nova said from somewhere behind Jordan's head. "Don't worry."
He had a feeling that hadn't been directed at him but at Grace; he relaxed all the same.
Somewhere outside the kitchens, a group of soldiers jogged past, armour rattling. As Jeorge vanished to sort through bottles and jars on another table, Jordan tried to ignore his aching body. Ren curled up beside his head, rumbling, and he wondered if she could sense how much pain he was in.
"Did you fetch Yddris?" he mumbled to her, but he fumbled his words so badly he barely understood them himself.
He thought of his tutor, and how alarming it had been to hear him so exhausted. He didn't know when the demon swarm would stop. Nobody seemed to know what had caused it, and nothing he had seen indicated that even Nictavian natives had seen anything like it before.
It wasn't an encouraging sign.
Grace's hand stroked his hair back from his forehead. He was glad she didn't try talking to him; it was nice to have her there, but there were too many things to say. With clumsy fingers he sought out her other hand and squeezed.
"You're very warm," she said, with a choked giggle. "I think that's the magic, though."
He tried to focus on her face, but she might as well have been the other side of warped glass. He settled to stroking her hand with his thumb, to distract himself as much as anything.
A shout; someone deeper in the castle cried out. The cry was taken up in other places, and more soldiers ran past the kitchen door. Grace tensed. Someone cursed; Nova, perhaps. Footsteps crossed the room, and then a gasp before the door slammed.
"Elandriel's balls," Nova hissed. "It's that thing."
It was a miracle what the body could do when one was scared shitless. Jordan swung himself upright, the lance of pain an afterthought. He pulled his dagger from the sheath at his hip and scrambled off the kitchen counter against Grace's protests, and then he had to lean back against it as he swooned.
"How close?" he gasped, and blood tracked down his chin. His white shirt was already splotchy red.
"It's..."
The door juddered as it took a hit from the other side. For the first time, Jordan saw genuine fear in Nova's face.
"...close," she breathed, just before the latch shattered. A metal component shot across the floor and the door swung wide to hit the wall opposite, framing the figure on the other side, curved sword glinting.
Jordan's magic erupted along his arms, but the figure seemed unperturbed. It stepped inside with an eerie grace, surveying them with invisible eyes. It felt wrong, like all the air had been sucked out of the room. Jordan's flames dimmed even from looking at the sword.
He should have taken his chances with the demons.