2.16. Enna-Belum
The Verdugo
Anna’s drawing had captured Enna-Belum’s silhouette acceptably enough, by her estimation. There was the head bedecked with horns, there the heavy knuckle-walking front legs and the digitigrade predator’s haunches. There were the spines along his shoulders and studding his back. There was the size, just as she’d promised, a train car’s worth of flesh and an army’s worth of hatred packed into a bovine’s worth of brains.
But the sounds of dismay from her warriors taught her that she had come nowhere near a proper depiction. Who could? What sane hand could reproduce the face that hung beneath those horns? Or faces perhaps, it was hard to tell. A confusion of loose, flabby features, as though a card table’s worth of leather-skinned old veterans had been flensed and sewn together with only the vaguest idea of a human face’s proper contours. This nightmare conglomeration hung like fleshy curtains from the thing’s skull, curling and flexing as it approached like the puckering of lips, the eight filmy eyes a concentric spiral around its leech-sucker mouth.
“Saints sanctify us.” A blond-bearded man tapped the guy next to him. “Arvind. You could’ve warned us your mother’s visiting.”
“Tighten up,” Anna said, over the stricken laughter that drew out of the spearline, but it was on instinct. Better they be laughing than wailing.
Enna-Belum loped toward Shaheill’s forward palisade, his vertical maw splitting his gormless face open like an orchid, his ring of eyes fixed.
Anna glared back. Hello again, you big blackfeathered asshole. Come again to die at the hands of the Legion? We’ll oblige you.
The initial attack in the battle for Shaheill came from its kindred, and it issued forth from the trees all around the wide, dug-through clearing. Arrows whistled from hiding places high in the boughs. Unseen rifles cracked. Enna-Belum let out an ursine bark of confusion as they pockmarked him, some finding his face, others falling below, none landing more than shallow pits or thin lacerations.
Two loose skirmisher columns spilled from the trees, sprinting into place and dropping to staggered double-deep firing lines. Closer to the monster, more accurate, and positioned—Saints be kind—to draw him into one of the dozen or more pit traps they’d spent the night preparing for him.
Ofelia was in the left column; Anna could see her. Right, she thought, meanly: go right. Enna-Belum could not have heard her, surely; there were seraphs that could, even if you’d never spoken aloud, but not blackfeathers. He went right regardless, breaking from his loping jog into full gallop.
And now it began.
The first terrified skirmishers broke away, sprinting for the trees, and even a tyrant like Anna couldn’t fault them, could only commend them for their haste, because here he came, his earthquake run gaining velocity. There was a pit trap waiting for him, but his strides were so colossal that they must have cleared its boards, and now he was on its other side, among them, bellowing and bristling.
He caught a woman in his zipper jaws, hefted her into the air, slammed her back to the ground and knocked her limbs into ragdoll uselessness, slammed her again and cut off her howling terror as her ribcage collapsed and pulped her heart. His foreclaw seized another fighter who took a puncturing talon through the chest and had the misfortune not to die immediately. The monster launched the impaled man with trebuchet force into the palisade, headfirst, and his skull cracked like a hen’s egg on contact, wild eye hanging out on its glistening stalk. His lips moved for a terrible second as if he was still there, still seeking for a last word, and then he was dead.
From the raging beast’s blindside, another volley belched fire and billowed smoke. Quarrels stuck from the rubbery skin of Enna-Belum’s neck. He reeled around from the squad’s fleeing remnants and caught a sling-pot to the face; it burst open in a caustic cloud of quicklime. It burned into his mouth and his blanked eyes and the weeping wounds on his face and he let out an unnervingly human scream, high and stripped, and charged at his new attackers.
The rolling rifle smoke drifted and curled at the edge of Ofelia’s sable cloak where she stood amid the line, cranking another quarrel into her crossbow, all calm concentration, as though she’d fired at a doe rather than a demon.
The urge to break ranks and go sprinting toward her daughter nearly sent Anna stumbling, but it was too late, Enna-Belum would reach the skirmishers before she would, and Ofelia would be another broken doll, jaw slackened by death or torn from its housing—
The ground broke open with a timbershaking crack. Enna-Belum’s knuckled forelimb punched through the boards and the mat of topsoil, and crashed through into the dug-out trench below and its thicket of sharpened stakes. He yowled, scrambling and raking and upturning a fountain of blackened earth, and tugged free a mangled, perforated claw.
But he wasn’t dying.
He returned to the chase, leaning now and tracking thick dark blood in his wake. “Back!” Ofelia’s high cry piped across the field. “Back, back, back! Tiago!”
The ragged line of marksmen dissolved and fled for the treeline, where their fellow shooters rained bowshot and bullet from the forest’s boughs. The surviving skirmishers to Enna-Belum’s rear let fly again. Their aim was inexpert and their target’s face was occluded, and their barrage served only to add more fletching to the feathers that already fluttered from him, but it was enough to further enrage him, to send him careening the way he’d come, a vexed hound chasing a thrown stick.
Another crack! and the blackfeather toppled facefirst into another trench and came up with a thick timber lanced through the underside of his jaw, pinning his face open, spitted tongue lolling and flapping around the obstruction. Some beautiful brave bastard sprinted forward with a quicklime sling and overhanded the earthenware right into Enna-Belum’s face, bright bursting powder like a birthing star. The slinger whooped with triumph and scurried away from his mark, and the ale he’d squeeze from the tellings and retellings of this story would drown a dray, but Saints love him, he deserved every drop, because blind, bleeding Enna-Belum was pawing at his ruined face and yowling.
But he still wasn’t dying.
Into the trees fled Ofelia’s skirmishers. Forth from the trees came Tiago’s flanking teams, with their billhooks and spears and sickles and their desperate bravery. They roared defiance. Enna-Belum roared in reception.
The flankers reached him and swarmed, ants around a lion beetle, blades biting into the heavy hide around the monster’s joints. They came close enough to smell the carrion in his shaggy pelt and see the deranged hatred in his limpid eyes. They brought the fury of Shaheill with them, raw and unseasoned, but incandescent all the same. At their fore, Tiago swung a poleaxe overhead with grim precision and split a toe open, steel sparking bright against the talon it hacked past.
Riccana al Teremi shifted out of the corner of Anna’s eye. The red-maned girl was reaching for her sidearm, her eyes stormy with eagerness to join the fray. Anna raised a warning hand. “Stay, CH.”
“If we all—”
“Stay,” Anna repeated, though in truth she itched as badly as Riccana did. Her boy was out there. “We come after.”
He was blinded and he was in agony and he was impaled through the face like a hooked fish, but the Sorrow of the Northmarch hadn’t earned his nickname in idleness, and people were still dying. A woman stooped to drag her moaning friend to safety from the beast and came away with only his upper half, and in that moment of hesitating horror she was carved from her life by a scything claw. A man with wispy gray hair chopping again and again and again on a leg like he was felling a tree, teeth bared, was smashed open by that leg’s flailing reaction, his entrails unwound by the barb at the beast’s elbow.
Enna-Belum’s great bulk shifted and thrashed. His rear limbs found their footing and he yanked, and some spars splintered and came away and others released the eldritch flesh they’d impaled with a horrible wet crackle. The wound-riddled face peeled open in another gurgling roar.
“He’s up!” Tiago seized his neighbor by the shoulder and tugged her bodily back from their butcher’s work. “Away! Pull away to the line!”
Tiago’s team abandoned their bloody work and sprinted from the hulking seraph. On raw, ribboned legs Enna-Belum attempted pursuit, stumbled, stood again and lurched forward with the popping of unhoused gristle.
And still he wasn’t dying.
His huge shaggy foreleg whistled downward onto a spearman who’d tarried too long, and burst the man from crown to belly, powdered bone and flattened steel and a bright mist of red and pink. That might have been another Teremi, to go by the tufts of red hair that now clung to Enna-Belum’s claws and the gasp of dismay from Simon.
“Sorcerers.” Anna’s fist shot into the sky. “Now.”
Atop the palisade walls, the motley siege-sorcerers raised outstretched hands. Young and fresh or scarred and gnarled, stonefaced or terrified. To Anna’s vicious joy, the four sorcerers produced four fireballs, snapping through the sky like arching lightning and blooming into white-hot concussive light upon contact with Enna-Belum’s bulk, sending the seraph rocketing backward.
“Again,” Anna roared, through the ringing in her ears. “Free-fire!”
Enna-Belum was struggling back upright when the next siege spell hammered into his face and blew a gouge out from it, and one of his horns cracked like dry wood in the superheat. That was the second fireball from the youngest sorceress, who seemed tapped-out, now, sweat sticking to her clammy forehead. Her trembling hands stayed up and forward, though, and concentration riveted across her fast-blinking eyes.
Around the wavering girl her fellow fireballers poured more murderous magic after her, dropping Enna-Belum back down every time he forced his head up. A dozen casts or more blistered the battlefield, searing the air and blowing out eardrums. The muran managed a fourth—a fourth, bless the bastard—and vomited all over the palisade in front of him. His fellows caught him and clapped him on the back and shoulders, and he was so spent he couldn’t even raise the usual thorny murani reaction to being touched.
Their joy didn’t last.
Flesh sizzled and fat bubbled and feathers burned like matchsticks and great patches of ruined red opened all along Enna-Belum and he was more blister than hide, now, melting like a candle, and not fucking dying.
The muscle and gristle and bone beneath the burning would not be stilled. Enna-Belum stood. Three eyes had burst open from the heat. Five more stared with primordial contempt at Shaheill’s defenders arrayed before him. They stared back, in despair and disbelief.
“How?” Simon il Teremi mumbled, and “how?” again, his hands shaking so hard that his anchorpike’s tip trembled, staked as it was into the ground.
Anna sucked in a great gulp of air, with the tang of fouled meat and blood at its edges, and took a knee at the root of her anchorpike. “Brace,” she bellowed. “Brace pikes and ready!”
Enna-Belum didn’t so much charge as launch. One hellacious leap and then it was all pell-mell momentum, so damaged were his legs that he could barely keep himself upright, and his rear leg found another pit to crash into and his foreleg slid on the rusty muck that the dirt had made in its marriage with the sheeting blood of seraph and kindred intermingled, and he listed to one side. It didn’t matter. Twenty demented tons of seraph bowled into Anna’s line of pike. Courage met physics. Physics won.
The first man who took the charge died of pure misfortune. He hadn’t done a thing wrong, had obeyed his orders to the letter, had stood bravely in defense of his people, and now he was a smear across the field, a mean satirical death out of the imagination of a troubled child with a red crayon, just lumps and splintered shards of wooden pike and gleaming bone. Here was the truth of war with the seraphs. A hero’s funeral where they scrape you into the casket, and they all had to be fucking heroes anyway, the misbegotten bastards.
“No,” someone sobbed. “No, no, no—”
Four more anchorpikes found Enna-Belum along his charge; two snapped, one was turned aside as its wielder was reduced to paste, one stuck and dragged, and then finally—finally—the fifth pike drove into a spot between his sternum-plates and stuck, bringing him to a shuddering halt.
“Pull pikes!” Anna sprang to her feet and hauled her heavy polearm with her. “Up and forward!”
She mounted a charge of her own and lanced the towering anchorpike’s head into the base of Enna-Belum’s throat, right above the steel-strut collarbone. He howled and swatted at her; she dived from the descending blow. Flaps of cloven flesh from the toe her son had destroyed spattered her with mud and blood. She seized the butt-end of the anchorpike, invoked the Tower Lord blazoned on her thigh, and felt a knotty, compact spike in her gut as her weight briefly doubled; with her hexed heft she stomped her anchorpike’s burrower as far into the earth as she could manage.
A single anchorpike wouldn’t do a thing to immobilize Enna-Belum, but the line was snapping shut around him, and a thicket of spear tips were needling him, finding spots to burrow in as Anna’s had. She darted back away from Enna-Belum’s counterattacking swipe; here came his other claw, opening that breastbone gap for a spearhead, but Anna was already rolling, she couldn’t take advantage, damn it all, and they were just skidding across his flesh, into the blubber and the meat, not the guts—
Riccana il Teremi had lost her helmet at some point in the fight, and she looked gorgeous as she struck, like a miniature Pladuriya from one of Annalise’s storybooks, a great nimbus of red hair around her, face caked with dirt and blazoned with fury. Her pike took Enna-Belum right below the ribs, shoving a foot or more into his core. Anna hissed victoriously. Now there was a hit he would feel.
And then her joy, and Riccana’s war cry, were cut off by a swiping blow that caught the Chief Hermandat on the midsection and ripped her from her feet, clattering her into a dazed heap at the threshold of the monster’s massive talons.
Enna-Belum reared one massive fist to crush the girl flat. Her uncle’s pike skewered into the pit of his upraised arm. Simon’s teeth were bared in a horrified, hateful grimace. The seraph’s addled eyes refocused on him.
Sitting by as witness to this family drama wouldn’t help. Anna found the soldier whose pike had stuck-and-dragged Enna-Belum. He’d been dragged, too, and had lost most of the right half of his body along the way to an errant twenty-ton footstep. What was left of the twitching face belonged to the joking blond man, the one who’d razzed Arvind about his mother. His pike had fallen from its purchase in the seraph’s shoulder; Anna reached for it and the dying man made a noise like muh and tightened his grip on it.
Anna gave an insistent pull. “I have it,” she said. “Let go.”
The man let go, of the pike and of his life simultaneously. His mouth went slack, that your mother joke the final one to emerge from it. Anna lofted the lance he’d bequeathed her and turned back to the ongoing fight, right in time to be spattered by the blood of a severed human arm as it spun past her.
This wasn’t working. Their spears weren’t pushing deep enough. They had no fireballs left to cast. Their weapons were failing. Shaheill was—
“Ship!” someone screamed. “Saint Silas’s mercy, it’s here!”
Anna's heart leapt into her mouth.
He'd come back.
Already the size of a thumbnail and growing fast, the Shipfarrok stormship approached through the turbulent evening sky. A curtain of thunderous rain and gale surrounded it as the storm vented, pointing its broad nose right at the surrounded seraph.
The Shaheill army was fleeing ground zero—which was fine, but some were taking their pikes with them, or leaving them unused.
“Stake him!” Anna seized a flagging soldier and shoved him forward again. “Don’t run before you fucking stake him!” As if to demonstrate the point, she stabbed her own pike into Enna-Belum’s ribcage, and though it was a shallow bite it was, she decided, enough to get a tip in there and get the fuck out.
More anchorpikes came loose from the cold ground and plunged into seraph flesh. More desperate bravos of Shaheill fled. Anna snatched Simon il Teremi from his kneeling place above Riccana and fled with them.
“Wait,” he slurred. “Wait. Riccy.” He pointed, or tried to. His left arm was torn away to the elbow. Two silver shards jutted from the stump’s red ruin. Not red for long, if he lived. A wound that deep would snuff his light before the sun set.
A pair of soldiers, one with red hair (how many goddamn Teremis were there?) labored to pull their unconscious Chief Hermandat away from the raging seraph and the incoming vessel. Wind whipped helmets from heads and sent the wounded staggering.
The stormship roared forth. Metal screamed and peeled and the storm howled and the blackfeather Enna-Belum howled back, in murderous idiot defiance, thrashing against the thicket of pikes with oozing, broke-open limbs. He was moving again, yanking the buried anchorpikes up with him, but they’d bought the time they needed and the fleeing pikemen were away. The seraph’s blood-boiled brain fixed on the speeding behemoth approaching him and gave him the only command it ever did: kill. His chipped claws spread. The slabs of muscle bunched and snapped loose and Enna-Belum launched himself in a hobbling stagger-charge toward the stormship’s terminal dive.
Two figures were drifting through the sky behind the plummeting vessel, beneath two billowing sails of canvas. One of them clung to his connecting ropes with curled-in fear. The other, whose descent had the smoothness of expertise to it, detached his grip from the parachute’s steering toggles and held both scaly arms straight out, toward a bare gap in the fuselage’s metal plates.
Simon was running too slow. Anna hefted the dazed and bleeding undersecretary onto her shoulder and tore toward the palisades.
The seraph and the stormship met. A sound like a hundred thunderclaps pealing at once. The world went white.