“I bloody well won’t!” My ears popped after a minute, and I could finally make out what the older man was yelling. “Bringing them here to die with us won’t help anyone. Look at those things!”
“Bringing who in?” I asked, confused.
“Half of our damned army!” Pritkin said. “The Corps got word of the trap from the first arrivals, in time to pull the rest back, and hung everyone else out to dry!”
“What else were they supposed to do?” the officer demanded. “We’d have evacuated ourselves if we could have got back to the line, but they cut us off. We’re getting killed out there!”
“We were getting killed!” Pritkin said. “We have a chance now—”
“What chance does that look like?” the man gestured savagely upward. “Those damned things were supposed to be on the borders! What the fuck happened?”
Pritkin didn’t answer. Instead, he grabbed what looked like an old-fashioned radio, the kind that came in a backpack with a handset and belonged in a World War II flick, off the guy’s shoulder. The man let him have it without a fight.
“Won’t do you any good without the password, and I’ll die before I give it to you,” he said flatly. “Think, man! We lose any more and we’ll be vulnerable to the damned vamps!”
“The ‘damned vamps’ are inside the city, fighting for us right now,” I told him.
That didn’t get a response. I don’t know that it would have anyway—the man didn’t look nearly as impressed to see the Pythia as Tobias had been—but the shield above us started to buckle, requiring everyone’s full attention. The war mages got it stabilized—somehow—but we had minutes at best. We had to think of something.
I could try to shift us out, but I doubted—sincerely—that it would work with so many, power boost or not. And even if it did, where would we go? The cave and then through the portal back to Earth? Because that would leave Mircea alone in the city, and with nobody left to distract our enemies from his position.
No, that wouldn’t work.
But what else was there?
I didn’t know, but it was up to me to figure it out. Pritkin was straining, the cords standing out on his neck, fully occupied trying to reinforce the shield. Mircea was busy fighting in the city, and Caedmon—who the hell knew where he was? But I honestly didn’t blame him for retreating. He’d had maybe a hundred fey with him.
It wasn’t enough.
So, this was my fight; I knew it was. But I was flat out of ideas. This was when I needed Billy, I thought, feeling a knife turn in my heart. He’d saved me so many times when things were bad, just like he had today, and yet I was letting him down, I was letting them all down.
But grief made it hard to think, and the noise was worse. Pritkin had dropped the silence spell, needing to channel everything he had into the shield, and the cacophony was unbelievable. Not least because the sounds those things were making bent the brain. I’d called them shrieks, but that missed the mark by a lot. The truth was, I didn’t know what to call them, because I’d never heard anything like them.
They were so bad, they were actually disorienting, like an extra offensive weapon—and maybe they were. So bad that, if we stayed here for long, we’d probably all go mad. Of course, we’d be dead long before then—
I realized that I’d wandered away from Pritkin only when I almost ran into the shield. The energy zapped me, even though I was inside and it wasn’t supposed to do that to the people it was protecting. But it looked like it was getting confused, too.
And no wonder. Those damned shrieks felt like ice picks to the eardrums, making me cover my head and hunch down, trying to concentrate past the pain. Trying to think. But that just left me looking at one of the manlikans outside, because he was right next to the edge of the shield.
He wasn’t attacking, however. He’d lost his rider and was just lying there, getting trampled, with the same vacant look on his face that the severed head had had. Like an idling engine with no driver. Like the golem that Billy and I had once hijacked to—
My thoughts stuttered to a halt.
I stared at the creature and it stared back, quietly, passively. I got to my feet—slowly, and staggering a little because of the pain in my ribs and the noise. And then just stood there, like an idiot, until I gave myself a mental slap.
Go find Pritkin!
I finally did, after pushing through the milling crowd, most of which seemed as confused as I had been. But Pitkin was still laser focused, and I guessed he’d gotten that password, after all. Because he was screaming something into the handset.
I tried to get his attention, but there were so many people bumping and jostling around, half of them also trying to tell him something, that it didn’t work. And maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe I should find out if my crazy idea was actually crazy before I dragged him away for nothing.
I went back to the shield. The fallen manlikan was still there, because of course it was. It wasn’t going anywhere without a rider, was it? But the thing I’d never bothered to ask myself was: why not? Why could a fey direct such a thing and so easily, too? I’d never seen them issue any orders, and the manlikans didn’t have visible controls. So how did the damned things work?
I didn’t know, but I had to find out. We desperately needed some new troops on our side, and there they were! I could see them through gaps between the scrabbling bodies outside: fallen manlikans, lying all over the battlefield, just waiting for new riders.
It looked like the Corps had been smart enough to target the fey controlling them rather than the creatures themselves, and they’d hit the mark. We’d taken casualties, but so had they. There were downed fey all over the battlefield, with their abandoned vehicles idling alongside.
I stared at the giant, mossy face in front of me. It had a deep gouge across the forehead, the edges burned black by some spell, with the interior showing a lighter colored rock, like a healing scar. But I didn’t see any animosity in its expression, any hatred. Any more than I had on the severed head.