She watched a burly goblin swing his sword doublehanded against a bird’s neck. It bounced off. The bird closed its beak on his head, lifted him bodily, and shook him. Then it stopped shaking, but his body continued to swing as if his neck was now made of rope. The bird dropped him and planted a foot on him. Then it pulled his head off.
Kadie staggered under the platform and found another trunk to lean on. There were a dozen men sheltering under there already, and birds were trying to come in at them on the far side.
They were ravens, enormous ravens.
She laughed a little. Raven Totem. Death Bird. Blood Beak. Giant ravens! Obviously the wardens were playing jokes, and she was sure she would see how funny it was if her head would just stay still a minute. The goblins had eaten her horse. Allena the Fare?
Dragons belonged to the warlock of the south, Mamma had said, and the legions belonged to the warlock of the east. No one must use sorcery against the legions, but today South had sent his dragons against them, so now East had sent these birds against the goblins, tit for tat. Quite obvious. Warlock Raspnex had said that the wardens had been deposed, but he must have made a mistake.
All around her ravens were feeding, or chasing men through the trees, smashing branches and even trunks as if trees were weeds. She peered up, between the logs of the platform. The sky was dark with the monsters, still coming from somewhere. Over the low wall that enclosed the orchard, she could see them settling like starlings on the main host of goblins. Thousands and thousands of them—jetblack feathers, black beaks, black legs, bright golden eyes glittering. Their shrieks were the cries of ravens magnified a hundredfold. Arrows bounced off them, swords bounced off them.
There were bodies on the platform, one still dribbling blood.
“Kadie?!” A hand grabbed her.
She looked around, and saw two Blood Beaks, both grass-green with terror. She smiled at them vaguely. Oo, what a lot of noise there was! How was she ever going to get to sleep with all this noise?
Behind the Blood Beaks the ravens were winning the local skirmish, grabbing men and smashing them against trees. When they were dead, the birds fed on the corpses. There were only six or seven defenders left under the canopy, and all that was keeping them from being overrun was the congestion of feeding birds. The others could not pass to get at their prey.
The goblin king was fighting like a human whirlwind, holding off two monsters. But the unequal struggle could not last forever. Even as she watched, a beak as big as two swords jabbed into Death Bird’s chest. The points came out through his back in a wash of blood. The raven backed away, carrying him. He pounded fists on its head for a moment, then went limp. Bye-bye, Death Bird . . .
“Kadie, I’m sorry!” Blood Beak was yelling in her ear over the noise. “I didn’t mean what I said!”
“Yes, you did,” she said politely. There was only one of him, which is what she expected, really. She wished her head would stop aching. This was all very interesting and if she could see properly it would be even more interesting. She wondered if the birds would attack only goblins. How did they feel about jotunn-imp-faun mixtures? Perhaps she should take her clothes off so they could see she was pinky-brown, not green. Could birds tell colors?
She was going to find out very shortly. Only three men were left under the platform, and Blood Beak, and her. The noise was growing less, she decided, more bird shrieks but a lot less man-screams. The goblin horde was being reduced to carrion. Soon there wouldn’t be any goblins. Two whole armies wiped out without even having a fight—even if she had survived to tell this tale, no one would ever have believed her.
Then Blood Beak yelled, and she turned. Two ravens were coming through the trees. From the way the closer one was looking at her with its beady gold eyes, it was obviously interested in more than goblins. She drew her rapier.
“I’ll save you, Kadie!” Blood Beak waved his sword. “I doubt that very much.” Again she spoke so quietly that he would not hear. Her head was going round too fast for shouting.
The two monsters rushed in side by side. Blood Beak swung his sword at the one on his side, and the sheer power of his blow seemed to knock the great head back. Eyeing her own opponent blearily, Kadie decided she would dance forward lightly and lunge at the beak itself, hoping to hit the tongue. Tongues should be vulnerable, shouldn’t they?
Her feet seemed to move in all directions at once. She stumbled forward, almost falling. She missed the tongue.
The point of her rapier struck the beak, and the whole bird vanished with a sort of plop! noise.
Oh.
How unusual.
Blood Beak slashed again unsuccessfully, retreated before the next stab, caught his foot, sprawled over on his back. Fast as a whip, the raven’s head flashed down and gripped his leg. He shrieked. It began pulling and lifting him.
Kadie lunged again, felt a hit, and the bird had gone. She knelt down. ”You all right?”
He stared up at her with wide square eyes in a face the color of green cheese. “What happened?”
“My sword. It’s magical, you see. Good against magic birds. Of course I didn’t know that until recently. How is your leg?”
“Broken.”
She looked and saw white bones in the red stuff. It wasn’t broken, it was crushed. She looked away quickly. Blood Beak would never run again.
“I’ll make a bandage,” she said, removing her cloak. A shadow warned her—she spun around just in time. As the monster lunged at her, she lunged right back. It vanished like a soap bubble. Another bird was right behind, so she took a step to meet it and dealt with that one, also. The men had all gone. There was only Blood Beak and herself under the platform. She glanced around and saw no goblins upright anywhere.
She did see an awful lot of giant ravens feeding, though, tearing at the corpses, and about as many again still hunting, most of them heading for her.
She reeled back to Blood Beak, who was whimpering and trying to sit up.
“You had better bandage your leg yourself,” she said. “I’ll keep the chickens off.”
Suddenly she felt a thousand years old. Her arms were so heavy she could barely lift them, and the cloak lay forgotten at her feet. If the monsters came at her from all sides, she wasn’t going to be able to get them all.
There were thousands of them.
8
Cowering in her vantage on the high Mosweeps, Thaile wept in horror. The Keeper had known, or had guessed. He plans a fiendish mischief, she had said. Thaile had never anticipated an evil so great. She could do nothing to stop it. No matter how powerful, one sorceress could not resist the Covin.
Very soon it was over. The dragons had destroyed the legions.
But then came the second message from the Almighty, and the second atrocity. Raw, naked power squirted out from the heart of evil in the center, enveloping the helpless mundanes of the opposing army and ripping them to bloody fragments. The illusion of black birds provided for the mundane spectators did not deceive Thaile. She saw a single overall iniquity like a thundercloud, emitting random flashes of destruction. It was mindless and brutal and coldblooded, a callous display of the usurper’s might.
She could not identify the victims. None of the books she had seen had described such a race, but they were human, and they were dying, rent apart.
Again she could do nothing, and this time the butchery took longer. It ended when the horde had died and their corpses been reduced to gory pieces. Nauseated, she looked down upon the stricken terrain. All gone. She sensed others seeing and recoiling, also. Any sorcerer not alerted by the dragons would certainly have heard this slaughter. The Covin had made its point: None can resist the Almighty.
The last few stragglers were being hunted down and destroyed when Thaile detected a tiny flicker of sorcerysorcery of a different hue. The distinction was so subtle that she thought no other sorcerers would notice, unless they were very close, but someone was putting up an occult resistance; one man must be still alive among the dead. That pitiful spark of defiance caught her sympathy and her attention.
It was a woman? A girl! What had a girl been doing among so many thousand men? She was not even of their race.
A prisoner? Thaile wondered. Kidnapped? Kidnapped as she herself had been kidnapped from the Leeb Place? The spell of horror that had held her frozen shattered like ice on a pond.