Forest Kingdom Trilogy 3 - Down Among the Dead Men

MacNeil glanced across at Flint, who was staring straight ahead of her with one hand resting comfortably on her sword hilt. He was glad Flint had volunteered to take the first watch. He trusted her. The Dancer meant well, but if he got too comfortable he had a tendency to doze off. Which meant he spent most of his watches pacing up and down to keep himself alert. Things like that didn’t help at all when you were trying to get to sleep. And Constance … was untried. MacNeil closed his eyes and let himself drift away. He could trust Flint. She was dependable. He yawned widely. It had been a long, hard day… .
    Time passed. Flint watched over the sleepers, and the lights burned steadily lower.
    The demons came swarming out of the long night, vile and malevolent, and the guards at the town barricades met them with cold steel and boiling oil and what little courage they had left. Duncan MacNeil stood his ground and swung his sword in short, vicious arcs, cutting down creature after creature as they threw themselves at the barricades in a never-ending stream. Shapes out of nightmares and fever dreams reached for him with clawed hands and bared fangs, and their eyes glowed hungrily in the endless night. Blood flew on the air in a ghastly rain as the guards swung their swords and axes, and the demons died, but there were always more to take the place of those who fell. There were always more.
    A tall, spindly creature with a spiked back and talonea hands reared up before MacNeil. He ducked beneath a flailing blow and gutted the demon with one swift cut. Long ropes of writhing intestines fell down to tangle the demon’s legs, but still it pressed forward until MacNeil sheared off its bony head with a two-handed blow. Its mouth snarled soundlessly on the blood-soaked ground, and the body swung this way and that for long moments before realizing it was dead. None of the demons made a sound, even when they died. Forever silent, in life or death, like evil thoughts given shape and substance.
    Something the size of a man’s head, with thick black fur and a dozen legs, came flapping out of the darkness on bat’s wings. MacNeil cut it out of the air and it exploded wetly, showering him with foul-smelling blood that burned where it touched his bare skin. And while he was distracted, shaking and cursing, a patchwork demon with a vast corpse-pale body and huge scything jaws slammed into him from nowhere and threw him to the ground.
    For a moment all MacNeil could see was a confusion of human and demon feet all around him, slipping and stamping in the crimson mud. He lashed out at the pale demon as it bent over him, and screamed shrilly as its claws tore through his ragged chain mail. He wriggled away through the mud, then drove his boot up into the creature’s gut, desperation lending him strength. The demon lurched backward, caught off balance, and MacNeil surged to his feet. By the time he had his feet under him again, the pale demon was gone, carried away by the shifting press of bodies, but there were still more demons to be faced. MacNeil wiped blood and tears from his face with his sleeve and hacked about him with his sword to try to clear himself some space. He put all his remaining strength into his blows, and the power from his muscular arms and broad chest drove his sword deep into demon flesh and out again in steady butchery.
    The demons came from all sides now, vicious and unrelenting, and the night wasn’t dark enough to hide the horror of what they did. MacNeil fought on. He had no idea of how many demons he’d killed. He’d lost count long ago. It didn’t make any difference. There were always more. He swung his sword double-handed now, and the hilt jarred in his hands as he hacked through a demon’s spine. There were screams all through the night, and somewhere close at hand a man was cursing endlessly, his voice thick and empty. A woman sobbed, loud and anguished, until the sound broke off suddenly. And then the demons were retreating as suddenly as they’d come, melting silently back into the endless night.
    MacNeil lowered his dripping sword and leaned on it, fighting for breath. The air was full of the stench of blood and death. The great muscles in his arms and back ached horribly, and he was deathly tired. There was no end to the demons, and the intervals between their attacks were getting shorter. They came to the slaughter like pigs at a trough, and there was no end to their appetite for carnage.