Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Sixty Six: An Attack

When Nova woke, the first thing she noticed was the pain in her head.

The next was the screaming.

As consciousness filtered back to her, she became aware that something was horribly wrong with the air. It hurt to breathe, and prickled and burned and as it entered her lungs. She opened her eyes; she still lay on the kitchen hearth where she'd settled last night, and the hard stone under her shoulder was evidence that this wasn't an unpleasant dream. She sat up, listening with a frown.

Then it fell into place, and she got up with stiff legs and stumbled to the window. She was almost blinded by a flash of green and another wave of horrid prickling over her skin as a Marrowhawk rebounded off the rune net.

A groan behind her alerted her to Jeorge waking. His crutches tapped across the floor to where she stood, and she resisted an urge to turn and kick them out from under him.

"Did it wake you up, too?" he asked, voice still full of sleep. She gritted her teeth and didn't respond.

They both jumped as two more Marrowhawks shot towards the rune net, rebuffed by a pulse of magic Nova felt in her teeth. Now she was alert, she recognised the call of a Firebull somewhere in the din, and the laughing calls of Rock Wights. She frowned as another wave of magic stood her hair on end. Just how many demons were trying to break through?

"Where are you going?" Jeorge called, as she turned on her heel and dashed from the kitchens. She ignored him, pelting through the castle corridors to the main foyer, and then pounding up the stairs and hurtling along another corridor until she came to a first-storey window. A thin rattle behind her indicated that her noisy flight had alerted the guards patrolling the servants' quarter, but all thoughts of that fled her when she saw the sight out of the window.

A veritable cloud of Marrowhawks were dive-bombing the rune net, and in amongst them were the smaller forms of Forest Haunts, which had never been documented in the city before. Their wings were stubby and mostly for gliding between trees, so they were recognisable by the frequency with which they dropped to the ground to rest. Nova only knew what they were from a dim recollection of an illustrated library book she'd read once.

She wasn't high up enough to see over the rampart wall, but the guards patrolling it were running up and down with frantic abandon, clearly at a loss of what to do in a real emergency. No one had been out in the corridors aside from the night guard; the idiots hadn't got around to warning anyone yet, it seemed.

"Ma'am?" a soldier said as he appeared in the doorway of the guest chamber she'd broken into. He faltered when he realised who she was, instantly shedding the deference. "You shouldn't be roaming the castle at this hour."

"I'm guessing you aren't aware of that, then?" she snapped, pointing out of the window. The guard dragged his feet when coming to look, and then froze as he saw the commotion. "I would advise you rouse barracks, since those louts clearly didn't manage it yet. Unless you want to be the one to alert his Lordship."

The guard, a skinny youth barely past adolescence under all that shiny armour, shook his head, throat bobbing crazily.

"I would also advise you don't mention taking instructions from me," she said with a small smile, and made sure he watched her stalking out. It irked her to have so many guards in the halls at night. She'd be tailed to the privy if she could ever bear to leave the hearth for it.

The memory of the Caelumese spy confined her to the usual servants' route up to the lord's chambers. Now that the initial shock had left her, she became aware of the damage her awkward sleeping position had done; her head ached, and the freshly raw stump of her wing, now a couple of inches shorter than the other, was throbbing. The bandages felt sticky when she moved. Over it all was the horrible buzzing of countless attempts to get through the rune barrier.