The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way by Harry Connolly Page B

into the town, among your families. It will tear your children apart.” What was the town called, again? “Your mothers, your sisters, your aged fathers, little toddlers splashing in the mud. All of them will die screaming if you do not hold this line! Pack in! Pack in! Shield to shield!”
    They did as he ordered, although some hesitated to leave their place in front of the door of the great hall. Redegg slammed those doors shut and threw the bar, for all the good that would do against a creature strong enough to batter open the heavy southern gates.  
    “If you are not a soldier,” Tejohn called, “clear the yard! Give your defenders room to maneuver!”  
    Ordinary citizens began to move back toward the caravans, and those that would not move were dragged away.  
    There were still soldiers by the broken gate, some facing outward in case a second grunt came through, some guarding the first group’s back. “You! Form a double line beneath the archers’ position. Quick now!”
    In the center of the yard, the grunt shoved its snout under the bloody bared rib cage of its victim. Still, it looked up often as the soldiers organized.  
    It doesn’t fear us. That’s why it fed directly in the middle of the yard. It was taunting them.  
    A tiny, ruthless part of him urged him to slip away. These   poorly trained spears would be the perfect distraction, and I have more important tasks ahead .  
    No. Song would know what he did today, and he was not going to shame himself in front of the gods. Besides, he needed this pass to be in human hands when he returned. He needed it.  
    The grunt kicked the little corpse away from it, finished with that meal. It started scanning the courtyard for more victims, and Tejohn knew that if the creature’s hunger was slaked, it would start biting as many people as it could to spread its curse. There was no more time to muster the troops.  
    “VOLLEY!”  
    The grunt reacted to his call faster than the archers did. At the moment he shouted that word, the creature bounded to the side, leaping out of the path of the sheet of arrows. Only two archers, who were so slow their arrows did not loose with the others, came close--one stuck lightly into the creature’s hip and the other struck the ground between its feet.  
    It roared, and everyone in the courtyard fell back a step, even Tejohn. The Fire-taken thing had understood him. Could it speak the Peradaini language, or had it understood that one word the way a dog understood “fetch” or “stay”?  
    “Form up!” Tejohn shouted. The line of spears between the grunt and the town stretched all the way across the courtyard--a ten-year-old child couldn’t have slipped through--but many were still stepping backward. “Form up and ready for a pincer! Archers, loose in a sheet when I call ‘another’!”
    The grunt turned toward Tejohn, and the terrible way it looked at him made him long for a spear. Glancing at the archers, he could see that they were only now readying their next shot. “Bend! Another!”
    A second volley of arrows flew from the top of the wall, and this time the grunt did not have a chance to dodge them. It howled in agony, its back and left side bristling with arrows.  
    At least he knew the beast could not speak Peradaini. “Loose another when I say go! Spears! Stamp advance, with a pincer!”  
    The grunt turned toward the archers and roared at them. A small, shameful part of Tejohn was grateful that the creature had turned its attention elsewhere, but that only made him shout his next order all the louder: “Points! Shock line!”  
    The creature bounded toward the wall. The spears managed to brace their weapons against the ground but it did them no good. Just like Third Splashtown. I should have remembered that a shock line was a failed tactic. The grunt reached them in two great leaps. With a sweep of one claw, it batted six spearpoints aside, then lunged in to grab hold of a man.  
    It lifted