Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 50 of 619

The gate opened at the third hour after moonset. Ajax saw it from the ridge. Two men shoved the door wide and staggered out for air, hands on their knees, faces slick with sweat. A third followed with a bucket and dropped it in the dirt. "Now," Ajax said. Elara stood beside him. Her sleeve was still rolled up, the gold band on her wrist dim now, its light spent into the working she was about to hold. She raised her palm and closed her eyes. The air around the seven of them thickened and went pale, like fog under glass. "Move," she said. "I can hold it to the wall. Not past it." They went down the slope in a line. Grayson first, then Marco, then Tucker, then Ajax, then Asher, then Chalam at the back. The sick men at the gate did not turn. The shroud held. Ajax counted paces in his head. Forty. Thirty. Ten. A guard on the wall looked up and saw them the moment Elara's hand dropped. She sank to one knee behind them in the dark. The shroud broke. The guard shouted. Ajax was already through the gate. He cut the first man across the throat before the shout finished. Grayson took the second. Marco drove his iron blade through a third who was still fumbling at his belt. The sick were slow. The well had done its work. The spiral doors were inside the courtyard, three of them set into the inner wall. Ajax went for the first. Grayson for the third. Asher stepped to the middle door with his blade drawn, exactly where Ajax had put him. A man came out of a side arch with an axe raised over Ajax's back. Ajax did not see him. Asher did. Asher crossed the space in three strides and drove his blade up under the man's ribs. The axe fell in the dirt. The man went down on top of it. Ajax turned at the sound. Asher was already pulling his blade free. "Second door," Ajax said. "Going," Asher said. The iron blades bit the spiral doors the way the gnome said they would. The metal parted under Ajax's cut like wet rope. Grayson's door gave a breath later. Asher's third. Inside, the last of the guards were on their knees, retching, hands empty. The man at the center of the hall stood alone by a stone chair. He had no sword drawn. He looked at Ajax across the room and set his hands flat on the arms of the chair. "You came faster than I thought," he said. Ajax crossed the floor and put him down with one cut. The hall was theirs before the moon touched the ridge. Six men standing. One healer on her knees outside the gate, spent to the bottom. And a stone chair with a dead man in front of it, and whatever he had been guarding still waiting behind him.