And a few steps later, from somewhere behind her, a new sound began.
Boots. Heavy ones. The deep deliberate fall of a big man's stride on stone, each step landing with a weight the clerk's heels had never had — and coming, unmistakably, after her. Chasing her.
Flaure quickened her pace. Faster. Faster still.
Tmp. Tmp. Tmp. The boots came on behind her, heavy and even, swallowing the soft hush of her own soles.
She did not run — but her walk had become a thing barely holding itself short of a run. She kept her eyes ahead. She kept walking.
The boots gained.
Tmp. Tmp. Closer. The gap between each fall and the next drawing shorter.
It reached her.
The weight of it fell into step directly behind her shoulder, near enough that she could have turned and touched it, near enough to feel it the way you feel a held breath at the back of your neck—
And still she walked. Eyes ahead. One foot, the next. Walking away from the thing already beside her, as though if she simply did not turn, did not look, did not acknowledge it, it could not yet be true.
Silence. A held, total silence over the broken ground — and then a single sound broke it.
Snap. A boot coming down on a dead branch, sharp as a knife in the dark.
A tracer round followed the sound into the dark before the echo had died, a line of fire chasing the noise to its source.
A figure in priest's robes folded and dropped.
Emil worked the bolt — fumbling it, hands clumsy on a weapon he is new to it — and chambered the next round.
"How in the hell did the front let those things through. God damn it."
What's even happening up at the line right now... and that whole mess about the 'unclear reasoning'—
"Seniorrr Emil, sir! Can't we go up and assist the front line with everyone else?!"
"Yeah! We did four whole years of cadet training before we finally graduated — come on, give us a shot!"
"No."
"Aw—"
Emil cut the sound off with a raised hand.
A rider in Standing Army colours came pounding up out of the dark, breathless, his horse lathered and wild-eyed.
"O-order from the frontline! Request immediate backup!"
"Understood!" The cry went up as one, and they rallied and ran — pouring off toward where the eastern gate had been.
"Huh—?!" What is even going on up there? That's where all the best of them are — and it's three organizations integrated into one line, on top of that!
Emil chewed the edge of his thumbnail without noticing he was doing it. His eyes would not stay still and would not lift from the middle distance; he stood with his weight shifting foot to foot, unable to be still, the tension of the place hanging in the cold air around him like something he could not put down.
Boots — dozens of pairs of them — hammered across the stone, a hard rolling thunder of soldiers running, all of them bent the same way, all of them toward the front.
Hey — hey — hey... that's a three-organization integrated line up there, you understand—?! Emil did not lift his eyes from the ground. He stood with his head down and his shoulders drawn, the posture of a man who has decided that if he simply does not look toward the thing coming, it will be slower to arrive — staring at the mud, at the boots crossing it, at anything that was not the dark ahead.
More boots. More of them, pounding past.
Damn it, damn it — Deputy Marcus didn't pass down one word about any of this except the drill. No — there's no one who could have warned us about this—
A hand came down on his shoulder from behind.
"Heyyy, Senior Emil, why so wound up? We just do what we trained for, don't we?"
More boots, running, many pairs.
"How am I supposed to not be wound up—"
"LEFT SIDE OF YOU ALL-!"
Fire came across the field like a storm gone to ground — a great rolling front of it, lunging at them in a gust as though some hand had orchestrated the wind itself, driving the flame straight into their ranks.
And the wind in it was strong, and sharp — sharp as a drawn blade.
Emil lifted his gaze, slow, up from the mud at last.
The wind hit them — and where it passed across his cheek it left a thin line of cold that beaded, a moment later, into red. A single severed lock of his own hair turned over and over in the air in front of him and was gone.
His eyes went wide, and wider, the breath stopping in his throat, something cold opening in his chest beneath the shock — the particular horror of a thing the mind refuses for one full second before it lets it in.
— gasp —
His head... that new recruit's head—
It had been taken clean off, sheared away by the sheer force of that wind—
"AAAAGH—!"
"Help — somebody, help me — AAH—!"
Weeping, screaming, the long animal howls of the burning rose up from behind him.
The new recruits — those boys—
Fire had caught in the ranks and run, and it was not going out. A man rolled in the mud trying to smother himself; another beat at his own burning sleeves with a folded coat, slapping, slapping, the flame only spreading up his arm; the corruption in the fire clung where ordinary fire would have died, eating, refusing to let go.
My hands... they're shaking, they've gone numb, both of them—
Emil forced himself through it by main strength, dug his teeth into the side of his thumb — some small fixed point of pain to hold to — and dragged a breath up out of his locked chest, and screamed it:
"EVERYONE — get inside! Into the houses, now!"