The look on Enya’s face was enough. Draka didn’t need to look at it twice as he handed his helmet to Valmond to be placed behind his throne in the Hall. Her hooded eyes were red with worry and sorrow. Her dark-skinned wide cheekbones were flush, and her thick lips were pouty with concern.

  The wind wrapped them in cold air at the top of the walls, overlooking the trenches that were now lined with every villager and migrant who wasn’t within them. Enya gripped the parchment in her trembling hands, staring at him, silently pleading, silently accepting, silently wishing there was another way.

  Qasim was leaning against the outer wall to see the villagers and migrants pressing their heels over the edge of the second trench by the Paladins of their Order. The people were rocking and fidgeting, frightened by the gleaming steel spears aimed at them, the shields pressed towards them, to keep them from breaking from where they stood.

  He wasn’t as concerned as Enya. This wasn’t his first time, it was hers. The other side of the trench were Clerics with hooked rods resting on the ground, waiting.

  “The survivors…” Enya began with a dry swallow as Draka pulled on a tabard that matched the ones worn by the Paladins without points on their stars.

  “They’ll be allowed clemency, of course,” Qasim answered without turning. “So long as they renounce their faiths and the Holy Spirit grants mercy in life, not death.”

  She nodded. “I wasn’t sure if the Holy Spirit would command us in this or not.”

  Draka rotated his sword belt so that his ruby pommel was hidden under the tabard and began belting the plain replacement longsword on his right side over it. He grinned affectionately to her, reassuring her.

  This was one of those times that the Holy Spirit was their only guide. Without it, they would be no better than their enemies. The real problem will be what comes after. There were mothers and fathers among those villagers, sons and daughters, who would undoubtedly be killed.

  Qasim turned his back to the outer wall and put an encouraging hand on Enya’s shoulder, “May your Faith shield you, Sister. God’s Will be Done.”

  “And you, Brother. God’s Will be Done,” Enya nodded jerkily. To Draka, as he pulled the simple helmet on that made him into a faceless low ranking member of his own army, “The knights know what to look for when you mark them. Maud and the others are confined as ordered.”

  “Paladin Aurelie is being brought to me,” Qasim said before Draka needed to find a way to ask. “I figured this would be a perfect way for her to see, from a safe distance, what her oath truly entails.”

  Draka nodded his helmeted head moved. He waved his gauntleted hand for Enya to follow him toward the Hall after drawing in a deep breath. As he stepped down into the bailey. He shifted to let Enya take the lead, sliding his hand across her arm for her to move slowly.

  The crowd in the bailey had been stopped by the knights. No one was being brought into the Hall anymore. Knights stopped emptying the wagonloads of sandbags. Laborers were no longer helping with the preparations for the siege. Everyone was either sitting or standing, waiting to be told what to do with anticipation that was showing in their agitated and worried faces. Many of them watched the group of tabard covered Paladins following Enya with wonderous eyes, some angry while others were filled with curious fright.

  Draka called upon the True Sight from the Lord and leaned his forehead to hide the glow of his eyes as he looked about him.

  He staggered a step at what he saw. There were people doused in red scattered throughout the crowd; men, women, even children whose worried faces disguised the fury in their eyes he could now see. Red of corruption beat from hearts and splayed through their bodies in starry pulses that followed their veins outward, into their limbs, into their fingers, into their faces, into the glowing reds of their eyes. Even some of the knights whom had been his protectors for months.

  He turned toward the infirmary where Senna had been pulled outside with the door open so he could see Nina inside.

  Both were clean. Plain as if he were seeing them without his Gift. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to the rest.

  That was when he tapped Enya for her to look at him and gave the signal they had agreed upon if the number was greater than those who weren’t corrupted. The bottoms of her eyes filled but her face was otherwise unchanged.

  Draka went to the Paladins behind him and subtly pointed to the corrupted knights who were helping to keep the crowd from wandering. A few of the Paladins silently went to their Clerics to whisper in their ears while Draka and the rest went into the crowd. One by one, Draka began pointing and pulling people from the crowd who weren’t red in his eyes. He lifted children and passed them over people’s heads to the Paladins and knights to be removed.

  “Everyone stay where you are,” Enya called over them when protests began to rise from among them. “We have been informed that an infestation has been found among refugees brought within the Hall. Those who are selected will be the ones going into the infirmary for your inspections. The rest of you will be inspected within the Hall. Please do not resist, this is for your own good.”

  Suspicious eyes watched him. Children reached for their mothers as they were handed over. Mothers pleaded to stay with their children while being pulled out of the crowd. Elderly argued and pleaded to stay with their families. Draka moved on.

  One after another. He made his way toward the Hall, searching as he waded through a sea of red pulses and figures. With each step, he wondered if it would be his last, if they would figure out what was happening and try to defend themselves, but he reached the doors to the Hall and stepped through with a half turn as an indicator for Enya to follow with the rest of the Paladins. Behind her, the Clerics went to the knights they had been told about and brought them away from the crowd with friendly arms around their shoulders as others took their places.

  “When I say, you usher them in,” Enya said to the Paladin guards as she followed through the door.

  The Hall was nearly as packed as the bailey, but not with corruption, much to Draka’s relief and chagrin at the same time.

  Bunk beds that were three high were in rows along the walls in place of the tables. People were sitting on them or on the mats that had been laid across the floor and gathered in standing clusters here and there, men and women alike, with children running and playing wherever they could. Families, Draka winced, some completely red with corruption, while others only had one or two members.

  He gave the signal to Enya as they had planned.

  “Listen up!” Enya called as she went past Draka so that he and another Paladin could follow behind her.

  The rest of the Paladins flooded past her to part the way through the people who were climbing to their feet and turning their way.

  “You will be separated into two groups. We are doing inspections. One side will be moved into another area so that they can be inspected by our physicians there, while others will be kept here in order for us to have enough room here," She called. "There have been reports of an outbreak of infestation and we want to be sure that we have it under control before it is too late. You will be separated from family members. Don’t worry, you’ll be reunited soon after, if all goes well.”

  “What kind of infestation?” One of the men called.

  Draka noted the way his eyes glowed darker than the others, his body as plainly seen with the corruption as it would be without. His face pulled into a silent growling sneer. A paladin.

  “We’re still trying to figure that out,” Enya turned to him. “Please be patient and comply.”

  Draka went to the opposite side first. The paladin will know what is going on before he finishes if he isn’t careful. He began sending the corrupted, beginning with children and their parents first, then one or two of uncorrupted, to the side he intended to be the one that was corrupt. He brushed or nudged shoulders of others on his way to grab more, that way the others looked like they were doing their own selections as well. Then, he went across the divide to the other side, knowing that the man’s suspicious gaze was following him.

  “I thought we were already considered safe,” the man snapped at Enya, taking only a single step toward her, barely enough to separate from the crowd on his side.

  As Draka moved through that side, he began to see. He wasn’t the only corrupted paladin there. There were more. He began counting them as he selected the uncorrupted to be moved. One…two…three…he ushered a mother and her three children to be moved. Eleven…twelve…thirteen…fourteen…a young man had to reassure his pregnant wife that he would be back soon as he was pulled from her. Her red eyes went ablaze at Draka as she stood from the lower bunk, completely red: a cleric. Thirty-seven…thirty-eight…Draka was struggling to sooth his heavy breathing from becoming too loud as he waded through the sea of red.

  He found himself beside the first paladin and the woman beside him with a baby in her arms. Only the baby was uncorrupted...except the baby was...glowing green in the True Sight. Szczecin. He regarded them for a moment, frozen. They were his people.

  She cradled the babe to her shoulder with her red eyes beaming at him, patting its back to calm it as she rocked it by wavering from one foot to the other.

  He bit down on his lower lip. His eyes burned with the welling in them as he turned away from their glaring eyes and returned to Enya’s side. There was nothing further to do.

  Enya waved to the Clerics at the kitcheners’ door. They quickly opened the door and the group of uncorrupted were herded toward them and funneled through it.

  Draka waited until the last of them were through the door before he brushed Enya’s arm as signal for the ones outside to be brought in.

  That was when he started walking toward the platform, followed by the increasingly angry eyes of those remaining, now being joined by the others.

  Slowly, they were ushered in by the Paladins from outside, filling the center of the Hall with unarmed men, women, and children. And behind them, fully armed and armored Paladins flooded to form a line of shields blocking the door and the wall on either side of it.

  Enya and the other Paladins that had first come with them had been only a few steps behind Draka as he reached the platform steps. With an intentional calm and slowness, he climbed those steps to cross behind his throne and bend to grab his helmet that had been laid there by Valmond, setting the other in its place.

  “What is this?” the man whipped between the line of Paladins blocking the way out and Draka’s group.

  The locks and wood blocks being dropped over the outside of the doors leaving the Hall echoed as Draka pulled the tabard off, still hidden behind the high-backed throne at the center of the platform. He took a steadying breath.

  Lord, be with us. Your Will be done. Draka straightened, fastening his helmet in place.

  “GOD’S WILL BE DONE!” Enya roared at the top of her lungs as she drew her sword.

  The Paladins around her drew their swords and stepped with a thrust of their shoulders. The Paladins behind the crowd dropped their steel spears and shields into a readied stance for attack.

  “It’s a purge!” Someone called as the first paladin roared, “Defend yourselves!”

  The Hall exploded with bright Holy Light as all of Draka’s Paladins thrust it at the crowd.

  Some were thrown from their feet. Some were tossed flailing high across the air into the walls. Some shielded themselves with crossed arms over their faces. Some charged and leapt at the Paladins in trails of red from the auras they used to shield themselves.

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  Enya led the charge of her Paladins into the crowd from her end with a thunderous battle cry. Those from the other side slammed into them with their shields and spears.

  Draka took a running leap from the platform, drawing both swords on his way. The aura of Jehovah carried him into the glowing red of the mob.

  Even though the True Sight had faded, the red glow of their auras was as blinding, fighting, swirling, entangling with the blue Holy Light of his own Paladins in the fray against them. They were being carried by it. They were faster, their slams that much stronger.

  Paladins were being thrown hard into the walls by inhuman strength. Spears were being ripped from their hands and the spikes protruded from their cylinders bashed through their helmets in sprays of blood. Swords were skillfully wrenched from gauntlets and pierced through armor with speed that was near impossible for human eyes to see. Children doused in red glow crawled the walls and leapt with streams of red light to swarm Paladins from above, clawing and biting at them in hopes of tearing off their helmets. The Paladins who pulled those swarms away from them were screaming even as their strikes splattered and crushed their tiny attackers.

  Enya was struggling to keep from being overwhelmed. Draka ducked and dodged as often as he was able to land a blow with his blades. The others were sending blasts of Holy Light while being blasted by unholy light and facing persistent, unwavering attacks.

  There were leaps of men and women, using the weapons they had pulled from Draka’s Paladins they had already killed, in unholy smites high over their heads, causing explosions of gore to cast over them.

  Draka waded into them. He couldn’t let himself falter. He couldn’t let his faith fail. He had to keep his strength up. He had to let the Holy Spirit carry him through the fray. He had to fight. He had to swing. He had to cut. He had dodge. He had to roll. He had to land on his feet when corrupted light threw him back. He had to leap and tumble back into the attack. He couldn’t waver. He couldn’t slow. He couldn’t let them win.

  The floor splashed with their fighting steps. The walls became painted with their blood. The Hall was echoes of screams and shrieks, howls and roars, the chimes of steel on steel, the splitting of flesh, and crunch of bones, the blasts of Holy Light versus the unholy, the corrupted.

  Many of the fallen paladins and clerics were beginning to form into groups, using their blasts to disintegrate the armors of Draka’s Paladins before striking in unison.

  Draka didn’t have to make the command. Enya called for spears to be thrown.

  They quickly scattered as steel spears arched the air into them followed by another charge. That was when he noticed that the red auras were beginning to cover some of the fallen paladins in their armor, complete with swords and shields in their hands. The first paladin he found shot him a growling glare as armor formed out of the red light engulfing him.

  You are mine, Draka charged for him, meeting the fallen paladin’s newly formed sword in a parry and a kick to push his shield away. He tried to cut at the paladin with his spare sword but met only air. Another parry and a quick, spinning dodge out of the path of a shield slam, and he was able to kick the man behind his knee to make him fall.

  Draka didn’t hesitate. He drove both swords deep through the thin space between the paladin’s helmet and shoulder plates.

  The woman carrying the baby screamed and charged for him with a mace whose rivets were protruding, unholy armor covering her from head to toe.

  He had to tumble and roll sideways to keep from having his head knocked by her one-handed swing. He left the blades driven into the fallen paladin’s neck as that unholy armor faded into ashes and cinders.

  She kicked at Draka as he rolled. He pulled a vial of the Holy oil from his breastplate while finding his feet.

  The babe in her arms screamed nearly as loudly as she was roaring in her bloodlust for him, swinging her mace in her madness.

  He rolled over bodies and gore and…a spear! With a quick underhanded and timely lift, he lifted the spear upward. She ran into it, driving it through herself. He dove, barely catching the baby when her arm fell from clutching it to her breast.

  The woman turned to him as her knees bent, held upright by the spear driven through her and out her back. Hateful eyes turned on him and she spat blood. “We will have your head sooner or later. He may not be able to see you, but he knows where you are now.”

  Draka held the baby to his chest, shielding him from the fray that was surrounding them, though nearing its end. She couldn’t see, but his brows were furrowed at her in confusion. Who couldn’t see him?

  The woman’s hateful eyes softened when she saw him cradle the baby and she began to loll as she said, “Don’t let my boy share your fate. Protect him, please.”

  Draka nodded.

  He carried the baby around the fray. Dodging and twisting into one handed strikes to evade foes, he kept the screaming babe away from harm all the way to the platform.

  The last of the fallen were pressed and encircled by Enya and her Paladins. The last explosions of embattled auras were extinguished by the final strikes. Bloodied bodies writhing through gore to give one last swing were stilled as he wrapped the baby in the tabard he had left behind the throne. He quickly doused the tabard in holy water and drew a cross on the baby’s wailing, wrinkly little forehead with holy ointment, calling on the Lord to bless and protect the child with what was to come.

  Silence felt like a wagonload of bricks in their ears when it finally filled the Hall. The walls were dripping in chunks of crimson. The floor was a sea of blood and corpses between shattered pieces of what had been the wooden frames of the bunk beds.

  Enya and the remaining Paladins straightened but didn’t sheath their weapons. There were barely half of their number remaining. She turned to Draka as he made his way to retrieve his swords with a hard yank and whip at the gore that clung to them.

  “I don’t know if they will leave it alone,” Enya warned him. “We’ll have to keep the pressure on to keep their attention on us and away from it.”

  Draka nodded, his eyes drawn to the walls and then to the beams of the ceiling.

  The bird’s nest was still there. He furrowed his brow at it. He wondered if it would be a target as well. After all these weeks of making sure it had food and bits to build that nest for the winter. He let out another long breath. He was tired of having to sacrifice everything he cared about no matter how big or small it was.

  The air shifted, causing the fires in the braziers hanging from the beams to flicker and the lamps to rock on their hooks on the walls.

  Draka adjusted his grip on his two swords and took up a fighting stance. His eyes moved over every detail surrounding him, just as every other Paladin around him did, all moving into a circular formation in preparation for the upcoming onslaught.

  The blood on the walls began dripping upward instead down. Puddles of gore bubbled. Limbs, whether still attached to corpses or not, began twitching. Debris shifted in crimson ichor.

  “Don’t cast the Holy Light until I say,” Enya’s eyes were glowing blue as she looked about them, sinking into the center of their circle. She was using her Gift of Discernment to predict their attack. “They will be attacking in force before their leaders rise. We must all do it at the same time or we will be overwhelmed.”

  Draka nodded while the others vocally agreed.

  Shields were lifted. Grips on swords adjusted. Heads were constantly turning. There weren’t many of them left. He wondered how many they would face. He felt his heart pounding in his ears. His grip tightened on the hilts of his swords.

  The fires and lamps extinguished. The Hall, their vision, became a sea of black.

  Silence.

  Darkness.

  A few flutters above them.

  Was it the bird?

  Flutters beside them. Not feathery. Draka narrowed his eyes through those slits in his helmet at the darkness beyond.

  A hushed snarl.

  “NOW!”

  In a single thunderous explosion of Holy Light that burst from the circle of Paladins, the Hall became filled with brightness that relit the braziers and lamps with blue flames.

  They had been all around them. Their eyes were human. Their snouts were those of a snarling lion baring sharp, jagged fangs dripping ichorous slime. Sharp claws on elongated fingers with opposable thumbs, hooked talons on feet reaching, and leathery wings stretched to carry them in their encircling swarm. They had risen from the blood that had been spilt in the Hall only to burst to cinders as the light of the Holy Spirit thrashed through them. Their shrieks made Draka’s ears pop as their abominable forms became ashes that fell like snow around and over his Paladins.

  “STABLE SIDE!” Enya called.

  A cluster of corpses and severed limbs sucked together across the blanket of gore between them and the door to the bailey.

  Two of the Paladins leapt into arching smites through the air by the Holy Spirit as the rest of them charged through the heaps to reach where the limbs were coming together. The glob of corpses, inflating and deflating as if it were a giant lung of bloodied and mangled bodies and faces, began to form limbs just as the two Paladins landed their smites. Those limbs were severed, dropping into plopping piles of misshapen dead. Thankfully, they were caught before they could fully form.

  Draka and the rest heard the booming of the Holy Spirit within them call, “Smite the Abomination!”

  They leapt into their own arching attacks, surrounded by light and God’s grace. Their strikes came down on it with a myriad of thunderous bursts that sent all that had been pulled together to construct the abomination in all directions around them in pieces.

  Enya’s eyes were still aglow from a face painted with ichorous bile as she roared, “LAKE SIDE AND THRONE SIDE! Throne is strongest!”

  Draka tapped Enya and two others to go to the abomination forming on the lake side. The last of them, he had follow him as he charged for the throne.

  It will not take the child, he dropped his spare sword.

  He raised his ruby pommeled sword with both hands in a maniacal baring of his teeth, leaping into a smite before the corpses had begun sucking together at the foot of the platform. He was midway through the air when the Holy Spirit began carrying him, agreeing to his call, as his Paladins charged for it beneath him. He came down on it with a booming explosion of gore. His boots sank into the pile of corpses, a splashing pool of severed limbs and disfigured, mutilated corpses.

  Other corpses began to suck together in shapes like enormous claws. They grasped to find a hold. He began chopping at them while his other Paladins leapt into their own smites. More explosions of light. More splatters and dispersions of horrific remains.

  The center of the one Draka stood within opened into a dark pit for a single, split second, as a thousand voices spilled out of it in unison, “To the Victor, Son of Trich. For now.” And the pit closed.

  Beneath Draka’s feet became solid, the gore around him tumbling and falling away. He straightened and let his arms finally relax at his sides. The others who remained were staggering on their feet, heaving to catch their breaths, meeting each other’s glances with nods of appreciation and acknowledgement.

  Enya used her sword to push herself straight from the floor and sheathed it on her way to the door to the bailey. She removed her helmet and knocked with a hammering fist twice.

  The sound of the wood blocking it and the lock being turned from the other side made her smile back at the others, wavering with each breath.

  The door opened. “Give the signal,” She said.

  The Paladin on the other side nodded to her then gave a more curt one toward others in the bailey beyond. Her smile faded when she saw the knights that had been pulled aside had their throats slit by the Clerics who had been talking with them the way a close friend would.

  Draka set his helmet, dripping with blood and chunky ichor, on the cushioned seat of his throne on his way to behind it. The baby was kicking his little legs and arms at the swaddling of the gold and red tabard. His face was squinched in a halfhearted cry, unharmed.

  He knelt beside the baby with a warm grin and pulled his gauntlets off before scooping him up into his arms and to his shoulder, his hand bracing that little head. And he cried. Holding the baby tightly to him, with his cheek to the side of that tiny, screaming face, he let the tears pour from his eyes.

  “He shall be called Jacob and thou shalt raise him as thine would a son,” The voice boomed in Draka’s bones.

  He rocked back onto his haunches, folding into his embrace of the child. The result of such slaughter, bred of such evil and corruption, yet left uncorrupted. Safe. A gift he hoped he would prove to be truly worthy of in the eyes of the Lord.

  “For thine blood flows in his veins.”

  Draka felt his breath pulled from him as his eyes burst wide and his mouth gaped. His head whipped toward the man he had felled.

  Draka sank.

  His eyes went to the woman still held on her knees by the spear he had impaled her with. His heart raced as the tears began blinding him to the wails of the wriggling baby in his arms.

  Which one? He wondered. Which one was his family? Was it the man? The woman? Whom did he kill?

  He cast the thought aside. He didn’t want to know. Instead, he carefully climbed to his feet and clutched the baby to him. He held the tiny head against his cheek as the baby slowly calmed to his soft bouncing and made his way toward the door into the bailey.

  He didn’t look at the corpses around him. He didn’t pay heed to the blood that splashed and rippled around his bootsteps. He never met Enya’s gaze at him from the fallen paladin he had killed before the baby’s mother. He refused to see her expression, holding the man by the hair so she could see the man’s face.

  He only went to the door and out into the bailey.

  Puscifer – Momma Sed (Tandemonium Mix) (Preparation/Marking the corrupted),

  Two Steps from Hell – None Shall Live (Battle against the living),

  Kings & Creatures & Colten Tyler Williams – Coven Rising (the demons are coming),

  Damned Anthem – Glitch Saw (Demons/Rush to smite abominations)