Sleepless Knight 3

The dead man yelled a warning. The second of the three wildmen was hurling himself at her. Ghita slashed out her sword in a vicious arc. Vicious, but carefully controlled. The blade took his ear, but didn't spend its strength on the blunt protection of his skull. Instead, ghitas precision pared the side of his face from his head like a roast was carved. It peeled away from his skull, a mask partially taken off, and while he felt at his straying skin with confusion, the headless man finally ran out of blood. He tipped over, trying to swim out of his own blood like a puppet. Limbs controlled by fraying strings. Ghita thought she saw the blood moving without the touch of his hands or feet, something else stirring the broth alongside that which she could see.

The third wildman came for her. She was ready for him, but he was still so fast. All Ghita had time to do was get her sword up. She did not need more. The wildman drove himself into the swords tip with the willingness of a whore paid in gold. His hands swiped out at Ghita and she gave ground. The sword kept the maniac at arm's length, but he tried to impale himself further, wanted to feel the cross guard at his belly so long as Ghita was close enough to touch.

Ghita backpedaled frantically. The dead man told her the wall was fast approaching. Even if she disemboweled this fiend, it would not stop him before he'd wrung her neck. If not worse.

In the corner of her eye, Ghita saw the light from a window relieving the inn’s dimness. An idea grasped her; she had no time to consider it. Only action would fit into the span she had left.

She dug her heels in. The sudden stop thrust the wildman along her blade. Before his outstretched hands could reach her, she lifted. Her sword razored through his guts, stuck on his ribs, and she had him up off his feet. Hoisted on her blade like a pig on a spit.

Ghita turned, twisted. She swung the wildman into the window beside her. The wall stopped her swinging blade. Nothing stopped the wildman. He slid along the swords cutting edge until it slurped out of his side. And he kept going, through the window glass, out into mist the same color as the steam coming off his innards.

She didn't need the ghost to remind her of the second wildman. His howl alerted her. He'd managed to get rid of the irritation she'd left him with. Muscle and skin bulged between the fingers of his clenched right hand.

Ghita had no intention of letting him get as close as her last opponent. A quick circling of the wrist to change grip on hilt, then she flung her sword like a lightning bolt would depart the heavens. It pierced the wildman, transfixed him, its force bearing what should've been a corpse to the ground.

Ghita had learned to mistrust death on this day. She scooped an errant chair leg from the destruction the wildmen had already visited on this place and put it to work as a hammer. One overhead swing landed on her swords pommel. Forcing it down through the wildman and into the floorboard.

But already he was tearing free, pulling and clawing at the floorboards to get loose of the pinning sword, even if he ripped himself open in the doing. Like the others, he seemed to regard maiming his own flesh with all the care Ghita would take in pulling off a loose thread.

She used the chair leg again. This time on his head. It didn't go as far into the floor as her sword had, but it couldn't be said this nail would be easily pried loose.

The ghost said her name. It was not a warning. It was concern.

The second wildman, who she'd pitched out the window with his chest only halfway connected to his legs, was up. He was trying to drag himself back through the window, but the organs spilling out of him were catching on the glass still attached to the frame. It was enough to sicken even Ghita. Life did not belong in something that dead.

Ghita focused on pulling loose her sword. She still heard the death throes of the creature. The wet noise of something rupturing, spilling out on the floor, and a screech that took all the breath in the mangled thing's lungs.

And, in the mist beyond, the answering shrieks of the other raiders molesting the town.

Ghita did not clean her blade as she'd been about to do. She hurried to the door, closing it and throwing across the bar. Then the windows, the shutters. But those wouldn't keep them out for long. This was a village, not a fortress. She climbed the stairs, wondering if she could hide. Perhaps the roof? Or choke closed their advance at a point of narrowness like the stairs.

But they outnumbered her so vastly… it was an outcome she wouldn't wager on even if these were ordinary foemen and not the work of devilry. If she made it to her horse… if she could somehow survive fighting her way through a town that ran riot with these things… and if they could not saddle a horse themselves and pursue…

Ghita was beginning to envy the sleepers, blissfully ignorant of the evil at work as they dreamt.

“Fräulein! If you can hear me, please come this way! I can get you to safety! Please, with great haste, they are moving quickly!”

The human voice came as a shock after all the silence and all the noise of battle. It didn’t seem to belong in between the two. It was gently accented to the Germanic, almost musically, a voice made for the rare Teutonic joviality of Octoberfest, of the sad clown. Yes, a sad clown, that was what he sounded like to her.

And this sad clown, mystery that he was, was a better prospect than any plan that had occurred to her.

Following the voice, she rushed upstairs. Already the wildmen slammed into the walls, broke through the window, crashed into the door. There was no rhyme, no reason. They threw themselves against whatever resistance the building offered, using their bodies as hammers. There was no attempt to find a weak point, only to be hitting something.

The second floor. She heard the sad clown still exhorting her. He was in one of the rooms, behind a shut door at the end of the hall. She took it to be a suite from the iron-banded door. Ghita raced for it, turned the knob—it froze. Locked.

“Let me in!” she cried.

“I cannot! Please, you will have to make your way to me! There is little I can do from here!”

Spitting an oath, Ghita kicked at the doorknob. It broke, but the door only swung a few inches before chains held it in place. Ghita almost swore again, but the sounds of rampage downstairs made her think better of it. The wildmen had few wits between them, but however long they took to look upstairs would be shorter if they heard something.

Ghita drew her sword. There was no room for the overhead swing that would most serviceably clear the chains out of the way. She reeled her sword-hand back, then lanced forward. Her sword’s point punched out one of the chains. Two remained, and the clatter of the severed chain made its way downstairs; she heard the chaos still, the expectant hush of a predator seeking prey. Even the most loudly barking dog could make itself silent on the hunt.

Ghita went ahead and cursed, thrusting her sword forward again. It damaged the second chain, but didn’t break it. Ghita reached in with her off-hand and worked the broken link off its brethren. The chain fell; one more.

Footsteps tromping up the stairs. Rabid, salivatory howls and boos and laughs—a chorus of them. Ghita did not dare look over her shoulder. She attacked the third chain and it parted on her first pass. The door yawned open. She hurled herself through and slammed the door behind her. Right on her heels a body thudded against the door. She had to jam her weight against it to hold it in its frame. Another thud, this one meaty—the sound of a second wildman crashing into the first, adding his pressure to the force already bending the door inward.

Her booted feet skittered across the floor. Ghita dug her heels in and pushed back, looking frantically about the room for her savior. She saw nothing, only an empty room, a clean chamber pot, a dresser waiting for a visitor’s usage.

And a mirror that did not reflect the rest of the room. Its reflection was so different that she took it for a window at first, but the view was not that of the fog-drenched town. A gaunt man stood beyond the frame, his hand gesturing to her.

“Ja! In here, Fräulein!”