As it turned out, training an impromptu militia was more work than it seemed at first glance. This is not actually true of most people, I think. Problem was I wasn’t most people, I was me. And with the silver spoon lodged firmly in my lower intestines since birth, my first glances tended to oversimplify everything else, and overly complicate me. So it came as quite a nasty shock when my new work turned out to be actual work.

  I should’ve expected as much, from the bloody ten grain fee I ended up having accepted as my wages. But I didn’t. Idiot, remember?

  For another nasty surprise, it turned out Rogrid’s defences actually weren’t well committed to the mines. Our friends among the Overseers may have been fibbing a bit—or at least letting us run with several generous assumptions—regarding their own level of influence and power over the city. They controlled its economy, most of its people, the workers. But tell the actual Earl that there were several hundred ravenous magical monsters ready to descend upon him from the skies and he suddenly cared a lot less about such things when it came to picking where his personal guards and soldiers ought to stand.

  So Gruin and I were put in charge of somehow turning miners into an actual fighting force, one that could stand around the mines farthest from the city and stop anything expensive from being damaged in the fighting. Apparently the Duke had gotten it into his head that simply having miners nearby would make attacks more likely, so just staying within the blackmist shelters of the city proper was out of the question.

  Lined up before us were maybe one hundred or so men. Not the extent of the miners, but the extent of the ones who hadn’t run, passed out, shit themselves or, surprisingly commonly, all three at once. I’d like to say they were a sorry lot who we whipped up into shape, but the fact is that you don’t normally get sorry lots in militias with any sort of screening.

  Most of them were big, tough men hardened by taxing labour in the mines who already knew how to handle a pick and possessed many skills that would transfer into using a weapon as well as my weapon skills had into mining. It was about as good a start as any trainer could have hoped for. One small problem; I wasn’t a bloody trainer.

  Gruin was, or seemed confident in playing one at least. He stepped forwards as confident as any creature I’d ever seen and called out to the assembled men with a voice that might have deafened someone at less than a pace.

  “Alright you lanky human bastards, listen up because I don’t like repeating myself. We’re all going to be attacked by a bunch of big, horrible monsters. These monsters fly, they can shrug off arrows right to the chest, and they eat people. You are going to kill them. You will do this the way I’m about to teach you to, if you try any other ways you will die. If you don’t listen, you will die. If you run, then I will catch you, and you will fucking die. Is that understood?”

  Silence rang out for a second, then the sound of…laughter.

  “You think we’re scared of you, stumpy?”

  Gruin didn’t even wait, he simply screamed with rage and sprinted right into the ranks of men in search of the offender. I don’t even know if he got the right one—but he definitely found a poor sod he blamed for the remark.

  The next stage of basic training was, apparently, what to expect if you decided to be rude to Gruin. The Grynkori hauled the screaming man out in front of the rest and calmly beat him into unconsciousness for the next few minutes while everyone else stared in horror. As far as lessons went, I had to admit, it left an impression. Even scared me a bit. Causing a grin, which the men saw and quickly drew all the wrong conclusions from.

  By the time our first round of tutelage had passed, we’d made some small progress. Most of the dirty fuckers under our charge now knew that the pointy end of a spear was aimed away from their bodies and towards the enemy. They knew how to properly raise a shield, not to do anything stupid like stab themselves or run away mid-fight, and were nice and reflexive about doing as they were told when a big, horrible man barked out orders.

  On the other hand, there had been more developments than just that. Apparently rumours were flying around about Gruin and I’s real past. It was known, now, that we had gone looking for the monsters and killed one of them. So we were professional adventurers apparently. Well maybe that fit Gruin, but it obviously didn’t fit me. What was worse; we had a reputation for insane savagery and mad violence.

  Again, maybe Gruin was well described in such a way but it hardly seemed fair to lump me in with him. Then again, grinning while a man is beaten into near-unconsciousness hardly disuades such things I suppose.

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  Night came rapidly as Gruin and I rested and awaited it, seated beside one another in a small room that had been put aside for us by the Overseers. He was, I noticed, uncharacteristically talkative.

  “Thank you,” he said abruptly.

  I stared at him, still not familiar enough with the Grynkori and his ways to be certain this wasn’t the prelude to some unexpected attack.

  “Thank me…for what?”

  He looked annoyed at that, but for once didn’t say anything about it.

  “Down there, in the caves, you kept pace with me. Could’ve just sprinted on ahead—in fact you did at first. But you hung back with me the whole while, even when the exit was right in sight. I appreciate that. Thank you.”

  Ah, I saw his confusion now. Of course I’d needed Gruin to show me the way out at first, so sticking by his side while we were running had been essentially my only option. By the time we were within sight of the exit, though, I’d been jogging for long enough that fatigue and exhaustion had robbed me of my speed advantage. Just matching him had been a challenge, let alone overtaking him.

  But Gruin was Grynkori, he didn’t seem to realise the physical limits of a human body. From his perspective I must have proved myself able to easily overtake him and then insisted on matching his pace from beginning to end just out of…what, loyalty? Concern for his well-being?

  Well, neither of those thoughts had so much as a place in my cowardly little brain at that point. But he hardly needed to know.

  “Yes, well, you’d have done the same for me I imagine.”

  The Grynkori looked away at that, and remained silent for a long while.

  “That was what I wanted to say, anyway,” he grunted, “now it’s said.” I actually felt a bit guilty, seeing his guilt, but of course said nothing. If he thought there was some budding friendship between us then so much the better, it meant he’d be more inclined to put his body between me and any edged talons coming my way when everything kicked off.

  Later that night, we ate a meal of utilitarian composition, slept on hard beds, and waited. We were not waiting long, one more day of training passed before the creatures came.

  At first it was hard to tell. They were so dark, so well camouflaged against the black of the night with their subtly shifting pigments and textured scales, that they seemed to be no more than patches of darkness detaching from the sky and dropping down onto us.

  Then they actually dropped down onto us, which cleared things up more or less instantly. There was no mistaking them when they’d started ripping into bodies and taking out patches of meat, naturally. Gruin was among the first to respond, I was among the last.

  I noticed many things quite quickly as this newest violence unfolded. First was that our archers, the majority of our gathered men, were shit. They couldn’t really see these attackers, and so they could not hit them.

  Not that archers hit much of anything most of the time anyway. Decades of novels and stories have given everybody a rather unrealistic impression of battlefield archery, allow me to correct it. You don’t ‘snipe’ people from across fields, pinning them to trees or putting lengths of wood clean through their eyes. Archers, at least those with longbows, simply sight the enemy a very large distance away and send as many projectiles in their general direction as they can. A good archer might manage three arrows within a yard of each other from three hundred paces, all fired in twice as many seconds. Very good for killing giant masses of men in tight infantry formations.

  Not so good here, where individual targets not only weren’t sticking together, but couldn’t even be made out.

  Archery was starting to fall off back then, with heavy armour making it already a less popular choice on the modern battlefield compared to footmen with their own heavy armour and still heavier weapons. But it was a fuck sight less effective there than even normally.

  On the other hand, we were fighting an enemy that also lacked ranged options. This did not give us any sort of advantage, simply meant that we could actually fight rather than simply getting massacred from afar.

  The night still covered our attackers as they swooped down like living death and dropped atop us, shrieking only at the instant before impact as talons unfurled and dug deep into flesh. Few of us had actual armour, a handful of the proper guards hired on full-time were clad in gambesons and breastplates, but for the most part it was just thin clothing against deadly edges.

  I was no exception to that rule, save for a few minor advantages. My night vision was better than most of the peasantry, and that gave me at least a good ten feet earlier warning on being gutted than they had. My reflexes were duelist-quick, my sword was well suited to suddenly defending from attacks at different angles and variable ranges.

  And I’d fought the horrible things before, so whatever instinctual terror there was in hearing and seeing them, the terror I saw freezing others right now, had already lost most of its potency when it came to affecting me.

  Something flapped for me, fast, jagged. It came from the darkness then fell back into it as I spun around and threw all my turning momentum behind the glinting edge of my sword. It found scales, cut through them and tough hide, bit deep, spurted dark blood to hiss out into cold air and dropped the thing instantly.

  But didn’t kill it.

  Even wounded, it scrambled for me with fangs flashing and throat convulsing. I stumbled away, hacking away at its head but made clumsy and desperate by my frantic fear. The sword swings now took little notches from its face and scalp, nicks and scrapes here and there that would have hurt a man but did nothing to slow this creature. Pain meant nothing to them, it seemed.

  Something barged into me from behind, sent me stumbling into the monster and I landed atop it with a howl of horror. We were too close for me to use my sword, but I’d landed on top. I used that advantage well, hurriedly adjusting my grip to place both hands on the monster’s wings and lodge a knee against its chest.

  Even half my size, it was giving me a run for my money in strength. God knew the mother-thing would already have killed me.

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