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st traditionally attacked from above, swooping down on men like hawks on mice. Except that hawks were unquestionably kinder in dispatching their mice quickly than the Host would be with human captives. The wards still clinging to this side of the palace were supposed to protect them while outside, but the wards had failed before.
"Well, come on then." Thomas hauled him out into the open court.
The night air was chill, the court lit only by light seeping through cracks in shutters and closed doors. The Albon Tower high above them was only a dim shape in the darkness, clouds streaming swiftly across the moon. Phaistus hurried along in Thomas's shadow, casting worried glances at the sky.
The first level of the tower had become an infirmary, and the sick familiar odor of cauterization hit Thomas as soon as he went in.
The wounded lay on pallets along the walls of the high-ceilinged hall. There were women and children among them, far too many. They had been hacked up by the bronze blades of the human servants of the Host, burned in the sporadic fires that had broken out from overturned lamps, or bitten and clawed by the fay. There were no victims of elf-shot. If someone was hit by one of those tiny harmless-looking stones he fell down and never moved or spoke again, no better than breathing dead, and was lucky if starvation or thirst killed him before the stone found his heart. Anyone struck by elf-shot had been left behind, or smothered by Dr. Lambe or one of the other apothecaries.
Fires had been lit in the two great hearths, and dozens of lamps and candles added their stains to the smoke-blackened rafters. The furniture had been pushed aside to make way for more pallets, and Thomas had to climb over a couple of tables to reach the other end of the room. It brought back less-than-pleasant memories of the Bisran War, of border villages overrun and taken before the inhabitants could scatter into the forest, and of the aftermath of battle.
Dr. Lambe stood near the long draw tab