“Francisco,” he said, praying no one had heard Sherwin’s yell.
“It’s all right,” Etana was saying somewhere above. “Just put your hand in this one. That’s right.”
She looked perfectly at home on the wall, hanging on upside down, the skirt of her dress falling over her torso and revealing the boy’s breeches she wore under it.
Francisco had moved up two handholds, and Sherwin gratefully hurried to occupy those he had left behind. Rafen reached for the footholds Sherwin had vacated before hearing the oddly distant scraping of his own boots as his lower grips gave way. He barely managed to grab onto one of Sherwin’s previous footholds before his old handholds vanished too, and the sudden jerking drop of his body weight threw his arm joint upward in its socket with horrible impact.
Sherwin glanced down in horror.
“Er, are yer all right?” he gabbled. “I’m tryin’ to hurry, Etana, look, yer have to come on.”
Rafen’s teeth were gritted as he tried to pour every vestige of concentration into his slipping fingertips. He didn’t dare speak, but his rasping breathing and popping eyes communicated for him.
Seeing him, Etana made a squeaky noise. “Francisco, get up, up,” she whispered. “Please hurry.”
In a rush, Francisco moved up two more handholds, his right boot coming loose momentarily. Sherwin surged up, leaving Rafen to swing.
“Etana, yer better freshen up his grips.”
Free handholds were one thing for Rafen; getting to them was another. The oak beneath his hand was fighting him, and his fingers were surrendering. He swung his torso desperately, trying to fling his right arm up to the next grip. It was slightly too high.
The sliding of his fingertips seemed to take an age, but the falling was a violent rushing of wind. The ground leapt upward, and he gave a shriek, trying to do kesmal to break his fall.
A savage jerk halted his descent as something scratchy caught his ankle. The ground spun dizzyingly, a story and a half below. The blood was running to his head, and his face reddened, sweat beading on his brow.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Wood
and Flame
“It’s all right, Rafen,” Etana called from above as loudly as she dared. “I’ll get you up in no time.”
“Can you hurry?” Rafen managed through clenched teeth.
If he had eaten something other than roots that day, he might have been sick.
A tugging on the kesmalic rope resulted in Rafen rising a foot, still swinging like a mouse hanging by the tail. A snorting sound from above sounded suspiciously like Sherwin restraining laughter. Rafen scrabbled at the wall, trying to place his palms against it to stop himself swaying. He was reminded horribly of Roger dangling him by the ankle out an open, upper story window in the palace.
“I… can’t… do it,” Etana said, her voice strained.
“I thought you were supposed to pull with the kesmal, not your arm,” Francisco said in the distance.
“Yes, Francisco,” Etana said intolerantly. “I haven’t learned that part yet.”
“Raf did it when ’e fished Franny up out of the river once,” Sherwin said. “Um, is this goin’ to take long, Etana? Because my handholds are goin’.”
Above the churning, tramping sound of approaching Naztwai in the East, Tarhian voices spoke quickly, drawing nearer. Rafen’s heart plummeted, pulsing forcefully in his throat.
“Etana!” he said in a strangled voice.
He pointed his left arm at the top of the wall, feeling kesmal make the slow progress upward to his fingers. It looked like he was going to have to pull himself up. The only problem was that the wall was wood. He hadn’t tried this earlier, because his kesmal always manifested itself as flame.
“Look,” said Sherwin, “this is ridiculous.”
Rafen abruptly shot up, choking with the sudden movement, his hair thrown against his face. Sherwin was a blond-haired flash in dingy clothes as Rafen passed him. Rafen retched when he halted suddenly by Francisco. Etana had vacated two handholds for him, and Francisco nervously removed a hand from the wall to grab one of Rafen’s and shove it into a grip. This resulted in Rafen being in a horizontal position. He had a beautiful view of the ground again, three stories away. Two blue specks approached the bottom of the wall. Etana moved up another foot, and Rafen dug his other hand into the foothold she had left. The kesmalic cord was still around his ankle, and Rafen felt it vaguely, a humming, icy circle of life. It snapped into non-existence as soon as both his hands were safely in grips. Rafen braced his feet against the wood, quivering slightly.
“I’m not going to ask how you did that,” Etana whispered to Sherwin, “but thank you.”
She moved quickly up when Francisco started whimpering about his handholds vanishing. He quickly took Etana’s place, and Sherwin followed him, looking smugly mysterious. The two Tarhians had paused below and were pointing up at them.
“Zion help us,” Etana murmured, her face white.
In another two minutes, she was three feet away from the ramparts. Rafen moved into Sherwin’s wake and followed him, still shaking, his head spinning. The little lights popping before his eyes rendered everything invisible.
“We’re out of shootin’ range,” Sherwin said to Etana. “All they can do is gawk.”
“And raise the alarm,” Etana said, her voice trembling.
She had reached the battlements’ edge. The merlons there were formed by the rounded ends of the wooden panels that comprised the New Isles wall. Sherwin had once said it looked like “loads o’ popsicle sticks standin’ up together”, a description that had mystified Rafen. Behind the rounded wooden merlons, Rafen imagined a dozen crouching Tarhians on the wall-walk, grasping pistols.
Etana swung her foot between two merlons with desperation. Francisco followed agonizingly slowly. Sherwin fairly hurled himself after him. The handholds were once again returning to unforgiving wood as Rafen reached the battlements. The Tarhian voices beneath were loud. Rafen dared to look down at the crazy, swirling ground. In the moonlight, three men now stood there, and a fourth was running further along the wall to speak to someone in charge.
Rafen hastily clambered over the battlements’ edge onto the wall-walk, just as Etana whispered firmly, “Don’t!”
He straightened behind Etana, Sherwin, and Francisco, who were all staring with horror at the tall horse-faced Tarhian before them, pointing a pistol at their heads. The Tarhian said an ominous oath in his tongue.
“What do you think you are doing? Where have you come from? Spies, are you?”
Etana’s and Sherwin’s faces, expressive with terror, nevertheless betrayed their ignorance of the Tarhian language. Francisco stepped forward, meeting the Tarhian’s brown eyes.
“We have arrived too late for the census, then?” he said in impeccable Tarhian as the man tightened his finger on the trigger.
Though Rafen’s heart was thundering, he tried not to move a muscle, knowing by Francisco’s calm expression that he could handle the situation. This low-ranking Tarhian obviously had not received a description of Rafen or had not paid attention when he had. They were safe.
“You have come for the census?” The Tarhian raised a thick black eyebrow. “You have come – over the wall?”
“There was no other way to enter,” Francisco said, and Sherwin met Rafen’s gaze, long-faced as he tried to understand what was going on. “We had no papers.” He assumed the exquisite countenance of a martyr. “We knew, of a certainty, we would not be let in without the papers.”
“You cannot be counted if you do not come in by the gate,” the Tarhian said.
This was an obvious mistake of Francisco’s, and Rafen shifted uncertainly.
“Of a certainty, no!” Francisco said with the light laugh of the Tarhian nobility. “But we may be counted now that we are in, yes?”
The Tarhian nodded slowly. “You will tell me who you are, and where you are from, and I will carry the message to the official.�
�
“Peter, son of Kurt, a Tarhian merchant,” Francisco said with a slight bow, “and my brother Fretirk. From Smitton. James, son of Lyle, an official in Smitton, and his sister, Gertrude.”
He really has improved at lying, Rafen thought with mild admiration. Normally, Francisco struggled to think this quickly.
The Tarhian’s forehead furrowed. “This was for the most part a census of the ruling powers of the local regions. Your father is a ruling power, then?” He looked suspiciously at Francisco.
Francisco smiled. “I think he will be, some day.”
The Tarhian’s face darkened, and he made an impatient noise in his throat. The tramping of the Naztwai was a crescendoeing rumble. The Tarhian turned on his heel and strode away from them toward the nearest tower on the wall-walk, to find some papers to record the latest visitors.
“Wha’ was tha’ all about?” Sherwin said.
“Does it matter?” Etana said, her face pale. “They’re coming. We have no time!”
“We have to get down into the city,” Rafen said. “We’ll go to the tower the Tarhian went into. We need to find some stairs.”
“What if we get discovered?” Etana said.
“I don’t think any of that’s going to matter, now that we’re in the city,” Rafen said, pushing past her and taking the lead at a run, his boots clattering on the paved wall-walk. “There don’t seem to be many Tarhians here; they likely want to get out and make sure they have the right people in.”
“And we don’ matter too much,” Sherwin explained.
They reached the arching doorway in the rectangular tower. Rafen shot through it and took a sweeping glance of the room to locate the stairs. The Tarhian was nowhere in sight, but a quill had been dropped on the floor in a small pool of ink. The wooden desk it had probably been retrieved from was spotless. The room was extraordinarily empty.
Rafen hurried down the stone stairs to his right. They were not twisting steps like those of the palace, but formed sets of squares, making it harder to gain momentum. Nevertheless, Rafen descended the five stories at an incredible rate, the others behind threatening to careen into his back any moment. At ground level, another arching, oaken door was closed. Rafen flung himself at the plain, rectangular handle. It wouldn’t give.
“He’s locked us in,” he said feverishly.
“Great,” Sherwin said.
The door was wood. Rafen whipped his sword from his sheath, praying to Zion that this time he would have something in him, that he wouldn’t let his mother down. The kesmal rushed down his arm in a warm wave and rolled up against the door with a roar, unfurling orange flames. The door melted before their eyes, cascading into ash and taking a few charred bolts with it. Clenching his teeth and contracting his shoulder muscles, Rafen focused on sucking the kesmal back into his fighting arm. He gave his sword a flick, as if brushing the small inferno away. The flames snagged on the blade and vanished in wreaths of smoke, revealing the empty marketplace beyond the doorframe. Within, he felt his kesmal shoot back up his arm and burn with refreshed energy, his body vibrating. He had done it! He had absorbed his own fire, and now it was providing him with new strength, ready to fuel his next performance of the supernatural.
“Rafen!” Etana cried, touching his arm nervously. “You did it! You made your flames vanish. You did it even faster than Moth—”
She broke off, likely thinking of her family again, who were Zion knew where.
“Let’s go,” Rafen said, feeling his adrenaline mounting.
He rushed through the smoke and ash and stared around the marketplace. The huge oval, from the eastern wall to the dilapidated temple at its western edge, was silent. The rubbish from a day’s selling still littered the cobbles: apple peels, pieces of broken pottery, a milk-maid’s red ribbons, and numerous other things. A little south, the huge clock tower reared. The skinny, many-storied houses around the marketplace’s edges were shuttered and uncommonly austere in the summer twilight.
“If there’s been a census, the city should be full,” Etana said. “This is odd.”
“They’ve probably all been packed away,” Sherwin said.
“Etana, you take the eastern wall,” Rafen instructed. “Just go all along it, knocking on the doors of the inns there, and explain everything to the innkeeper of the Sianian Arrow.”
“Now?” Etana said.
The tramping of the Naztwai was already deafening, and their screeching battle calls filled the night air. At the same time, cries resonated from nearby houses.
“Yes, now. Go!” Rafen shouted. “All of you, tell everyone the Wolf sent you. They will listen. Sherwin, take the southern edge, and get other people to help. Make sure everyone gets into the Sianian Arrow.”
Quivering with repressed energy, Sherwin nodded and sprinted toward the tall houses in the south.
His face pale green, Francisco twitched, awaiting instructions.
“Go to the Sianian Arrow,” Rafen said. “Arrange for some men to guard the door. We need as many as possible, in case the Naztwai follow. Then shepherd the people into the passageway.”
“Yes,” Francisco said, turning and half-running, half-stumbling, toward the distant inn.
This was the moment that would determine Siana’s future. If the nobility went, there would be no one to strong enough to build an army with. Rafen put his hand to his phoenix feather. Zion and his mother were watching him.
“Ei lii,” he whispered.
Zion help us.
Sheathing his sword, he threw back his head, allowing the Wolf in him to triumph while he was still a man. The howl that emanated from his throat was resonant and haunting. In answer, somehow, some way, his wolves would enter the city – perhaps by squeezing themselves under the heavy New Isles gates. He needed whatever help he could get tonight.
Transforming, he hit the ground on skittering paws and plunged toward the western edge of the New Isles marketplace, making for the alleys near the temple. This would be the hardest part of the city to evacuate, because it was dense and deep. The northern edge mattered little, containing the buildings of soldiers who guarded the city.
Even as he ran, the smell of the Naztwai was overwhelming, and he glimpsed movement at the tops of walls. The Naztwai, too, were climbing. Their elongated, black-haired, blue-skinned faces appeared at the battlements, like the visages of mutilated gorillas. They flung themselves over or between the merlons with unnatural speed and agility.
As Rafen flew past the temple steps, memories of Erasmus contesting with everything else in his mind, the scent of smoke also reached his wet, quivering nose. Oddly, it did not smell like his own kesmal; this smoke was cruder and more ordinary somehow. A horrible thought reoccurred to him as he remembered burning down the door between himself and the marketplace.
The walls of New Isles were wood too.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Saving
New Isles
Sherwin ran with the unnatural speed he was now accustomed to, the speed at which Etana and Rafen had made it necessary for him to travel when he was with them. He should have been panicking about what was going on, but nothing could be further from his mind. He had just done kesmal on the New Isles’ wall, and it had been brilliant blue. He had felt it coming in a cold rush down his arm, unstoppable. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. It was a horrible feeling. Francisco hadn’t seen it properly, for which Sherwin was glad; Francisco had recent memories of a kesmal that color.
Sherwin paused before a shabby door and pounded it with both fists. A ragged man wrenched it open and stared at him with red-rimmed eyes.
“The Sianian Wolf says the city is going to be destroyed,” Sherwin said in a voice of calm, ringing authority. “Remove all your people to the shelter in the Sianian Arrow, then return and help evacuate houses.”
“This Sianian Wolf,” the man said in a heavy peasant’s brogue, “is this the same dog that abandoned the people the day of Talmon’s Massacre?”
> “The Sianian Wolf does not abandon people,” Sherwin said sharply, stepping closer. “That is why he is here tonight.”
A long whistle rose from nearby.
“I trust you know what a Naztwai sounds like,” Sherwin added.
Eyes widening, the man turned around and started to bellow inarticulately to the occupants of the narrow, three story house he inhabited. Sherwin stood rooted to the spot.
He had spoken without a British accent. He had sounded commanding, indomitable… and Ashurite.
When he left the step of the house and started running to the next one, he tried to focus on the task at hand. However, he couldn’t drive the thought from his mind that he had to – somehow, some way – curb this strange side of himself before it was too late.
He was becoming someone else, and it felt like there was nothing he could do about it.
*
Rafen transformed and leapt onto two feet again in the dark shadows of an alley. Whirling to face a door, he thumped on it. A woman in a long, embroidered gown threw it open, her lips pressed together with fury. Rafen was immediately struck at the sight of a noblewoman in a peasant’s house. It was another sign of the Tarhians’ dominance over the Sianians. No nobility would willingly stay in a peasant’s house, even if all the respectable inns in New Isles were already full.
“What in Zion’s name do you want?” the woman said.
“I am the Sianian Wolf,” Rafen said. “You have to get out of here now. The Naztwai are destroying the city. Make for the Sianian Arrow.”
“The Sianian Wolf?” The woman raised an estimating eyebrow. “This is madness. You’re a boy. I heard about the Sianian Wolf. The peasants here told me he abandoned a group of three hundred rioters to the wrath of the Tarhian King Talmon. Many died that day.”
“Yes,” Rafen said through his teeth. “I’m making up for past wrongs. You have to go now.”
The shrieks of the Naztwai on the battlements, and the clattering of their rough four-legged gait – like the sound of so many pinecones tumbling onto concrete – was becoming louder. The woman’s face tightened into lines of fright.
Servant of the King (The Fledgling Account Book 3) Page 25
