As Iron Falls

by Bryce O'Connor

  “Oh, no,” he said, turning and gesturing to the disguised assassins with one hand to open the pots. “Nothing quite so dramatic, I’m afraid. I did learn much of the man, though, during our shared time together.” As the Southerners each took a side of a lid and lifted them free with matching grinds of clay on clay, his grin broadened. “For example, how and when to hit the lizard the hardest.”

  Together on either side of Ekene, his First and Second Hands leaned forward slightly to peer into the jar. Even the Tash himself, overcome by curiosity, pulled himself back onto his feet from the bed to look inside.

  What they saw was enough to make even Yseri’s dark face turn green, and Naizer heaved and stumbled back through the curtains, reaching the edge of the balcony just in time to vomit.

  Ekene, though, only saw the largest piece of the Third’s plan fall into place.

  “And so,” Koro said with a cool shrug, “I thought we could attempt a trick my old master once tried. With some changes, of course.”

  CHAPTER 50

  “The Gods always see fit to fell the tallest of the trees…”

  —Sigûrth proverb

  Akelo sighted carefully down his arrow, silently cursing—for the hundredth time—the bleached-leather bracers that encased his arms. The stolen soldier’s armor he and the other kuja had donned once more was cumbersome, and not at all conducive to archery. The white dye was distracting, and the bowstring often snapped across the lacing.

  They would very likely need the disguises, though, if they were going to even have a chance at carrying out Raz’s deranged plan.

  Mad, Akelo thought to himself, loosening the arrow and watching it fly upward, toward the top of the inner wall of the city. They’ll be calling him ‘The Mad Dragon’ by the time this is all said and done.

  The arrow struck true, taking the sentry he’d been aiming for squarely beneath the jaw, dropping him like a silent stone as it ripped up through his head, piercing the top of his mouth to settle somewhere in the cavity of his skull.

  Shifting in the early morning shadows under the cloth awnings of several silent shops that paralleled the wall, Akelo drew a second arrow. Nocking and drawing, he stayed crouched as he sighted the center-most of the eight soldiers paired off on either side of the gate Raz had selected to make their entry by into the noble’s quarters. As with the other dozen or so such gates scattered throughout the districts—at least according to Karan, the atherian Syrah had returned with in the earliest hours of the morning—it was a smaller entrance than the main gates of Karesh Syl’s outer wall, barely wide enough to allow three or four men through standing shoulder to shoulder. Ordinarily there might have been one, maybe two sentries tasked with the tedious work of guarding the place, just enough bodies to ensure the commoners of the outer city stayed away from the wealthier quarters and out from under the feet of the nobility, but—after the pandemonium that had been raging all night—none of them had been shocked to find security increased. In fact, Akelo had honestly expected grander measures in place, especially given how patient they had had to be to escape the south-east where the army of freed slaves still waged their war. Then again, the lookouts on the inner and outer walls had very obviously been cut back, so perhaps the Tash was merely a little too keen on crushing the revolt as soon as possible, with as many soldiers as he could spare.

  Whatever the case, Akelo tried not to dwell on the nature of their good fortune.

  And so, with a prayer to the Sun that must have been just rising over the eastern horizon, Akelo made a piping sound like a common mousebird, and let loose the arrow.

  By the time it struck its mark, taking the poor soldier through the throat to slam him against the wall behind his shoulder, a trio of flickering points of light zipped out from beneath a set of arched stone steps across the road from the gate, and three more men tumbled to the ground. The four left standing had just begun to shout in alarm, their cries falling on the dead ears of the wall sentry above, when Raz dropped from the roofs above, landing right in their midst, Ahna and his gladius already swinging.

  The soldiers died before any of them could think to raise their shields in defense.

  “On me,” Raz whispered into the slowly brightening shadows of the streets around them. At once, Akelo rose from his hiding place and hurried to join him. As he did, nineteen other forms appeared from around various nooks and corners to do the same. When he and Syrah had both taken their places by Raz’s side, the atherian peered into the group.

  “Karan, Aleem,” he said as he found the pair he was looking for, “do you know the way from here?”

  The cook and the young atherian nodded together, stepping forward.

  “It’s not far,” Karan said, pointing up through the gate at the towering form of the palace in the very center of the city. “The inner quarters aren’t nearly as broad as the outer. I don’t know if they’ll have patrols or additional lookouts, though…”

  “Let the rest of us worry about that,” Raz told her, rapping his steel claws against the head of his sagaris pointedly before turning his attention on Aleem. “You’re sure you’ll be able to find the entrance?”

  The former slave nodded timidly, pulling uncomfortably at the cotton of the kitchen-hand’s tunic he was dressed in once again. Syrah had spent every spare moment they’d had using her magic to scour the white cloth, and—though it was still stained and dirty—it was a far-cry cleaner even than when they’d freed him from the patrol along the eastern roads. All the same, the man looked miserable in it, like it weighed him down as much as the chains that had once bound his scarred ankles.

  When Raz had asked him if he would don the uniform again, though, the cook’s hesitation had been only brief.

  “The door is along the south side of the palace wall,” Aleem told them, his voice high as his wide eyes stared fearfully at the distant structure. “Away from the main gates to the west and south. His Great-the Tash—” he caught himself, frowning as anger replaced some of his fear “—never would have wanted his guests to risk stumbling across it.”

  “Can’t blame ‘em,” someone—Akelo thought likely Erom—muttered queasily from behind them.

  He ignored the comment, however, watching Raz step aside to wave Karan and Aleem through the gate.

  “Lead on,” the Dragon said.

  And with that, they were on the move again, slipping into the breathtaking sprawl of the sloping inner city.

  The buildings that rose up around them felt like the stuff of legend to Akelo. From a distance, in the expanse of the grass plains as they’d approached Karesh Syl, they’d been impressive enough, a myriad of jutting and twisting towers woven upward toward the sky on narrow struts of white marble and other polished stone. The inner rings of the outer city had been beautiful on their own, he’d thought, the clean edges of the stone-and-iron structures unlike anything he’d ever seen, least of all the rickety homes and hamlets of the coast cities. Now, however, they moved through a maze of true wonders, the empty streets still in the brightening light of the morning, the silver and gold gilding along the ledges and lips and gables gently glowing in the first light of dawn.

  Akelo felt as though they had broken into some massive treasure vault, its wealth of riches left out for all to take.

  “Easier than I thought,” he admitted to Syrah as they hurried up the street, dark eyes scanning the arched and narrow rooftops on either side of them for trouble, bow at his side and his free hand steadying the hilt of the soldier’s sword on his hip. “Doesn’t mean your man isn’t still mad, though.”

  Beside him, the Priestess gave a pained snort.

  “Just don’t let him here you say that,” she answered, and Akelo saw her glance at the atherian on her other side, whose gaze was fixed on the outline of the Tash’s palace rising before them, growing more and more distinct as the darkness of the cloudy night chased itself westward.

  Syrah had returned just before midnight, shouting for Akelo and the others from the common
room of the Red Shield Inn. He’d been incensed, at first, not understanding why the woman would be so rash, until he and Cyper descended to find her waiting for them in blood-splattered robes, standing with a young atherian female and an old man they didn’t know. The scars around the strangers’ ankles, of course, spelled out everything that needed to be said, and it hadn't taken much convincing on Syrah’s part before the men gathered their things and set out at once into the chaos the south-east district had become, leaving the old man—Abir, Syrah had called him—to keep an eye on the horses. All around them, Percian families had been fleeing their homes, shouting to one another and clogging the streets while pointing up at the mass of smoke and glow of fire that was blotting out the light of the Moon and Her Stars. As a result, it had taken them longer than they would have liked to catch up to the mass of slaves, at which point only Syrah’s presence and Karan’s assurances had saved them—in their stolen pirate’s leathers and irons—from being lynched by the furious mob. Eventually, though, several individuals had been able to point them north-west, saying that’s where the Dragon had last been seen.

  When they’d found him, a few hours after midnight, Raz looked a terror. He’d been on his own, reprieving himself of the skirmishes that were happening in practically every direction, sitting with his back and wings against the enclosure wall of one of the burning slave camps. They’d almost missed him, the entire group running right past the corner he had tucked himself around until Karan caught his scent. Exhausted as Raz was, a little of Syrah’s magics and a hurried conversation among the men had been all it took to get him on his feet.

  When he’d started talking about “striking before things spiraled out of control,” Akelo had wondered if the man had gone half-mad.

  He’d seen the gathering soldiers with his own eyes, though, seen the battles breaking out all around the district as they’d searched. He could tell, as inexperienced as he might have been in the rules of war, that the Tash’s men were assembling, and that no one seemed keen on pressing into the havoc of the district just yet. They were waiting, preparing for what could only have been a single, massive push to crush the rebellion before it claimed Karesh Syl as a whole.

  It had been just enough to convince Akelo not to voice his reservations when Raz had announced it was time to act, especially after Aleem came forward, offering a risky—but plausible—opportunity they might just be able to work to their advantage.

  An hour later—Akelo and the other kuja donning their soldier’s uniforms once more while Aleem put on his slave’s tunic—their little group had slipped by the perimeter of soldiers surrounding the outer ring, taking advantage of the army’s preoccupation with gaining a foothold in the chaos of the battle.

  And now, as the day announced itself anew, they’d already beaten the first of the major barriers Akelo had been worried about.

  He was grateful, for the first time in his life, for the innate laziness he’d come to know among the nobility, including the minor gentry that presided over the coastal villages and ships he’d been enslaved in. In this earliest hour of light, before the Sun could even begin to show itself over the distant outer wall of Karesh Syl, only rarely was there so much as a hint of the residents and owners of the intricate buildings rising up around them. Not even a half-dozen people crossed their path, and most of these individuals were so taken by surprise at the group’s appearance that Syrah had no trouble stunning them with a silent spell. Better yet, whether the inner city was generally presided over by few soldiers, or the chaos in the outer ring had drawn them all away, they came across only three patrols as they climbed the rising streets toward the palace. The first two they managed to avoid, scattering and ducking into any crooks and shadows they could find at the hissed signal of whoever saw them first.

  The last had not been so fortunate, as Raz heard them coming around a corner in the road ahead, only one man even managing to begin a scream before the Dragon turned the bend to meet them head-on, Ahna and his gladius moving in patterned blurs.

  They paused for a single minute, then, taking the time to hide the bodies down the narrow stairwell of an alley nearby, Syrah burning away the bloodstains from the cobbled street with white fire.

  Not long after that, Karan led them around a large curve in the street, and the group found themselves looking both ways along the length of the palace wall. Twenty feet high, it was a beautiful, ornate masterwork of masonry. The only traces of metal were plated bands of hammered gold around staggered capstones along the top of the fortification, making the entire thing look like a massive crown encircling the form of the palace behind it. Its burnished surface had been carved and chiseled so that every ten feet a meticulous, deftly sculpted mural stood embellished in the stone, each work a separate depiction of some scene or event Akelo assumed must have been part of the history of Karesh Syl. It was so spectacular, the group as a whole couldn’t help but stand and gape at it, Syrah even letting out a little “Oh…” of awe as she tilted her hooded head back to take in the nearest work.

  Fortunately for all, however, it appeared to have been many years since Aleem and several of the other recruits had been remotely impressed by the wall.

  “This way,” the cook said, pointing west and taking the lead. “We need to hurry. The nobility might sleep in, but their slaves and servants do not.”

  It was enough to shake the others from their stupor, and as one they followed, hammering after the man.

  Not two minutes later, the door appeared. It was a bizarre sight, Akelo thought as they approached, a heavy bronze thing that looked like it had tried to be crafted with respect to the beauty of the stone it was set in, but nonetheless felt like a stain against the pristine white. In addition, the nobles' residences across from the wall had been built a dozen yards further away here than anywhere else along the perimeter of the palace, like a little square around the small door. It might have made for a quaint spot among the busyness of the rest of the inner city, were it not for the distinct, pungent reek of the place. It was a putrid scent, at sharp odds with the beauty of the decor that ringed them, and by the time they slowed to a quiet halt by the door several of the men looked queasy.

  On the other side of Syrah, Akelo saw Raz turn to him.

  “You’re up,” the atherian said under his breath, inclining his head toward the door as he motioned for the men who wouldn’t be needed to press themselves against the wall behind him.

  Akelo nodded, gesturing for the other Percian to join him. Odene, Zehir, Neret, and Rufari fell into place behind him at once, hefting their shields. Akelo traded his bow and quiver with Marsus Byrn, who had been holding onto his own shield, slipping the heavy thing onto his arm and strapping it tight before leading the way over to where Aleem was already waiting for them by the door. When he and his “soldiers” were in place behind the cook, Akelo glanced over at Raz once, giving him one last “You’re mad!” look.

  The atherian just shrugged in reply.

  Then, barely holding back a sigh, Akelo grabbed Aleem by the back of his kitchen tunic as gently as he dared, and reached up to pound on the brass body of the door.

  CHAPTER 51

  “If given the choice, follow the general who smells like piss and shit, because he’s been digging the sewage trenches with the rest of his men. The others know nothing more of their troops than what the sycophants and assenters they surround themselves with are willing to tell them…”

  —Jarden Arro, Champion of the Arro Clan

  They didn’t have to wait long before Raz heard movement on the other side of the wall. He stiffened, shooting Akelo and the other disguised kuja a look, telling them to be ready. Not a few seconds later there was the shuffling of approaching footsteps, and with a bang and the shifting sound of oiled metal, a slot in the upper third of the door slid sideways.

  “The Sun’s name is all this?” a rough voice demanded through the space. Raz couldn’t see the man, but he could imagine the soldier glaring out at Akelo and his
group, taking them in suspiciously. “What are you doing here, Captain? All spare units have been ordered to the outer city.”

  “We’ve just returned from patrol assignment along the east roads,” Akelo answered, sounding artfully weary. The stained conditions of his armor didn’t hurt in selling the lie. “Got routed through the south gate. Haven’t even returned to barracks yet.”

  The voice on the other side grunted, apparently buying the story. “You’re lucky the gate sentries didn’t report your presentation to your superiors.” He paused, then continued in what Raz couldn’t help but think was a slightly suspicious tone. “The east road patrols? I was told we wouldn’t be expecting any of you lot back for another moon, at least.”

  Akelo, fortunately, was a quick thinker.

  “Got put on one of the minor trade routes, into the south-east villages,” he said with an annoyed snort, like he didn’t care for the assignment. “Looped into one of the major roads, where we ran into another patrol. Commandant leading the unit ordered me home. Said there wasn’t much point on so many of us on one route.”