Behind them, the Tufenchis were cresting the rubble of the old tower, and there were shots.
Kallinikas screamed.
Aranthur grabbed her wrist and pulled. He was a big man, and she was a small woman, and he pulled her along like a sledge.
More shots. She was hit.
A volley from just over his head, crisp, ordered, and Vilna’s voice chanting the ritual of reloading.
Aranthur bent and got his arms under her. Kallotronis appeared from below, put a hand under her, and pushed. The three of them tumbled over the scarp and into the new works.
Aranthur got a hand on her chest, pushed in with saar, and stabilised the blood flow around the wound. The rest needed an Imoter.
He raised his head.
Vilna snapped “Fire!”
The whole wall erupted in fire.
Tufenchis fell like wheat under a scythe, but there were hundreds more, and the Exalted burst from the middle of them. They were in the ditch now. In the very heart of the trap.
Masked gonnes at either end of the ditch fired grape into the packed men, and the carnage was total. In the Aulos, black sihr welled up like water from a spring.
The Exalted was gone as if it had never been, and the destruction was so total that there were very few wounded. Silence fell over the ditch; a handful of dying men kicked.
The amount of blood was horrible—enough to make the bottom of a sand ditch wet and black.
Most of the militia turned their heads away, or fiddled with their matchlocks.
Aranthur was still watching the ditch. Smoke was drifting, and far out over the sandy hell of no man’s land, some ruthless bastard decided the assault had failed and ordered the enemy siege gonnes to reopen fire.
“It’s still down there,” he said.
Vilna was lighting his pipe. He shrugged. “For heroes.”
Aranthur looked along the wall, east and west. They hadn’t lost a man or woman.
Kallotronis was carrying Kallinikas down the back wall, shouting “Imoter!”
“Off the wall,” Aranthur ordered.
The militia were all too happy to comply, tumbling back into the safety of the trench behind the new work.
Chimeg was left with Aranthur, looking down.
“Still down there, boso.”
He nodded. “I’m going to… cast something. Malas. Baqsa stuff. And then I will move very fast.”
She took his carabin and checked the prime.
“I’ll cover you, boso,” she said, simply.
Aranthur cast his enhancement so easily that it was difficult to remember how much effort it had once taken. He drew the old sword, and slid down the front face of the inner wall in between artillery rounds.
He landed in the blood and sand at the bottom. The bodies were a thick carpet, the dead men curiously flat, and horrible to walk on. The smoke was dissipating, but the dust hung in the air. Already, the world looked different, as he moved and lived faster.
It occurred to him that the gonners on the masked gonnes at the ends of the pit trap might think he was a Tufenchi. His red Nomadi khaftan was of almost the same colour that most of the Tufenchis wore. It also occurred to him that he was a blur to them, like the Exalted.
He missed its move. He was trying to wave at the gonners, and the pitiless thing exploded up out of the wet corpses, scarlet robes dark with the stains of dead men.
The Exalted’s bright swords cut.
He crossed the first cut late and something burned his forearm like fire. He stepped back on the awful carpet, his back foot skidding on a head to rest in entrails. The second cut he also covered, snapped a counter-cut down the same line and the Exalted stopped. It just stood, both bright swords over its head, something like smoke dripping from its shoulder where he’d cut it.
“Who are you?” it asked.
Aranthur saw the face, the puzzlement, and he understood something in that moment. Something very important.
Aranthur also saw the indecision—the war on its face, the conflict in its lips, the pain—and then it ran. It went straight up the face of the ditch as if it ran up a grassy bank, and then it was gone into the smoke and the gonne fire.
He didn’t follow it.
Aranthur went up the inner face with more care. When he looked back, there was only smoke and dust and brilliant sunlight. He cancelled his enhancement.
He stayed on the wall until their relief came—an hour in intense pain. His right arm felt heavy, and he couldn’t stop eating: first the biscuit he kept in his ration bag, and then some hard military cheese begged from the Imoters. It wasn’t until he was back in the shade of the cathedral, with Dahlia cutting away his sleeve, that he realised what was familiar. His arm was turning brown, exactly as it had with the kotsyphas, the Black Bird. It seemed a lifetime ago, in his garret in Megara.
5
Antioke
But one thing that the Vicar’s force had aplenty was Studion-trained Magi; Imoters and polemagi too. Dahlia held his arm while two young men cleaned the brown tinge off his skin with repeated applications of ritual, and a liquid that smelled like good arak.
The younger man, who had long black hair, smiled, poured a little into a cup, and handed it over.
“Good inside, too,” he said.
“Do you have any food to go with that?” Aranthur asked.
“Food’s rationed now,” the Imoter said.
“I can find you something,” Dahlia said. “You look like shit, if I can be blunt.”
“Aren’t you always?” Aranthur said. Whatever the Imoter was doing hurt.
“Always, but you look like a thuryx addict—you’re skinny as a corpse and all the bones in your face stand out.”
Aranthur shrugged. “I’m fine.”
“Sure. Listen, then. Sasan wants to be fighting.”
“I wondered where you’d all gone,” he admitted. “I missed you, and I worried about Sasan.”
Dahlia waited until the two Imoters were finished. Farther down the nave of the great cathedral, under a gilded and painted statue of Sophia, Aranthur could see Haras working on a table full of implements—alchemy, he guessed.
The dark-haired Imoter gave Aranthur a light slap on the shoulder.
“Enjoy my magik elixir,” he said. “You’re good to go, syr. Should be getting some sleep.”
“This is particularly good on an empty stomach,” Aranthur said. “Gods, I’m drunk.”
He was lying on the cool floor and saw no reason to move.
Dahlia came and sat with him and took the cup.
“I have some food, as long as you don’t ask where it came from. Better yet, come to the ship and sleep safe, and eat your fill.”
Aranthur considered the morality of it.
“No,” he said. “I should be with my people.”
Dahlia nodded. She wasn’t angry. But she was… empty. Or possibly…
Aranthur looked up at her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “And what are you doing, while I fight for the Empire?”
She laughed. “You never used to be sarcastic before.”
“I hadn’t seen a war yet.”
She nodded and sipped his arak.
“Listen. I’ve been looking at this place. They actually stopped the ritual here. The Magdalenes burst in and saved most of the ritual sacrifices—they were fighting around the altar. Their Great Sword says that several of the knights actually saw into the… the Hyperaulos. I don’t have a better name. But the ‘gates’ were open.”
Aranthur had already assumed as much.
“So they meant this to happen—”
“At the same moment that they took the Black Stone and opened the gate at the pyramids.” Dahlia sighed.
Aranthur managed a smile. “I know what Kallinikas would say—my new mentor in everything to do with war.”
Dahlia polished off the arak. “What?”
“You drank all my medicine.”
“Toby left the bottle.” Dahlia refilled
the cup. “I did healing arts with Toby first year.” She shook her head. “Blessed Sophia, first year seems a lifetime ago.” She looked at him. “Anyway. What would the estimable Myr Kallinikas say?”
“She’d say it was a stupid plan. Anyone who thinks they can win two major battles simultaneously and time things like rituals amid violence isn’t god-like. They’re just arrogant. The Pure planned to knock over three or five sacred places?” Aranthur was warming to his subject. “But instead, they lost a field battle and their Disciple in Masr fucked the whole thing away, released a bunch of dead gods, and failed to break open the sky. And here… Instead of doing the obvious and doing their dark ritual while they held the city, some arrogant twit ordered them to hold to the very end so that they could keep the timing…” He shook his head. “Idiots.”
Dahlia nodded.
“What’s Sasan doing?” he asked.
“More than five hundred ‘Pure’ surrendered or were taken wounded when the army stormed this place. He’s questioning them.”
“He’s recruiting,” Aranthur said.
Dahlia nodded. “Of course.”
“And Kati?”
He caught the hesitation in Dahlia’s face.
“They are doing it together,” she said, without much tone.
Aranthur understood too much, which was how he had begun to feel all the time.
“Let me tell you something, in case I take a ball out there. The Exalted. They’re constructs, exactly like my wife.”
Dahlia exhaled. “Of course they are. Thousand hells.”
“I’m going to guess wildly,” he said. “But haven’t you wondered about their… lack of gender?”
Dahlia shrugged. “No. Gender—who cares?”
“They’re amalgams. Someone is building super-sorcerers by binding three or four people in one body.” He shrugged. “That’s what I think I see.”
Dahlia shuddered. “Oh, gods.”
Aranthur shrugged. “Masr does it, so we’ve probably done it, too.”
Dahlia was shaking her head. “Round up your political opponents who have power, and bind them to a healthy body and a mind that’s politically reliable—”
“You can see how the ‘Master’ could start very small and grow very quickly. I should message Qna Liras. Except that the more I learn about Inoques, the less I trust any priest of Masr.”
Dahlia raised an eyebrow. “It’s not just the sarcasm. You’ve changed.”
Aranthur took the cup and drank some. “I’m tired of a number of things. I feel like a swordsman committed to defence, who parries and parries instead of taking the initiative and attacking. Every day we keep this up, people die, and the poor fucking Tufenchis are victims as much as our militia.”
Dahlia sighed. “Will you take Sasan?”
“Of course. Why didn’t he come in the first place…? Oh. His own people.”
“Almost all of them. There’s some Armeans out there, but mostly it’s Safians.” She took the cup. “And your wife.” She smiled when she said it. “She scares me, Aranthur. What’s under those tattoos?”
He considered various half-truths and outright lies.
“Power. And a person as complicated as the rest of us.”
Dahlia watched him for a moment, took a slug of arak, and shook her head.
“You like her?”
Aranthur looked down the nave, where two Imoters were removing a severed arm from a bin. Two young girls were washing the area around the operating table, as if kneeling barefoot in old blood was their everyday lives. And perhaps it was.
“Yes,” Aranthur said.
She reminds me of you came to his lips, and he realised how true it was—the self-assurance and the ruthlessness and even the humour.
And a terrifying thought.
If a superhuman entity wanted to seduce me, would it immediately read my relationships and then duplicate…?
He paused, and then shook his head.
“I don’t really know her,” he admitted.
“No shit. None of us do. I thought Haras hated her, but yesterday they were thick as thieves.” Dahlia put the arak bottle carefully aside. “Be careful. I speak as a Magas and not as a woman—be careful. This is a temporary marriage? Unbind it. You are bound to something much more powerful than we are.”
“Powerful and yet a slave.” He shrugged. “As to Haras…” He watched the man siphoning a bright yellow liquid, intent on his work. “He and Inoques share a common goal. And I’m not going to speak of it here. Listen, Dahlia. I’m worried that… this is not where we ought to be. The Pure. The Black Pyramid. This place, the ritual. The bone plague. Think about that. I understand what role this place plays, but it’s not…” He looked around. “It’s like what we talked about in the Delta.” Which seemed like a hundred years before. “It’s not a Cold Iron problem. It’s an army problem.”
“They need us,” Dahlia said, but even as she said the words, her lack of assurance showed what she thought.
“They need to know the fleet is coming, and they needed our food. But let’s face it—they have better magik than the General had, and the Vicar, Kallinikas and Ippeas seem—”
“Very competent,” Dahlia agreed. “The Vicar’s in over his head, but the other two hold him up, and he’s canny. And the troops like him, exactly because he’s old and tough.” She glanced around. “But when the food runs out, it will get ugly.”
“He’s cautious,” Aranthur said. “In storybooks, soldiers love a rash leader. But in the trenches, they like an old man who knows their names and doesn’t get them killed.”
Dahlia leant over and kissed him on the forehead.
“I’m scared, Aranthur. It’s all too big and it moves too fast.”
He got up with uncharacteristic care; he really was drunk.
“It makes me angry,” he said with sudden truth. “I’m sick of being a tool.”
Dahlia shook her head. “You are fucking dangerous. I said so to Tiy Drako the first time I met you. You are some sort of vortex, and you draw everything to you.”
Aranthur’s vortex at that moment was a faint tendency to wobble on his feet. He waved dismissively.
“I need to go and pretend to be an officer.”
He went and saw his own wounded: a dozen militiamen and women, including a wheelwright’s apprentice he knew from the Square of the Mulberry Trees. He sat with the young man.
“What are you doing in the Twenty-second City?” he asked. “You’re from Northside!”
The boy smiled. When he spoke, it was in the shoreman dialect.
“Nah, syr. I’m a longshoreman. Well, my da’s a longshoreman, an’ I have the tats. But Nella gave me work when I needed it, and I liked the wood. Still a shoreman born.”
Aranthur nodded. “Seems a long way from the City.”
“You think we’ll hold, syr?”
Aranthur knew full well that the “boy” was perhaps a year younger than he was himself—perhaps two years. But the young man’s trust was absolute.
“Fleet will come in a few days,” Aranthur said. “Trust General Tribane.”
“We heard she was some sort o’ traitor.”
Aranthur shook his head. “I know her.”
“Well, then. People talk a lot o’ shite when they’re afraid, aye.”
Aranthur nodded and moved on. Two pallets down was Chimeg’s partner, Nata. When Aranthur approached, he turned his face away.
Aranthur knelt down next to his pallet.
“Nata?” he said cautiously.
“Go away,” the tribesman said.
“Nata, can I do something?”
“Give me my fucking hand back,” Nata spat.
He held up the stump of his right hand. It had been severed cleanly.
“Blessed Sophia!” Aranthur was surprised, in a way he didn’t think he could be surprised. “That’s—”
“Your fucking Imoters saved me.” The little tribesman’s voice was dead, devoid of real emotion, or exhausted. “
Saved me. You know what life is like on the Steppes for a man missing his right hand? Now I can eat with the same hand I use on my arse. Just kill me.”
Aranthur had no words—no banter—for this.
“Just fucking kill me,” Nata spat. “Or if that’s too much, pay someone.”
“I’ll get Chimeg…”
Nata looked at him with pure hatred.
“Yes. Yes, Bahadur who thinks everything can be fucking fixed. Get Chimeg. She has the balls you lack.”
Aranthur found himself backing away from the small man’s rage.
“You can live without a hand,” he said.
“Yes, Bahadur. No doubt I can. Criminals do, after all.”
Aranthur backed away from the man’s anger. He stopped in one of the Temple’s labyrinthine cross-corridors under a very dark depiction of the eviction of Draxos from Heaven. Draxos was not innocent, in this depiction. Aranthur shook his head at the relish the artist showed for the smith-god’s degradation, and then smoked some stock to clear his head before he went back to his wounded.
He visited every wounded person he had. Then he found Kallinikas, her feet up, on a once-grand settee, manipulating a saar-filled tablet.
She glanced at him. “You saved my life, I hear.”
He shrugged.
She shrugged again. “Half-rations as of tonight. Two hours after midnight I will blow our countermine. Expect to go with the assault wave.”
He stood, stunned. “Assault?”
“I’m going to try for their gun line. What the hells? We’re doomed, Aranthur. We have maybe three days. Why not attack?”
“The Vicar is backing this?”
“Vicar and Great Sword. Vardar is against it. Sorry, Aranthur. It’s bad. We’re holding on by luck. Like the direction in which the tower fell.” She shook her head.
“I still haven’t met Ippeas.”
She smiled. “He’s leading the assault. You should be about five feet apart.”
Aranthur succumbed to temptation and swam in the sea. The harbour was still clean; almost untouched by the siege, it was like a different world from what was going on around the walls.
Dark Forge Page 33
