Blays toweled sweat from his moisture-flattened blond hair. "Does it count as a battle if my sword hasn't got any blood on it yet?"
Lira patted his hand, making a face at its dampness. "Patience, sweetness."
"They haven't had to fight rival sorcerers in generations," Dante said. "They'll adapt soon enough."
He'd no sooner said the words than a messenger burst into the pub, chest heaving. Someone handed him a beer, which he chugged in seconds, sleeving foam from his mouth. To Dante's incredulity, he explained the enemy had killed the few scouts manning an eastern section of the wall, then used the ether to carve a crude set of stairs into the side of the Ingate. Hundreds of redshirts had swamped the wall, overwhelming the light resistance until Olivander rode in with his cavalry, dismounted, and retook it foot by foot. Once the king's men had been beaten back, Olivander blasted out the lowest steps in the makeshift stairs, thwarting them.
Blays got his own taste of blood not long after. Cries rang out from the west. They rushed to the walls. A half mile from the gates, the attackers had brought in ladders and swarmed up the walls. Three hundred of the enemy had climbed up before Dante and the others joined a charging brigade of defenders. The fighting was close, vicious, angry. Boots splashed on bloody stones. Men fell from both sides of the walls, moaning in the streets, arms and legs and spines shattered. Lira left the fight with a deep slash to her left wrist. Dante retreated with her, sending the nether to mend her parted flesh. They lost nearly as many men as the redshirts before they pushed them back and smashed the ladders.
Yet they held. Their archers picked off enemy soldiers one by one, slaughtering the group that tried to wheel a battering ram up to the gates. Fires rose around the city. The plaza behind the Ingate smelled of blood and smoke and sweat. Dante heard Kav's lung had been pierced in a duel with another sorcerer. Ulev was tending him personally, but even if he lived, he'd be useless for the rest of the day, perhaps longer.
The afternoon crawled on. The sun baked the blood to the stones. Soldiers began collapsing without wounds. They were brought to the tents for shade and beer and water. Beyond the gates, the redshirts extended a line of wooden walls toward the Ingate. Narashtovik's archers set their arrows alight and let fly. As if the king's army had run out of ideas, they hung on the fringes of bow range. Their numbers dwindled.
As the sun's heat finally began to wane, bitter horns piped from the northeast side of the city. Dante's heart sank.
Blays's mouth hung half open. "That's the signal, isn't it? They're through the walls."
"It's time to fall back to the Citadel." Dante clutched his sweaty temples. "Why isn't anyone sounding the retreat?"
"Aren't you the highest-ranking person here?"
Dante scanned the walls. Archers fired sporadically. A trio of monks in their lightest robes kept an eye on the battlefield. A ways down the wall, Somburr's thin, twitchy form was unmistakable, but there was no sign of Olivander. Kav had been wounded, removed from action. The only others with seniority over him—Hart and Tarkon—were old men who hadn't held up well in the scalding afternoon. They'd been brought to the Citadel to act as reserves. Cally, of course, was long gone.
He called for the retreat.
They'd practiced this, too. The subtle spread of orders through simple hand signals. While a skeleton crew remained at the walls to support the illusion nothing had changed, the rest jogged down into the square and gathered into formation. Dante passed word to the Citadel guards commanding the mixed forces of soldiers and citizens. He and a small team would scout the route ahead. The main body of their forces—some 1500 men or more, with more yet having shifted to the battle to the northeast—would follow them to the Sealed Citadel three minutes later, with the crew on the walls descending to follow another three minutes after that. Ideally, they would all be safely behind the Citadel's walls before the redshirts managed to break through the abandoned gate.
Dante grabbed a monk and two guardsmen dressed in Narashtovik's black. With Blays and Lira, they headed north up the gentle slope towards the colossal spire of the Cathedral of Ivars and the Citadel behind it. The shouts from the plaza at the Ingate faded, replaced by the dull roar of men and arms from somewhere to the north. The streets were otherwise silent. Pale faces stared from third-floor windows. A few thousand citizens remained, unarmed, isolated. What would happen to them as the king's men marched on Narashtovik's last defense?
The tall rowhouses draped them in soothing shadows. The five o'clock sun came in at yellow angles, dazzling the glass windows of the finer shops. Up the street, a handful of redshirts sprinted across the pavement. Dante flattened against a rowhouse, waiting for their footfalls to fade. He continued on, the pandemonium of battle echoing through the abandoned streets. He crested a small rise. The boulevard was a straight shot into the square between the Cathedral of Ivars and the Sealed Citadel. There, a mass of red-shirted men clamored around the still-open front gates, swords flashing against those of Narashtovik's soldiers.
"We're too late," Dante said.
Blays flung out his hands. "Why are the gates still open? What are they thinking?"
"They're waiting for us."
"If they wait much longer they'll be waiting on Arawn's doorstep instead." Blays pointed at the sky. "They'll never hear us from here and if we get any closer we'll be chopped into breakfast. Do that thing where you make stuff appear in the sky and tell them to close the damn gates!"
"We'll be trapped out here!"
"So what, dummy? Did you dig that tunnel for fun?"
More redshirts surged into the square every second. Dante exhaled in a frustrated sigh. He sucked the nether from the shadows of the buildings and sent it straight for the sky above the Citadel. In fifty foot letters, purple and twinkling, "CLOSE THE DAMN GATES—LOVE, DANTE" appeared in the air.
"I dunno," Blays said. "Might be too subtle."
Dante turned to the monk and two soldiers who'd come with them. "Go back to the others. Tell them not to go to the Citadel. They're to meet us at the carneterium instead."
"My lord," the monk bowed. The men ran back down the hill.
Blays gestured in the direction of the other hill on the north end of the city. "Lead on, exalted one."
"I didn't establish the rules of propriety," Dante grumbled. At the Citadel, the gates squeaked with a mighty grind of metal. The fighting below redoubled. Dante smiled. "I hope you didn't just get us all killed."
"That depends a lot on the effectiveness of your tunnel, doesn't it?"
Lira gestured forward. "If you two don't quit jabbering, we're dead either way."
"Sorry, love." Blays ran down a side street, then cut north to skirt the Citadel from a distance. A cheer went up. Either they'd just lost, or the defenders had finished sealing the doors.
The hill that bore the cemetery and carneterium swelled above the Ingate. The northern door through the walls was open, deserted. A couple hundred corpses scattered the plaza on both sides. Clearly this hadn't been the site of the main battle. The roads beyond were just as desolate. The houses stopped. Dante slowed as he jogged into the grassy field leading to the carneterium. Something stirred within the tall yellow grass.
"Get down!" Blays shouted.
Dante peered ahead, frowning. Blays plowed into his back and tackled him to the ground. Two arrows whooshed overhead. Lira rolled onto the dirt beside Blays. A lone oak stood twenty feet to Dante's left. He crawled for it, hidden beneath the grass. An arrow fired blindly through the stems. Dante flung himself behind the tree trunk. Across the field, three men in nondescript green waited with bows bent in their hands. They loosed their arrows as soon as they saw the whites of Dante's eyes.
Arrows rapped into the trunk. Blays burst from the grass, zig-zagging toward the archers. Dante gaped in horror and called out to the nether. It slithered to him from leaves and grass and dirt. One archer took a shot at Blays, firing wide. Lira ran pell-mell behind him, eyes locked on the archers' hands. Dante slung a spike
of shadows toward a man taking hurried aim at Blays. The archer fell with a cry.
Another took a quick shot at Blays. As the man released, Blays dived forward, landing on his shoulder and rolling through the grass. He popped up within sword range and lunged forward. Both his blades plunged into the archer's stomach. Blays pivoted, using his swords as levers to put the dying man's body between himself and the final scout. The man's arrow thunked wetly into the corpse's back. Lira closed on him. He took a whack at her with his bow. She intercepted it with her wheeling left arm, rolling her forearm to absorb the blow, then grabbed the bow and yanked it forward. The man leaned with it. Her sword found his throat.
"What were you thinking?" Dante called as he ran to them. "They had bows! The long things that fire other long things across long distances!"
"The tunnel's right around here, isn't it?" Blays said. One of the men groaned. Blays stabbed him without looking down. "What if they'd found it and were running off to tell Cassinder?"
"Then I'd seal it up."
"Yeah, after a thousand men boiled out of the basements and clued you in. Come on. Let's make sure this place is clear."
A cooling sea breeze ruffled the grass. Nothing else stirred the field or the hill. Inside the carneterium, the entry to the tunnel was just as empty. The first of their troops arrived minutes later, led by the two guards and the monk.
"Get them inside as fast as you can," Dante said. "It's a straight shot from here to the Citadel basements."
Dante lit one of the torches kept in the entry to the carneterium and dropped into the tunnel. It was cool, moist. His boots echoed with every scrape. He alternated walking and jogging, preserving his sun- and battle-flagged strength.
Blays frowned in the snapping torchlight. "If this is what it's like down here, remind me to be buried aboveground."
"What does that mean?" Lira said. "Like, in the air?"
"Sure. Just put me in a coffin and hang the coffin from a branch. Little kids can use me as a swing."
A draft puffed down the tunnel. Dante emerged into the gloom of the basements. Rats skittered among spilled grain and casks of wine. As he climbed the staircase to the ground floor of the keep, the sounds of battle met his ears.
The courtyard was a sea of blood. Around the sealed gates, soldiers of Gask and Narashtovik lay dead in equal measure. The defenders had already hauled an unknown quantity of the slain to a ghastly pile beneath one of the walls, but hundreds remained. From the thirty-foot walls, archers plunked away at the redshirts on the other side, who returned fire, lobbing arrows into the courtyard on high arcs.
Across the way, Olivander spotted him and trudged over. His goatee and hair were in disarray, clumped with blood and sweat. His face was just as haggard.
"Reinforcements will be here any minute," Dante said. "They're coming through the tunnels."
"There's some welcome news. Their sorcerers broke through on us. Tried to do the same here, but Hart and Tarkon held them off."
"How's it looking now?"
Olivander shrugged wearily. "We've worn them down, but paid in turn. They still have the numbers. If they break through again, we can finally rest."
"Sounds like you could use me on the walls." Dante headed up the stairs. The walls around the Citadel were even higher than the Ingate. Dizzying. Exposed to the still-warm sun. The scene beyond was much as it had been at the Ingate: a clear field across most of the plaza, scattered pockets of archers hidden behind planks to keep the defenders honest. Thousands of men were spread out in the monstrous shadow of the cathedral, others spilling into the streets forking from the plaza.
These conditions held for another hour. Smoke trickled through the cooling air. Dante did little more than watch, conserving his strength. It was a smart choice. An hour later, with the sun continuing its slow descent to the west, chaos exploded across the battle.
It began on the cathedral. Along its roof—taller than the Citadel walls, half as high as the keep itself—men appeared by the dozens, setting up makeshift shields and firing down on the defenders along the wall. The city's soldiers hunkered behind their merlons, sniping back as best they could. As Dante ran nearer, Somburr's slim form popped up from behind the battlements. Nether whisked from his hands, slashing into the enemy ranks, knocking them from the roof. They screamed as they tumbled and thumped to the plaza.
More replaced them. As Dante brought the nether to his palms, cries went out along the wall to his right. The tops of ladders materialized above the stonework. Black-clad soldiers rushed to meet the attackers scrambling up the ladders. Blays and Lira ran toward them in a dead run. Dante swore and followed.
It wasn't just ladders. There were two mobile staircases, too, wheeled up while the defenders' attention diverted to the archers on the cathedral. Men poured from the stairs, laying into the massed defenders. Blays threaded through the lines, Lira matching him step for step. Dante drew his sword.
Blays ducked a looping swing and buried his blade in the ribs of a redshirt. Lira blocked the sword of another, grabbing his wrist and holding both their swords in place. She kicked out his knee. He shrieked, fell, died under the spear-thrust of a guardsman behind her. Blays blocked a downward cut with an outwards flick of his wrist. With his second sword, he stabbed through the hole opened in the man's guard.
Dante lunged opportunistically, hanging back, jabbing at any exposed flanks or overextended limbs, picking up the scraps of Blays and Lira's carnage. Blays fought as if he were literally two men, his twin blades blocking and probing and slashing independent of each other. Whenever he brought them to bear on a single redshirt, the target fell in seconds. Lira's unorthodox style threw every man she faced off guard. When they advanced, she fell back. When they regrouped, she advanced. She flowed away and after them like a malevolent sea. Every time they slipped, every time they hesitated, or their sword swung too far, she pounced upon their weakness, dropping them to the stone floor.
Over the next five minutes, they advanced by inches. Bodies piled along the raised stone defenses. Dante's sword arm grew heavy, sluggish. Blays and Lira showed no signs of slowing down. Dante refreshed himself with a small burst of nether. Blood spattered Blays' face, Lira's empty hand. The redshirts began to give them a wide berth, clustering to engage the Citadel guardsmen instead.
A spear jabbed into the neck of the guardsman next to Blays. The defender fell, gurgling, collapsing into Blays' knee. Blays toppled. A blade followed him down, diving into his gut. He screamed. Before his attacker could withdraw, Lira hacked off the man's arm at the elbow. Blood fountained from the stump. Dante punched out his fist. Shadows slammed into the man's head, bursting it in a hot red shower of blood and stinging shards of bone.
"Get him out of here!" Dante yelled. "To the monks in the Citadel!"
Blood masked Lira's face. Dante moved past Blays, wreathing his hand in visible shadows. It discharged none of his strength, but was enough to drive back the line of attackers for a crucial second. Lira hoisted Blays on her hip and retreated through the ranks of defenders. Blays' hand was clamped to his gut, dark blood oozing between his fingers.
Someone shouted. A sword flashed for Dante's throat. He knocked it back with an awkward swipe and stumbled against a guardsman, who brought down his attacker. Another two minutes of fighting and Dante's arm was too heavy to lift. He withdrew, letting fresh troops cycle in for the fight to reach the staircases.
Wheels squeaked from the square. Below, a covered ram rolled forward, a pitched roof protecting the men pushing it along. The archers on the walls, still harried by those perched on the cathedral roof, concentrated fire. Arrows thwacked into the wooden cover. One of the men at the ram fell away, clutching at an arrow stuck straight through his leg. Two more dropped dead, leaving a trail of corpses behind the rolling ram. By the time it disappeared into the entry to the gates, it was reduced to a crawl. The remaining men wouldn't have the strength to lift it, let alone to batter down the doors.
Laughter echoed from
within the gates.
The doors exploded inward in a roaring flash of ether. As splintered wood and warped metal spun into the courtyard, Cassinder dashed away from the ram toward the safety of the redshirts' lines. He'd been hiding somewhere inside the ram. Sneaking in until he was too close to stop. And now the gates were open. It was over.
Dante hurtled a lance of shadows at Cassinder's back. An instant before it would tear out his heart, it sprayed into sparks, deflected by a sorcerer somewhere in the enemy crowds. A thunderous cry rippled across the king's ranks. As one, thousands of men charged the fallen gates.
Dante stared, dazed. How many men massed outside the gates, stopped, however briefly, by the guardsmen plugging the gap? Five thousand? What now? Surrender? Flee? Fight to the last? They could attempt to retreat through the tunnels. Regroup in the Norren Territories with whatever clans were still alive to fight. Conduct a guerrilla resistance until their spirits or their lives at last gave out. But what would happen to the citizens who stayed in Narashtovik? And after all the blood spilled in the last few months, how could they hope to resist the next wave of the king's men?
His mind split, paralyzing him. Fight and die. Leave and lose hope. Two halves. Two worlds. Neither acceptable.
He screamed so loud the redshirts tipped back their sweat-streaked faces. He screamed until his sight turned red. As the scream faded from his ears and the red fell from his eyes, he knew what to do.
He ran down the steps, joggling the soreness in his back. Men snarled and slashed and bled for control of the gates. The redshirts had already pushed their way inside, an expanding bubble of men that would soon burst across the courtyard and flush away any remaining defenders. Along the walls, archers poured fire into the men still beyond the gates. Soldiers in black shirts ran down the steps as fast as they could.
The Great Rift Page 58
