by Sam Hawke
“I care about you,” I began awkwardly, and she laughed, a booming sound in the silent cavern.
“Jovan, you are very nice, too. But I was not fishing for a declaration of your affection. I was asking if you were too much of a wooden heathen to feel the fresken.”
“I felt something,” I admitted. “I don’t know what, exactly, but—”
“You do know what,” she said, clearly amused. “But if you would like to pretend that you do not, well and good.” She stretched, and I felt the bumps on her skin under my hands and her tiny shivers. I found myself shivering, too, suddenly hyperconscious of the space—the icy damp air, the distant booms from far above. With reluctance we gathered our clothes from under us and dressed again. My stomach chose that moment to grumble, the hollow ache reminding me how long it had been since my last real meal.
Hadrea had already climbed back on the pile and was tugging at a large rock. I climbed up beside her and dislodged one myself, awkward. Mouth dry, I tried. “About earlier. I’m sorry,” I began. “I shouldn’t have said those things to you. I was—”
“I know what you were doing,” she said, her tone resigned, not cold. “Blaming yourself. Punishing yourself. But you will not do it this time.” She turned her gaze on me, and I found myself smiling. Who could argue with that look?
“I won’t.” This time, I wouldn’t. Our world might, in fact, be ending, but I wouldn’t regret one moment spent with her.
“Look!” she cried, and I scrambled up beside her, holding the lamp aloft. It shone through, past the rock pile, to the passage beyond. “We are nearly there.”
Enthusiasm lending us greater energy, we cleared the rocks and rubble until we had exposed a hole big enough to crawl through. Far above, a boom sounded, and I eyed the roof nervously. Hadrea made to climb in, but I grabbed her arm. Eagerness aside, who knew how stable our little path might be? “Maybe we shouldn’t do this? At least, not without someone else here who can help us if there’s another collapse and we get stuck on the other side.”
She wiped the hair off her face with a grimy hand. “Jovan,” she said. “There is no time. Everyone in the city is busy either getting ready to fight for their lives, or hiding and hoping for the best. No one up there is interested in an old map and a Darfri spirit. But I can feel a connection to Os-Woorin. It is strong and still open. Perhaps you really cannot feel it, but it is there. I was not entirely honest with you, before. With anyone. Even my mother. We are not supposed to use fresken without supervision of a Speaker, but I was young and lonely and I thought…” She broke off, shaking her head. “It does not matter. What I am saying is there is some chance there is something here—something magical, I do not know, but something—we have to try.”
Yes, it was madness to believe we would find the key to reaching some supernatural being buried in a room deep under the lake. Almost every part of me knew that whatever was in there, it was unlikely to improve our plight. But one stupid, senseless bit of hope remained that Hadrea was right. And, honor-down, I didn’t want to return just yet to the disaster waiting for us above.
I went through first, feet first on my stomach, heading into the unknown. I shuffled backward, pressing my body over the rough stones and trying to calm the panic inside me at every tiny sound. I wished it weren’t so easy to picture us being trapped, pinned beneath rocks here, left to starve or suffocate.
“Pass me the lamp,” I said, coughing to disguise the squeak in my voice. “And my bag.” I dared not descend farther without seeing where I was going.
This side of the tunnel looked much like the other. A cascade of rubble sloped down from a gaping wound in the ceiling, ending around knee height against a door. By the fortunes, I hoped that door opened inward, or there would be no chance of clearing a path to get it open.
Hadrea squeezed through next, and though it was wildly inappropriate in the circumstances, I appreciated her tightly curved backside leading the way. “You’ll start a whole new fashion, walking around in those trousers,” I muttered, helping her down the slope.
She grinned. “Keep your focus, Jovan,” she said. “The door. Is it locked?”
“That’s the least of our problems.” I tugged out my small roll of tools from my bag. I could pick the lock, but it would do no good if the door opened the wrong way. I held my breath as I balanced on the wobbly ground and held the lamp up to the edge of the doorframe. No hinges, which meant it probably did open inward.
The lock was corroded, and didn’t require much picking. I supposed whoever had last been here hadn’t been worried about its integrity, since they’d planned to collapse the tunnel anyway. It didn’t take long to deal with the lock, but it took both our full weights against the door to get it open—first pushing, then kicking, then eventually throwing ourselves against it—so warped had it become over the years in the damp.
We both fell in a tumble when it finally burst open, and I almost smashed the lamp. I picked it up, gave Hadrea a hand, and then, heart pounding, held the light up to illuminate the Os-Woorin room.
Silence.
Hadrea looked at me. “What is it?” she asked.
I held the lamp up again, mouth dry. “I have no idea.”
* * *
By the time we reached the surface, the dull roar from above had grown to ominous levels, and without discussion we increased our pace. And as we came out of the sewers up near the north gate, fear solidified into a hard lump in my stomach.
Dawn had broken, and the Finger’s gate had fallen.
Whether by the relentless force of their catapults, which we’d failed to destroy, or some other more direct means, like a ram, the gate and half the base of the tower were a crumpled ruin. The rebel army swarmed the bridge, fighting to get through the gate and out of the range of our arrow fire. Hadrea and I ran along the shoreline, half-deafened by the screams and cries of battle. Our soldiers clung to the remaining structure of the wall and tower, half shooting down arrows, some fiery, the other half hurling the miscellaneous contents of the great barrels stacked up behind the wall. The foul stench made me gag as we came closer. Order Guards yelled instructions to our troops in the trenches, preparing them for when the fighting moved to the shore. Among the rebels on the bridge I spotted several of the unarmored women adorned with symbols—Speakers?—their arms raised up and outstretched. Above them the wind whistled wildly, carrying dirt and rubble with it just as it had outside the walls. The maelstrom flew at our troops on the wall, knocking arrows out of their path and blinding them with debris as if the Maiso itself had come into the city and did the Darfri women’s bidding. The screams of the fearful and the dying split the air. This is it, I thought, numb as I accepted a misshapen sword from someone. This is the end.
Then another, different, roar from the south made me turn. Our own men and women, cheering in defiance, for this short time drowning out the drums and the cries from the bridge and west shore. It took a moment to see why.
Tain strode along the river bank, dressed in ceremonial armor. He looked a magnificent sight, with his gleaming conical helmet, a bright cloak billowing after him and shining sword glinting in the dawn. No one would have known the armor and cloak concealed injury or that his poise masked his weakness. They saw him as a shining leader here to give them heart in the worst moments of their lives, and they did not care that they had not seen him for a week or more, or that only last night they had been muttering about him having fled the city. He was here now, and somehow his presence converted a scared rabble into a united force. I raised my hand and my voice as he came near, along with everyone else. Perhaps it was stupid, but whatever surged through the crowd surged through me, too. Maybe together we could get through this.
I turned to Hadrea. She had not cheered. She was looking at the clash of people defending the tower base, eyes wet. My brief burst of Silastian pride fizzled away with no more than a whisper. For Hadrea, this was no glorious defense of the city. These were her own people, perhaps even friends and fa
mily, dying for a war they had been pushed into against a population that had wronged them. If we saved ourselves today, what would be the cost?
And then Tain was upon us, tailed by Bradomir, Varina, and Javesto, even old Budua and Marjeta, all armored. I hoped the missing Councilors were engaged elsewhere and not dead or hiding. Even Lord Ectar, whom I hadn’t seen in days, was here, with his servants, ready to fight.
“How are you—” But I broke off, already guessing what Tain had done by the wildness of his eyes and his quick, jerky movements. “You found my darpar.” I shook my head; too late to worry about what it might do to him now. “Try the peace flag again,” I begged, surprising myself with the strength of my desperation. “Before it’s too late. The mercenaries in charge won’t listen, but now it’s face-to-face they can’t shield everyone from your words.”
He shook his head. Up close, there was no hiding the toll this performance was taking. His skin looked more gray than brown and his eyes were bloodshot. “We tried, Jov. They shot an arrow through it. They won’t talk peace. They won’t even take our surrender—I’m not too proud.” He looked back to the bridge. “They’re going to break through any moment. We have high ground but they’ve got the numbers.”
“A lot of people are going to die today,” Javesto said. His usually animated face looked dull and numb. I guessed he too saw the cost on both sides as a loss to all.
“Unless we can think of something to stop it,” Tain agreed. He glanced at the other Councilors. “A moment, please,” he said, and steered me away. From inside his breastplate he pulled my family’s battered journal. “You left this under the lamp, Jov. Whatever you did, it worked eventually.”
I took it, pulse thumping at the sight of the revealed words: pages of tiny, neat notes. “The heat, of course. It needed a bit more heat.” I’d not factored in the age of the paper.
“Jov, did you and Hadrea find the Os-Woorin room?”
I nodded. “But it’s … I don’t know what it is. It’s not a shrine. There was nothing Darfri in there. The whole room is some kind of machine.” A great metal wheel, a sealed chamber. After all that digging, Hadrea and I hadn’t come out with any understanding of what we’d found, or its relationship to the spirit of the lake. She had been disappointed but my disappointment had been mingled with some relief, as well. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to be directly confronted with something that couldn’t be explained. “I don’t know what it’s meant to do.”
“Well, I do,” said Tain. “Look at this. We—” He broke off as a horn sounded. “They’re through,” he said. “This is it.”
Our people fell into place to meet the sudden rush of the enemy through the tower. We could no longer hold them off. My sweaty fingers clenched around the sword as I followed Tain into the throng. Then panic surged through me and I turned. “Hadrea!” I cried. She stood behind me, her long knife in hand, far steadier than I felt. “Get back to the city. The rebels won’t hurt you and the rest of the Darfri. You’ll be safe.”
For a moment her face, wet with tears, stiffened. Then, instead of fleeing, she pressed in beside me and kissed me hard on the lips. “But you would not, without me. I have seen you with a sword.”
It was like being at the bottom of the ladders all over again. My mouth was dry and I couldn’t get enough air as the lines clashed together and the rebel army poured in. I joined the protective circle around Tain and only as a woman with a spear charged at me did I realize I hadn’t taken a shield or even the crudest armor. I twisted to avoid the thrust, felt it catch in my tunic, and lunged back. As I did, the blur of Hadrea’s shape caught my eye and I spun the sword at the last moment to hit my opponent with the hilt instead. Idiot, idiot, you can’t just knock them all out, part of me shouted, but I knew, even as I ducked a swinging blow from a man with a hammer, that I was going to try. Unless and until it killed me.
The sword became my shield, for defense only. My free hand flung lavabulb seeds into eyes. Beside me, Hadrea slashed and pivoted and darted in and out. I felt a clumsy animal compared to her; with every swing and parry I grew weaker. I could only avoid their relentless attacks for so long. I tired quickly, my movements slowing and my strikes weakening. A glancing blow from a club to my hipbone sent me staggering, and the club would have crushed my head if Hadrea had not suddenly been there, slashing at the back of the man’s knees. He screamed and fell almost on top of me. I got out of the way just in time, wobbling to my feet.
I took another hit, this time a knife to the left shoulder, making me cry out in agony and lending a desperate strength to my right side as I smashed the base of my sword on the man’s elbow. As he staggered back, I kicked him in the knee as hard as I could.
As we fought and struggled I became aware of a pressing sensation around my head and glanced at Hadrea; she was looking around wildly, obviously sensing it, too. I saw a Speaker approaching through the crowd, dirt and grass stuffed in her raised and outstretched fists. Her face turned to the lightening indigo sky and she chanted over the roar of the battle. Somehow she moved through the crowd undisturbed, never deviating in her path, a gliding water bird on a still lake. I ducked under a swinging shield and drew closer to her. I knew I shouldn’t leave Tain’s protective circle but my shaking legs shuffled forward almost of their own volition, compelled and repelled by fear and the memory of the gritty hand on my leg and the sight of the swirling mists and debris-filled winds.
The Speaker’s head suddenly snapped down like a heavy lid closing. Her gaze moved over the crowd and she drew her fists in toward her bare chest as if pulling some great tense rope. The tight sensation around my ears intensified.
People behind me cried out simultaneously; I spun around. Great earthy ropes of grass and dirt burst from the ground and gripped Hadrea and Tain, along with half a dozen others protecting the Chancellor, pulling them to their knees like sentient vines. Hadrea clutched at her neck as the green-and-brown fingers tightened around her throat, and Tain coughed and beat at his chest as the ropy strands dragged over his shoulders. I started toward them but Hadrea’s eyes met mine and instead of fear I saw resolution; she jerked her gaze sharply to a point over my shoulder. I nodded and pivoted, leaping toward the Speaker without much thought beyond reaching her.
We collided roughly; the last instant before impact I slipped sideways slightly so that instead of catching my arm around the Speaker’s neck and barreling chest-to-chest as I’d intended, I struck her shoulder-to-shoulder. She stumbled back hard, losing one hand’s worth of dirt and grass, but didn’t fall. Her gaze snapped to me, crackling with rage. I had only enough time to stick my free hand into my pouch, for the next moment she thrust her arm toward me with a bellowed command, and grass and clods of earth sprang up from the very ground, pinning my arms and coiling around my torso like great snakes. The roaring in my ears intensified as the bizarre earth fingers tightened their grip.
I tried to back away but I was held fast, my sword flat and useless against my thigh. Inside the pouch my fingers scrambled around until they found a phial. Dangerous and foolish to attempt it, but I did anyway. With a series of quick, tiny yanks I got my hand out of the pouch and free of the bindings, the phial only just within my fingers’ grip. Hoping the fortunes were on my side, I popped the lid of the phial with my thumb and flicked my wrist toward her as hard as I could.
The scream from the Speaker as acid splashed across her bare stomach reverberated in my skull. I, too, felt a burn like a hot needle driving into the side of my thumb where I had collected a tiny splash. But as the Speaker collapsed, still screaming, my bindings fell away to nothing. Relieved coughing sounded behind me under the howls and shrieks, and I almost cried with relief to see Tain, Hadrea, and the rest staggering to their feet as well. With my uninjured hand I struck the Speaker unconscious with the butt of my sword then hurried back to join my friends. Wary rebels now circled in once more. My heart felt heavy in my chest. Darfri magic was real. How could we possibly stand against something like that?
<
br /> So loud were the rasp of my breathing and the hammering of blood in my ears that it took some time for the sound of horns to penetrate. I looked around, confused. What were the horns signaling?
Tain’s voice cracked with disbelief. “It’s the army,” he said, then he shouted it again. “It’s our army!”
Others took up the cry. All around us, men and women on both sides slowed and fumbled in their attacks, looking around in fear and confusion. No one quite seemed to know what was going on. But the cheer picked up, louder and louder, until it finally sunk into my woolly head.
Aven had arrived.
* * *
Confusion reigned. Rebels on our side of the lake stopped pressing forward and instead worked to hold their ground as they peered frantically through the crowd, searching for instruction. None of the mercenary leaders could be seen amidst the mist rolling across the lake. Cynical, I doubted whether any had engaged in this first push across the bridge. Why should they when they could just send waves of our countrymen across to clear the way?
Eventually the retreat call sounded, and rebels fought their way, not forward into our territory, but back to the bridge. “Protect the tower!” an Order Guard screamed, and a surge of our own people thickened around the base of the tower to cut off the retreat. But Tain raced down the hill, leaving us scrambling to keep up.
“Let them through!” he bellowed. “Let them through!”
The Order Guard perched on top of the half-crumpled wall stared down at Tain as he charged toward them, head cocked as if not understanding what he’d heard. I puffed to keep up as Tain darted through the crush, fired by unnatural agility and energy from the darpar. Even unarmored it took all my effort just to keep him in sight while avoiding the desperate strikes of the rebels as they retreated to the tower.
