by Jon Kiln
She had missed. The javelin sat, juddering in the ground a few feet in front of Dal Grehb, who regarded it silently as if it were nothing more interesting than a signpost. There was a moment of silence, and then a sudden roar of sound as the Menaali side cheered and jeered at their leader for having the courage to stand his ground. Their chanting matched their war drums and their crazy horns, easily louder than the chant of the “Fuldoon” had been from the city’s defenders. Suriyen watched as the first column of heavily armored warriors moved onto the bridge, walking in tight formation inside a structure like an immense cart-frame.
“Dammit!” Suriyen swore, jumping down off the battlements beside her second in command once more. “I am such an idiot,” she confirmed as she saw the wary, owlish looks from the other defenders as they stole glances at their failure of a captain. “What the hell was I thinking, that I could end the war with one spear throw?”
“Don’t say that.” Ruyiman had the same owlish look of wide eyes as the rest. “It’s better to try and end it with one blow then a thousand. And your troops, they don’t think that you’re a failure at all. They must think that you’re a hero.”
“What? Are you mad, I missed!” Suriyen snapped back at him, thinking that he was just trying to sugar-coat the truth.
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that your troops saw you stand there and face off against the entire Menaali army. Alone. With little more than a spear, and if you can almost kill the warlord of the entire Menaali army with one spear, then what can a hundred defenders do? A thousand?” Ruyiman looked between the battlements and growled. “Now what is that?”
“It’s a siege engine,” Suriyen said, pointing out how the warriors were affixing their shields to the front, the sides, and, finally, overlapping the top as well. “I’ve seen their like used by the Menaali before. Really just like a big open cart, with lots of axles pushed by the warriors up to the wall or gate. Under that shell of metal shields they can bring up battering rams or masons with chisels, saws, anything they like to work on the gates.”
Her second spared a glance to their side of the gates, whose wooden frame had been braced by a small copse of timbers, and then there were carts piled with rubble ready to be pulled across at the first sign of weakness.
“Let’s hope that your plan works then,” Ruyiman said grimly, as they heard the creak of complaining timber as the siege cart, covered in metal and containing a small contingent of the fiercest Menaali fighters, started to creak forward along the bridge.
“Archers!” Ruyiman waved a flag. “Pick off what you can. Aim for the wheels. First volley!”
Up and down the wall, every third or fourth defender drew out their long and short bows, taking careful aim, and let loose the first volley of the day.
The sky hummed with the whine of arrows lancing down towards the siege-cart, and then rang with the sound of metal arrow heads meeting shields, or the bridge itself. There was a smattering of screams as arrows found the occasional unprotected calf or thigh, but the siege cart kept trundling on.
“Second volley!” This time, as the previous archers reloaded, every first and second defender drew and fired their bows, resulting in another thunder of arrow heads on shields, and a few screams.
But the siege cart did not stop nor slow. Suriyen watched as it crunched over the spear that she had thrown, splintering it in an instant, and kept on moving towards the gates.
“Now?” Ruyiman looked over at the stacked collection of pots every few feet or so along the battlements. He licked his lips nervously.
“No,” came an answer, but it wasn’t from Suriyen’s lips—it came from the hurrying form of thin Councilor Maaritz, still dressed in his robes of state, but who had augmented it with at least a stiffened jerkin, arm greaves, and a sword. Although it was hidden, Suriyen knew that he would also be wearing around his neck another of the medallions that she had kept for so long—the bull with the wheel between its horns.
“Maaritz?” Suriyen looked up anxiously. “What is it?”
“Suriyen,” Maaritz said breathlessly. “Speaking as a member of the high Council of Fuldoon, and as your friend,” his eyes caught hers, “you cannot do this.”
“Councilor?” Ruyiman raised an eyebrow at the man. “Doesn’t the wall-captain have full authority in matters of defense?”
Maaritz frowned as he looked at the second, appearing clearly at the end of his tether with the ex-pirate. “Ruyiman, thank you for making the rituals and procedures of the city clear, but I am not giving you an order, I am begging the captain to find another way to defend the city.”
Suriyen clenched her teeth and hit the wall with her fists. She had feared that something like this would happen. Of course people will be disgusted with me, she thought. I am disgusted with me. Who resorts to this sort of defense?
But she also knew that without defenses like this then the city would be doomed. The walls might be high, and the defenders fighting for their lives, but still, there were far too many Menaali out there and far few soldiers in here. Unless some distant northern kingdom decided to take pity on them and cross the entire Inner Sea, then they would be doomed, and just another part of Dal Grehb’s ever expanding empire of the south.
“Councilor,” she chose the word heavily, knowing that he came to her as a friend, and as another member of her holy cult. “Does Fuldoon wish to stand or not?”
“Suriyen!” The man’s distinguished features, usually as handsome as a statue, contorted in pain. “You, of all people should know of what it is that I speak. This will be a tragedy if you let it happen. How many lives will be lost?”
“I know precisely of what it is that you speak, Maaritz,” Suriyen said. “I spent five years in the slave camps of Dal Grehb, I saw the Menaali take Brighthome, take the Greenriver villages. I know what will happen to half the inhabitants of this soft, trader city when the Menaali come crawling over the walls and through the windows. Because they will, Councilor, they will.”
“But, as a friend,” Maaritz matched her vehemence with glaring determination, “you know what could happen to those who die such an agonizing, fruitless death. You know what dangers their hatred and fear will present in later lives. The soldiers you torment today will only be fodder for the hells tomorrow.”
“Later lives? Painful deaths?” Ruyiman was laughing at the Councilor. “You need to get your heads out of the books, Councilor, and look around you. Let the gods sort out all of our souls, but right now I’m more worried about the painful death that we’ll be facing.”
Maaritz sighed and threw his hands up in the air. “This is madness.”
“This whole war is madness,” Suriyen said back. “And Ruyiman is right. It is up to the gods to sort out our souls—both the Menaali’s, yours, and mine. What sort of devil will I come back as if I let myself fail here, today?”
“One with a kind heart, perhaps,” Maaritz countered. “Please, there must be another way than this.”
The siege-cart was getting closer to the gates. It had now covered nearly three quarters of the bridge. Suriyen looked down the line at her own men, seeing their confusion and fear at this new tactic. What would they think of her when they see her roast a few hundred, a thousand, men alive?
It was something that I didn’t want Talon to see me do, some part of the warrior said.
“Captain, the hour is getting late,” Ruyiman reminded her.
“Dawn,” Suriyen said. “The gates will hold for a day, and so you have until dawn tomorrow, Maaritz, to find another way to defend this city.”
“If we’re not all over-run by then,” Ruyiman whispered as he stood up with a growl and waved his flag once more. “First volley! Fire!”
The arrows rained down on the implacable metal beasts below, inching ever closer to the gates of Fuldoon.
7
The sun was barely in the middle of the sky by the time Aldameda and Talon got to the eastern side of Fuldoon. The boy had never thought that the city was
so big—he had never even considered that any city could be this big, until every step along the cobbles started to ache through even the thick leather of his boots.
“Cities grow like tree-rings, boy,” Aldameda explained. “And Fuldoon is old. Every few generations it expanded outwards, until it hit the river on one side, and the rocks on the other.”
“The rocks?” the boy said suspiciously.
“You’ll see soon enough,” the old woman said, walking with the same stiff determination that she had when they had started.
They had crossed the heart of the city surprisingly easily, as the siege had caused many people to take to their houses or barricade their homes, and not fill the streets with their usual bustle and hubbub of economy. The pair passed grand temples and even grander guild houses—each one with dressed stone and carved statuaries adorning their walls, displaying spinners and weavers, armorers, bushels of grains, and more tools of their profession.
“Fuldoon is one of the spiritual homes of the Guilds, you see,” Aldameda said. “Here they got to trade almost freely, until of course…”
Until the Menaali came, Talon thought, as they continued to trudge past fountains and parks, orange adobe houses, stone streets, workhouses, storehouses and factories alongside narrow canal channels that ran their complicated lock-systems all the way to the Great Inner Sea beyond.
But even out here, at the eastern edges of the city where the houses had a little more room, and were a little finer, they could still detect the distant sounds of war. Smoke sat behind them on the skies, and occasionally Talon could even hear the boom and thud of the heavy blocks thrown by the siege tower. Each one caused him to flinch a little, and the boy wondered if the juddering through the ground was all in his imagination or whether he really could feel it.
“Do you think she’ll win?” Talon asked eventually of the older woman. He felt oddly confused, as if he might be sick with a fever, or that this might all be a dream. Just what was happening? So recently he had been ‘working’ for the gypsies in their desert caravans—really little more than a slave—and now he had managed to lose his only two friends in the world, as well as retreating from a world at war! It felt as though he had stepped out of the pages of his life and into a story.
“She might. She might not. It is up to the gods to decide that,” the old woman said in a sharp tone.
“Then why does she stay here?” Talon felt tired, and unsure of what he was meant to be doing. “Why are we doing what we’re doing, if the gods will decide what they want to anyway?”
Aldameda halted in her steps and looked up at him. “Because the gods will base their decision on how much of this,” she poked him in the heart, “you use. That is what us Friends believe, anyway. The gods of the upper heavens will decide what happens to each and every one of us, whether we fail or succeed in our tasks. But they will only look favorably on us if we act with all of our hearts.”
“Is that why you are chasing down the demon inside Vekal?”
“Shhh, Talon.” Aldameda looked around at the few other travelers on the cobbled road, but none of them seemed close enough to have heard. “I know that we face many dangers, and we must still be careful.” She waited for a few more steps before encouraging the boy to walk closer and whispered into his ear. “The answer to your question is, yes. However, I do not know what the gods will decide for the fate of the spirit, but I know in my heart that I have to try my hardest to do my best to stop it.”
“But… why? What has it done so wrong?” Talon said back, thinking of the many times that the Sin Eater Vekal had saved his life, all, presumably, with the devil inside of him.
“Why, child!” Aldameda gasped, pursing her lips as if Talon had said the worst kind of insult possible. “I guess that if you are old enough to come with me, then you are old enough to know what we do. One of our friends captured another devil here, called Sadgast, who was acting like a sort of smuggler for all of the devils rising out of hell and latching onto the weak-willed. Sadgast told our friend that the devil’s name was Ikrit—a very powerful imp who is older than this city is itself.”
Aldameda made a sign over her chest, as if to protect herself. “The name is known to the friends of old. It is an imp of cruelty and savage curiosity. It always liked the sorts of torments that tore two lovers apart, or made kings eat their own gold coins. Horrible torments. It wasn’t just one of these mindless fiends that revel in blood and pain, this Ikrit really thought about the suffering it was going to impart, you see? I dread to think what would happen were it allowed free reign in the world. And we should count our lucky stars that it is trapped inside the Sin Eater, Vekal, and unable to get out!” Aldameda had stopped, and had placed her hands onto Talon’s shoulder. “This is our chance to stop a great evil from spreading, a very great evil indeed.”
“But, Vekal?” Talon started to say, wanting to ask just how it was that the Sin Eater had always managed to be so kind to him and to Suriyen. Was that all a trick as well? Had it been another of the devil’s ‘cruel games’?
“Ma’am?” A voice broke the boy’s protestations, as shadows passed in front of them. Talon looked up to see that two of Fuldoon’s guards were standing, barring their way down the street. They each wore the white cloaks of their position, and they held spears fully a foot taller than they were. Through the gap between them, Talon could see a wide, empty courtyard, with an iron gate set in a wall thirty or forty feet high.
“You and your boy cannot pass, ma’am. You must have heard the proclamations. The city is closed,” the first guard said.
“Shame on you,” Aldameda scowled at the guard. “One old woman and her grandson, looking to flee a city under siege? What is wrong with you?”
“Ma’am, orders are orders. From the High Council itself. If we let everyone leave, then Fuldoon will fall,” the guard said, not really angry with them, but also not feeling particularly threatened by them either. “Come along now, back to your home. If there is an evacuation then the word will go out, district by district—”
“And what am I supposed to do for the war effort? Stand with a spear on knees already knackered? Or stick wounds with eyes that can’t read anymore?” Aldameda said.
“We might need every hand on a spear before this is over,” said the second, slightly burlier Fuldoon guard. “And your boy looks healthy enough. He should be proud to defend his city.” The larger scratched his chin. “Or maybe you two have plans out there in the wilds. Maybe you’ve got some money stashed away, or maybe you’ve got your own tales to tell.” His eyes narrowed.
Aldameda made a startled sound of outrage in the back of her throat.
“Mother?” asked Talon. “What does he mean by, tales to tell?”
“Talon, this rather rude young man is trying to suggest that we might be spies, hoping to leave the city and walk three days to the south and then three days back up the other side of Fuldoon to tell those Menaali monsters what military secrets we know.”
“We know military secrets?” Talon wasn’t entirely sure that he knew any secrets at all, whether military or not.
“Now, ma’am, I’m sure he didn’t mean that,” said the first guard, shooting the burlier one a look. “But what if the Menaali have troops out to the east, who could capture you and your boy? You know the Eastern Rocks are filled with pirate hide-outs. What if one of them thinks that your boy will make a good galley slave?”
“Then I’m sure that he’ll have a better life than slowly starving in Fuldoon,” Aldameda said crossly. “Are you seriously going to prevent one old woman and one boy from walking through that gate over there? What is it worth to you?”
“Worth?” The burly guard looked up suddenly. “Well, that depends, doesn’t it? What are you carrying that could be worth me and my friend unlocking that gate?”
Talon saw Aldameda’s eyes darken as she grumbled and muttered angrily, turning her back to the guards and hobbling to her horse’s saddlebags. “They always say Fuldoon is a
city where everything is for sale,” she muttered, standing over one bag and beckoning the larger guard over.
Strange, thought Talon. I don’t remember Aldameda having such a limp before. In fact, she had seemed healthier even than me.
“Here we go.” The bulkier guard set his spear against the nearest side of a building and clapped his hands together. “Let’s see what goodies you got, old woman.” He lumbered over to her to peer into the saddlebags.
Aldameda shot Talon an inscrutable glance that he couldn’t read, just as the older guard said, “Eh? Loads of little pouches and bags? What are they filled with? Diamonds? Rubies? Fire-stones?”
“Pepper,” Aldameda said, moving quickly to throw the substance that she had in her hand over the guard’s face, causing him to blink and seize, before screaming with pain as the pepper started to burn into his eyes, nose, and mouth.
“Get it off! You witch!” The guard was screaming, as the older woman moved dazzlingly quickly, turning the disorientated guard around and clamping one arm behind his back. A curved blade the size of a small sword had mysteriously appeared in Aldameda’s hand as she held it to his throat.
“I wouldn’t move, if I were you, or else you’ll have a lot less blood in you as well as a face that feels like it’s being burnt alive,” she hissed, her eyes dark.
“Halt! Wait!” The other guard was shocked by the sudden change in the old woman, and clumsily leveled his spear. “What are you doing?”
“Talon? Be so good as to disarm the guards would you? I don’t quite think they understand that this is a hostage situation, and we have the hostage.” Aldameda’s voice was calm and careful.
Talon gulped, looking at the slimmer guard and the larger, wondering if either of them would fight him. The slimmer looked confused for a moment, caught between plunging a spear into Talon and running away.
“Easy now,” Talon was saying, thinking of how he might calm a goat or a horse. He kept his hands up as he took a step towards the nervous Fuldoon guard. “No one has to get hurt.”
