The defenders trying vainly to break past Arken's defences were now falling back into the tower itself, directly adjoining this wall.
“Get in!” Sasha yelled at him, pointing past with her sword. Arken charged out of the guardhouse along the wall, Sasha after him, and crashed shield-first into the tower door. It burst open, and Arken was then pressing down the stone corridor beyond, a one-man barrier taking up all the space, absorbing blow after blow with his shield and leaving defender after defender dying underfoot as he pressed on. Sasha had respected the Steel before, but now that respect reached a whole new intensity.
Behind her came Yasmyn, then Danel guarding their backs…only now the defenders seemed to vanish as those before Arken died or fled, and those behind diverted to the main skirmish, against the small knot of Steel infantry now well within the keep's walls.
They emerged into a major hall, elegant dark stone, tapestries, and rugs lit with lanterns. Some servants saw them and ran in terror.
“Let's find these fucking Meraini,” Sasha growled. “Where would they hide?”
They found the Meraini barricaded within a regal suite at the top of the tower. Sasha stood just out of sight of the suite's main doors down a hallway, as Arken continued to keep watch, leaning around the corner with his shield for protection from the occasional crossbow bolt that came his way.
Yasmyn removed the bolt from Danel's arm and helped wrap the wound to stop the bleeding. Danel wanted to go downstairs and help with the battle, but Sasha told him what any with ears could now begin to tell.
“No need,” she said, leaning by a window and listening. “Once a formation of Steel got into the tower itself in good order, it was over. They know it, I hear them surrendering.”
She sent Danel and Arken to guard the hallway stairs while she watched the Meraini's suite with just one eye exposed to crossbows. As she'd thought, some men retreating from the fight below came rushing up the stairs, and in the enclosed space, Danel and Arken sent them crashing back down. She heard further yells from below, panicked men thinking they were trapped, no doubt telling their superiors that the upper floors were held by entire battalions of Steel.
They may as well have been. The local guards could fight, but with nothing like the skill of Arken and Danel, and their equipment was not to the Steel's quality. One Steel infantryman in these hallways could block the entire passage and force opponents to fight him one-on-one, a contest that nine times in ten they would lose. Seeing that, with militia of less than full commitment, demoralisation set in fast. The moment the Steel phalanx had made it past the second portcullis, the fight had been won.
Soon Arken was being summoned downstairs to accept terms. Then a pause, as prisoners were disarmed and rounded up. Then Bergen climbed the stairs and came over, grinning to see Sasha and Yasmyn guarding the Meraini's location.
“So you girls got them boxed in, huh?” His shield bore many new marks, and a bolt stuck through the steel and wood. He looked unharmed, though sweaty and tired.
“How do you like real fighting, cavalryman?” Yasmyn asked, seated against a wall with a view of the Meraini's doors. Sasha knew she'd probably been wrong to include Yasmyn in the first wave-atop the walls and guardhouses, she could have used another man with a shield, and Yasmyn's speed and climbing hadn't been as useful as she'd thought. Still, Yasmyn had done well, and would never have forgiven Sasha if left behind, for she certainly could not have taken a place in the Steel phalanx.
Arken returned with Danel and Eirden. “We have three dead,” he told her. “Two more may not live, several more are injured but not seriously. We count a hundred and thirty-seven prisoners.” To Sasha's surprise, he fought back a grin. “They could not believe it once they'd surrendered, and counted how few we were. They thought we were hundreds.”
Sasha nodded, not really surprised. “Good,” she said. “Now someone else is going to have to talk sense to the Meraini, because I don't speak the tongue, and they probably only speak Ilduuri besides.” And if they have to surrender to a woman, she didn't add, they'll probably throw themselves out the tower windows for shame.
“It's an amazing victory!” Arken continued. “I confess I did not think it could work. How did you know?”
“Practice,” said Sasha. The hero-worship was nice, but she was impatient to be out of here. Petrodor Riverside had been the first time she'd killed people and regretted it. The Altene was the first time she'd attacked and killed men who had not attacked her first. She could not get the terror on the weeping crossbowman's face out of her mind. He couldn't have been more than twenty.
Arken started shouting at the grand doorway at the end of the hall. Indignant shouts came back in Ilduuri. Arken began to translate to Sasha, but she made a face.
“I don't care,” she said. “Tell them we'll take them willingly or unwillingly.”
More Ilduuri Steel came up the stairs as Arken continued. A number were staring at Sasha in amazement to see that she was still alive, having charged alone along the walls and guardhouses with no shield or armour.
Arken soon became tired of what he was hearing and arranged six men in two lines of three. Shields overlapping, they rounded the corner at a walk, took several bolts through the shields, then ran. There followed a lot of crashing, hacking, and finally screaming, as more Steel followed their comrades in.
Sasha walked in to see, and found a broad regal chamber now strewn with the bodies of several men in chain and black embroidered shirts of a style she had not seen amongst the others. One man the Steel had down on his knees, disarmed with hands held behind him as he struggled. He had a black goatee, long dark hair bound at the back, and quite a lot of jewellery.
“Jeffensen of Meraine, he says,” said Arken, leaning on his shield. “Second son of the Chansul. He says we have committed an act of war against Meraine, that we have the blood of thousands on our hands from the battles that will follow.”
“Thousands of yours, you cock,” snorted one of the Steel. “Doesn't count, see?”
There came more scuffling from the adjoining chamber, and some swearing by the soldiers. One of them called Arken, who went. Sasha followed.
In the next room, a man was being dragged from a bedchamber. He wore the clothes of a high-class townsman: silk shirt and tight breeches. He stared at Arken, and Arken stared back. Then Arken began laughing. Surrounding soldiers seemed grimly amused.
“What?” Sasha asked in confusion.
Arken shook his head in disbelief. “General Daani,” he explained to Sasha, with the mocking little bow of a man making an introduction, “Commander of the Ilduuri Steel.”
EIGHTEEN
They could have waited the night but Sasha knew she had to move fast. She had her men (because they were assuredly her men now) commandeer enough wagons and horses for them all, plus their wounded, Jeffensen and several more Meraini, General Daani, the several senior Remischtuul found in adjoining chambers or trying to hide in the kitchens, and all the boxes of Meraini talons they could find, the stash revealed to them by one of the Altene staff, hidden in a dungeon vault.
Now they rattled down the road from the Altene, a far more pleasant descent than the way they'd come up, with torches and moonlight to show the winding way down. Sasha climbed into the rear of her wagon and slept.
She expected to be reawakened as soon as they encountered Stamentaast or other unfriendly patrols, yet as the dawn bloomed pale above mountain peaks, she awoke to find the wagons rattling along the road up the Andal Valley, with the city outskirts approaching ahead. The city was silent, and the streets as they entered were deserted. Sasha did not particularly fear Stamentaast; they only moved in smaller groups and this party was eighteen strong and able to defeat militia many times that number. Bergen and another man with cavalry experience rode in the saddle, and they'd brought additional horses tethered behind the wagons. Two more men they'd sent riding ahead to reach the Steel garrison up-valley, and tell them what had been discovered in the Altene. Sa
sha had no expectations of what the Steel would do when they heard, but thought it might be nice if she did not have to do all the persuading and motivating herself for a change.
She did not expect that the column would be abruptly stopped on the deserted city road by a group of serrin talmaad, all with arrows nocked to bowstrings, and all looking dangerously ready to fire.
“Stop, stop, stop!” Sasha called up to the lead wagon, and they reined to a halt. And to the serrin, “I am Sashandra Lenayin! To whom is your ra'shi?”
A serrin woman came around a corner, beckoned to them, then she walked back the way she'd come. The lead wagon driver looked back to Sasha, who indicated they should follow. Not liking the wagon when a saddle was available, she leaped off, untethered one horse from the rear, then mounted. Ahead, the serrin woman also retrieved a horse hidden in a lane, mounted, and the pace accelerated.
Andal was deathly quiet. It had been two days since the night of the Stamentaast's attack and the purge of Andal serrin. They passed market squares where morning trade should be commencing, past bakeries whose chimneys should have been smoking with the fires of morning bread, all barred and shuttered. Yet the serrin woman ahead rode with confidence, and did not fear ambush.
Sasha took the lead on her horse, ahead of the first wagon with Bergen beside. They passed familiar streets now, near the lakeshore where Father Belgride's temple sat, on the easternmost edge of the lake where the city was densest.
Finally they entered a large square, deserted like all the rest. Deserted, that was, save for talmaad, who sat beneath the large central tree and prepared breakfast, and trained, washed, or slept. It was a camp for a serrin army, and Sasha guessed there were at least eighty men and women here. She wondered how many more that meant there were throughout the city.
Another woman came out from the tree to meet them, and Sasha dismounted fast before her wary soldiers, ran to Aisha, and embraced her. “I'm sorry I couldn't come after you,” she said with emotion. “Something came up.”
“We stopped the riders you sent,” said Aisha, releasing her with a smile. “We heard what you did. Then we sent the riders on their way, to talk to the Steel.”
“What happened here?” Sasha asked, gesturing for her men to dismount, and gazing about at the talmaad camp. “These came across from Saalshen?” The defences of the Altene were so strong in fear of precisely that, she recalled.
Aisha nodded. “The Steel guarding the eastern border have basically retreated to garrison and stopped patrolling the border. And the locals are all friends to serrin out there, so there was no one to stop them. These talmaad were about to hit Andal, but Kiel got word and rode out to find them. Arendelle, too.”
“What happened, where are they?”
Aisha looked over her shoulder, as Rhillian appeared, with her familiar, swinging stride. “I think I'll let Rhillian explain.”
Sasha embraced Rhillian also, and made an introduction to Arken, who cautiously shook her hand. “Bring your wounded down so we can treat them,” Rhillian told him, and gestured to some serrin to help. “Then some breakfast-you must be hungry. A serrin named Tershin came to tell us where you'd gone, and I've been waiting for you. If I'm to move any further, I'll need your help.”
Rhillian explained events over breakfast and a small fire. Sasha couldn't believe it. For a long while she could think of nothing to say.
“How did you do it?” she finally managed. “I mean…the vel'ennar…”
“I know,” Rhillian said mildly. Her eyes had a faraway look. Thoughtful, and faintly sad. Yet not regretful. “I'm unsure. Errollyn is not the only serrin born with unusual instincts. You did tell me in Petrodor that you'd once thought he was the strangest serrin you'd met, only to become convinced that it was me.”
Sasha remembered that day, sitting atop dockside buildings in the sun with a view of the harbour. “I did,” she recalled. “But serrin cannot fight the vel'ennar. I've seen them try. It's paralysing.”
Rhillian shrugged. “He deserved it.”
Sasha blinked in amazement. The strangest serrin she'd ever met indeed. “And Arendelle?”
“That I regret,” Rhillian said sombrely. “Yet he was at an untested moment also. The vel'ennar led him two ways at once, to fight Kiel's killer, yet the killer was me. Kiel's ra'shi evidently won that conflict, and left me with no choice.”
“And all these other talmaad? All in preference to Kiel's ra'shi at that moment? They just accepted your actions, and went along with you?”
“Oh, no,” said Rhillian. “Quite a few of them wanted to kill me. Yet they could not. Most serrin cannot. Evidently I can, to my own astonishment as much as anyone else's. It does place me in a unique position of influence.”
“Obviously.” It was coldly phrased, put that way. Rhillian had influence because she could kill other serrin, but they could not kill her. Such a person could have unfettered power in Saalshen. All were defenceless before her. Sasha suddenly understood the thoughtful, faraway look in Rhillian's eyes.
“So how is it that you can?” she pressed her friend.
Rhillian's emerald gaze fixed on her. “Kiel's plan was evil,” Rhillian said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I do not do evil. Should Saalshen begin to do evil, Saalshen should cease to be worth saving.”
“There were times in Petrodor when I heard you reject such logic.”
Rhillian shrugged. “I've been through a lot since then. Life is not worth having if it does not serve some greater purpose. Perhaps this is a new phase of the serrinim, a new direction of our people. It is good that the vel'ennar unites us, that unity has served us well. Yet if it can also drive us to commit horrors, unthinking and unresisting, then that is no good thing at all.”
“Morality over unity,” Sasha murmured.
“Exactly.”
“You've done it now. If Saalshen enters a new age of the individual above the group, you'll find that each individual's morality is different. And that, my friend, is why humans are always fighting.”
Rhillian sighed. “We'll see. I think that the vel'ennar should remain intact enough that we do not all suddenly leap at each others' throats. In time, we may come to see that it is not my behaviour that was the aberration, it was Kiel's. I surely could never have done what I did had not Kiel forced my hand, and probably had not Errollyn's previous actions given me many thoughts to ponder. Our fates are interlinked, and not merely amongst we serrin.”
“And so what happened then?” Arken asked. “After you killed those two?”
“That will be discussed for many generations in Saalshen, I'm sure, should we survive,” Rhillian sighed. “There was a rupture in the vel'ennar, for certain. A confusion, a tul'an aehl.” Arken looked askance at Sasha, who shrugged and smiled. “A lot of us simply stood around in shock, or sat and could not speak. A few fainted. It took a while to resolve. Some of those most aggressive took to arguing, as though by argument they could bring Kiel and Arendelle back to life. I told them that any attempting to carry out Kiel's former plans would also die. When the shock of that faded away, I argued plans with them. You know serrin, we argue like rabbits fuck.
“Finally they were convinced that their only course of action was my course, and so we scouted Andal instead. I found Tershin, or rather he found me, and told me where you had gone. I decided that you could quite possibly succeed, you being you and all…” she gave a faint smile that Sasha returned, “…and that in the meantime, I had to save as many Andal serrin as possible, and try to get the Steel out of their barracks one way or the other.
“We came in and cleared the streets. The Stamentaast aren't much for fighting really, certainly not against us, and not in the dark. We must have killed several hundred for only a few losses, and the rest have barricaded themselves in around the Remischtuul, and Heroes' Square. Most regular Ilduuri here hate us, but those who attack us die, and the rest stay inside. We make no friends, save those in Steel Town; a few of them help us but even t
here they do not like to see serrin occupying their city.”
“How many are you?” Sasha asked.
“More come every day. We're nearly a thousand now. The Stamentaast and allied forces are at least double that.”
“Allied forces?”
“Militia. A few ex-Steel, but not many, mostly just local men who have found weapons. A few Nasi-Keth too, but a lot of the Nasi-Keth here hate the Stamentaast, and seem to think it justice that serrin should kill them for what they've done. But the area around Heroes' Square is open, they have many crossbows and even more shields-if we attack into that we'll have heavy losses. Talmaad are not good for such direct actions. We need the Steel.”
“You want us to help you take our own city,” Arken said bluntly. And flinched as Rhillian's stare found him.
“This is your city? Do you claim its recent actions as your own?”
“No,” Arken muttered.
“Then is it not your city?”
“Just because the Steel and those minded like us are not in control of the Remischtuul,” Arken retorted, “that does not make what you ask any easier. Andal is the capital city of Ilduur, and…”
“I'm sorry,” Rhillian interrupted, not looking at all sorry. “We serrin do not truly understand this concept of belonging without responsibility. If something is yours, you are responsible for it. You either accept Andal as yours, and its actions as yours, or you reject them both. Now, is Andal yours, or not?”
Sasha sensed something unspoken behind Rhillian's words. “How many serrin dead?” she asked quietly.
“Oh, we don't know yet,” said Rhillian, with the distraction of someone being deliberately vague to avoid confronting too powerful an emotion. “They took a lot of prisoners in that first night. Ordinary folk, many families. When we began to fight back, they needed men for fighting, and could not spare guards for the prisoners. So they herded them into houses in Remischtuul district. When the fighting began to go badly for them, they set some of those houses alight, with the prisoners still inside. We think about a thousand.”
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