by Myke Cole
Onas looked at his feet, smiling. Heloise waited for him to speak, to leave, but he only stood there, his mouth working, and she realized that his smile was frightened. He’s working up the courage to say something. The thought made her heart sink.
His next words set her stomach tumbling. “When all this is … over, I don’t see how you can just go back to being … a villager.”
“No.” Heloise’s mouth went dry. “I can’t.”
“I imagine,” Onas continued to stare at the tops of his boots, “that none of your villager men will take you for a wife now…”
He finally looked up at her, and the shock in her face rattled him, and he stammered a hasty addition, “… not because of your wounds. Beauty such as yours cannot be hidden by a scar.”
The forced grandeur in his words bewildered her. Is he … courting me? Heloise had never thought of herself as beautiful. Basina was always the beautiful one, for all the good it had done her in the end. Onas looked so mortified, so frightened, that Heloise felt she had to say something to fill the thick silence that cloaked them after he stuttered out the last word. “Thank … you.” She did not feel grateful to him, only shock and anger that he had violated her one moment of privacy to talk about her marriage prospects and her beauty.
“I’m sorry…” he went on, and a horrible thought pierced her, a spike in her mind. He’s the son of a Sindi Mother. If I anger him, will they desert our cause? “… It’s just that I wonder if you hadn’t thought of a different life, one I could offer you.”
“You … can offer me a life?”
Onas mistook the disbelief in her voice for interest. His face lit as he went on. “You are a great beauty, Heloise, but most men are frightened of … of who you are, of what you have done, of what you can do.”
Heloise was so stunned that she actually choked as she tried to draw breath. He was courting her. She suppressed the urge to flee, to lash out with the machine’s metal fist, anything to make him stop.
“But not me,” Onas went on. “We’re the same, you and I. We understand one another. I know you may not … love me yet, but the Traveling People do not always marry for love. Sometimes, if it is a good match, something that may unite the bands, or settle a dispute we…”
Heloise searched for something she could say to cut him off, desperate to stop him from speaking.
“We are fighters, Heloise,” he continued. “We are people who change things. Our wheels are turning together for a reason. You cannot know how much you have changed my band simply through your example. For the first time in many winters, I am hopeful for our future, and I want to be a part in making real what you imagine. I know we can do it better together, and when I think of what our children…”
“Our children?!” Heloise sputtered.
“Of course. So many of our people are mired in the old ways. They have lived that way for too long for them to change their minds. But we will rear children in the new way, and it will be the only way they know, and they will never accept a yoke again. We are already setting this right, can’t you see? Together, we can change everything. If … if you will allow it, I will send my mother to your father, and ask them to promise us, one to the other, our wheels to turn together until the end of our roads.”
The shock gave way to anger, and it was Heloise’s turn to stammer, “You … you only say this because you are … you mistake gratitude for love.”
Again, Onas misunderstood her, shook his head, smiling. “No, Heloise. I love you. I see your scars. I have seen you fight and kill. I know what you are to your village and to the Empire, and I choose you regardless. I love you, and I will have you to wife, if you will allow it.”
He bowed then, a ridiculous flourish that bent his front knee and swept his arm out to his side, his free hand on the hilt of one of his silver-handled knives. Tell him no, her mind screamed at her, do not let him live in hope. No good can come of it. But when she opened her mouth to answer, she was nearly swamped by the image of his face twisting first in disappointment, then in anger, of the gates opening and the Traveling People’s wagons trundling away. Don’t be stupid, the Order will never let them go. But the image, and the terror it evoked, were overwhelming. A hundred other justifications rose to her, unbidden. Onas was good, Onas had stood by her, Onas had advocated with the Mothers to help them. None of it mattered, she could not marry him. She thought of the melting feeling when she’d kissed Basina, the breathless excitement at Xilyka’s nearness. It wasn’t just Onas. She could never feel that for any man.
The thought was followed by rage. Why had he waited to ask her now? Now, when they were trapped, when she could not think and could not escape. “Why now?” she managed, but the worry robbed her voice of the anger, and Onas only misunderstood her yet again.
He shrugged. “Because we may die tomorrow, and I would not go to my grave with this unsaid.”
“Onas … I…” She thought of Xilyka, her dark eyes and hard voice. Why, of all the Traveling People to love her, couldn’t it have been her? “I just … I just don’t know.” Lies. You do know. “I don’t know.”
Onas smiled sadly, patted the air with his palms. “No need to give me your answer now. Only promise me that we will speak of this again when the fighting is done.”
No. We will never speak of this again. But Heloise felt weak with relief at the prospect of the conversation simply ending. She could put it off until after the fighting, and if living in hope made him fight more fiercely, then so much the better. He was one of her personal guard, she couldn’t imagine having to fight a battle knowing he would always be at her side, angry and disappointed. “All right,” she said, “after the fighting we will speak of this again.”
He bowed again, even more laughably exaggerated this time. “Thank you, Heloise. I will live in hope.”
And with that, he left her, standing in the weed-choked boneyard, all the peace that solitude had brought her banished by the sick anger boiling in her belly, the hammer blow pounding of her heart.
* * *
Heloise was surprised when sleep finally took her. Xilyka was crouched in the shadows by the altar, and the enemy was still outside the walls. Tomorrow the fight would begin in earnest. Onas’s suit joined Poch’s words and her father’s face in the morass that had been whirling in her mind all day, and now, at last, her body had had enough of it, and refused the waking world, no matter how much worry and terror churned in her. Heloise closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, it was night and she was slumped in the machine’s chest strap, and wind was sighing across the back of her neck. It was blessedly cool and sweet, smelling of winter’s edge; she could hear it whispering in her ears, lifting the strands of her damp hair until they tickled the tip of her nose.
The machine’s engine had died, and she didn’t have the acrid tang of the seethestone to compete with the freshness of the air, the steady thrumming of the engine in her ears. She gave herself up to the moment, breathing deeply.
She jerked upright in the strap, panic lancing through her, setting her trembling fingers scrambling for a chunk of seethestone to cram into the chute. She sawed her head left and right, desperately searching the shadows.
The wind. Blowing. Inside the thick stone walls of the chapter house.
A door was open.
The sound of her fingers digging in the salted cloth pouch sounded as loud as a ringing bell, and she froze, straining her ears, squinting into the darkness, willing herself to be able to see. For a moment, the silence continued unbroken, save for the sounds she expected: her parents’ soft snores, the whisper of that terrifying breeze.
And then she heard it.
A cloth-wrapped footfall, the gentle tread of someone moving behind her. The whisper of steel clearing a muffled scabbard.
She looked at the seethestone pouch again. The stone would rattle on its way down the chute to the engine, loud enough to wake the dead. It would take precious time to get the stone and get it into the chute, then more time for it to settle
in the puddle of water at the bottom, to activate, to build up enough pressure for the engine to bellow to life.
Whoever had come in the night, they were trying to conceal their movements. They meant her harm, and would not wait for the engine to start. And without the engine, the war-machine was just so much dead metal around her. It might protect her from a knife thrust, but not for long.
She would have to come out.
For a moment, the threat behind her faded into the larger threat that was the whole world beyond the metal and leather frame. The tiny chapter house suddenly seemed enormous, Sigir and Barnard and her parents, her guards, all so impossibly far away that they could never reach her in time to help. In the machine, she had killed a devil, had taken a walled town, but outside it, she was only Heloise, who didn’t have a weapon even if she knew how to use it.
No. Her own voice spoke up in her mind. You have a weapon. You will always have a weapon. In that moment, she forgave Onas’s stumbling proposal. This was his gift to her.
She looked down at the machine’s metal sleeve, eyes traveling the length of it to the end of her stump, where it disappeared into a slim metal collar stamped with the trefoil of the Sindi band. Beyond that, the long knife curved up, until it barely peeked out through the slot in the machine’s empty metal fist. She wiggled her stump, felt the leather straps that bound the collar in place hold fast.
It would make noise to draw it out, but it would come quickly.
She reached over, undid the strap around her chest, wincing at the gentle chiming of the buckle as it fell free. She let her feet take her weight, her legs weak after so many days of not having to carry her, muscles tightening painfully at the unexpected use.
The enormous darkness around her came rushing in, and the tightness in her chest ripped her breath away. The whispering behind her came closer, darker and more terrible than any devil she could imagine.
But Heloise kept her eyes on the long, curving blade of the knife, the metal collar that held it fast to the stump of her wrist. I have a weapon, she said to herself, over and over and over. I have a weapon I have a weapon I have a weapon.
The darkness embraced her as she leapt off the machine, ripping her arms out of the sleeves, the knife sounding a rattling warning. She could hear the whispering footsteps cease as the strangers froze.
Heloise leapt down from the machine, landed on her feet, jogging until she tripped over Onas’s sleeping form, curled against the altar where he was supposed to have been keeping watch.
“Xilyka!” Heloise shouted, taking a long step to keep from falling, checking her forward momentum against one of the candelabra, sending it to the floor with a crash. “Wake! Wake! Danger! Wake!”
Her eyes were already adjusting to the darkness as she turned. She could see her mother rising up on one elbow, shaking her father’s shoulder. Barnard was also rising, and Xilyka had sprung already to her feet, a sheaf of blades fanning out in her hand.
Beyond them were six figures, woven from threads of shadow, living darkness in human shape, and they sprang after her, flowing around the machine, raising their weapons to strike.
Heloise recognized their slim blades, the black cloth shrouding every inch of skin.
The Black-and-Grays.
But Heloise barely glanced at them. Her gaze was fixed over their shoulders at something far more horrifying.
Sigir.
He was clothed, as if he had not slept, and he wore his armor—his iron cuirass and pot helm. In one hand, he held a sharp dagger. In the other, the handle of the chapter house’s postern door, still holding it open wide to let the assassins in.
Her mind couldn’t process the sight. Sigir who had loved her, who had fought for her, who had wept after the Knitting of Hammersdown, who had sheltered her father. How could he … Her mind spun a dozen tales to excuse him. He had been tricked, he had been forced, it wasn’t really him. But there was no time to consider it. The Black-and-Grays were upon her, and Xilyka shouldered her out of the way. The Hapti girl swept her arm across her chest, letting the thin, flat knives fly.
The assassins leapt aside, rolling on their shoulders and landing on their feet, but one of the knives sank deep into one Black-and-Gray’s chest and he stumbled as he tried to rise, then collapsed. Two of the assassins rushed Heloise, one from each side, knocking into the machine and sending it rocking on its long metal legs. Her mind tried to reconcile it all, the sight of Sigir holding the door wide, these strange shadow men. This is just a dream. There’s no need to fight. You will wake any moment now.
One of the assassins’ swords flicked in and Heloise raised her knife-hand to parry it. The shock against the collar tight around her wrist reminded her she was wrong, jolting all thoughts of dreams from her mind. The other assassin missed her by an inch, and then Onas shouted and Heloise could see the Sindi boy tackle the Black-and-Gray, his hooked knife rising and falling as he plunged it into the assassin’s face.
The remaining three assassins tried to find a way to assist their fellows, but they were blocked by the war-machine, its huge metal bulk covering most of the floor between the postern door and the altar, and they could not strike without hitting their own. Onas dropped the man he had killed and spun his way toward them, while Xilyka drew another handful of knives.
The assassin fighting Heloise pushed his sword down, forcing Heloise’s knife aside, and stabbed at her face with his dagger. She jerked aside, but still felt the slim metal pierce her cheek, bursting through her teeth in an explosion of pain that made her vision go gray. Her mouth filled with the taste of blood and she staggered back, screaming. The assassin advanced, raising his sword for the death blow.
And then his head was gone, and Barnard’s forge hammer swept past. The momentum of the swing carried the huge tinker around in a circle, sent him wheeling back into the remaining assassins. Heloise looked in vain for Sigir, but the pain in her face was so great that her single eye watered, and she couldn’t find him. One of the three remaining assassins dropped, gurgling, one of Xilyka’s knives in his throat. Another was being driven back by the blur of Onas’s flashing knives, sparks flying as he attempted to parry the Sindi boy’s whirling onslaught. The Black-and-Gray did his best, but Onas’s weapons weaved as if they were alive, darting over and under the assassin’s sword to bury themselves in his throat.
The last assassin fell back, to where Leuba was helping Samson to his feet. He kicked Samson in the face, sending Heloise’s father tumbling backward. Leuba scrambled after Samson, calling his name. No! Heloise thought, You can’t help him by turning your back on the enemy! She hated her mother in that moment, weak, powerless, doing precisely the wrong thing.
The assassin kept his eyes on Barnard as he casually stabbed down with his dagger, slipping the slim blade between Leuba’s shoulder blades.
Heloise and Barnard shouted in time, and the huge tinker brought his hammer down. The assassin raised his sword to parry, but the strength of the blow shattered the blade, and the hammer crunched into the man’s shoulder, driving him to a knee.
She watched her mother go still, sprawled over her father. Heloise shrieked, leaping for them. An arm across her chest held her back.
She recognized the touch of the calloused palm, the pattern of hair on the back of the hand.
Sigir.
She threw an elbow behind her, was rewarded by stinging pain as it collided with Sigir’s metal breastplate. She could hear the jingling of his chain of office against it, could smell his sour breath as he pulled her close. His beard was wet. Tears, she realized. He’s crying.
“Forgive me, Heloise.” His voice was soft, even gentle, full of the same sorrow and care she’d heard when he’d spoken to her after Hammersdown. “I must think of the whole village.”
She twisted, knowing what was coming, almost feeling more than seeing the knife flash as he brought it down past her face, plunging it to its hilt into her chest.
There was no pain, only a cold, wet feeling in her lungs
. Sigir released her and she whirled on him, striking out with her knife-hand, but her movements were coming to her as if from a long way off, her body responding like the war-machine did when its seethestone was nearly spent, sluggish and slow. The Maior parried the blow easily, the look of kind sorrow never leaving his face. That look made her all the more furious, and she struggled to reach him, only now she was somehow facing the cold stone of the floor. I’ve fallen, she thought dimly. How did I get here?
And then she heard her father give a strangled cry, and everything went black.
12
DIE TO MAKE IT SO
My hands quenched by the blood of the righteous, and still they burn. By blood and fire are they cleansed, that they may in turn cleanse.
The blood cleanses in the shedding, making pure, but the fire cleanses the purest of all.
The fire is both My love and My wrath.
Even as it purifies the afflicted, it lights the way,
Even as it warms the cold, it scours,
Even as it feeds the hungry, it drives Mine enemy into the dark.
—Writ. Ere. VIX. 7
Heloise awoke to a rhythmic smacking sound, not too different from the wet thudding of her mother’s fist when she softened a cut of meat by punching it against the cutting board. She tried to sit up, couldn’t. The smacking sound went on. There was a grunting to accompany each impact, and she recognized her father’s voice. She craned her head to look.
“Be still,” Leahlabel said. “You’re going to be all right, but there’s no sense in taking chances. Just give me another moment.”
It was then that the pain reached her, the throbbing of her cheek and her wounded mouth, pulsing in time with the wound in her chest. She breathed weakly, the passage of air clotted and thick, as if a heavy cloth had been tied over her face. The pain pulsed and she spasmed with it, head tilting back, giving her a view of the source of the smacking sound.
Her father held Sigir by the dented collar of his breast plate, was hitting him steadily, over and over and over again. Sigir was slack in his grip, his face purple and swollen so badly that he looked more rotten turnip than man. Heloise reached out with her tongue and felt the hole in her cheek that Leahlabel had healed. The gap was scarred over and whole, but the assassin’s knife had taken two of her teeth, and they would not be back.
