The Queen of Crows

by Myke Cole

  The sky and the ground changed places and she fell down the gate’s far side. She could hear the ram jingling against its chains, the shouts of the soldiers around it as they looked up and saw her hurtling toward them. She righted, getting the machine’s feet under her, the world blurring again, the horizon rushing past. She glanced down to ensure that the machine’s metal feet were positioned correctly, had only an instant to look at the ram’s tar-soaked roof.

  The impact was much less than she’d expected. Where the ground was leagues deep, the ram’s roof wasn’t more than a handspan of wood shingles. Heloise barely felt it break as the machine’s massive weight punched through it, spraying her face with splinters, the oddly pleasant smell of pitch and pine. She shut her eyes against the sharp fragments of wood, but she could hear the shrieking of the chains as the machine straddled the long, wooden ram, the wood thunking against the metal crotch, holding for a moment and finally ripping free to drop into the mud.

  The screaming began, and Heloise opened her eyes. The ram’s interior was like a comfy cottage, shadows gathering in the eaves, curling back from the light admitted by the hole she had punched in the roof. One of the supporting beams had fallen inward, crushing two of the soldiers flat. A third man, one of the uhlans, was the source of the screaming. He must have been holding the back of the ram, and he lay beneath the fallen log, arms smashed under its weight, the pale shredded skin visible around its edges, seeping crimson into the earth. There were another eight men crowded in there with her, uhlans and levy, all wide-eyed and backed against the thick walls. They wore what little armor they’d retained for the work of swinging the great log, but had left their weapons behind.

  Not that weapons would have done them any good.

  Because Heloise wasn’t thinking of the reluctant levy, forced into the fight, and how she didn’t want to hurt them. She was only thinking of her mother, her pale flesh blackening in the crackling pyre, of Sigir and his sad eyes, the look of grief as he’d plunged the knife into her chest.

  She turned to one of the levy, a boy no older than Onas, so terrified that he gibbered, drooling, his palms flat against the ram’s wall, as if he could somehow push himself through it.

  “We fought the Order!” Heloise screamed at him, using her shield to sweep aside one of the uhlans who found the courage to charge her.

  “We’re the same as you and we fought them!” She stabbed the levy boy, the knife going through his gut and the wall behind. She kept pushing, driving the point in, until it reached its end and the machine’s metal fist crushed his ribs, the cracks sounding louder than the splintering wood when she’d crashed through the roof.

  She leaned in, drilling her gaze into his dying eyes. “We fought them. Why couldn’t you?”

  The anger fled as abruptly as it came, leaving hollow, exhausted grief in its place. “Why couldn’t you?” she whispered, drawing the knife out, leaving him to slump slowly down the wall, leaving a trail of fresh blood as wide as his shoulders.

  One of the other levy, an older man, screamed the boy’s name and rushed at her. His father, no doubt, or an uncle. It didn’t matter. Kin or not, grieved or not, he would open the postern gate. He would let the Order in. There was nothing she could do for him. She met him with the corner of the shield, bringing it down so hard against his shoulder that she snapped him in half, folding him over sideways to flop like a landed fish against the ram’s iron-shod head.

  The rest of them fled after that, tripping over one another, jamming the ram’s small doorway, meant to protect those inside from attack, but not to allow for easy exit. Heloise worked like the machine itself, cool and efficient, stabbing and smashing until they were a barricade of corpses, blocking the soldiers and Pilgrims outside, who at first tried to come to their comrades’ rescue and finally stood back, watching in horror.

  They tried shooting arrows and casting javelins in through the tiny opening, and then Heloise heard the crackle of flames as they finally gave up and set fire to the structure. A soldier made to force the doorway, but after Heloise gutted him and added his corpse to the pile, no one else made the attempt. And when at last the heat grew too great, Heloise squatted again, and leapt back out the hole she’d created, perched delicately on the ram’s peak, then jumped again, clearing the tower easily this time, and disappearing down the far side to land beside Onas and Xilyka, panting from their long run to the gate. Two of the townsfolk had joined them, hastily nailing boards crisscross along the cracks in the gate. As Heloise watched, a third scrambled up the tower and began hurling rocks down the other side.

  “Don’t…” Onas panted, “run away like that.”

  “Had to be done,” Heloise’s spoke through the cloud of her grief, her voice coming as if from a long way off. “Had to be done,” she repeated. What her father had said after the Knitting, when he excused the slaughter of Hammersdown.

  Onas misunderstood her, his eyes fixed on the gate. “Someone else could have done it.”

  “No.” Heloise looked up. “It had to be me.”

  More townsfolk arrived, racing up the rampart to cram into the towers, hurling stones. Children rummaged through the grass in the shade of the tower walls, finding stones big enough that it took two of them to lift, and walked them ponderously up to their parents on the wall.

  “That won’t hold,” Onas said, watching them.

  “It will, for now,” Xilyka said.

  “It will have to,” Heloise said, looking at the wall she’d come from, where the siege tower was burning brightly now. The rampart was crammed with bodies now, so many that it looked as if it were boiling. “Are we winning?”

  “We’re holding,” Onas said. “There’s no need for you to…”

  But she was already running, slow enough that they could keep pace with her, not because she needed their protection, but because they were two more bodies to throw into the fight, because she was not asking them to do anything she wasn’t about to do herself. They did not disappoint, running fast enough that she actually lengthened the machine’s stride. When she saw they had mounted the rampart, she leapt for it herself, coming down on the parapet beside Leahlabel.

  The Sindi Mother knelt, her hands on the belly of a knife-dancer, brow furrowed in concentration. Giorgi slumped beside her, his face gray, a pink-scarred wound freshly healed in his thigh. His flame-men were gone, but they had done their work well, and the enemy position on the rampart was still burning brightly. The soldiers held one of the watchtowers, and had built a barricade beneath it, walling off the rampart with their own blackened corpses and timbers hacked from the burning siege tower. The knife-casters stood off at a distance, flat knives held at the ready, sending them shooting through the flames whenever one of the enemy was stupid enough to raise his head above the burning beams.

  It was a stalemate, but a stalemate that favored the attackers. As Heloise watched, two more ladder teams raced forward below the wall. Behind them came a column of gray-cloaked Pilgrims. The Order joining the fight at last.

  “We have to clear the rampart,” Samson shouted over his shoulder, his words cracking as he saw that Heloise had returned. He grunted at her and turned back to the barricade, thrusting with his spear, trying to unseat one of the broken pieces of wood.

  Barnard rested on the haft of his hammer, but Heloise could see the muscles in his shoulders bunching as he prepared to take it up again. “Don’t be a damn fool, Barnard,” Samson groused at him.

  “That barricade has got to go, Samson. You’re not going to break it with a Throne-cursed spear.”

  “I just need some time,” Samson grunted, sending one of the blackened corpses tumbling off the top. The enemy soldiers lurched back as it fell, then raced forward to add another beam to the top.

  “We don’t have time!” Barnard swept his hammer up.

  “He’s right,” Heloise said as she pushed past them both, ignoring their shouts. The enemy cried out and she saw three archers standing to shoot her. One fell screami
ng, a Hapti knife buried in his chest, and the other two vanished as Heloise brought the shield in front of her, but she could hear the dull pings as their arrowheads ricocheted off the metal surface.

  She lowered her shoulder, and felt the barricade break apart as the machine surged through it. Men screamed as they were knocked from the rampart. She could hear the screeching of blades, wild swings scraping the machine’s metal frame. She heard a roar and the scraping stopped, punctuated by more screams as Barnard appeared on her left, swinging his hammer, each strike sending two or three of the enemy falling to their deaths below. She could see the point of her father’s spear, striking beneath her arm, whisking in to hole an enemy uhlan in the gut before sliding out again, then darting in again to find some other bit of unprotected flesh. She felt the touch of something heavy on the machine’s shoulder, and then Onas was leaping off her, spinning into the enemy, knives blurring out to send the enemy scrambling back. Heloise and her people surged forward.

  In moments, they had passed the burning remnants of the siege tower, and the press of bodies went suddenly tight. They had reached the end of the rampart, where the base of the wall’s watchtower interrupted it. The enemy could run no farther. She could feel them crushed against the surface of her shield, scrambling to reach her, Barnard and her father pressed against the machine’s back. She tried to draw her knife-hand up to strike, heard Xilyka cry out as the movement pushed the Hapti girl dangerously close to the rampart’s edge. They were packed much too close to move. It was all right. Heloise didn’t need her knife. The weight of the machine would be enough. She leaned forward, letting the machine’s weight push the shield, and heard the coughing gasp of the man on the other side as he was crushed against his fellows.

  A flash of gray drew her eyes down to the rampart’s edge. Hooks were glinting in the sunlight as the ladder attached to them rattled. She heard the jingling of iron chains.

  “The ladders!” Heloise called to Xilyka. “Get them off!”

  She heard the Hapti girl grunting as she tried to move through the press of bodies to reach the trembling ladder, as the first of the gray hoods appeared over the rampart’s edge, but she could not move. She threw a knife instead, but the jostling of the fight would not allow her to aim. The blade struck the Pilgrim on the shoulder, went spinning harmlessly off into the empty air.

  And then the man was up, his hood flying back, his teeth bared. He balanced easily on the rampart’s edge, one boot hooked through the ladder’s top rung, the other over the battlement, his flail held by the end of the haft, high over his head. He swept it down, the weapon reaching well past Heloise and her guard, and into the press of bodies behind her. Heloise did not recognize the voices that screamed and cursed, but she could tell they were Traveling People, and when the Pilgrim brought his weapon back up, the flail head was bloody.

  He laughed. “Be cleansed! Be quit of heresy! Fall beneath His glory!” The flail came down again. Heloise reached for him, nearly sent Xilyka tumbling again. “Someone stop him!”

  Onas turned from the enemy soldiers to the Pilgrim, and was driven back by a great sweep of the flail that would have struck him were it not for Heloise’s shield corner catching the haft. At last, her father thrust his spear, the point coming in low, from between the machine’s legs. It caught the Pilgrim in his groin, turning his laughter into a high-pitched shriek, sending him tumbling from the wall. Within moments, another Pilgrim had scrambled up, hooking his feet in the same way, anchoring him in place. Heloise’s stomach fell. They can do this all day.

  She felt her shield shoved, jerked her head to the side as a blade came whickering over the top edge. “The Throne!” A shout rose from the enemy pressed against the tower’s edge, rallying at the sight of their Pilgrims in the fight at last. “The Throne!”

  She felt a tug as Xilyka scrambled up her knife-arm, racing to find a grip as the machine was shoved backward. The sentry behind her was not so quick, and Heloise felt him lose his balance as the machine pushed him, toppling off the wall.

  “Spread out!” Heloise shouted. “Make room!” But her mouth was pointed at the enemy, and even if she had been facing her own force, they wouldn’t have been able to hear her over the din.

  Slowly, the defenders were pushed back, until the Pilgrim was able to come off the ladder and stand on the rampart. Another swarmed up behind him, and another. No, Heloise thought. She had stopped the ram. She had killed that boy. They couldn’t lose the wall this way, not now. But the momentum couldn’t be denied. She threw her weight behind the shield and pushed with everything she had, but she only managed to slow, not stop, what was becoming an insurmountable tide. There was a drumming against her shield. A man scrambled over the top, his short hatchet drawing sparks as it clanged against the metal frame above her head. She ducked, instinctively, punched out with her knife-hand, spitting the man through his mouth and knocking him off her shield. There was another roar, and she was shoved backward again.

  “Heloise!” A woman’s voice, older, she recognized it. Florea. “Heloise, hold them for a moment longer!”

  “I can’t!” Heloise tried to yell. Flail heads drummed on her shield now. She could hear the plinking of the spikes against the surface. A Pilgrim had replaced the man she’d stabbed through the mouth. She could hear his high-born accent thundering at her from the other side of the thick metal.

  And then suddenly the pressure was slackening, and Heloise heard shouts of terror from the enemy. She had been pushing so hard that the sudden lack of resistance sent her stumbling forward, the machine overbalancing. It skidded on its metal knees, sliding on the rampart to the top of the scaling ladder, suddenly empty. She looked to her left and saw Xilyka, Barnard, and her father staring open-mouthed over the wall. To her right the enemy was shrieking, cramming themselves back against the base of the watchtower, waving swords and spears as if they were trying to ward something off. Only three Pilgrims remained among them, writhing and wriggling on the rampart, their gray cloaks bound fast to them by coils of rope.

  Heloise turned to look back down the ladder. The sickening height made her dizzy, but the leather straps holding her fast to the machine’s seat kept the sensation from overwhelming her. At least a dozen more Pilgrims lay in the grass at the ladder’s base, all bound in ropes, writhing and kicking as their comrades on the rampart. Heloise saw the same ropes twining their way up the ladder, coiling and uncoiling as they came.

  Suddenly, her vision focused and she jerked back, the machine groaning as she shot upright.

  Not ropes.

  Snakes.

  “Don’t worry, Heloise.” Mother Florea’s voice sounded strained. “They won’t hurt you.”

  The Hapti woman had come to stand beside Samson, her hands waving in the air over the rampart. She took a few steps closer to the enemy, until she stood beside one of the kicking Pilgrims. “You don’t have to worry either,” she said to the remaining enemy flattened against the tower’s base. “Snakes only eat mice.” She nudged the corner of the Pilgrim’s gray cloak with one soft boot.

  The Pilgrims shrieked and shuddered, their bodies disappearing under the growing mass of writhing serpents. A few were the big forest vipers all children learned to spot before their parents would let them go into the woods, but most of them were small garden snakes, glittering green or mottled gray, coiling and uncoiling, gripping folds in fabric, or a wrist or a finger, and biting, biting, over and over again. The rampart rippled between the ladder and the kicking bodies, and Heloise realized with a start that they were climbing. The snakes were wriggling their way up to the ladder’s top and over. She looked back down to see the ground alive with them, the army scuttling back like the ripples in a pond where the stone is thrown, giving the line of snakes as much room as possible.

  “You may go,” Florea said to the enemy soldiers, “back down the ladder. They will let you climb. They will not harm you. Or you may stay, and they will. Make your choice.”

  But Heloise barely notice
d the remaining enemy as they ran past her to the ladder, as the snakes writhed out of their way, coiled aside to let them begin their descent. She didn’t see the soldiers’ fearful glances as they passed within a handspan of her, so close that Onas and Xilyka came running to stand at her side, blades drawn.

  Her eyes were fixed on the black tent, the one the armored knights had guarded so carefully.

  They were gone.

  The flaps were open, exposing the gray interior to the shifting light.

  It was empty.

  14

  THE END

  To the Song of the false Emperor, from Lord Ludhuige, First Sword to the Senate of the Free Peoples of the Gold Coast: Greetings. I will not waste words—you burn wizards as you traffic in wizardry. You claim to shield the people from devils as you introduce them into our midst. Your throne is heavy, and unbalanced. Soon, it shall topple upon the people of your lands, and they shall bear its full weight. In the name of these people, who have done no wrong, and warrant no hardship, I demand you quit your throne, and kneel before the people you claim to serve, and submit to their judgment.

  —Letter from Ludhuige the Red to the Emperor’s Song on the eve of the Battle of the Bend

  Florea kept the snakes up until the last of the enemy had descended and the scaling ladders had been pulled up, cast down the inside of the wall to clatter on the common green. Only then did she exhale, sitting down where she was, and the snakes wriggled over the side of the wall and were gone. “That,” she panted, “haven’t done something like that since I was a girl.”

  Xilyka ran to her, kneaded her shoulders. “Are you all right?”

  Florea patted her hand. “Didn’t become Mother of a band by being soft, girl.”

  “Sacred Throne,” Samson whispered, “we held.”

  “We did.” Barnard wiped a forearm across his brow. “For the Emperor’s eye is on his Palantine and her people, always.”