by S L Farrell
“No!” she told them. “Stay and fight, or you’ll face my blade! Stay!”
“Third line, kneel. Third line, fire!” Talbot cried, and this time the volley was a stutter rather than a concerted explosion, but still more Tehuantin were falling. Brie could see the enemy wavering. “Again!” she shouted to Talbot. “Hurry!”
“First line, kneel! First line, fire!” Another stuttering, and some of the men could not fire at all, still clumsily trying to load their pieces with trembling hands. But yet more of the Tehuantin were down and the arrow fire had stopped entirely. Down the hill, injured and dying warriors were screaming in their language, and other painted warriors were shouting in return. “Second line, kneel. Second line, fire!”
Again the sparkwheels gave their roar, and as more warriors fell, the Tehuantin finally broke. The warriors turned and began running back down the hill despite the efforts of their offiziers to hold them, and it was suddenly a panicked retreat. The sparkwheeler corps gave a shout of triumph, and a few, without orders from Talbot, fired their sparkwheels at the retreating backs. At the top of the hill, fists punched the air in triumph.
Brie shouted a huzzah with them, but then she looked behind and the joy died in her throat. Well below, on the road, the Garde Kralji was in full flight. She could see Allesandra’s banner waving and hear the cornets calling retreat. Behind them, the Tehuantin warriors were pursuing: a black wave of them that overspread the road along both hills, a wave that would overwhelm their cadre of sparkwheelers if they stayed. “Talbot!” Brie shouted. “To the Kraljica! We can’t stay here.”
They may have won a small victory in their skirmish, but there would be no greater victory here. She led Talbot and the sparkwheelers down the hill to join the Kraljica in her flight.
Niente had thought that Tototl would chase the Easterners straight back into their city, or even overrun their retreat and slay them here. He might have done exactly that, except one of the High Warriors came gasping back to them raving of a massacre: the group that had been sent to the western flank had been nearly destroyed. Tototl called a halt to the advance, sending only a few squadrons to to pursue the fleeing Easterners. Tototl and Niente had followed the High Warrior around to the far side of the hill. Now Niente was looking up on a terrible carnage on the hillside before him—though he’d seen worse in his long deades of warfare, certainly. He’d witnessed men hacked to pieces, had viewed corpses piled on corpses. But this: there was an eerie quiet here, and the bodies were strangely whole. There was too little blood.
Tototl had leaped down from his horse, going from body to body strewn over the grassy slope. “What magic did this?” he demanded of Niente.
Niente shook his head. “A magic I haven’t seen before,” he said to Tototl.
“Why didn’t you see this?” Tototl raged, and Niente could only continue to shake his head. His hands were trembling. He could smell black sand in the air.
Black sand.
This was no magic . . . The thought kept coming back to him with the scent. The fact that black sand was not created from the X’in Ka was something Niente had kept from the Tecuhtli and the warriors. He wanted the warriors to believe that black sand was something magical. He hadn’t wanted them to know that anyone could make it if they knew the ingredients, the measures of the formula, and the method of preparation. He and the few nahualli he’d entrusted with the secret kept it so—they all suspected that if the warriors could make black sand themselves, they might decide they had no need of nahualli at all.
This was no magic . . .
He knew this, but he could not admit it to Tototl.
If Atl is facing this also . . . Fear ran cold through him, and he nearly reached for the carved bird, nearly spoke the word that would allow him to communicate with his son and warn him. But he would be too late: that battle was undoubtedly also underway. Too late. And while the Easterners had this deadly skill, it still hadn’t made a difference in this battle. They had taken out the flanking troops, but they’d still be routed.
But Tototl was right in one respect: he had not seen this. What would the scrying bowl say now?
“The Easterners have learned a spell they’ve never shown us before,” he told Tototl. The wounded bled from deep, jagged, but nearly circular holes. The dead were the worst—it looked as if they been struck by invisible arrows that had—impossibly—torn through metal-and-bamboo armor to plunge deep into the bodies, sometimes lancing entirely through them. And on the top of the hill, where the surviving warriors had said that the terrible barrage had come from, there were no bodies at all, very few signs of blood, though there were a few Tehuantin arrows on the ground. But the ground wasn’t disturbed as it would have been had they needed to drag away bodies. The Easterners had been able to inflict this damage on them without significant loss of their own.
Could they have done this with the main troops? Are they holding this back, waiting for a better place to use this power?
It may not have been magic, but something both awful and unbelievable had happened here. They had used black sand in some way that Niente could not comprehend. “I need to use the scrying bowl again,” he said to Tototl. “Something has changed, something Axat didn’t show me before. This is important. I worry about the Tecuhtli.” The Long Path: could it still be there? Could it have changed, too? Or has everything changed? Has Atl seen this? He had to know. He had to find out. He was missing something that was critical to understanding their situation—he could feel it in the roiling in his gut, a burning. He felt old, used up, useless.
“There isn’t time,” Tototl answered. “The Tecuhtli will take care of himself, and he has the Nahual with him. The city is open to us. All we need to do is chase them. They’re running; I can’t give them time to regroup.”
“Then as soon as we can after we reach the city,” Niente told him. “Look at this! Do you want this to happen to us or to Citlali?”
Tototl scowled. “Pour oil on the bodies and burn them,” he ordered the warriors. “Then rejoin us. Niente, come with me—the city awaits us.”
He spat on the ground. Then, with a final scowl, he remounted. Niente was still staring, still trying to make some sense of this. “Come, Uchben Nahual,” Tototl told him. “The answers you want are running from us as we stand here.”
In that, the warrior was right. Niente sighed, then went to his own horse and—with the help of one of the warriors—pulled himself back into the saddle.
They rode away, Tototl already calling out to resume their advance.
If the day had been terrible, the night was hideous. Varina was huddled with the Garde Civile, pressed between the two earthen ramparts that had been built over the previous few days, and the night rained spark and fire, as if hands were plucking the very stars from the heavens and hurling them to earth. Both sides now used catapults to throw black sand fire into each other’s ranks. The explosions thundered every few breaths: sometimes distant, sometimes distressingly close.
There was no rest this night and no sleep. She watched the fireballs arc overhead to fall westward, and cowered as the return barrage hammered at their ramparts. She tried to blot out the sounds of screams and wails whenever one of the Tehuantin missiles struck.
This was worse than open combat. At least there she had a semblance of control. There was no control in this: her life, and the lives of all of those around her were up to the whims of fate and accident. The next fireball could fall on her and it would be over, or it would miss and take someone else’s life. Varina felt helpless and powerless, cowering with her back against cold dirt and trying to recover as much of her strength as she could so that she could replenish her spells for the attack that would come in the morning.
It would come. They all knew it.
The news from the north had been disheartening. Neither Starkkapitän ca’Damont nor Hïrzg Jan, with the Firenzcian troops, had been able to hold the west bank of the Infante. Both had been forced to retreat across the river. Worse,
the word had come that Hïrzg Jan had been injured during the retreat, as the a’Certendi bridge was destroyed. The rumors were wild and varied: Varina heard that Jan was dying; she heard that he had been carried back to the city to the healers; she heard that he was directing the defense from his tent-bed; she heard that he’d had himself lashed to his horse so that he would appear unhurt to his men as he rode about encouraging them; she’d heard that his injuries were minor and he was fine.
She had no idea which rumors were false and which true. What was apparent was that the battle of the day before had been only a prelude. The Infante would be forded; they all knew that. The Tehuantin would find the shallow places and they would cross as soon as it was light.
She trembled, closing her eyes as another fireball shrieked overhead and exploded well to her left. Had she believed in Cénzi, she would have prayed—there were certainly prayers being mumbled all around her. She almost envied the comfort the soldiers might find in them.
“Varina?” Commandant ca’Damont crouched next to her. In the noise, she hadn’t heard his approach. She started to stand, but he shook his head and motioned to her to stay down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was trying to rest.”
He smiled wanly. “There’s not much rest around here. I wanted to tell you—Mason, your Vajiki ce’Fieur: the healers say he’ll recover. They’ve going to evacuate him back to the city.”
“Good. Thank you. I appreciate your telling me that.”
“I want you to go with him,” ca’Damont continued. “This is no place for you.”
An old, frail woman . . . She could nearly hear the unsaid comment. “No,” she told him. “You need me here. I’m A’Morce Numetodo; this is where I belong.”
“More war-téni have arrived,” he said. “A full double hand. And I have the other Numetodo you brought with you. You proved yourself earlier, Varina. No one could ask more of you. And you have a child to think of.”
She wanted to agree. She wanted to take his offer and go running back to the city—but even there she wouldn’t be safe. She could flee as far as she wanted, she could take Serafina and go east or north, but if they lost here—and she could see no way that they could win—she would always wonder whether she should have stayed, whether her presence might have made a difference.
Karl would not have fled. He would have stayed, even if he thought that the battle was lost. She knew that for a certainty. “Most of the gardai here have children to think of,” she told him firmly. “That’s why they’re here.”
“Still . . .”
“I’m not leaving,” she told him.
The Commandant nodded. He stood and saluted her. “You’re certain?”
She gave a shuddering laugh as another fireball howled past. Firelight bloomed and shadows moved as it exploded. “No,” she answered. “But I’m staying, and you’re interrupting my rest.”
They heard the low rumble of another explosion somewhere beyond the rampart. “Rest?” the Commandant said. “I doubt any of us will be getting that tonight. But all right. Stay if you want. Cénzi knows that we need all the help we can get.” He seemed to realize what he’d said, giving a wry half-smile. “Forgive me, A’Morce.”
“Don’t apologize,” she told him. “If your Cénzi exists, I hope He’s listening to you.”
It wasn’t supposed to have been this way. Sergei had prayed to Cénzi, but Cénzi hadn’t answered—not that he expected any help from that quarter. The Tehuantin pursued Kraljica Allesandra and the Garde Kralji all the way back into the city. The Kraljica had tried to re-form and stand at Sutegate, but the Tehuantin were moving across too wide a swath now, pouring into the city’s streets from everywhere along the southern reaches. Allesandra didn’t have troops enough to cover the city’s entire southern border. It had become quickly obvious that they couldn’t hold the South Bank: not with the Garde Kralji, not even with the sparkwheelers, who had proved oddly effective during the retreat. They’d pulled back even farther, abandoning the entire South Bank for the Isle A’Kralji.
They could keep the Tehuantin from pouring through the bottlenecks that were the two bridges.
Sergei had urged Allesandra to destroy the Pontica a’Brezi Veste and Pontica a’Brezi Nippoli entirely, to take down the spans so that the Tehuantin couldn’t cross the southern fork of the A’Sele without ships. She refused. “The ponticas stay up,” she said. “I will not just give up half the city. The bridges stay up, we defend them tonight, and tomorrow we’ll go back across them to take back our streets.”
Sergei had argued vehemently with her, and Commandant cu’Ingres had agreed with Sergei; neither of their arguments convinced her to change her mind.
And it was on the Pontica a’Brezi Veste and the Pontica a’Brezi Nippoli that the sparkwheelers truly excelled. With Brie and Talbot’s guidance, the corps had controlled the small spaces. Though the Westlanders had thrown wave after wave at them through the late afternoon and into the dusk, they’d left both bridges full of corpses. After several vain attempts and with the sunlight dying, the Westlanders had finally pulled back.
From the roof of the Kraljica’s Palais, Sergei could see fires burning in the South Bank where once the téni had lit the lanterns along the Avi a’Parete. The yellow flames were a mockery. To the west and north, across the A’Sele but still outside the city, there were constant rumbles and the flashes of explosions, as if a rainless, cloudless thunderstorm had taken up residence there. Below, beyond the outer walls of the courtyards and entrance to the palais, in the Avi, Brie was still awake, on foot now. Sergei could hear her voice in the stunned silence of the palais: setting the watches on the bridge and exhorting the sparkwheelers to see to their weapons, get what rest they could, but be ready to respond at need.
Hïrzgin Brie had proved to be as valuable as her husband in this fight. Perhaps more so.
Sergei felt Allesandra come alongside him. She was still dressed in her armor, though it was no longer gleaming and polished: in the moonlight, he could see the scratches and scorch marks of the battle. Her graying hair was matted to her head. A sextet of Garde Kralji were with her, as well as the few remaining members of the Council of Ca’ who had not fled the city. “Tomorrow,” she told Sergei, told the councillors, “we will take back the South Bank.”
“We will try as best we can,” Sergei said. His tone betrayed his feeling as to the success they would find.
“We will,” Allesandra answered sternly. The councillors looked frightened, and Sergei knew that they all believed that as unlikely as he did. A flash, and—belatedly—another rumble came from the west. He could feel the building trembling under his feet with the sound. The councillors looked around as if searching for shelter; the gardai shuffled nervously, clenching their pikes. “A runner’s come from the North Bank,” Allesandra said. “The Tehuantin have the west side of the Infante, and the Garde Civile has pulled back to the earthworks. They’re safe for now. They’ll try to ford the river tomorrow and we will push them back. Let the Infante and then the A’Sele take their bodies back to the sea.”
“We will try, I’m sure,” Sergei answered again. “Have you heard further news of the Hïrzg?”
Her face tightened. “I’m told that Hïrzg Jan has refused to return to the city. How badly he’s been injured . . .” She shrugged. “No one is saying. He’s my son, and he’s a soldier. He will continue to fight as long as he can.”
Sergei glanced down again to where Brie was patrolling. “Does she know?”
“I told Brie myself. I offered to let her go to him while she can. She said her place was here for now, and that Cénzi could keep Jan safe better than she could.” Allesandra almost smiled. “I think she’s learned to have a fondness for these sparkwheelers.”
Sergei grunted. “I hope she’s right,” he said. “We can’t hold back the Tehuantin, Kraljica. Soon, they’re going to start bombarding us with black sand until we can’t station the sparkwheelers at the bridgeheads any longer, and onc
e the sparkwheelers have pulled back they’ll come across. We need to take down the ponticas to the South Bank and cut them off. Let them throw what they want at us, but they won’t be able to cross—not until they build boats.”
Alesandra drew back. Her eyes narrowed, her lips pursed. “You’ve said all this too many times already, Sergei. I won’t give up the South Bank. I will not abandon my city. Not while I can draw breath. No.” She took in a breath through her nose, loud in the night. “I’ve asked Commandant ca’Talin or Starkkapitän ca’Damont to send us a company or two of gardai to help.”
“Kraljica, they can’t spare them. Not with the Tehuantin force they’re facing. You can’t ask that of them.”
“The message has already been sent,” she told him. “I said that they needed to make their best judgment as to whether they could spare the troops or not. They’ll send them,” she said firmly.
It was obvious that he wasn’t going to change her mind. He was also certain that whether they had an additional company of gardai or not, the Garde Kralji weren’t going to be sufficient to take back the South Bank. If the bridges continued to stand, they would not even be sufficient to hold the Isle, even with the help of the sparkwheelers. He tapped the tip of his cane on the roof tiles uneasily. In the west, there were more flashes. “If you’ll excuse me, Kraljica, I need to find Talbot . . .”
He left Allesandra still on the roof with the gardai and the councillors. He found Talbot on the ground floor of the palais, looking frazzled and angry as he snapped orders to a quartet of the palais staff. They scurried off as Sergei approached. “I don’t have enough staff here,” Talbot said. “Thee quarters of them evidently fled the city as soon we left here yesterday.”
