by Danie Ware
She said, “But the Count of Time isn’t going to wait. For now, we give you amnesty. You can come to us, one at a time if you want, or muster your courage and revolt against your commanders.” She was smiling, cold. “Come down, be reunited with your friends, your loved ones, with those who’ve missed and needed you. We’ve got food, ale, fire, warmth and welcome for those who wish it.” She turned, making her yellow flag snap, threw the last words over her epaulette. “But don’t take too long. At the sun’s zenith, anyone left will be beneath my blades and hooves.”
And you will be alone, little brother, alone in a world of death. You will come to us, give yourself, because there will be nothing else remaining. The world will be ours and you will have let it happen.
Watching, Rhan said nothing. Let it happen. He was grappling with their presence and power, with the voices and the bodies they were using, with an onrush of memories too much to bear. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was railing – Samiel, why? Why have you let it come to this? But he knew the answer.
The Gods had bored of the world; it was an old toy, rolled away and forgotten. He had been left – had been set up and cast down – to be its caretaker.
Calarinde, lost love. Why did you do this to me? If you have ever heard me, hear me now…
But Mostak shouted the only answer Vahl was going to get.
“Bollocks!”
At the response, Ythalla turned and sneered and spat, the gesture specifically aimed at her one-time commander. Selana shook her head, sorrow and regret; she looked up at her commander uncle as though pleading with him. Mael made no move; he watched the hilltop for a long moment, looked almost as if he would say something, then turned away.
As the three of them rode back to the curtain-wall and their own lines, the commander raised a hand for archers, but Rhan shook his head. Mostak’s face was flushed, his expression unreadable.
Rhan realised that he, too, was struggling with his family so close.
And Vahl must be laughing at all of us.
By the Gods. Bring me war, brother, bring me something I can face and understand. I want this over!
Behind them, the overgrown courtyards of the ruin were lined with warriors, and they were shifting now, with temptation and unease. Rhan understood: they, too, had had enough. They wanted an end, they wanted to go home. Slowly, the whispers were beginning, a susurrus of tension and curiosity; a restless need that flowed from lips to ears, and was rapidly gaining strength…
Selana speaks! And what if she’s right? What if her promise is true? What if there’s healing offered for all? A future!
Food – and ale!
The zenith of the sun.
The warriors at the hilltop had been through the rhez itself. They’d lost their families and friends, their homes, their city. They’d run across half the Northern Varchinde, feeling it die beneath their very feet. The figure of Selana was like a light, bringing them home. Gone was the memory of the trick Rhan had pulled on the balcony – their Lord was here, and she was warm and real.
Because they needed her to be.
* * *
Okay, so he couldn’t help it.
The image was haunting him; fucking thing wouldn’t leave him alone. It felt like Eliza was ramming the point home – See, you need to fight for the good guys, you need to care! – and he just couldn’t let it go.
So, fuck it, he went out through the defences, looping out round the edges of the hillside. They were all intent on the parley anyhow, and hell, if they saw him, they could fucking bring it on.
This shit was messing with his head.
The morning had clouded over, and the air was drifting with sleet, and bitterly cold. Carefully, well aware of his lack of kit, Ecko came to the outer edges of the Kas encampment.
The chill was sharp outside the protection of the ruin, and it had cooled his adrenaline, made him think. He closed on the site carefully, leopard-crawling through the cold, covering his woolly garments in Christ-alone-knew-what, and then pausing to scan and inching forwards once more.
Nothing saw him.
Nothing raised the alarm, or opened fire.
The place was quiet.
Too damn…?
He waited.
There were no morning muster points down here, no campfires, no breakfast. Neither were there blazing pentagrams, blood-drenched sex orgies or giant idols of goats with too many eyes. Frankly, if you came down here expecting to party, you were out of luck.
The command tent stood obvious; the horned vialer paced out on regular patrols. He watched them carefully – wishing to every fucking deity that he still had access to plastic explosive.
Boom.
Solve the whole mess.
But the vialer paced on, unseeing. And right now, Ecko only wanted the outskirts, the people that the Kas… chrissakes… the children that they’d used as fucking batteries.
Like Triqueta. Like Karine.
Silently, wary of sticking his belly on some giant pit-trap and heading straight for Rhez in a handbasket, he approached the camp.
And stopped.
He didn’t feel the cold ground under him.
He forgot that he was in stealth mode.
Ecko had no idea of the last time he’d cried – chrissakes, not in his adult life, not even under Mom’s delicate touch – but now he was biting his lip, his breathing ragged. It wasn’t just the tiny huddle of the pathetically elderly, all of them curled together in the freezing cold. It wasn’t the thin blankets they had pulled around their shoulders, or the corpses, eyes and mouths open to the black sky. It was the memory of Fhaveon, the children bereft of their parents and too young to understand.
Ecko’s family had run an orphanage.
A world and a lifetime ago.
These children had run across the dead plain, and they’d been sucked dry, day by day, night by night, drained of their time and youth. What the hell had they gone through? What the hell had they thought, watching their friends age and falter and die? What the hell were they thinking now?
He swallowed bile, and the pile shifted.
In that moment, his resolve was stronger than it had ever been, it was absolutely powerful, sartorial, some fucking fist-in-the-face epiphany. He’d capitulated for Roderick, almost because he’d had no choice, but this… this caught him right where it fucking hurt. He’d seen Triqueta drained – ten years, fifteen? – seen Karine as a hollowed-out cadaver.
But this had no words.
Somehow, he’d tear these fuckers to pieces.
He’d make them tell him how to fix it.
Sudden thoughts: if they ate time, did they shit it out again? Could they puke it back up? He wasn’t fucking scared of Kas Vahl Whatsit, he’d be quite happy to shove two fingers down the daemon’s throat—
One of the vialer was coming his way.
He froze, focused his lowlites, watched.
But the beast veered off – it went past the edge of the people’s campsite and over to the lone stores tent, the one that stood a distance from everything else.
It paused as if checking, then it turned and wandered back.
The little huddle of people shifted again. He could almost feel the time being sucked out of them, slurped greedily downwards and inwards, fuel for the commanders’ strength.
It made him want to rage, to burn, to fuck everything up, really very badly. He wanted—
Oh, hang on a fuckin’ minute.
A lone stores tent?
A distance from everything else?
Silently, somewhere in the back of his head, Ecko started to laugh.
* * *
The lone tent had a single guard, and a laced-shut front flap.
Ecko went in at the back, rolling silently under the edge.
And then he crouched in the darkness, almost as if he were right back in the great grey sprawl of London.
He was beginning to grin.
So.
What’s the one fuckin’ tent you put the h
ell away from everything else?
In fact, he was grinning like he hadn’t grinned in days. He was grinning so much he was making his face hurt. Fuck, he’d missed grinning.
Oh, baby.
You know you wanna…
And they were all there, waiting for him. Heavy pottery balls, a fucking mother lode of them, all very, very carefully stacked. And with them all the little spiky caltrops, lovingly made out of terhnwood fibre.
And there, carefully placed on one side, a bucket of white powder. Not Lugan’s Best Bolivian, but something just as much fun.
Yeah, an’ it’s Christmas. New Year. Thanks-fuckin’-giving, all rolled up together. Let’s see you deal with this, motherfuckers.
It wasn’t exactly plastic explosive.
But – gift fucking centaur – it was good enough.
His grin grew even wider. Somewhere in his head, his laughter was manic – Oh yeah, you watch me now! Somewhere, Eliza was looking at this on her fucking flatscreen, waiting to see what he’d do. Somewhere, at the top of that hill, his own forces were gonna be ground into shit and gravel…
Not if I can help it.
Ecko cut a long slit in the back of the tent.
He racked his boosting through the ceiling, tuned his targetters to the max. His pulse screaming at him, he chose two of the spheres for himself – they were all he could carry. Then he placed the bucket – with all the delicacy his technical wiring could manage – on the top of the pile of pottery.
He didn’t bother with the door guard – not like that fucker was gonna last anyway.
He’d no idea what the range of this stuff was – but if it took out the people’s encampment, ending the lives of those last poor fuckers that remained, and if it deprived the Kas of the final gasp of their fuel source, then hey, he was gonna take the risk.
Besides, he did fucking love the movie-explosion thing.
Targetters crossing, he aimed a roundhouse kick at the stacked explosives, just below the bucket of quicklime.
And then he ran like fuck, before the world went bang.
19: KHAMSIN
TUSIEN
The detonation was enough to rock the ground, shake the sky. The walls of Tusien shivered and ran with dust. Mostak turned a single, savage look on Rhan, but the Seneschal shrugged, his terhnwood armour clattering.
Amethea’s heart was pounding so hard she could feel her skin shudder. She’d run out of the hospice and now stood on an old wall, craning on her tiptoes. She could just about see the flare of flame and the huge cloud of smoke that was now billowing from the bottom of the hill. She could smell it – that strange mix of substances burning. The smell was Maugrim, the scent of his heated skin.
Faintly, she could hear shouts, cries.
Something in her heart said, Ecko, and she found herself laughing, almost unbelieving that he’d set off his fire alchemy right under the daemon’s very nose.
At the hilltop, everyone was running, shouting, trying to work out what the rhez had just happened. Tan commanders bellowed, drummers sounded the cadence for order.
But then a voice cut hard across the chaos.
“They’re forming up…” The voice was the Bard’s, cold and clean. The drums changed note – she recognised some of them now – this one was the order to muster.
From somewhere she heard the great kettledrum – boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom. She could hear Mostak shouting, hear the flag commanders echoing him and the curses as the soldiers ran to their places.
“We were at parley!”
“What the rhez was that?”
“They blowing themselves up, now? Saves us the bother!”
Raucous laughter echoed after that one.
The kettledrum boomed, echoing in her skull. Soldiers scrabbled, tripped over guy-lines, swore. Everything was spears and shields and flags.
Then she heard the drums sound again, and the warriors ran – every man and woman to their place in their tan, and their flag, and their line. Their discipline was startlingly good, their ranked shields and spears impressive.
She could hear Mostak shouting, coughing, shouting again.
And then, there they were – she could see them, now, surging out of the smoke of their own destruction. The leading cavalry was a short line, but four-deep, the formation behind it ragged but furious. Several looked wounded, had taken flying pieces of debris; the horses, too. But they came on anyway, and they burned with righteous fury.
As though their injuries were unfelt, their damage…
Dear Gods!
Her healer’s soul shuddered as she understood. Driven by the Kas, people and animals and creatures had no concept of hurt or injury – they would simply fight until they dropped, whatever it took. They would fight through shredded flesh and broken bone – fight until they literally could not stand.
It was a travesty, a horror beyond words. But what could she do?
Put your shoulder to the wheel.
Gorinel’s words – and his courage – steadied her. She took a breath, jumped down. Her own struggle started here, and she would just do her damned best.
She spared the fat old priest a momentary touch of her thoughts – wondered what had happened to him – but she’d no time to fret, not now.
Outside the tent, Amethea had several defending flags of her own – not hers to command, but Mostak’s reserve, held back from the fighting. Among them, rumour was stabbing back and forth. The incoming were monsters, they said, immune to death, they said, would fight with their claws and teeth, they said. Above her, archers scrambled on the walls, shooting through the smoke. At least one had fallen screaming to his ending, his neck snapping as he hit the ground.
And she could see their own mounted troops, the lighter-armoured skirmishers at the flanks, though trapped and mostly useless in this closed-in area. They were fast-response, waiting to plug any gaps if the assembled shieldwall crumbled.
From somewhere the Bard said, like a sudden rush of courage, “We will win this.”
She heard him with her heart and her blood. Her pulse thundered like the drums. The very hillside seemed to shake.
Then Amethea heard the command to volley, heard five hundred shafts slice through the air. She could watch them arcing up, over the smoke and into the sunlight – they seemed to pause for a moment, high above, and then come back down in a hard black rain. She felt the ground and walls shake. Then she heard the command to brace, heard the colossal impact of the horses hitting the shieldwall, of the warriors stepping forward into the collision with a single, unified shout.
And then the mayhem really started.
She couldn’t see it – not from here, the smoke had drifted across the field. Fear was making her sweat in spite of the chill air. Yet she could hear the tumult, the clatter of weapons and hooves, the shouts and cries and screams. It took only a moment for the first of the injured to be with her, a young man, his hands over his eye, and blood streaming from beneath them.
But she knew this, this was what she did.
As she clamped her own hands to the injury and helped the man into the tent, she was half watching the blind rage of the incoming horsemen – the defenders’ flank was closest to her, and the attackers were pushing hard, striving to surround them, to get past the edge of the shieldwall and in behind it.
They had no humanity in their movements, no flicker of recognition. Injuries did not slow them, fears did not touch them. Something about them was both relentless and terrifying.
Horses and riders both were being hacked to pieces in order to make them stop. She saw one young shieldman turn and throw up.
Memories assailed her, borne by the smoke – Feren, and fighting, and falling. It seemed so long ago. Out there, horse bodies reared, hooves flashed, tearing shields from arms and arms from bodies. Weapons shattered, or tumbled and fell. More screaming, a chant of defiance that fragmented into shrieks of horror. People fell, puking and writhing; they clutched at gashes that would kill them, at dropped spears
and spilled guts and courage gone forever.
And behind it all, Amal’s monsters ravaged and raged.
“Amethea!”
She’d taken her attention from her patient.
“Sorry.”
She was blood to her wrists, with no idea where it had come from. More were coming to them now, some of them hurt beyond words, some of them bearing broken friends. The courtyard was standing tense – she could see past the reserve to the second rank, more tan formed up and ready to plug the breaches, to step forwards and carry on the fight. She heard commands as the shieldwall tried to push back, stepping forwards and slamming shields hard into the horses’ chests and flanks – it bristled with spears like some spiked creature – but they were outmatched and had little hope. The horses were driven, loco and demented. They were huge, hooves and teeth and fighting fearless. Before them, the soldiers were simply being ground down into the stones and weeds of the courtyard. They didn’t have the experience to face this. The archers could shoot down from the walls, or volley over the heads of their own side, but the shieldwall just could not hold the weight.
It was crumbling, at both edges and at critical points in the centre.
She swallowed fear, let out a breath.
“Amethea!”
Cursing herself, she ducked into the tent proper. Her helpers had their hands full, her supplies were limited, and she had promised Gorinel…
Shoulder to the wheel.
All your training, Amethea told herself, all your life has led to this. Now shut up and do it.
“Don’t move your hands, don’t move your—! Saint and Goddess!” Amethea shouldered the lad out the way and gripped the woman’s upper arm, fingers and thumbs in a circle, clenching as hard as she could. Below her grip, the muscle had been sliced clean through, the artery severed. The woman’s elbow and forearm were covered with freshly pumped gore.
Cut like that, she’d taken a blade hard and edge-on. It had probably scraped the bone.
“Give me your belt tie.” Amethea pointed with her chin. “Then if the water’s boiling, bring it here.” Even as she turned, there were more wounded incoming, some of them on their own feet, some of them being carried, on shoulders or on shields…
