CHAPTER VIII

…spring, and it is two weeks since Ahjvar fought the Blackdog in the Malagru

Nikeh had had troubled dreams in the week since she had executed Dimas. Nothing she could remember clearly. Voices muttering in another room. Aunty, whom she had not thought on for years. A baby crying. Dreams like that. Usually she could ignore them, but she had not been sleeping well since Teacher deserted her. She should go back to the city, perhaps. Find the blond Nabbani man Teacher said was to be addressed as the Rihswera, though she called him something else herself and spoke to him in a language she had never taught to Nikeh and which was not any dialect of Nabbani—though that scruffy Taren servant of his seemed to get by in it well enough, and presumed a familiarity to which he had no right with Teacher on the basis of it.

Teacher was an agent of the god of Nabban, and so was the Rihswera, so Nikeh supposed that as Teacher’s apprentice and ward, she ought to consider herself likewise a servant of that distant god. Would she be offered a place in the ambassador’s house? Their quarters in the historians’ college of the great library complex must presumably be given up, now that Teacher was gone. By whatever means she had gone.

She could offer to ride as a courier; that would get her back to Marakand in a single day. The city was almost fifty miles away, near the Eastern Wall of the pass.

She had no real rank or position here, though the captain of the south-end tower, Sulla Dur, was a cousin of Lia’s and seemed to accept Nikeh as some kind of auxiliary of her garrison even now that she lacked Lady Daro Jang’s authority to account for her presence.

She had no real rank or position in the city, either. She might be permitted to remain a scholar of the library, but scholarship seemed an empty thing at present.

Lia Dur had had command of the middle watch of the night and was still sleeping deeply, sprawled over most of the narrow upper bunk. Nikeh rolled off the edge left to her and landed softly on her feet. One of the two men crammed head to foot in the lower bunk grunted and leaned up on an elbow.

“Sorry,” she whispered, groping for her boots and the plate-reinforced vest, helmet, sword, bow…Even on a quick visit to the latrine behind the barracks adjoining the tower proper one had to think of such things. Teacher had taught her so. Be vigilant. Be prepared, when one sleeps with the enemy near. The kitchen was awake, hot and clattering. She passed it by and climbed the stairs to the platform of the roof. The night crew of the trebuchet were scattered about like cats in an alley, not sleeping, not entirely wakeful in the light of their lanterns, ready to react at a moment’s alarm. Those who kept watch on the enemy did not drowse. She exchanged a murmured greeting with Lia’s street-guard comrade Danil and pulled herself up into a crenel.

“Take care!”

She ignored his fear, crouched there as if she would leap away into flight like a devil in a tale, stone tight against either shoulder. The valley was still dark, cast in night by the wall, though dawn was greying the sky behind them.

Very dark, below. She looked up. The night was clear, stars sharp. The waning moon was just past its last quarter, bright enough to cast faint light on the hills, but still high enough, too, at this hour, that there should be no long moon-shadow of the wall.

“Danil? When did it grow dark, below?”

“Uh? Sunset, I suppose? You know, when night fell?”

Street-guard. But city-bred, and never out on night patrol without a nice bright pool of lantern-light to blind him to the shades of the dark. She leaned out, straining her ears. Danil seized her belt. She ignored him, save to risk leaning a little further. Wind. Leaves rustling below. The usual sparse scatter of lights still burned in the Westron camp, well beyond reach of even the great ballista built to Teacher’s design, which crouched like a lion about to spring on the platform of the gate-tower over the road. She cupped her hands around her eyes like the blinkers of a cart-horse, peered down into the nearer darkness, below, and towards the road and the fortress of the gate through which it passed. No straying lantern-light from behind to spoil her vision.

She ought to see a little. The shape, the roughness of the land. Some mottling of moonlight, grey to black.

She could hear nothing but the wind. No owl, no fox, no first chorus of birds waking to sing, as they should with thinning of the night, the creeping dawn.

She felt no wind on her face.

Illusion. All illusion. Send Danil to Captain Sulloso, ask her to send up a wizard to peer into this darkness, to listen, to ask why they heard no birds and what else they did not hear, and why the moon above shed no light west of the wall.

What if she roused the length of the wall and there was only a little fog hanging below?

Then everyone still sleeping woke early, and cursed her, and Captain Sulloso Dur sent her back to the city as a nervy clerk better off stuck among old books in the library than twitching at shadows.

Fog would show as a paleness.

Teacher would not expect her to dither, when lives were at stake.

“Sound the bells,” she ordered. “Danil, go. Ring the alarm. The All-Holy’s come to the wall.”

“What? No, I’ve been on watch these four hours. They haven’t broken camp.”

“They’re here.” She pushed back past him. “They won’t wait longer— the sun’s rising and even you’ll notice that darkness.”

“What darkness?”

“Gah! Wake up!” she shouted at the trebuchet crew. “Ready your sling! They’re here, they’re here!” The bells themselves were so close—the belfry rising past the inner corner of the tower. Didn’t do her much good. Pushed past the trebuchet crew, down the stairs to the rope-chamber, shouting.

When those charged with that watch failed to do more than ask pointless questions, she seized a rope herself. Ended up struggling with the man, kneeing him where she really shouldn’t have as he tried to pull her off. Got clouted across the ear, head ringing, but so was the bell, the triple toll of warning.

Picked up at the next tower along, reverberating between the hills, the cliffs, the rising mountains. Echoing and re-echoing, swelling louder—the bells of the great tower at the gate. There were signals to be lit to pass the alarm to Marakand, fires by night and smoke by day, at stations along the heights, mostly converted windmills…

Old Great Gods, what had she dared?

The man she had kneed was advancing on her, limping, eyes streaming with pain, fist raised, and she couldn’t honestly blame him, though she could have hit twice as hard if she’d really meant it and he should consider that he could still walk. She backed away.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Gabbling. “I was—”

Two of the watch were at the bells, heaving and heaving, three and three, but now all the bells were singing full-throated, up and down the wall, tangling with their echoes. Lia in the doorway, a cutting gesture. Something thudded. She felt it through the soles of her boots more than her ears in the din. The rope-pullers stood to and the clamour faded.

“She—”

“Archers to your positions,” Lia said. “Nikeh.”

“I’m sorry,” she offered again, as the man seized his bow from a rack and bent fumbling to string it. He scowled, but waved a hand. Apology accepted, she hoped. The two bell-ringers were already at the arrowslits.

“Gurhan and Great Gods defend us,” one said. “Lieutenant—” Another thump. Shouts above.

“I’ve seen. Gods be with us.” Lia turned on her heel, heading for the stairs to the roof. Nikeh went to an arrowslot, peered through. The sun had risen, lemon light touching the unfolding hills, running down towards the desert. Early morning mist smoked thinly, hiding nothing.

The All-Holy’s army had shifted in the night, marching in silence, muffled in wizardry, hidden by it. Wizardry or devilry. There were wizards keeping watch at the gate-fortress, day and night. She didn’t think sixth-circle priests could have worked any wizardry they wouldn’t have seen through. It had been the devil.

He would not have baffled and deceived Teacher, Nikeh was certain of it. If only she had been here.

Like a tide run in over the mudflats, water where there had been land. Dark, seething with subtle movement in its stillness. Wheeled towers.

She turned and ran after Lia, out onto the tower platform.

“No ram,” Lia said. “I don’t see a ram—do you?”

“No.” But there had been no engines, no materials for siege with the Army of the South at all, by the report of Istva and his fellows. The All-Holy, though, had brought timbers from the Malagru. They had been building engines in his camp. She had seen from the top of the belfry.

“He’s not going to try to force the gate itself.”

Just to overtop the walls, swarm them. Seize the gate-tower and open it from within. Or as at Emrastepse, have it opened for him, traitors in place to seize it.

Not here, where there were wizards to know the truth of a person’s heart. Surely not.

The trebuchet crew were reaching high on their ropes, ready.

“And pull!” Danil dropped his raised arm, and they heaved down as one, snapping the arm. The sling flew up. Not shaped stone shot, of which they had a goodly supply, but one of the clay cannisters marked with Nabbani characters. Wizards’ work.

A cheer. But, “Too far!” Danil called. They were already reloading.

Thump and shudder. Something striking the side of their tower. “Short!” Danil called jeeringly over the valley. The Westrons—Nikeh didn’t like thinking of them so, when she was Westron herself and here they didn’t understand how many Westron folk had died at the hands of the red priests—would be aiming for the platform and the destruction of the trebuchet, the only one at this end of the wall.

Two more of the Marakander cannisters failed to burst, or burn, or whatever they were supposed to do. Wizardry quashing them. The trebuchet switched to stone shot, scored a hit on the swaying siege-tower, shattering timbers. It leaned. The shouting carried. Oxen bellowed. Something cracked and its upper storeys fell away. People screamed, crushed by the fallen timbers. Danil called down their success and the crew cheered.

The bows had been singing; more archers were rushing up. Others ready to fetch and carry, standing by the barrels of sand and water against fire, with hooks and halberds if the enemy closed with tower or ladder…

At first Nikeh thought this would be the way of it as they settled to their work. The thrum and snap of bowstrings, the ready-pull of the trebuchet-first’s voice, growing hoarser and hoarser. Trying to batter what was left of the siege-tower down past repair and smash the enemy’s engine. No more cheering.

Stone smashed, chips of the coping of a merlon flying, leaving faces cut and bleeding. The devil’s engineers had the range now and began to pound the battlements. A fire-pot of some kind landed next to the trebuchet, flung burning splashes of something that clung like tar and could not be beaten out till the two wizards of the tower wrote signs against it in chalk. By then there was a screaming, writhing woman, her face unrecognizable, to carry down, and one of the support beams of the trebuchet was burnt through. The burned woman, a slinger from the hills, died before the engineers got their beam replaced. Two other Marakanders died, smashed by stone shot, and half a dozen others were wounded by arrows. The enemy was closer now. Their wheeled tower was lost but they had scaling-ladders. Nikeh concentrated her shots on those carrying ladders.

The captain had come up from her post in the central chamber below the bell-ropes and was in urgent conversation with Lia. One archer more or less was going to make no difference. Nikeh traded places with one of the Marakanders. Her right hand was cramping, left arm starting to waver. She climbed the ladder to the roof of the belfry, joined Danil keeping watch there. A good vantage point.

She had thought of the ocean she had not seen in years when she first saw the army; from here the comparison seemed even more apt. The curve of the wall, down and back, the uneven motion—they were the cliff-face of the coast, and the devil-worshippers the waves curling, rushing and retreating from arrows and fire, pushing forward again.

Not much retreating.

Banners hung limp. The All-Holy’s white, with the black symbols of his cult, the script that Teacher said Nikeh could not learn to read, no human could.

Marakand’s banners were a tricolour, yellow over blue over white for its three gods, dead through two of them might be. The limp silk overhead stirred. Breeze touched her face.

“Nikeh, keep your head down!” Lia Dur, looking up.

“You’ve been told.” Danil grinned. “Bossy, eh?” He dropped to his knees, tipped over. Dark fletching stood from his eye.

“Down!”

But she stayed where she was, crouched behind the belfry’s low parapet. The enemy had reached the wall at another way-tower lower down, between her station and the gate, and soldiers were swarming up their siege-tower and across the bridge almost before it thumped down. Ladders ran up along that section. Some were pushed back or shoved sliding sideways, carrying down screaming dark figures that seemed hardly human. Others were made fast, defended by those who had been climbing even as they were raised. The Westrons already covered the platform of the tower, a writhing mass of human lives. Impossible to say which way it was going. Neither had any consistent uniform; there were street-guard russet tunics, but there were far more Marakanders on the wall than were street-guard, and few of the attackers had more than a red armband or a white badge badly copied from the flags to proclaim themselves. Too easy to kill a friend in that mess and she was glad of her clearly Marakander gear.

More up that tower, up the ladders, and more, and the tower seemed to absorb them. She could almost feel the terror, the fighting in the close spaces as floor by floor, chamber by chamber, the All-Holy’s folk fought their way down, the floors grown slick with blood—mama must have died so, defending the princess and her little heir in the tower of Emrastepse…

“They’ve taken the halfway tower!” she called down. “We’re cut off from the gate-fort.”

A strong gust of wind lifted the banners. Out of the west. Like a bad omen. Could the devil control the weather? Probably. The banner of Marakand on the halfway tower was down. Something white flying from the battlements. No easy passage through, at least. Only the gate-fortress showed anything but a blank wall to the west at the lower storeys. But to spread to the other towers now the enemy had not only the track along the eastern side of the wall that ran its length from south to north, but the wall-walk, wide enough to drive a team of ponies, she had heard someone say with pride in the ancient builders. As if anyone would want to. A clear street to them, was what it was. A weakness that meant one tower taken could lose them all.

She was by the ladder to leap back to the rooftop platform, intending some warning to Captain Sulloso about barricading all the entrances to the tower, when she saw the All-Holy, the devil Jochiz himself, riding up through his lines. Even he had to go around the burning wreckage. He rode a white horse and was all in white himself. A holy man. For a moment even she felt it, his holiness, the shivering touch of the Old Great Gods. He seemed to glow, to hide starlight in his robes.

Illusion. Wizardry. Lie, forced into her emotions. Nikeh rubbed her eyes, scowled. And absurdly, her stomach growled. Past noon, and she had nothing in her belly but a swallow of wine and a hunk of bread passed around at some point in the morning.

To be hungry, when a man she knew was dead at her feet.

They were all animals. Scrambling and squabbling far below the view of the Old Great Gods.

No. The Old Great Gods saw, and reached arms to enfold all who fell. But the devil denied his own folk their sanctuary, however long it would have taken them to attain that state, and surely the Gods wept for that greatest of all sins ever a devil had committed against the folk of the earth.

She half thought the skies might open over Marakand, the Old Great Gods themselves descend in radiance, as once they had, to bind the devils. But even then they had not destroyed them, and the seven had worked some great evil, to prevent the Gods travelling the road from the heavens. Not human souls, no, that had never been said till the lies of the nameless god became the lies of the All-Holy, but the Old Great Gods—perhaps it was true, perhaps not. Certainly they had never come again.

The All-Holy’s primates and commanders were around him. If the Old Great Gods answered prayers, let a bolt of the great ballista strike him, let the trebuchets hurl wizards’ fire over him. Let his folk see and understand what he was…

He raised his arms, turned his face to the sky in an attitude of prayer. A sword in one hand. All his folk flung wide their arms in imitation, praying. As if the Old Great Gods might hear. Let them. Let them hear, and smite him down with all the lightning of every storm that yet might be, oh, let fire pour from the heavens—

He pointed with his sword at the gate-fort, and Nikeh did not at first understand what she saw, the heave and hump of earth and stone, not fire but a wave travelling through the earth, and it struck the bronze-clad gate, a great mass of earth and rubble and broken stones the size of horses, of wagons and houses, and the boom was thunder, smashing between the cliffs and crashing back again. She felt it, yelled, and the tower swayed beneath her feet.

The Marakanders had expected engines. They had expected siege. They expected to sit behind their walls, with all the lands Over-Malagru to supply them, while Jochiz battered away at the gate in the Western Wall that held the pass against him, and never an arrow to fall in even the Suburb of the caravanserais, the second city outside the circle of the city walls proper.

They would find themselves mistaken in their expectations. Senate, wardens, wizards and scholars of the library…even Vartu? Did she think even now he would fight this war by Marakand’s rules and the limitations of human flesh, of engines and mortal wizardry?

It’s a trap, Sien-Mor’s voice said in his ear. They pretend they see you for less than you are. They pretend they think it can’t happen, to lead you on. But they know better. This is Marakand. I taught them to fear you, the god who would come out of the west.

He shut his ears to his sister.

“Most Holy,” Clio murmured at his elbow. “Should you ride so near the gate?”

“Do you think their stones and arrows will be permitted to touch me?”

“No, Most Holy. But I do think that they may try to insult you by killing your horse.”

The earth kicked against them; he felt it smack upwards, his big Westgrasslander stallion leaping away as if it had trodden on something alarming, coming down splay-legged, snorting, reluctant to heed the rein, to stand. He forced it to turn in a tight circle. Men, horses, camels screamed. Some were fallen. Some were burning.

“All-Holy!” Clio called. She had her beloved axe in her hand, as if that might be any use here. “Come away out of range, please, Most Holy.”

The smoke was grey, tinged with dirty yellow and it smelt of pitch and sulphur and wizardry. A seer failed to fight her camel out of its billowing clouds swiftly enough. She and the beast alike coughed and choked. She fell first, and then the camel. Pity. She had been one of his best, a wizard of some strength, unusual among the Westron folk, who had lost much of their wizardry when they lost their gods and demons.

And whose fault was that? Sien-Mor asked.

Sarzahn never expected the gods would involve themselves, he protested, stung.

She tried to goad him. Ignore her. She was nothing but the voice of his own doubts.

He had no doubts.

He stopped the seer’s heart, stilled the screams of the burning knights and animals. Silence, save for Ambert’s coughing. The smoke had caught him. That would shorten his life considerably, but it hardly mattered. Jochiz caught up the wind in his hand and swept the clouds away. They dissipated before they reached the wall. Disappointing.

The Marakanders were reloading their ballista. Jochiz watched, eyes narrowed. Sang the word in his mind alone, set fire to the timbers. They burned to ash in a breath, a roar, a ball of flame like the anger of the Great Gods. The fire did not spread as he intended, to consume all the lives on that platform. Wizardry against him.

The next tower south had been taken. Closer to the gate, the companies were pushed up against the wall if they would claw a way through with their hands. No ladders had managed to hold near the gate-fort so far, and his siege-towers were all burning.

“What god doesn’t care for the lives of his folk?” Sien-Mor asked. Aloud.

His head whipped around. Movement in the corner of his eye, as if someone that moment stepped away.

Only the fluttering of a banner.

“Their lives are mine,” he answered.

“All-Holy?” Clio asked.

He drew his sword. Raised it to the heavens. An attitude of prayer, of summoning, beseeching. Let the Old Great Gods hear and bless their emissary, let their will flow through him…something like that. Whatever pleased the folk. Those near copied him, crying various phrases of praise and prayer. He gathered himself, tasting the strength, the weight and life of soil and stone. Swallowed it and spat it out with a word, searing the air, the earth, pushed it burning with a fire that could not be seen, a wave of force, of desire and will, a shaping. The fortress of the gate, built by engineers of Marakand’s brief and near-forgotten empire against the rising of a dynasty of unifying warlords on the Great Grass, rode the heaving crest of the earth like a ship rising on a swell, but as an unlucky or ill-guided ship might, it foundered in its descent. Or rather, towers heaved skyward, shook stone from stone, and fell. The bronze-faced gates twisted from their hinges and bars, crashed like thunder. Bells rang themselves the length of the wall, the wave spreading onwards, outwards, weakening, but cracking mortar and stone. Jangled to silence in a rising cloud of dust.

Silence about him, but for the thudding, the sound of ripe fruit falling.

“All-Holy…” It was a whisper, a breath. Lost. Clio.

Not lost. Gathered. Saved.

“She did love you,” Sien-Mor said matter-of-factly. “She thought you were beautiful, and filled with the wisdom of the Old Great Gods, and strong.”

She wasn’t there. Only the commanders, the primates, the message-riders and signallers, the horses and camels…still on the bare earth. Clio. They fanned out from him, the fallen. Dead creatures, dead leaf and flower, root and stem. Dust and straw, and not a cricket, not a spider, a worm. His own horse shifted its weight nervously, snuffing the air. Hot stone and metal, maybe. No screams, no shrieks of the crushed and trapped and dying from the towers. Crushed, maybe, but dead. Those of his own who had struggled there beneath the rain of arrows, beneath the stones dropped against the ladders, dead, too, but at least their souls were gathered safe.

A necessary sacrifice. The Old Great Gods themselves could not work from nothing, not when pinioned, constrained, within the physicality of the world.

“Old Great Gods preserve us…” Primate Ambert, safe on the edge of the circle of dead.

The stunned pause broke in roaring, as if life returned, the dead field waking—at least aside from the gate and his path to it, where it was unlikely seed would ever spring again. Jochiz looked around—shut his mind to the woman on the red horse that shadowed his own…Northron horse, the tall, heavy breed that the Westgrasslanders had crossed into their own stocky herding horses, giving rise to these he so favoured for his knights, but he knew that red horse with its white nose and stockings…she had wept over the damned thing when she lost it in the battle at the Hill of the Claws, the last Vartu and Ghatai had fought as allies—and won, but that had been the weakness of his own chiefs and they had paid.

Sien-Mor smiled at him, sweet and secret as ever.

You are not even a ghost.

The man who killed me and burnt my bones to ash should know, of course.

His sister rode past him, towards the gate. The hooves of the red horse stirred no dust.

Sien-Shava—he was Jochiz, Sien-Shava was a vessel, no more than that—spurred his horse after her. It kicked against Clio’s sprawled corpse. She should have died when she was arrogant enough to attack Vartu and Sarzahn, anyhow.

The army—most of the commanders had been too close and were dead but what did it need them, when its function was so nearly fulfilled—surged forward, as if the All-Holy’s moving—his survival, as they would see it, from a vicious attack of the Marakanders and their devil-loving god, and the glorious grace of the Old Great Gods manifest in his will, the destruction of the gate—were a signal.

As it must be. He nudged at one of the commanders of the knights who had been outside the life-searing unleashing of his power, and the man—woman, one of the few to be admitted to that circle or permitted once there to rise—wheeled her horse and dismounted to prise the main standard from the hands of its bearer. It left a plume of ashy dust in the air as she rode to his side. She felt the touch of the All-Holy. He saw it in her eyes, all warmth and wonder…

Oh no, Sien-Mor said, in his mind, a whisper in his ear, he could not tell. You made me yours and never let me free to find another. You are mine, now. Leave her be.

The remaining siege-towers had found their lodging, bridges down, the defenders undone as much by their own fear as the assault, the faithful who climbed the bodies of their comrades and kin to come at them, at the heathen who defied the will of the All-Holy and the Old Great Gods. He added fuel to that fire, as he had through all the long march. He could not seize them all, ride them, but he could stoke what was there, stir it when it sank in exhaustion, wake hope in despair, quell doubt and fear. The faintest touch of them was in him, as he in them. Their god, in truth, held them all in his heart. And would more fully, soon enough.

The army of the All-Holy poured through the gap in the wall, moved out along the tracks behind it that linked tower to tower. They swarmed the ladders and the siege-towers, cleared the wall-walks, fought their way down the towers floor by floor, chamber by chamber…

Bells rang again, without pattern or message, only a wild alarm. From the southernmost tower, rockets screamed into the sky, shrieking like beasts in torment, bursting with colour and smoke. A desperate signal. He did not think there would be any answer, though the north tower, moments later, launched its own. So perhaps Marakand would know its wall had fallen. It made little difference. Their wizards would no doubt be aware regardless.

Sien-Mor, dismounted to lead her horse over the mound of rubble that filled the gateway, stopped and stood there where the root of a broken arch still launched itself skyward, carrying nothing. She halted, waiting for him. Smiled again, leaning back against her horse’s shoulder, arms folded.

Sien-Shava rode slowly to join her.