Fourth moon, afternoon, day forty-one of the siege
Main hospital, Second Circle, Rilporin, Wheat Lands
‘Stop your bloody fussing, Hallos. You’ve said I’ll live, so let me up.’ The words would’ve carried more weight if they hadn’t been wheezed through an airway that tasted of soot and cooked meat and hurt more than the rest of his wounds combined.
Hallos’s eyebrows bristled and a hand the size of a ham pushed on Mace’s chest, sliding him effortlessly back on to the bed. ‘No. You need to rest. You have extensive, though superficial, burns.’
‘It’s funny you should say that, Hallos,’ Mace croaked, ‘as I can feel each and every one of them.’ In truth, the burns were a hot, burrowing madness tickling constantly at the edges of Mace’s mind, flaring with every movement, impossible to ignore. It was taking all he had not to let his officers see the pain he was in.
‘Then take the opium,’ Hallos snapped back, echoing the little voice in Mace’s head that was pleading for pain relief.
Mace clenched a fist. ‘Opium? Are you insane? My men have been holding that fucking breach for three hours now without my aid, we’re losing more to fatigue than wounds and my father is still missing. I don’t have time for opium. I don’t have time to be injured.’ He made another effort to get up, the skin on his arm and chest and belly crimping and screaming as it shifted and rubbed. Hallos shoved him down harder this time.
‘And yet you are injured,’ Hallos retorted, ‘and I thank Major Renik for alerting me to that fact, as you clearly had no intention of seeking treatment. You cannot help the men defending the breach or scouring the wall for your father. He is no doubt in one of the towers, bleeding from a minor wound and hiding there so he doesn’t have to face me. You, however, do, and that means you will do as I say, general or not.’
Mace was silent and mutinous and so, so tired and the shameful weakling part of him gloried in Hallos’s order. ‘Hallos, step back from this bed or, so help me, I will make you step back,’ he said quietly.
Hallos stared intently at him for an uncomfortably long time, and then he threw up his hands. ‘Fine,’ he bellowed, ‘go and die somewhere in some futile, heroic gesture that does nothing but leave us without yet another officer.’
The door burst open and cut him off, much to Mace’s relief. Major Tailorson with a body in his arms.
‘Please, you have to save him. You have to,’ he said desperately. Mace slid off the table and Crys placed the body down with exaggerated care. The Wolf. Ash.
Hallos made soothing noises and bent over the table, a wet cloth rubbing gently at the blood. He grunted and moved on, peeling off Ash’s chainmail and then his shirt, rolling him this way and that, cleaning at the blood. So much blood.
Mace watched Crys watching the physician, noting the pinched expression on his face. Tara appeared on his other side. ‘We really, really need to talk,’ she murmured. ‘Really.’ Mace nodded but Hallos spoke before he could gesture her to the exit.
‘There’s nothing to do,’ he said and Crys let out a strangled groan. He lunged for Hallos, a knife pressed beneath the physician’s beard and into the soft skin of his neck.
‘Save him or join him,’ he growled. Mace and Tara yelled and reached for him, but Crys pressed the knife tighter and cursed them away.
‘You don’t understand,’ Hallos tried.
‘No, it’s you who doesn’t understand. You will save him, you will save Ash or I will kill you and every last man in here. All of you.’
‘I can’t save him—’ Hallos tried and Crys’s growl deepened, an animal threat that would’ve made the hairs on Mace’s neck rise if they hadn’t been burnt away. The knife cut deeper, parting skin, and Hallos’s voice went up an octave. ‘I can’t save him because there’s nothing wrong with him!’
Crys paused; they all did, eyes swivelling to the body on the table. ‘What?’
‘He has no visible wounds. Several newly healed, but nothing that needs treating. Look at him. He’s breathing, man.’
‘What?’ Crys whispered again. The knife came away from Hallos’s throat and the physician stepped hurriedly away as Tara twisted the blade – not unkindly – out of Crys’s hand and palmed it to Mace.
Crys ignored them, drifting towards the table. ‘If this is a trick …’
Mace took a step closer. Ash lay half-naked and still, eyes closed, chest moving slowly. His face bore a thick purple scar through the jawbone and up across the cheek; his jaw was dented, but there was no wound, just rusty stains where Hallos had wiped away the blood. There was another purple wound, healed, in the middle of his chest.
‘But he was – there was blood everywhere. He was dead. He was dead.’
‘Did you find him like this? Unconscious, I mean?’
‘I found him pinned to a door with a spear through him.’
Hallos coughed in surprise and Mace turned to Tara. Incredibly, she nodded.
‘I see,’ Hallos said carefully. ‘Then he’s extremely lucky to still be alive, isn’t he? We’ll keep him here until he wakes. Why don’t you stay with him?’
Crys didn’t acknowledge the words; he sat on the edge of the table and took Ash’s hand in both of his, pressing kisses to each knuckle. Hallos gestured for Mace and Tara to precede him through into the next room; then he closed the door after him with a click.
Mace rested a hip against the wall. ‘That’s it,’ he muttered, ‘we’ve all gone mad. All of us.’
‘If only, sir,’ Tara said quietly. ‘It’s true what he said. Ash was … clearly, definitely dead. I know a corpse when I see one pinned to a door by a spear, and he was. His face was ruined. Barely recognisable. Crys … brought him back. Because he loves him, as you’ve probably worked out.’
‘Crys what?’ Mace asked, dismissing the second part of her statement because under normal circumstances he’d have to execute them both for their actions and he couldn’t afford to. Funny how necessity breeds contempt for the rule of law. And let’s fucking face it, who are they hurting? And why am I even thinking about this now? He focused on Tara again, noting Hallos’s brimming curiosity. The physician’s eyes were alight.
‘Brought him back. I know how this sounds, but it’s true. There are about three hundred witnesses, Rankers from the West and Palace, plus Wolves. We all saw him do it.’
Hallos pursed his lips and blew air. ‘General Koridam tells me you assisted him in Last Bastion, which means you inhaled rather a lot of smoke. That can affect a person’s comprehension of events.’ He put a hand on her forehead. ‘Tell me, have you hit your head recently?’
Tara slapped his hand away. ‘I know what I saw, and it wasn’t influenced by smoke inhalation. Look at him.’ She beckoned and opened the door a crack. ‘At Crys. Look at him.’
They crowded behind her, peering over her head. ‘What are we looking for?’ Mace murmured.
Tara shut the door again. ‘He doesn’t have a single injury,’ she said in a low voice. ‘When he healed Ash, when the silver light rose, it covered him too. He healed himself.’
‘Silver light?’ Mace asked, nonplussed. He wondered if he was the one who’d hit his head.
‘Preposterous,’ Hallos said, but Mace could see the fascination gleaming in his face. He realised he had absolutely no idea what to say next. Officer training had never included dealing with things like this.
He was spared having to think about it when the door slammed open again and Colonel Edris and Dalli burst in.
Dalli hurried to his side and winced when she saw the extent of his injuries, her face sliding over his skin with worried intensity. She settled for putting her filthy hand on a small patch of unbroken skin on his shoulder.
Edris saluted. ‘General Koridam, I am glad to find you in … health,’ he faltered. ‘We still hold the South Gate, General, and we still hold the breach, though barely. And—’
‘Mace, love, we found your father,’ Dalli interrupted. ‘I’m so sorry, but he’s gone. Fallen.’ Her hand tightened on him as Mace’s vision contracted down to a narrow tunnel of light with her face at the end.
‘No.’
Dalli was ashen, but her voice was steady. ‘He was crushed when the wall came down. It’s likely to have been very quick.’
Mace’s mouth was open. ‘That can’t be right,’ he whispered. ‘My father was the greatest soldier in Rilpor; he wouldn’t just … he wouldn’t just die under a pile of stone. That’s not how men like him die.’
‘It’s him, love,’ Dalli said softly. ‘It’s him.’
Mace turned at a noise and saw Hallos with his hand over his eyes, shoulders shaking. ‘Hallos,’ he tried, crossing the room. He put his hand on Hallos’s back. ‘It might not be—’
‘Forgive me, lad,’ Hallos said, his eyes wet. ‘You’ve more cause to grieve than me. It’s just … I’ve known that man for forty years. To think he died under a wall is … it’s just wrong.’
‘It might not be him,’ Mace tried again, but Hallos’s expression silenced him. He clenched his fists as a wave of new pain surged through him, obliterating the petty sting of his burns. ‘Take me to him. And Tara? Bring Crys. In chains if needs be. I’ll believe anything you like if he can repeat the miracle.’
The pain only grew as they made the walk from the hospital to the north barracks in Second Circle. His father had been laid out in the colonel’s quarters there, and torches and candles burnt with a clean bright light, illuminating the desk on which lay Durdil Koridam, Commander of the Ranks.
He was very, very dead, his chest plate caved in and merged with the flesh beneath so they couldn’t remove it without tearing him further, but his face was strangely untouched. Someone – probably Dalli, Mace thought numbly, it’s the sort of thing she’d do – had washed his face and hair, cleaned the blood and dirt from it and his hands, and he lay staring up at the flickers of light and shadow bouncing among the eaves with an expression of comical surprise, as though someone had burst in on him having a shit.
The room began to spin and Mace pressed his forehead to the table, fingers holding tight to the wood, the room echoing to his harsh breaths. The last days and weeks and months and all the deaths, all the losses, all the pains and aches and fatigue and the will to keep going, keep marching, keep fighting, all rose into one maelstrom of emotion that teetered over his head like a thundercloud and threatened to unleash everything in a single great deluge and Mace knew he’d never stand it, he wouldn’t be able to cope, and he was going to drown just as he’d nearly drowned in the tunnels—
He caught a whiff of old sweat and then small hands and arms wrapped around him and Dalli’s head pressed against his back and his burns yammered their hurt and the thundercloud grumbled, roiled and sullenly, reluctantly, retreated. Mace reached back and pulled Dalli around to his unburnt side and she clung there, silent and filthy and sweaty and there, right there where he needed her, and together they stared at the corpse of his father and the pain came again. Tears came too and there was no shame in them, not for Durdil.
‘Tailorson,’ he said softly, and Crys stepped to his side. His blue eye blazed with alien intelligence, the brown reflecting Mace’s hurt back at him. ‘Will you try?’
‘We will,’ Crys said, and Mace was dully surprised to see tears on the man’s face. Crys placed a hand on Durdil’s forehead, the other wedged as far as it would go down under the breastplate. He closed his eyes and the room fell silent, men and women holding their breath. Crys was shaking with effort, cords standing out in his neck, vein throbbing in his temple.
Nothing happened.
Crys slumped, shaking. ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered.
‘Try again,’ Mace said and heard the danger in his voice. Dalli squeezed him; he ignored her. ‘Try again.’
Crys did, eyes closed, trembling and straining. There was a pop of silver light from his hands, like a flint striking steel that made them all jump, and then nothing. Crys slid on to his knees, his rasping breath echoing in the room. ‘He’s gone, sir. We – I – can’t. He’s gone.’
Mace stared down at him and felt nothing but a yawning, empty chasm within. ‘Get him out of here,’ he snarled and Tara reached down, helped Crys up and led him out.
‘Forty years I was friends with that man,’ Hallos murmured, reaching out to tweak the blanket straight. ‘Treated more wounds of his than I care to remember. He was always going to be a soldier, and I was always going to be the man to heal him. Rotated through the Ranks together for a quarter of a century before he settled here and was made Commander.’
He put his hand on Mace’s shoulder and Mace’s breath hitched. ‘I will miss him every day of my life until I see him again in the Light. But one thing I know about him, and about you: you’re no fool and he didn’t raise you to be one. Don’t blame Tailorson, and don’t blame yourself. Men die; soldiers die. Even Commanders of the Ranks die.’
‘Sir,’ Edris said from behind, ‘the office of Commander is yours, sir. I know you will perform as well as he did.’
Mace remained silent, so Hallos turned him from the table. ‘Do you have the will?’
No.
Yes.
I don’t know …
‘We have the will,’ Dalli said for him and her voice was the strength he needed. ‘Between us we’ll see this war ended. For Durdil. For all of us.’
‘I’ll make him proud,’ Mace whispered and Hallos’s expression hardened. He grabbed him by both shoulders, unmindful of the burns or Mace’s grunt of pain.
‘You did that every single day of your life, you idiot,’ he said roughly. ‘Just concentrate on winning the war.’ He let go and straightened Mace’s jacket for him. ‘Commander.’