6.

 

When Steel moved to reinforce the Sixth Division of the Mireean Guard, Ayae was with them.

She had not been assigned a place on the Spine, had not been given a place to stand in the defense and, as the horn’s call had faded into the night’s cooling air, she was without direction. She wanted to go into the hospital: inside was both Zaifyr and Illaan, and despite all that had happened with the latter, she felt an unexpected grief opening inside her, made by the memories of the good times and of their loss. Yet she could not go into the hospital. As the horn faded, Reila ordered the guards to erect a makeshift tent for the injured and then gave one final order—an order for no one else to follow—before she walked through the hospital doors.

Meina’s hand fell on her shoulder, breaking her thoughts as the dark-haired mercenary inclined her head to the right. The horn let its deep bellow out again and Ayae nodded. Without words, she accepted the invitation, following Meina and her uncles to Steel’s new camp.

After Lady Wagan had praised their escape, their bravery, their survival, Heast had ordered the mercenary unit into a reinforcement position, settling them on the western side of Mireea. For the surviving members of Steel, it had felt like a judgment on the battle they had fought, the losses they had taken and the real measure of their success. They had gone from a large and spacious compound with bunks, cooking fires and storage sheds for arms, to weathered tents stretched across a narrow lane, their weapons kept within. Forced to sleep on bedrolls over hard stone with no fires, the men and women of Steel felt as if they had been judged to have failed, to have not met the challenge given to them.

“Survival,” Queila Meina explained later, “is not victory.”

Having been part of that survival herself, Ayae felt the verdict unnecessary and harsh, but she remained silent.

In part she did so because she acknowledged that the criticism had little to do with Heast—who she did not believe had a similar complaint—and more with how Steel viewed themselves after the battle.

Slowly, Ayae began to distinguish the sounds of fighting on the wall before her. Swords and axes rang out against steel, against flesh, against stone, against wood. She heard orders shouted. She heard screams. She heard sobbing as well. Among the bodies she could see fire that had sprung up from spilled oil, but so far it lined the edges of the wall, hindering those climbing more than those defending. As she drew closer, she could also see the dead and the injured, and with each step her muscles knitted tight together, threatening to render her motionless in their tension.

Then Steel was on the wall.

They did not charge, yell or announce their arrival. They fanned out and moved beside the Mireean Guards, reinforcing their position to help to push back the Leeran soldiers who had climbed to the top of the wall. Ayae found herself lunging forward, her short swords thrusting at the face of a young man, a man whose face she did not remember, not even after he had fallen. That would only come later, in her dreams: she would remember the smoothness of his white skin, the brown of his eyes, the shaven head, and she would dream of his name, a name she would make up. She would awake after her time on the Spine, surprised at the detail she did remember, at the clarity of it, and would wonder if it was a trick of her subconscious. But at the time, he fell, her blade hacking up through his jaw, and after she, drawing her breath, feeling the rapid beat of her pulse, tried to spy the catapults from her position.

“The push is to draw more of us in.” Meina had explained it to a fanned-out Steel before the runner had left. “You all know how it works: hit a section hard, force them to reinforce and make a better target. This target will even have fire on the wall. Not that it matters, because the result will be the same: you thin out the rest of the defensive positions for a second push or you thin out the strongpoint with the catapults. The downside for those attacking is the risk that it runs to their own soldiers—but if they don’t care about that we will take heavy casualties if we don’t fight smart.”

There: on the edge of the cleared kill zone.

She lost sight of it quickly as another wave of Leeran attackers came over the edge of the Spine. Standing next to a Mireean Guard, Ayae parried and dodged and slashed and found herself before a tall woman who pulled a long, two-handed sword off her back after clearing the wall and, seeing Ayae, swung it in a straight arc. The guard beside her tumbled to the ground, catching the blade in his chest. A second swing of the now bloody blade saw Ayae back up a second step, the length of her sword not enough to press a hard counterattack.

Behind the woman another two, then three Leerans appeared.

“Incoming!”

She heard the shout as the boulder hit the ground, too far from the Spine to damage it.

The woman’s sword swung again and Ayae rocked back, but only slightly. Pushing herself forward, she caught the return sweep of the sword with her left blade, her arm shuddering from the impact. Her right blade thrust forward quickly, pushing the woman backward and forcing her to raise her blade above her head—only to find Ayae’s sword slashing messily across her throat. And easily. How easy it had become, how easy and—

“Incoming!”

This time she recognized Meina’s voice, and saw the dark arc of solid rock bearing down on the Spine.

It crashed solidly into it.

The debris sprayed harshly and she turned her head, feeling whips of rock stinging across her cheek even though she was a good ten lengths away from the impact. At the point of impact, she could see two of the guards had caught chunks of stone and lay on the ground. A Leeran soldier lay between them, his body crushed by the rock. To her horror, Ayae watched the top of a ladder hit the wall and a trio of Leerans filled the gap that had been made.

They were not retreating. That was clear. The Leerans were going to fight through—

The ground shook.

At first she thought it was another boulder, that it had come down where she could not see. But then the ground shook again, her balance wavered, her arms going wide to keep upright, even as the soldiers before her and around her did—and as she managed that, a third shock cost her her stance, saw her fall to her knees as the Spine itself shifted, tilted and—

—and—

—straightened, just as the killing ground burst open, showering dirt, mud and rock into the night sky as the ground gave way, as it buckled and crumbled and the siege engines that had come onto it sank forward, devoured by the hungry, angry ground.

“Steel!” In the silence, Queila Meina’s voice rang out. “No one leaves alive!”