Street of the Cobblers
Gardens District, New Sarresant
The thrum of boots marching on snow rang through the street. Officers’ horses added their hooves, clopping over cobbled stone, but few of her soldiers spoke, and quiet prevailed. Trails of smoke rose from chimneys, and eyes watched their passage from rebuilt townhouses now peopled by whoever had moved in when the nobles had been driven out. If there was to be resistance, it would be mounted at the bridges over the Verrain river, giving her the opportunity to sweep south and flank them if they tried to hold too long a stretch of ground. A tactic she’d learned from Paendurion in his assault. But so far the city was quiet, without sign of militia or priests.
Jiri carried her at the head of the 81st Regiment, the vanguard of the 1st Corps, whose binders had been given pride of place beside her on the march. She’d seen to it her officers spread her message with efficiency and cold fact: that seizing New Sarresant was not a restoration of the monarchy, nor of any privilege associated with the old regime. Traitors had attempted to place themselves at the head of the Republic, traitors who would weaken the state and hand its reins, unwittingly or no, to its enemies. Her soldiers understood. Every general—every single one, without exception—had accepted Need, proving beyond doubt their loyalty to the cause. Dozens of colonels, majors, captains, and more had volunteered to submit to the binding, more than she could have found time to accept. But the division was clear. There were soldiers, the men and women of her army: loyal, brave, understanding of the virtue of sacrifice. And there were cowards at the heads of the Assembly and among the priests, all of whom would soon learn the price of their treason.
A scout rode toward their line as they advanced, slowing and saluting as he approached her flag.
“Sir,” the scout called. “The way ahead is clear. All clear, from here down Canopy Street and past the Exarch’s Basilica.”
She dismissed him with a counter-salute, and the scout rode off, doubtless due to deliver the same information to commanders of units farther up the line. She and Royens had planned a five-pronged attack, the fingers of a fist. She’d planned the movements down to each unit on each street, with logistics and supply trains, engineers in case the roads or bridges fell to sabotage, and gun batteries set to move in and deploy to fire at close range mixed in with the soldiers.
“Stay alert,” she called to the soldiers around her. “Clear for now doesn’t mean clear forever.”
It wasn’t an order, strictly speaking, but whispers of the scout’s report were already spreading through the line. Better by far for none of her planning to be needed. But lax discipline was the bane of every army, everywhere. Little as she liked thinking of her countrymen as enemies, for now they were nothing less, and a militiaman’s decades-old musket killed as sure as a newly minted rifle. Until every man or woman with the thought of violence against the army was put down, imprisoned, or killed, her soldiers had to maintain focus, and in return she would deliver them a city pacified and returned to order, with the single, unifying purpose of defeating their enemies.
“Sir,” the next scout called. “Clear for you to move, sir, all the way to the district boundary.”
“Steady on,” she said for her soldiers’ benefit when the scout had gone. “Press forward, and keep alert.”
The column marched, turning down the broad lengths of Canopy Street. The other four columns would be encountering the same quiet on their approaches, else she’d have heard musket shot, shouting, all the signs of battle. Yet the sounds of the city were absent, too: The streets had been emptied, with lookers-on safely hidden from view. Even the Exarch’s Basilica, the great dome looming over rooftops to the west, held no more than reverent silence.
They’d made it most of the way to the iron gate that marked the district boundary when a procession of brown robes turned onto the street.
Three hundred paces off, and with no warning from the scouts, but then, they were expecting militia armed with muskets and massed in ranks. Instead this was a procession in truth, the sort more suited to a festival or a day of mourning. A hundred men and women in brown robes, some of them even carrying holy books as they walked a slow, steady pace, joining arms to block the street from end to end.
“Hold,” she called, hearing the cry repeated by officers behind her. “Binders, with me.”
She spurred Jiri forward, and fifteen of her binders marched behind. Entropy binders, Shelter, Body, and Death, all trained to combat and willing to do their duty.
The priests made no forward movement as she approached, only shuffled into place to block the street. No weapons that she could see, though every man and woman among them would be trained to binding, the better part of them skilled with Life to heal and sharpen their senses, though some would have Body, Death, or Shelter. She closed to within fifty paces, then twenty, before she reined Jiri to a halt.
“Move aside,” she called to the priests. “Or be fired upon.”
She saw a mix of zeal and nerves in their faces, and her words triggered sidelong glances up and down their line, until one woman stepped forward, and spoke.
“High Commander d’Arrent,” the priestess said. “We condemn the violence you would bring into our city. We stand against law by force, the Exarch’s basest truth, and implore you to consider the wisdom of the Veil.”
They’d chosen an acolyte to deliver the message, or at least a priestess young enough to be smooth-faced, her voice rich and full as it echoed down the street. The woman had spoken it loud enough to be heard along the front ranks of the 81st, and doubtless delivered it for precisely that effect. There would be four more like her, if the priesthood had scouts enough to know the shape of her strategy, one for each column moving through the city. A barrier of faith, and youthful innocence, as calculated as any plan of battle.
An order to fire would damn her army’s morale, and spread like fire through the colonies. Wood presses of this priestess’s face would adorn every pamphlet and paper they could print. No seizures or destruction of presses could stop it. She saw the shape of that future as sure as she could see the lines of a flanking maneuver, an envelopment or artillery fusillade. But neither could she order the army to stand down. Disobedience would spread faster than any pox, and prove just as deadly to any hope of authority, once the city was hers.
She wheeled Jiri back toward the line.
“Forward,” she called, loud enough to be sure the priests could hear. “Forward, through their line.” Leave it up to the priests whether to move or be trampled.
For a moment her soldiers wavered. She took a place beside the 81st’s regimental flag, and nudged Jiri forward at a walk as officers repeated her order. They would look to her, and Gods damn her if they wouldn’t find her composed and calm, unafraid to be the first to carry out the command.
The 81st advanced, and the quiet on the street turned icy cold.
She kept her eyes level with the horizon, fixed on the silhouettes of Southgate’s factories in the distance.
“High Commander, you must turn back,” the young priestess called. “Don’t do this. The Gods are watching.”
She stayed still, and trusted Jiri to be made of the same cold iron. In the last ten paces, the priests’ features became clear in spite of her level gaze. Young men and women in brown robes. Always the youth; so it was, in every battle, and every war. But she’d seen enough dead youths not to flinch from what would come, if they held their line.
They broke.
A pace before Jiri’s front hooves would have taken a young man square in the chest, the priests dropped arms and fell aside, shoved away as Jiri pushed through their line.
She gave no outward sign, maintaining her stare at the horizon while her heart thrummed in pure relief.
Commotion sounded behind her as the front rank of the 81st followed in her wake, but the first priest served as an example to the rest, sure as she had done for her soldiers. She went twenty paces past them, then turned to survey the regiment’s passage, as stoic as she’d have done for fording a river, or traversing any narrow stretch of ground. Let them see her, cool and collected while the priesthood faltered in their zeal.
The priests had dropped their arms, releasing their links and being pushed between the 81st’s ranks. Thank the Gods her soldiers followed her example, keeping their gazes to the horizon as they sidestepped the men and women in brown. A jostling push or two saw them past the line, but—
A disturbance drew her eyes in the far rank, on the opposite side of the street, and before she could make sense of it, a cloud of smoke appeared, accompanied by the thundering discharge of pistol shot.
“No!” she shouted, then made it an order. “Hold fire!”
Screams rose from the ranks, and what had been an orderly procession dissolved into chaos.
The priests broke, colliding with her soldiers, and she spurred Jiri into the press.
Two more gunshots sounded, and a hundred more screams and howls. Orders went up from sergeants and captains around her as Jiri cut through soldiers and priests alike. She resisted the urge to draw her saber, instead finding strands of Shelter to cordon off the mêlée as she slid from Jiri’s back toward the center of the smoke.
“Hold fire!” she shouted again, but even her sharpest bellow was suited to giving orders in an open field; in close quarters, the Nameless reigned, for all the 81st’s soldiers tried to pull away.
Another round of shots went off farther up the line before she reached the first shots’ source. Body amplified her movements, quick enough to reach a young officer, a woman with a lieutenant’s stripe on her collar and a shaking pistol still smoking in her hand. She disarmed the woman with a strike to the forearm, sending her pistol clattering to the street, where two men in brown lay, both clutching at their stomachs. A rush of soldiers backed away, both advancing up the street and retreating back the way they’d come.
“Stand down!” she shouted, and the lieutenant she’d disarmed looked at her with ghost-white eyes while others took up the cry.
“They …” the lieutenant said. “They tried to take my sidearm, sir. I had no choice. I had to—”
“Form ranks!” came the shout from other voices, other officers finally cutting through the chaos with orders their soldiers obeyed.
“See to your company, Lieutenant,” she said, trying to keep her voice from seething rage. Jiri trotted into place beside her as the 81st’s soldiers formed up, pulling back to reveal the dead and wounded lying in blood-streaked pools on the street. Six men and women in brown, with the rest of the priests scattered or standing back in horror as the soldiers recovered their composure.
It was over as quickly as it had begun, and binders from among her soldiers rushed in to see to the fallen. The priests’ line had dissolved, leaving the way clear into the heart of the city, but Erris tasted bile as she swung back into Jiri’s saddle. A military tribunal would see to the damned fool of a lieutenant, and any other man or woman who’d discharged a weapon. This wasn’t the place for justice, only for advancing toward their objective. But she couldn’t help seeing her hopes for a peaceful retaking of the city bleed out with the wounded priests left in her wake. The vision of wood presses and newspapers returned in force. The people would hear of this, and put the blood on her hands, for all it had been the priests’ defiance and treachery that earned them their fate.
“High Commander, sir.” The Colonel of the 81st saluted, approaching her with his flag and retinue in tow. “What should we do, sir? I never expected my soldiers would … I didn’t think …”
“Keep discipline, Colonel,” she said. “We march forward, to the council hall. Once it’s secured, we can—”
More shots thundered, this time in the distance. But not the thrum of a full volley, or of artillery. Scattered pistols, all too like the ones she’d just intervened to stop.
“The Nameless will spit on you,” the priestess said, the same who’d delivered her their ultimatum, before the chaos. “We are not afraid to die for the Veil’s wisdom. We are not afraid to be martyrs for truth and right.”
“Arrest her,” Erris said. “And anyone else who presents themselves as our enemy. Kill anyone under arms and keep the rest of the regiment marching for Southgate. Am I understood, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir,” the regiment-colonel said, saluting again as he turned to give the order. Erris reached for Need, preparing to shift her senses to the other prongs of her and Royens’s advance. The shots in the distance had continued, all but confirming the priests had made their barricade of arms-in-arms along other streets, and at least one had gone as poorly as hers. It tasted of ash in her mouth, but she would count it a stroke of luck, if barricades of priests were the only resistance to her taking the city. She had greater worries than a few dead men and women in brown robes. They’d chosen to die when they stood in her way. The rest would sort itself when she was firmly in control.