Alexandria (56 page)

The street falls deadly quiet. Lia grips her spear with both hands and crouches forward with Rosa.

“Expecting us,” says Rosa.

She takes her bow next to Marikez and aims down the opposite way.

Time passes.

Sweat dampens them and their arms begin to shiver on their bows.

“Here they come,” says Marikez simply.

He lights off an arrow and slips another against the bowstring. Rosa steps out from cover and fires a quick shot, then ducks back as a hail of arrows whizzes past.

“Come on,” says Marikez, “they’ve seen us.”

They press farther back into the dreary recesses of the abandoned lobby, a virtual terrarium, overrun with weeds and creeping kudzu. Marikez ducks behind a large column and Lia finds cover with Rosa behind a long marble counter. They sit still and wait.

After an agonizing minute of silence, Lia crawls on the ground and peers around the corner. Two of them stand in the center of the space, slinking toward her. She fetches a rock and chips it off a far column, then skirts around the other side of the counter with Rosa.

The warriors split off to the edges of the room. Rosa rises slowly and peels off an arrow, skewering one through the neck. As she lines up another, the second man rushes her. Marikez lofts a shot and it goes wide, just missing him. Rosa stumbles backwards and the warrior raises his blade. Lia slides onto the surface of the cracked marble, levers herself to her feet, and pushes off the edge of the counter with her good leg, throwing herself through the air with her spear thrust forward. The tip sinks in just below his shoulder blade and they tumble to the ground. Lia keeps her grip and shoves the spear tip deeper. He drops his machete from his lamed arm and tries to snatch it back with the other, and she withdraws the bloody spear and plunges it down again, running it through his belly with sickeningly little resistance. He shudders and locks eyes with her.

She watches him die. He was Calyn’s boy.

Marikez is back at the opening, scanning the street, and Lia and Rosa rush to his side. A one-armed man on horseback bursts past them, racing down the street, leading his small army over the twisted metal obstruction. Lia knows the horse at once and hot anger flushes through her, seeing the monster that now rides Balazir. Rosa raises back her bow and Marikez stills her.

When the Nezra warriors have surmounted the rubble-strewn pass, the counter-attack begins. They hear it more than see it, and the uproar soon reaches a fever-pitch.

“Now
,” says Marikez, launching from the opening and sprinting toward the mangled pile that divides the roadway. He clambers up and surveys the battle. His fighters, some mounted, some on foot, engage the bloody warriors as they descend the tight passage. Marikez and Rosa start firing on them. Lia huddles behind, tightening her fingers with nervous tension. The Nezra scatter wild, abandoning their horses and diving for cover.

Rosa lets go another shot, then bucks forward as an arrow tears through a chunk of her thigh. Lia spins and sees two warriors stealing away behind a concrete wall. She calls to Marikez, then works herself down to street level and hides in a vine-covered niche. Rosa leans back against the rusted iron beams, ripping her robe and tying a quick tourniquet around her leg while Marikez covers her.

One of the warriors steps out and lobs a shot, then shirks back. Marikez fires and misses. When the warrior steps out a second time, Marikez is ready and his arrow lodges in the man’s ribs. He stumbles back and falls, and two more arrows follow in quick succession, striking his leg and back.

Across the barricade, a stillness has settled, both sides shielding themselves from view. Unseen archers fire on Rosa and Marikez. They stumble over the beams and lurch down the other side and run toward shelter.

Lia reaches to her side and withdraws the knife she took from Marikez’s armory, short-bladed with braided leather around the handle. She pushes her head through the vines then swiftly pulls it back. A warrior treads fast along the outer wall. As he passes the shadowed niche, Lia swings her arm through the tangle of vines and runs her knife into the soft hollow of his chin. He seizes onto her arm and bucks to the ground, and she keeps pushing until she sees the blade rise between his teeth and puncture the roof of his mouth, and further still until his eyes flicker out and his body jitters to a stop.

She scampers out and runs to join Marikez, picking her way over the pile. An arrow thumps off the trunk of a sapling growing out the mound, and Lia rolls to her side and nestles herself amidst the flaking metal beams. She crawls under the snarled mass of junk and edges closer to the other side of the street. Bodies are strewn haphazardly, some still moving. Beyond that, it is vacant.

A short distance separates her from Marikez’s hideout. She takes a deep breath and rushes across, loping awkwardly on her wounded knee. An arrow strikes neatly in the ground before her and she flinches back. Marikez steps out and shoots toward the source of the attack, giving her enough time to cover the distance and join them under the fallen wall. A smattering of arrows chocks off the concrete.

The outnumbered Nezra have vanished. Birds chirp dulcetly from the slanted rafters of the slowly listing buildings. Marikez looks from window to window, searching out their archers. He sees one on the forward corner, across the street.

“I have to find the others. Rosa, can you shoot?”

She nods. Lia takes her hand and pulls her toward the edge of the wall, then hands her the bow.

“Watch
there
,” he says, pointing up toward the corner, then he steps out and hoists himself atop the wall and runs down the other side.

He dives in an open storefront and scans around. A whispered call issues from the darkness and five of his men step forward. He beckons them over and motions across the street.

“There,” he says, “on the second level.”

“Jivann is there,” says the man to his side. “On the ground.”

Marikez stares into the shadows, then risks a call.

“Jivann.”

A lean young man shies his head out and locks eyes with him across the boulevard. Marikez points to the floor above him and Jivann nods and disappears through the interior of the building.

They stiffen their backs and watch the window. Out of the blackness, a body hurtles through and crashes to the ground.

“Quick
,” hisses Marikez, tearing out onto the street.

They careen around the corner, drawing a weakening barrage of arrows, and slip into the adjacent structure. Three young warriors stand flat against the wall, out of arrows, gripping their machetes with sinewy arms. One slashes at Marikez, the blade grazing along his arm. He parries and beats the blade away, then lunges in for his own attack. The warrior counters with a flash of swordplay and the clanging of metal on metal erupts in the confined space, Marikez beating his sword down repeatedly on his stiff-armed opponent, driving the man’s blade lower and lower until Marikez lands a blow to his forehead and cracks a seam into his skull. He falls limp, and Marikez spins to his back and sees two fallen Nezra, draining blood into the dry ground. One of his own lies next to them, with a rough slit open at the base of his sternum.

Marikez steps to the open frontage. Quiet. He signals and they bolt around to the next building, nearly collapsed, with no point of entry. They keep moving down the way, expecting a hail of arrows that does not come.

“Is that all?”

Pounding hooves drone louder and Taket flashes past in a blur, making straight for Lia’s little hideaway. He rides with a knife between his teeth, gripping the reins taut with his only hand.

Marikez drops his blade and unfastens his bow, fumbling for an arrow. Two of his men flank him and loft an arrow apiece, both missing. Marikez finally gets off his shot and it goes off-kilter, wobbling through the air and bouncing off Taket’s back.

Lia perches behind Rosa and feeds her an arrow. Taket rumbles toward them, releasing the reins and gripping the knife out of his clenched teeth. He leaps onto the wall and jolts toward Rosa and she pierces him in the hip joint with a quick arrowshot and he falters and skids to a halt. Lia reels backwards as he swings his blade through the air, prone on the ground and shoving forward with his legs, missing her face by a hair’s breadth. Rosa draws on him, narrowing in for the kill.

“Hold
,” shouts Marikez from down the way. “Don’t kill him.”

They skulk back along the fallen trusses and look around at the body-strewn street. Marikez waits, watching for more warriors, then slowly steps out and makes his way toward them, his men countering behind, sweeping their bows across the rows of jagged window openings.

“I want to see what he knows,” says Marikez, drawing near.

They stand in a loose semi-circle around the struggling Taket. He sits up, facing them, maimed, and with only his knife to defend himself. He leers at Lia with pure contempt in his eyes, then raises his blade and opens a thin red slash along his throat.

Marikez throws up his hands, then turns sorrowfully to take stock of his injured and dead. Rosa limps down the street, joining the others, and they move from one recess to another, collecting the fallen arrows and rounding up the horses.

Lia steps gingerly away, patting her hands on her hips.
“Balazir
,” she calls out sweetly.

He comes to her at once.

Night falls on the Temple. Solemn commoners retire early to their cottages, awaiting good tidings from the field. Long days these have been, anxious for their brave Sons to return. One by one, their candles snuffed, the humble little cottages blink out and join the peaceful darkness and the provinces fall to slumber.

Alone on the high terrace, Arana watches over them. He glimpses the quarry road, winding off to the north, where a younger Arana once walked with his father to see the unearthing of the great stones that would become his Temple. Simpler days, to be sure, but he can no longer remember if they were better. He tilts his mug and drinks bitter wine.

A golden aurora lights up behind him and he turns starkly to the south.

The mug slips from his hands and shatters on the terrace floor.

Down in the valley, the ruins burst alive with Fire.

Soot-black and crouching, Jack watches from the trees above the provinces as the black powder charges light the liquor-wet tinder ablaze, erupting in a series of loud cracks that streak across the base of the cliff and combust in a wall of flames. The fires coalesce and grow stronger as the ocean wind feeds them. It burns slowly up the steep hill and flashes out through the decrepit ruins, where it lights dry vines like fuses and spreads warmly through the haunted streets, spewing out a column of smoke that glows amber in the night.

It takes long moments for the terror to set in.

The men who line the Temple’s perimeter stagger backwards hypnotically, enraptured by the blaze, expecting a fuller onslaught to ignite them where they stand, then they break for the Temple, beating their legs faster as they near the grand staircase.

A scream sirens from the provinces, drawing out sleepy neighbors from their beds, and havoc ensues. They collect their families and stream from their cottages, headlong toward the refuge of the Temple.

Jack holds his breath steady and watches the scores of people cross the grounds, running for their lives. Temple children shriek across the bridgeways toward the main structure. Sajiress and his men hold up next to him, black and sinister in the limbs of the surrounding trees.

The crowd rushes past the amphitheatre, shoving their way in through the wide entrance, armed men ushering them in. When the last have passed, they roll shut the heavy door and batten it down.

The riot ceases and the blaze roars low in the valley. Inside they will be congregating in the foyer, the warriors branching off to man the narrow windows with their bows. Just like the drills Jack ran in training.

Numb to the core, he shifts his weight on the crooked limb. Thick smoke from the valley makes the air acrid and bitter, hazing over the grounds and dampening his view. He watches the door. Soon they will emerge, and there will be no turning back when they do.