Seasons of War (53 page)
Authors: Daniel Abraham
‘And our men?’
‘Perhaps half that,’ the captain said.
‘So many?’
‘They aren’t good fighters, sir, but they’re committed.’
Balasar sighed, his mind shifting. If he assumed the force pushing toward the palaces was having similar luck, that meant something like fifteen hundred dead since he’d walked into the city. More, if there was resistance in the south. This wasn’t a battle, only slow, ugly slaughter. He went to the doorway, peering out down the street. He could hear the sounds of fighting - men’s voices, the clash of metal on metal. A hundred small outbursts that became a constant roar, like raindrops falling on a pond.
‘Get the drummer,’ he said. ‘We’ll make a push for it. Scatter the enemy, take the entrance to the tunnels and then get runners to the others.’
‘The men we’re seeing, sir. They’re able-bodied. And decent fighters, some of them.’
‘They wanted to do this on the surface,’ Balasar said. ‘The tunnels will be their second string. It won’t be as bad once we’re in there. If they’re smart, they’ll see there’s no point going on.’
The captain saluted without answering. Balasar was willing to take that as agreement.
It took perhaps half a hand to gather a force of men together. Two hundred soldiers would press forward and take the forges, where Sinja had said the paths down would be open. They were only another street down. There wasn’t a line of defenders to crush, so the horsemen were less useful. They could still move fast, and men on foot who entered the streets wouldn’t be able to attack them easily. Footmen with archers interspersed between them ducking fast from doorway to doorway was the best plan.
He explained it all to the group leaders, watching the men’s faces as he asked them to run through the rain of stones and arrows. Two hundred men to move forward, to take control of the forges and then hold the position against anything that came up out of it until the rest of their force could join them. Balasar would lead them. Not one of them hesitated or voiced objection.
‘If we live until sunset,’ he said, ‘we’ll see the end of this. Now take formation.’
The drum throbbed, the captains and group leaders scrambled to the places where their men stood waiting. A few bricks detonated on the street in their wake, but no one had stayed out long enough to be in danger from them. Balasar squatted in his chosen doorway, rubbing his shoulder. The air was numbing cold, and the great dark towers rose around them, higher than the crows that wheeled and called, excited, he guessed, by the smells of blood and carrion.
It struck him how beautiful the city was. Austere and close-packed, with thick-walled buildings and heavy shutters. The brightness of snow and the glittering icicles that hung from the eaves set off the darkness of stone and echoed the vast blank sky. It was a city without color - dark and light with hardly even gray in between - and Balasar found himself moved by it. He took a deep breath, watching the cloud of it that formed when he exhaled. The drummer at his side licked his lips.
‘Go,’ Balasar said.
The deep rattle sounded, echoing between the high walls of the houses, and then the press was on, and Balasar launched himself into it, shield high, shoulder cramping. He made it almost halfway to the shelter of the forges and their great copper roofs before the arrows could drop the distance of the towers. Five men fell around him as he ran that last stretch and found himself in a tangle of heat and shouting and swinging blades. One last group of the enemy had stayed hidden here to defy him, to stand guard against them. Balasar shouted and moved forward with the surge of his men. In the field, there would have been formation, rules, order. This was only melee, and Balasar found himself hewing and hacking with his blood singing and alive. It was an idiotic place for a general to be, throwing himself in the face of a desperate enemy, but Balasar felt the joy of it washing away his better sense. A man with a spear fashioned from an old rake poked at him, and he batted the attack away and swung hard, cutting the man down. Three of the locals had formed a knot, fighting with their backs together. Balasar’s men overwhelmed them.
And then it was finished. As suddenly as it had begun, the fight ended. The bodies of the enemy lay at their feet, along with a few of their own. Not many. Steam rose from the corpses of friend and foe alike. But they’d reached the tunnels. One last push, down deep into the belly of the city, and it would be over. The war. The andat. Everything. He felt himself smiling like a wolf. His shoulder and arm no longer hurt.
‘General! Sir! It’s blocked!’
‘What?’
One of his captains came forward, gore soaking his tunic from elbow to knee, his expression dismayed.
‘It can’t be,’ Balasar said, striding forward. But the captain turned and led him. And there it was. A great gateway of stone, a sloping ramp leading down wide enough for four carts abreast to travel into it. And as he came forward, his boots slipping where the fight had churned the snow to slush, he saw it was true. The shadows beneath the gateway were filled with stones, cut and rough, large as boulders and small as fists. Something glittered among them. Shattered glass and sharp, awkward scraps of metal. Clearing this would take days.
He’d been betrayed. Sinja Ajutani had led him astray. The taste of it was like ashes. And worse than the deception itself was that it would change nothing. The defending forces were scattered, the towers would run out of bricks and arrows, given time. All that Sinja had accomplished was to prolong the agony and cost Balasar a few hundred more men and the Khai Machi a few thousand.
Ah, Sinja, he thought. You were one of my men. One of
mine
.
mine
.
‘Get me the maps’ was what he said.
Knowing now that it had been a trap, knowing that the forces of Machi would have some way to retreat, some pathway to muster their attack, Balasar scanned the thin lines that marked out the streets and tunnels. His fingers left trails of other men’s blood.
Not the palaces. Sinja had sent him there. Not the forges. His mind went cool, calm, detached. The blood rage of the melee was gone, and he was a general again. The warehouses. There, in the north. The galleries below would be good for mustering a large force or creating an infirmary. There would be water, and the light from it wouldn’t shine out. If it were his city, that would be the other plausible center from which to make his campaign.
‘I need runners. A dozen of them. We need to reach the men at the palaces and tell them that the plan’s changed.’
Sinja had ridden hard for the north. Even as he heard the distant horns that meant the battle within Machi had begun, he leaned down over his mount and pushed for the paths and rough mining roads that laced the foothills behind the city. And there, low in the mountains where generations ago it had been easy and convenient to haul ore, one of the first, oldest, tapped-out mines. Otah’s bolt-hole for the children and the poets, and the only thing between it and the city - Eustin and a hundred armed Galts. Visions of cart tracks crushed in the snow and disappearing into the mine’s mouth pricked at his mind. Let Eustin not find them.
He reached the first ridge behind Machi just as a distant crashing sound came from the city, the violence muffled by distance and snowfall. The horse steamed beneath him. Riding this hard in this weather was begging for colic; the horse was nearly certain to die if he kept pressing it. And he was going to keep pressing it. If a horse was the only thing he killed before sunset, it would be a better day than he’d hoped.
Sinja reached the tunnel sometime after midday. Time was hard to judge. Silently, he walked down into the half-lit mouth of the tunnel and squatted, considering the dust-covered ground until his eyes had adapted to the darkness. It was dry. No one had passed through here since the snow had begun to fall. He stalked back out, mounted, and turned his poor, suffering animal to the south again, trotting down the snow-obscured tracks, cutting back and forth - west and east and west again - his eyes peering through the gray for Eustin and his men. It wasn’t long before he found them - a dozen men set on patrol. There were eight patrols, they told him, and Eustin in the one that ranged nearest to the city. Sinja gave his sometime compatriots his thanks and went on to the south.
His gloves were soaked, the cold creeping into his knuckles, when he found Eustin. Balasar’s captain and ten of his men had stopped a beaten old cart pulled by a mule and driven by a young man with a long Northern face and a nervous expression. Eustin and four of the men had dismounted and were talking to the panicked-looking man. Sinja called out and Eustin hailed him and motioned him down with what appeared to be good enough will.
We’re allies, Sinja told himself. We’re Balasar Gice’s men on the day of the general’s greatest triumph.
He forced his numbed lips into a smile and let his horse pick its way gently downslope to where the soldiers and the unfortunate refugee waited.
‘Not going with the general?’ Eustin asked as Sinja came within comfortable speaking distance.
‘Thought I’d let him kill all the people I knew without my being there. I’d only have been a distraction.’
Eustin shrugged.
‘I’m surprised you’re staying around at all,’ he said. ‘You aren’t about to be the most popular man in Machi. Wintering here might not be good for you.’
‘Ah,’ Sinja said, swinging down from his horse. ‘I’ll have all my dear friends from Galt to keep my back from sprouting arrows.’
Eustin’s noncommittal grunt seemed to finish the topic. Sinja considered the man on the cart. He looked familiar, but in a vague way, as if Sinja had known the man’s brothers but not him.
‘What have you got here?’ Sinja asked, and Eustin turned his attention back to the refugee.
‘Coward making a run for the hills,’ Eustin said. ‘I was talking with him about what he’s carrying.’
‘Just my son,’ the man said. ‘I don’t have any silver or gems. I don’t have anything.’
‘Seems unlikely that you’d live well out there,’ Eustin said, nodding toward the north and the snow-veiled mountains. ‘So maybe it’s best if you come back to the camp with us, eh?’
‘Please. My sister and her husband. They live in one of the low towns. Up by the Radaani mines. We’re going to stay with her,’ the man said. He was a good liar, Sinja thought. ‘I’m not a fighter, and my boy’s no threat. We don’t want any trouble.’
‘Bad day for you, then,’ Eustin said and gestured with his fingers. ‘The cloak. Open it.’
Reluctantly, the man did. A sword hung at his hip. Eustin smiled.
‘Not a fighter, eh? That’s for scaring squirrels, then?’
‘You can have it—’
‘Got one, thanks,’ Eustin said. ‘Let’s see this boy of yours.’
The man hesitated, his eyes darting to the riders, to Eustin. He was thinking of running for it - his little mule against six men on horseback. Sinja took a simple pose that advised against it, and the man looked down, then turned to the back of the little cart.
‘Choti-kya,’ he said. ‘Come say hello to these good men.’
A bundle of brown waxed silk stirred in the back of the cart, rose up, and turned to face them. The boy’s round face was shy and frightened, but also curious. His cheeks were red from the cold, as if someone had slapped him. As the small hands pushed out from his blankets and took a pose of greeting, Sinja sighed.
Danat. It was Kiyan’s boy. So this man was Nayiit, and all Sinja’s worst fears were unfolding right here before him.
One of Eustin’s men stepped forward, looking through the cart. Danat shied back from him, but the soldier paid the boy no particular attention.
‘What do you think we should do with them, Captain Ajutani,’ he asked. ‘Kill ’em or send them on?’
Sinja kept his face blank as his mind worked at an answer. Eustin didn’t trust him and never had. Sinja tried to judge what the man would do - follow his advice, or take the opposite. He suspected Eustin would oppose him simply because he could. So the right choice would be to recommend death for Danat and Nayiit. The gamble was higher stakes than he liked. Eustin looked over at him, his eyebrows raised. Sinja was taking too long in answering.
‘I don’t like killing children,’ he said in Galtic.
‘Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done it since we left Nantani. There was a whole school of them near Pathai. Kill the man, then? And leave the boy in a snowstorm? That seems cruel.’
Sinja shrugged and took a simple pose of apology.
‘I hadn’t known you were a great killer of children,’ he said. ‘We all make our reputations somehow. Do whatever you think best.’
Eustin scowled and the driver’s face went pale. The man spoke Galtic, then. Sinja wasn’t certain that was a good thing.
‘Maybe I should kill the boy and let the man go,’ Eustin said, and Danat’s keeper swung out of the cart, drawing his sword with a shout. Eustin jumped back, pulling his own blade free. It was fast, over almost before it began. The young man swung wild; Eustin parried the blow and sunk his own blade into Nayiit’s belly. Nayiit fell back, clutching at his gut, while Eustin looked down at him in rage and disgust.
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