The Great Rift (56 page)

The scouts returned in minutes. The king's men were just beyond the next ridge, on the verge of reaching the slopes up to Borrull. Hopp gritted his teeth and shouted his clan on. Forty-odd warriors raced up the hill and spilled down the other side. In the shallow valley, a troop of some fifty men in red shirts marched up the base of the butte. The clan gained quickly until the enemy soldiers spotted them in the open grass. Faint shouts lofted from below as the redshirts broke into a jog, hampered by exhaustion and their wounded. The clan reached the bottom of the valley while the enemy was just a third of the way up to the safety of the wall.

A high trumpet blared down from the fortress. Hopp swore. Riders spilled from the open gates, followed by dozens of foot soldiers.

"We're too late," Hopp yelled. "Get back up the hill. Fast as you can!"

Dante turned and retreated with his fellow warriors, several of whom snarled, frustrated by the lack of battle. He glanced over his shoulder, gathering up the nether in preparation for a fight, but the soldiers from the fort met those running up the hill and stopped to help them up to the cover of Borrull. When the clan reached the ridge, Hopp paused to let them catch their breath and assess the enemy. A mile away, the swarm of redshirts clustered outside the wall and funneled through the gates.

They jogged back to their lakeside camp. Hopp dispatched scouts and spent several minutes exchanging loon-messages with the other chiefs. Blays went to the shore to towel off his sweat. He'd been bathing with some frequency lately. Shaving, too.

"Well, that was fun," he said when he returned, damp-haired. "I suppose it beats maybe dying."

Dante leaned over at the waist to stretch his back and legs. "But now they've got 250 men instead of 200, I'd say our overall chances of maybe-dying have shot right up."

"Let me ask you something: do you care?"

"Do I care if I might die soon?"

"Yeah."

"A bit," Dante said. "In the sense that yes, completely, I care. What are you, insane?" He paused, mouth twisting between a grin and a grimace. "Wait, you're not in love, are you?"

Blays flapped his hand. "That's not what I'm talking about. Does this feel real to you? Does it feel like a war? The kind of thing bards sing songs about?"

"Sure. I'm working on a song myself."

"Really?"

"I call it 'The Ballad of History's Greatest Sorcerer, and His Homely Sidekick Whose Name Was Unfortunately Lost to Time.'"

"Come on."

"Too long?"

Blays shook his head at the pond. It wasn't long until sunset and yellow light poured in through the branches of the trees. Flies floated down to the water and disappeared in swift ripples of rising fish. Someone had lit a fire. Smoke and pan-fried fish drifted on the cool air.

"Maybe it'll sink in soon," Blays said. "But right now we're standing by this pond. We're about to eat some fish. There'll be salt and white pepper and whatever those spriggy little herbs are. We'll get up with the sun and we'll fish and walk through the hills and come back and sleep."

"And we just got back from chasing a gang of Gaskan soldiers until more mounted soldiers chased
us
off."

"But now we're here. By this pond."

"And it doesn't feel like five miles between us and those soldiers," Dante said. "It feels more like five thousand."

"Exactly!" Blays nodded.

"Nope," he said. "Feels like war to me."

Blays made an exasperated noise and wandered off to find Lira. In truth, there were moments where it did feel like an idyllic dream, like one long voyage between streams and hills and mountains with no pressing destination in sight, but those moments were few, compressed between endless thoughts of days to come, of fishing to feed the tribe so it could fight, of practicing intricate tricks with the nether to keep himself sharp, of probing the earth to learn its language and raise walls to keep the enemy out. He tried to notice the light on the pond, but soon found himself thinking of the clans instead, and what he would do when it came time to knock the doors of Borrull right off their hinges.

He was right to think that way. The next day, Cally contacted him to pass along the latest rumor. An army had departed from the borders not thirty miles to the west, hundreds strong. Dante told him to tell the other chiefs. Minutes later, Cally spoke to Hopp instead: the chieftains had requested another meet.

"Think they're ready now?" Hopp grinned.

Dante shook his head. "The more I learn about norren, the less I know. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if they suggested leaving the hills to the king and building a ladder to the moon."

Hopp sent a quarter of the clan as pickets to the west. At the hill crowned by the seats of stones, the faces of the chiefs were hard and sober. Hopp didn't say a word. He planted himself on one of the long stones, smiling like a fox with a gosling hanging from its mouth.

"So as far as I can tell," Stann said in a clear voice that quickly silenced the pockets of conversation, "we're seeing their strategy emerge. It goes something like this. Capture the strongest point in the region. Which they've done. Move in a force strong enough to hold it against any nearby clans, which they're doing right now. Once that's established, they hole up in their fortress to prevent counterattack while remaining able to deploy hundreds of troops at once to smash any clans in sight, pinning down the region and whittling our disorganized little bands into splinters. This lets them control a big old chunk of the border and keep their own lands safe until their real armies take the field."

"Smart," Wult said, weathered face crinkling in annoyance. "Why can't Moddegan be dumb about it instead? Would make our job a hell of a lot easier."

Orlen stood and gazed straight up at the clouds that had mounted over the last few hours. "If we don't want them to do this, we should stop them from doing so. If we don't stop them from doing so, we admit we want them to do this."

Kella scowled. "It's not as as simple as that."

"I think it is." Stann didn't so much as glance around the circle. None of the other chieftains moved, either, but Dante could feel their assent nonetheless—the norren had reached one of their mysterious unspoken agreements. Stann turned to Dante. "How close do you have to be to bring down the doors? Within bowshot?"

"Thereabouts," Dante said. "It's subtler work than just smashing them down. Call it two hundred yards."

"I assume you work best when you are not being punctured with arrows."

"Unless I'm specifically working at bleeding, yes."

"Then we attack under cover of night. And under the cover of a big wooden shield." Stann took a look around the circle. "We must move today. Prepare as we march. If this new army reaches Borrull before we do, we'll lose the whole region."

Several chiefs stood immediately and jogged away from the hilltop. Hopp grinned and smacked Dante's back hard enough to stumble him.

"You're sure you can do this?"

"Fortunately for our chances, hinges don't fight back." Dante tugged the hem of his doublet to straighten it after his near-fall. "If you can give me a minute, I'll give you the fort."

Hopp smiled proudly, glancing at the other chieftains on his way down the hill. The norren was proud of
him
, Dante realized, as well as being proud of his own canniness—taking three humans into his clan must have been a terrible risk on some level, a gamble of whatever prestige he held with all the other clans. Blays had fulfilled Hopp's "test" by managing to only half-drown himself in the stream, yes, but there was no higher law holding Hopp to his end of the bargain. Taim, Josun Joh, Arawn, none of them had formed in the clouds to scowl down at the chieftain until he relented and took the three humans into his tribe. Hopp was a man for whom pragmatism came before honor. He'd break his word without hesitation if he thought it would make for a better tomorrow. He'd seen something in the humans, then. Some use or potential that convinced him to roll the dice. Not only was that gamble about to pay off, it was about to do so in front of fifteen other clans.

The Broken Herons moved east, covering half the distance to Borrull before nightfall. Dante gazed at the stars from under his blankets. He'd been in enough fights, scrapes, skirmishes, and battles to forget more than one, but he'd never been part of a siege of this size, let alone served as its cornerstone. As terrifying as that thought was, it was thrilling, too. A breath of cool air. The wind between an albatross' feathers. The night-dewed grass beneath a tiger's paws. Feared and fearless.

Away through the brush, Lira moaned. Dante struck out with the nether, neatly slicing a twig from the tree above his bed.

He woke sluggish and thickheaded. He wished for tea. The Broken Herons tramped east. They halted regularly to forage, rest, and wait for word from the scouts, but moved fast enough to encamp by mid-afternoon in a stream-fed valley some two miles southwest of Borrull. Several clans and some three hundred warriors were already there, mending shields, sharpening blades, fishing, wrestling in a foreign, upright style where victory was achieved by flinging the opponent to the ground. After each throw, sweep, or trip, the downed warrior bounced to his feet, laughing or wryly determined. More than once, he asked his partner to walk him through the technique that had just introduced him to the ground. If any old rivalries lurked among the divergent clans, Dante didn't see them that day.

Stann summoned Dante over at dusk to inspect the shield they'd rigged for him. It was more of a mobile wall than a shield: seven feet tall and ten feet wide, gently convex, with three horizontal slits at his eye-level. Leather handles had been nailed behind either flank, allowing for two warriors to carry it while Dante hid behind it. It smelled of fresh-cut wood, but had clearly been built by a craftsman whose nulla was woodwork—the planks sanded smooth and splinter-free, the viewing slits straight and perfectly parallel. Dante's doubts about the plan backed swiftly away.

Scouts came and went as night settled on the hills. The last of the clans arrived under starlight, swelling their numbers past seven hundred, outnumbering the men behind the wall three-to-one. In a straightforward siege, the odds would be far from overwhelming. In one where the front door would be knocked to the ground within two minutes of first contact—one where the attacking size was larger not only in numbers, but in the tree-trunk-like mass of their individual warriors, too—it would not be an easy night for the redshirts.

A ripple spread through the camp. It was time to march.

Seven hundred pairs of feet flattened the grass of the hill. Scattered clouds dimmed the moonlight. Spears swayed over the high heads of the norren. Nether danced between pebbles and twigs. They reached the rim and spilled into the waiting valley. The butte of Borrull rose from the darkness. The clans carried no banners. They sounded no horns. Hunching along in loose formation through the breeze-ruffled grass, the warriors were nearly halfway up to the fort before the first trumpets sounded from above.

Torches pricked up along the wall. Shouts tumbled down the slope. Blays grinned. "Think they've seen us?"

"Either that or they've spotted an alarmingly large rat in the kitchen," Dante said.

"Let's see how they feel about the one that's about to chew through their doors."

"If it turns out I can't, and they shoot me, don't tell Cally I was trying to plink off a hinge. Tell him I was trying to lift the whole wall over my head."

"You think that will make you sound
smarter
?"

Flaming arrows launched from along the wall, falling through a long arc before burying themselves in the ground. Their shafts burnt on, denoting range. The norren halted a few yards from the nearest. Atop the wall, arrowheads glittered in the torchlight. Silhouettes moved between the rounded merlons.

"Turn back or be slain!" a commander bellowed from up the hill.

Orlen strode up to the nearest arrow, yanked it from the ground, and broke it in his massive hands. "Within an hour, every redshirt behind that wall will be dead. To avoid that fate, I advise leaping from the cliffs, and taking your chances with the ground."

Norren hollered from up and down the lines. The twang of twenty bows hummed through the night. Orlen turned his back and walked away. Seconds later, a forest of shafts planted itself in the ground where he'd stood.

Hopp loomed beside Dante. "Ready for the big surprise?"

"I hope you've picked some strong men to hold that shield."

"I can vouch for Coe," said the chief. "We'll see how I do."

He beckoned Dante along the ranks to the giant wooden shield-wall. A gigantic norren waited at one of the handles. He nodded at Dante. Hopp grabbed hold of the other side and counted down. The pair hoisted it inches of the ground and shuffled forward.

Dante's heart pulsed. He walked with them, his breath echoing from the close wooden wall. Through the three slits, his vision swayed with the pace of the two norren. Despite the claustrophobia of it all, at least he could still run if it came down to it. In a siege of the eastern kingdoms several hundred years ago, a sorcerer named Federick had had the brilliant idea of enclosing himself inside a wheeled platform of pure iron to protect him as he set to the time-intensive work of blasting a large hole through the massive enemy walls. Once he got into position, an ethermancer among the enemy forces had let Federick work for long enough to drill through four feet of stone, and then, with Federick's strength depleted and his attention diverted, the ethermancer knocked off one of Federick's wheels, trapping him in place, and then turned the ether to the heating of the iron enclosure. Within moments, Federick halted his attack. Within minutes, the entire battlefield smelled like sweet pork.

Dante could at least be certain he wouldn't be cooked. Still, when the first flaming arrow rapped into the wall, he jerked back with a snarl.

"Did you think they wouldn't shoot?" Hopp chuckled.

"Shut up and carry."

"Are those the last words you'd speak to your chief?" Hopp said, mock-aghast.