“They’re not going to let you divide and conquer,” Alea said. “No, they’re not,” Solutre agreed. “At least we can leave the outer two to the other four clans. These, though, are our meat—ours and the Hounds’.”
On a terrace overlooking the Boulevard of the Elysian Fields, Gar stood beside Gyre, who led the Hawks as much as anyone did. “They’re looking for your village,” Gar told him.
“If you can call two floors of a building a village,” Gyre said with a dry smile. “Well, we’d better give them something to find. Leiora! Take five people and go light a bonfire on top of the Ocre Building!”
A young woman nodded, tagged two other women and three men, and headed for the stairs.
“My lord! There, smoke!” A sergeant pointed.
“A village on top of a tower—I suppose it makes sense,” Magician Lurby growled. “Well, if they can climb it, so can we!” When they found the building, though, the soldier stared up eighty stories, their stomachs sinking. “Did the ancients climb that high every day?” one asked.
“Not likely,” Lord Lurby growled. “They lived there, worked there, and probably only came out once a month or so. Still, when they came back, they had to climb. Find a door.”
They found a doorway closed by boards instead. “Tear them down!” the magician ordered.
The boards came down easily, revealing a double door of glass and metal, both panels sagging and partly open, though the glass was intact.
“They don’t guard their portal very well,” Lurby sneered. “In and up!”
The soldiers burst through the doors and found no one in the cavern except the bright mosaics and metal strips inlaid on the wails. They prowled about, past the strange recessed panels with rows of numbers above them, and finally found a stairway behind a deceptively modest door.
“Beware ambush,” the sergeant warned. “Only one at a time can file through there. Five men could hold it against an army.” But there were no enemies on the other side. In they went and started climbing, two hundred men two abreast, tense and wary, expecting a squadron of defenders around every turn—but they found none. They climbed.
And climbed. And climbed.
As they mounted on the north side of the building, Leiora and her five friends slipped down the stairway on the far side, leaving their bonfire burning atop the elevator shaft.
By the time the magicians and their forces reached the top, it was night and the fire only embers. When they found the roof floor empty, they were too tired to curse.
“Foolish notion, to go trying to climb a tower such as this!” Magician Stour barked at Lurby.
“Then why didn’t you say so before we started?” Lurby snarled.
“We came up because we thought they had a village here,” Korkand the wyverneer said, exasperated. “We were all keen for the hunt. Well, at least my wyverns can find us a way down. Still, I’d rather they do the climbing, not me.”
They were too weary to bicker further, but a good night’s sleep would remedy that.
The magicians Lurk, Goth, Vis, and Ghouri the Ghost-Caller marched down the Broad Way until they came to the first of the towers. There they split their force in two, one hundred to the west, one hundred to the east, not realizing that each half of the army was scouting the territory of a different barbarian band—Lurk and Goth to the Hounds’ territory, Ghouri and Vis to the Corbies’.
“They’re off the Broad Way!” Longshanks slapped the terrace rail in triumph. “Now to lead them astray!”
“Why bother leading them?” Alea asked. “Remember the Way and let them search, just pull your people back out of their way.”
“Yes, Longshanks,” Solutre said with a grin. “What flatlander can find his way among our towers, after all?”
Sure enough, they couldn’t. Ghouri even called up the neighborhood ghosts, who helpfully gave him directions that led him around in a four-hour circle. Finally tumbling to their ruse, he asked his own ghosts for guidance, but they had to search, and the city ancestors kept interrupting them with jibes and jeers, destroying their concentration and confusing them completely. Around and around they went through mazes of city streets until, weary and confused, Ghouri and Vis bade their men pitch camp in one of the city’s squares, where seeds had taken root between slabs of plasticrete and, by growing, broken them into rubble. Humus had piled up, giving them purchase for their tent stakes. They lit a campfire, put on a field kettle, and began to boil stew out of beef jerky and hardtack. Vis insisted they gather around to sing a martial song to bolster their spirits.
There they were sitting around the fire singing when Lurk and Goth, misled by a tip from a local ghost who claimed to hate his descendants, came slogging down an alley and saw before them the barbarian camp they’d been looking for all day. Lord Lurk came alive. “There they are! Fall upon them, men!”
The city folk felt absolutely no obligation to get in their way. Lurk’s and Goth’s men crashed into Ghouri’s and Vis’s, who shouted with fear and anger, retreated long enough to catch up their pikes, then waded in. It took only five minutes for Vis to realize who he was fighting. “Treachery! It’s all a ruse! Lurk and Goth have led us here to kill us! Fight for your lives!”
They did. The men fought with pikes against shields; Vis hurled fire at Lurk, who made the pavement tremble and crack beneath him. Goth sent his wyverns against Ghouri’s ghosts, but the ancestors trotted out a wyverneer of their own who sent the little monsters to hunt for rabbits—outside the city. Of course, Goth wasn’t afraid of ghosts, so he drew his sword and attacked Ghouri hand to hand—but Ghouri proved to be just as skilled as he. Finally Goth slipped, Ghouri’s sword slipped between his ribs, and a new ghost wavered in the air above the body, then took form. It shot up a thousand feet, took a look at what was happening, then plunged back at Ghouri, screaming, “You fool! They’ve misled us both, misled us into attacking one another!”
“Fool yourself.” cried the ghost of his sergeant. “If you two idiots hadn’t brought us here, we’d still be alive!”
“Mind your tongue when you talk to your master!” Vis barked.
“Oh?” the sergeant asked. “What are you going to do—kill me?”
The increasing number of ghosts behind him shouted angry agreement and descended on their former master.
Those still living froze, watching, then turned on their living master with howls of vengeance.
Ghouri fled, but stepped in a pothole, tripped, and fell. In minutes, his ghost joined the mob assailing Vis’s specter.
The troops of Magicians Borgen, Sechechs, and Espayic staggered into the large mall where Linden Tree Promenade met Centric Street. They pitched camp with the dragging steps and leaden arms of the exhausted, then collapsed on their blankets. For some of them, hunger was stronger than weariness, so a few cookfires blossomed in the dusk, though most managed to chew their beef jerky without benefit of boiling.
From an archway into a nearby courtyard, Longshanks watched with Solutre, Mira, Blaize, and Alea. “They won’t split up! They just won’t split up!”
“There has to be a way,” Alea said.
“There is,” Blaize said, face pale. “Assemble a hundred ghosts, tell them to make themselves look solid and only a little larger than normal, and have them charge the sleeping camp.”
“Yessss!” Longshanks lifted his head. “The soldiers will strike and their blades will go right through—to cut into one another!”
“Ingenious,” Alea agreed, “if we can trust the specters not to indulge in any of their usual haunting tricks.”
“I’ll have to lead the charge, of course,” Blaize said, his face pale and strained.