“Aiau, cousins,” Grendis said, through her bubbling blood and pain. “Our master is wise. We have come out, and the city is ours.”
And Fiona, far too late, realized how she had been used.
Fury struck her, her coat blackening with her thoughts, and blindly, deaf to the call of one of the Classani behind her, she stalked out into moving mass of purposeful soldiers, keeping on the edge of their column as she fought her way through them, moving always toward Calacas. She would have used her pistol if necessary, but in spite of the soldiers’ hurry and the shouts of their officers, they gave way in surprise before her angry black-faced figure with its featureless mask, and those who didn’t give way she easily enough shouldered aside. The column was slowing now, as if it had encountered resistance somewhere; and she could hear the clash of arms from the gate.
At last she jostled her way to the drawbridge, and fought her way across it, calling out angry curses to the soldiers who impeded her. On her way up the ramparts, she caught a glimpse through a narrow view-slit of an inner gatehouse, seeing there the butchered bodies of the hostages from Neda, the hostages Tegestu had killed, then displayed, to start the slaughter.
The attack in the citadel had not been treachery on the part of Tastis — it had come in answer to Tegestu’s hanging the dead hostages from the battlements, the naked bodies all dangling from the crenelations, easily recognizable with a long glass. Tegestu had anticipated Fiona’s being embroiled in the fight, and of having to use her offworld weaponry to smash her way out.
And to smash the defenses on which Tastis’ city depended. Neda’s gates were in ruins, its drawbridge down, and Tegestu’s people were pouring into the city.
A lithe light-absorbing form, the lunacy of death possessing her, she came up to the roof of the gatehouse, seeing Tegestu standing calmly at the battlements, his helmet tilted back on his head. There was a stir around him, his guards closing in; but he turned his head and saw her, then ordered them back, facing her, his arms lowered.
“If you intend to kill me, ilean, I make no objection,” he said, his voice calm, accepting. “But I would like to see my wife first, if she still lives.”
Fiona raised her pistol, then hesitated.
CHAPTER 30
Fiona’s clothes, her featureless mask, were the color of night, of death. Tegestu, accepting the need for his own death, stood with arms outstretched, facing the alien woman’s weapon. As soon as he’d seen Fiona moving with angry purpose along the bridge, among the long column of soldiers, he had known the woman would take revenge, and he had prepared himself. His mind was at peace, yearning for vail; for the end.... He hoped only to see Grendis first; but it seemed that was not to be.
Tegestu stood, his arms outstretched, and waited.
The weapon, held at the end of a shadow arm, fell. Fiona’s voice came clearly through her mask.
“Grendis is wounded badly,” she said. “An arrow through a lung. She is on the bridge, and is being tended by her people.”
A lung... Tegestu remembered the assassin’s arrow his own lung had taken years ago, the way Grendis had nursed him through the pain and lunatic fever. He would repay her now, with all the time Fiona allowed him before her inevitable revenge. Grendis was alive: a little flame of hope kindled in Tegestu’s breast. Slowly, deeply, he bowed to his death. “Thank you, ilean,” Tegestu said, and gave orders for a surgeon and assistants to make their way out along the bridge to tend his wife and the other wounded hostages. And, since his death was not yet to come, he returned to his business.
Black, poised, unmoving, Fiona stood behind him at the tower entrance, watching him as he received his reports. At one point she unclipped a small object from her belt, held it to her mouth, and spoke into it in her own language — perhaps a fetish to which she was praying, he thought. His flags were already flying above the Long Bridge Gate, and the column of soldiers was still pushing into the city, though it was moving slowly. It was some hours before he received a clear notion of what was happening behind the enemy walls.
The first column of cavalry, led by Dellila, had not stopped at the gate: their orders had been to drive at the gallop for the Old Cart Road Gate, stopping for nothing. Once there, they were to seize the gate, open it, lower the bridge, and hold to the death against the counterattack that would inevitably come from the Brodaini Quarter built nearby.
Dellila had succeeded: he’d seized the gate from Tastis’ people, who had thought them friendly reinforcements until it was too late. The counter attacks had come and in overwhelming numbers, but Dellila had beaten them off at the cost of half his men and, in the end, his own life. The last counterattack had been broken by Necias’ mercenaries, galloping over the bridge and into the enemy city. Their route was hazardous, for the Old Cart Road was under the walls of the new-built Brodaini Quarter, but Necias and Palastinas kept their people moving in all day, running past with their shields raised high, not stopping despite the chaos and bloody ruin caused by Tastis’ archers and engines.
There had been another group of cavalry following Dellila, and these had also had their orders: they were to seize every canal drawbridge they could, wreck the mechanism that would raise the bridges, then hold the bridges for as long as possible. Many drawbridges were dropped permanently, but few of the cavalry held them for long after Tastis’ reinforcements began flooding the streets.
The rest of the battle was a mad dance of streetfighting and ambush, but the allies’ weight of numbers began to tell. Tastis’ Neda militia, for the most part, simply went home in hopes of protecting their families, and many of his mercenaries, concluding the war lost, forted up somewhere and began making offers of surrender with honor, which would allow them to march out with their weapons and find employment elsewhere. These were offers their enemies were swift to accept. Some Elva captain got a water-gate open and Necias began moving his people in by barge, and that in the end broke the enemy: they could hold the bridges, perhaps, but once the bargemen arrived they could span any gap of water and outflank any defense. By the end of the day Tastis’ forces still held the Old Citadel and the Brodaini Quarter, but there was no effective resistance in the rest of the town. Tegestu had won.
That news came late, however, and found him no longer in the gatehouse. The column of soldiery on the bridge had, at last, passed into Neda, and the hostages been brought back. Tegestu saw Grendis on a litter, surrounded by surgeons and guards; and he turned to Fiona and bowed. “My wife is coming,” he said. “By your leave, ilean, I would see her.”
Fiona, black-visaged, nodded and stood aside; Tegestu came down the tower stair and met Grendis at the gate.
Grendis was pale, her flesh waxy and the lines of her face deepened, but her eyes were open, and he saw a smile of recognition tug at the corners of her mouth as he looked down at her. He reached down to the litter and took her hand, and walked with the litter-bearers to his palace, and then to her chambers.
His death followed on silent feet.
Grendis seemed not to feel any pain as she was moved from her litter to her bed; the surgeons had probably given her a narcotic. They showed him the arrow, its long, narrow steel point forged to pierce armor. “One lung is pierced, bro-demmin,” one said. “We think it has collapsed; she is breathing with the other only, and there is no air coming through the wound. There was hemorrhage at the beginning, but it ceased.”
The Classanu surgeon seemed strained and apprehensive: no doubt he knew that surgeons had in the past been executed for losing patients as important as Grendis. Steeling himself, he spoke on.