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 colordark 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 he," 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 hoots 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.
I Ie'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.
"Get me the maps" was what he said.
Knowing now that it had been a trap, knowing that the forces of Nlachi
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 HART) FUR THE. NORTH. EVEN AS HE HEARD THE DIS"I'ANI'
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 hack out, mounted, and turned his
poor, suffering animal to the south again, trotting down the
snow-obscured tracks, cutting hack 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. I3alasar'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.