Rane looked at the verdant glow, then at the groaning forms stretched out around her. “Do it, Dina. Get hold of the other trucks and tell them.”
Dinafar pushed the hair out of her eyes, then her weary face lit with a hope she hadn’t had before. She ran to the motorcycle that had fetched her from the hospital tent, spoke into the teletalk strapped to the handlebar, then trotted back up the ramp and worked with a greater urgency to get the last of the injured down.
Julia looked at her watch and was startled to see that less than a half hour had passed since the beginning of the attack. She looked down, looked away. There were five dead like Liz. Dead but their flesh still burning. Two of them with rifles. Exiles. Three of them clutching the burned remnants of crossbows. She couldn’t recognize them, knew them only by figuring out who was missing among the wounded. She whispered the names to herself, a leave-taking of comrades, and tried unsuccessfully to ignore the pain in her thigh and the moans of the burned still alive. She turned her back on them and stared at the tower, grieving for both the dead and the living as she waited for the truck that might save the dying.
15
Tuli lay on the hillside, mouthing all the curses she could recall, furious at herself for her complacent conviction that Ildas had destroyed all the vuurvis oil in that extravagant annihilation in their first raid. The fireborn snuggled against her and tried to comfort her. She stroked and soothed him but she was too angry and afraid to calm herself.
Coperic touched her arm. “Can you…?” He finished the question with a gesture toward the barrels where the Ogogehians gingerly loaded oil into clay melons and plugged the holes in them with wax and wicks, working slowly and with great care to keep the heavy oil from touching any part of hand or face. Three high Nor were there to protect them, the fourth was Kole’s constant shadow. The rest of the norits were clustered about the seven catapults spaced along the wall from cliff to cliff.
Tuli scowled at the barrels, shook her head. “Too much Nor, Ildas couldn’t get near.” She pulled the back of her hand across her face, felt the rasping of dry, chapped skin against dry skin. She almost couldn’t smell Coperic anymore; she was about as ripe as were he and the others. He was gaunt and grimy, his hair lank and too long, the front parts sawn off with his knife to keep them out of his eyes. None of them had been out of their clothes for more than a passage, the only water available to them cost a day’s trip along the road across the pass. She watched him, hoping the clever mind behind that unimpressive face would find a way to attack the vuurvis. His eyes were slitted, his mouth open a little, his hands were closed hard on a clump of grass.
“One spark,” he whispered, so softly she almost didn’t hear him. He was right, a spark was all that horrible stuff needed. But it looked impossible. The Nor wouldn’t let fire get near those barrels, and they were sticking tight as fleas.
Bella stirred, turned her face toward them. She was worn too, was brown and dark as damp earth now, her cousin Biel was brown and dark; dirt and oil and sweat and soot had dulled the fine gold patina of their skin, had darkened the bright gold hair to the color of last year’s leaves rotting back into the earth. “We can get close,” Bella said. She chuckled. “Long as we try it down wind.” She sobered. “They’re focused on the wall. Look at them. Gloating, I’d say. And the Ogogehians are staying well away from the barrels, look how careful those men are to keep the fumes from blowing on them. And look there. And there.” She began pointing out clumps of brush and cracks, working out a line of progress along the slopes that would take a careful crawler close to the hollow where the barrels were.
Coperic followed the darting finger. “Mm.” He watched a mercenary ride his macai at a slow walk away from the barrels, holding a net sling of clay melons stiffly out from his side. One of the Nor left the barrels and rode beside him, shielding him from anything off the wall. “Nekaz Kole,” he whispered.
Tuli took the words as the curse they were. “He don’t miss much,” she said.
The two Nor sitting on the knoll above the barrels suddenly pulled their macain around until they were facing the mountains, their eyes searching the slopes. Hastily Coperic and Tuli went flat, the others ducking down beside them, shoving their faces into the dirt. Tuli felt the Nor eyes pass over her like an itch in the back of her neck. She didn’t move until Ildas cooed reassurance to her. She lifted her head, exploded out the dead air and sucked in a hard cold lungful of new. The others sat up and began breathing again. “Seems like they don’t want folk watching them,” Tuli said softly.
Coperic glanced through the screen of brush. “They calmed down now.” He eased around and went snaking down the slope into the small socket eaten out of the mountainside where they usually slept. Little sunlight got through the brush, so it was chill as any icehouse. He squatted at one end and waited until the others had crowded in and settled themselves. “Had a thought,” he said.
He let a moment pass, his eyes shut, his brows drawn together, fingers of one hand tapping on his bony knee. Shadow seeped into the wrinkles of his face and hands, carved heavy black lines into his flesh. The muscles of his face shifted just slightly, enough to turn his face into a changing web of light and dark around the strong jut of his nose. Watching him, Tuli measured the change in herself by the change she saw in him; as the days slid past, as tenday slid into tenday and the stadia dropped behind them, he had stripped away his sly bumbling tavern-host mannerisms, dropping one by one as they moved down the Highroad and settled above the army. Now he was a prowling predator, limited to a single aspect of himself, little left of the complex man she’d caught glimpses of in Oras. They were all narrowed by the hunger, the stress, the killing, the danger, with the softer sides of their natures put away for the duration of the war. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever see those times again, gentler times when she could laugh and smile and run the night fields, sometimes she wondered if she’d be able to slough the memories that even now gave her nightmares. She realized suddenly that tomorrow was her birthday. Hers and her brother’s. Teras. Fifteen? How strange. She felt more like fifty.
Coperic opened his eyes. “Still a dozen of us,” he said slowly. “So far. Could change.” He went silent again, gazed over their heads at the dangling brush. “Comes to me, we could get down close, and when the first melons hit the wall and start burning, one, two, maybe three of us rush the barrels. Right then army, Nor, you name it, they going to be watching the wall too damn hard to be looking out for us. With some of us in ambush covering, one or two of us break through and fire the oil. If we move fast enough. In and out.” He scanned their faces again. “Anyone wants to back off, feel free. Me, I think it’s crazy, but could just maybe work. Roll the bones, come up live, come up dead, but make ’em pay.” He reached inside his vest, slipped out one of his throwing knives, looked at it a moment, slipped it back. “I’m crazy as that bitch Floarin, but I’m going in close to cover. Who’s gonna carry fire?”
Bella’s smile was a feral grimace. “Who’s not gonna? Anyone got an uncset? Odd man out’s the fire fool.”
Tuli snorted. “You’re all crazy. Can’t no one get close enough without those Nor spotting him, they don’t have to see you, they smell you out, Pero, and I don’t mean sweat stink. Me and Ajjin, we’re the only ones can get close enough, I got Ildas, she got her own ways.”
“Thought you said he can’t get to the barrels.”
“Well, he can’t. But he can shield me up to the spell-web. It’s like the Shawar shield, magic to keep out magic, magic to warn, but if those Nor are distracted enough, I can sling a fireball through the web and still stay far enough away so I don’t get my face burned off. And if I trip, there’s still the Ajjin.”
Coperic gazed at her a long time. She could feel him fighting against letting her go while his plotter’s mind saw a dozen advantages in her plan and was working to polish aspects of it even as he resisted giving in to it. For all his acerbity and cynicism there were parts of him softer and more vulnerable than Sanani. He was fond of her, she knew that, and in a cranky way was as proud of her as if she’d been his own daughter. She’d been wary of men since Fayd, but felt nothing of that kind of thing in the way Coperic treated her. Somehow he was more important to her than anyone, even Teras. The closeness between her and Teras was over; Teras didn’t have the least idea what she was now (and she suspected he wouldn’t care if he did, he was so wrapped up in the importance of what he was doing), but Coperic knew her possibilities. That amoral and disreputable leader of thieves understood her in ways her father and even her mother never would. She saw him smile at her, a slow and reluctant smile that admitted his capitulation. “Charda, go see if you can find Ajjin. Tell her what we’re thinking and find out if she’s crazy as the rest of us.”