He pounded his fists against it as he screamed into the storm. Blood and tears and rain stained it, then flowed into the crack. He screwed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth, screaming louder to defy the storm. He hammered the stone harder than the rain and felt the distant pain of bones breaking.
It wasn’t right.
It was the stone!
In his mind’s eye he could see where the stone belonged, where all the stones belonged. Tsatol Pelyn lived, incarnated again in all its glory. Towers tall, pennants snapping, its promise undiminished as the Empress and her heroes rode past toward Ixyll. The garrison stood tall on stout walls, sunlight reflected from the moat. It would take hours for her army to pass, but no man or woman would waver or turn away. Always alert, always ready, those defending Tsatol Pelyn would never be defeated.
Yes, this is how it must be. If Tsatol Pelyn were once again what it had been in its youth, we would not die!
Thunder crashed again and again, but the quality of it changed, muting and echoing. Wind whistled and shrieked, then something snapped above him. Keles looked up through rain-blinded eyes, then wiped them and stared again.
Pennants snapped on the tower above him. He knelt on a walled parapet. He pressed his hands flat to the stone, ignoring the pain of fractured bones sliding against each other. It seemed solid enough, and the pain meant he wasn’t dreaming. He scrambled to his feet and rushed to the parapet’s edge, to look out.
Tsatol Pelyn had been born anew. The moat had been hollowed and the rain struggled to fill it. The walls, which had just been rubble middens, again stood tall and strong. Towers had risen at the eastern corners and the west, and he stood in the tallest of them all. The handful of ministry warriors ran up to the top of the eastern wall, and Rekarafi laughed defiantly from atop the northeast tower.
And beyond, the Eyeless Ones came. The uniform tramp of their feet rivaled the thunder. Lightning flashes moved them forward in jerks, closer, ever closer, with their hindmost ranks still hidden by distance.
Keles clutched the stone. This is not enough! The fortress is worthless without its garrison. We must have the garrison.
A sheet of rain whipped across his face, driving him back and blinding him. He shook his head to clear his vision, then stepped up to the parapet’s edge again. He narrowed his eyes against the rain, and though it washed away his vision more often than not, he clearly saw what was happening below.
The adults stood, some frightened, some resigned, staring up at him. As lightning strobed they changed. They shed years as a snake sheds skin. Twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty years sloughed off, returning them to their prime, when they were hale and hearty, brimming with courage, determination, and confident in their immortality. Hair darkened, bodies thickened and shrank, straightened, and gap-toothed smiles became whole again.
As they held their arms out, mail sheathed them. Gauntlets materialized, and breastplates and helmets. Fierce battle masks covered their faces, armor covered their legs. Spears and swords filled hands. Bows appeared, as did quivers of arrows.
And then the children rose. They pulled on the years their elders had discarded. As if wearing adult raiment, they looked odd for a moment, then they began to grow into those years. They sprouted up and muscles thickened. Childish softness hardened into angular adulthood. Armor wrapped them and implements of war came to hand.
They followed their elders to the walls, and awaited the Eyeless Ones.
The invaders came undaunted. Perhaps they imagined they were a wave that would wash over a lowly sand castle. No dismay registered as they began their descent into the moat or had to scramble up the other side. Mindless as well as blind, they crawled over each other, rising higher and higher to find the top of the wall.
Arrows slashed down at them, twisting them around with the force of impact. Following commands that Jasai shouted above the wind, the archers drew as one and shot. Whole ranks of dead and dying Eyeless Ones wilted and thrashed.
Still their companions tromped over them, climbing ever higher, only to be met with spear thrusts that toppled them down into the pit.
Yet other Eyeless Ones pressed on and their line wrapped the fortress’ perimeter. They came at it from all sides, and here and there they reached the top of the wall. A sword cut would spin a warrior away, making room for another blind and another.
Tyressa whirled into the battle, a blur of black and silver. She spun her spear over her head, slashing down through one blind, then shattering another’s skull with the weapon’s butt end. That blind arced back over the wall into the darkness. She swept two others from the edge, then stood there defiantly, challenging blinds to attack.
Rekarafi proved no less magnificent. He leaped from his tower and scattered five blinds that had gained the wall below him. His claws flashed, shredding their flesh. Keles winced as sympathetic pain rippled up the scars on his back. Rekarafi grabbed one of the blinds at hip and throat and raised it above his head. He bowed the creature’s spine, then touched its shoulders to hips with a sharp crack.
Still, it is not enough. Keles spat down into the courtyard. Tsatol Pelyn is not yet complete.
Yet uncertain as to what was happening, Keles stalked around to the western side of the tower and gazed at the dug-out canal. It had once been eighteen feet across and half that deep, but the digging had only produced a shallow, three-foot-wide track. He’d seen deeper wheel ruts on a road.
He closed his eyes, picturing the canal as it must have been. He saw it on the day the workers cleared the last bit of dirt. Water from the river pushed at the thin wall. The earth darkened, then crumbled, dissolving into a thick mud that the rush of water carried into the moat. He watched the water pour into the moat in a torrent, a fast-moving torrent that filled it quickly, washing away the Eyeless Ones, collapsing their pyramids of bodies.
He pictured it in his mind and merged that image with reality. His body tingled as he forced reality to surrender to the image. As the fortress had been made whole, as the people had become the garrison, so the ditch would become the canal and it would be enough.
And so it was.
The water roared, leaping and foaming. It pushed a wall of mud with it that swept through the moat. Tumbling rocks shattered legs. Eyeless Ones pitched from the walls and disappeared in the roiling black water. Almost as if they had been made of mud themselves, the Eyeless Ones melted as they bobbed to the surface.
Yet even this did not wholly stop them. One of the four-armed creatures leaped the moat and scrambled to the top of the wall. He scattered warriors with flicks of his hands, then rushed at Rekarafi. He roared furiously, and the Viruk matched his battle cry. People between them leaped to the courtyard below.
As strong as the invader was, he lacked the Viruk’s speed. The two upper arms slashed harmlessly above Rekarafi’s head. The Viruk caught the creature’s lower arms by the wrists, then yanked. Ligaments popped as the arms tore free. The creature, stricken, looked down, then the Viruk battered it to death with its own arms.
The battle for Tsatol Pelyn raged long into the night, and only broke when the storm slackened. The moat had become a swamp of dead blinds. Some human corpses bobbed there, but remarkably few given the ferocity of the fighting. As the clouds parted and the first faint dawn glow painted the eastern horizon gold, the blinds had withdrawn toward Felarati and every defender of Tsatol Pelyn knew they would not return.
Chapter Fifty-six
3rd day, Month of the Hawk, Year of the Rat
Last Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court
163rd Year of the Komyr Dynasty
737th year since the Cataclysm
Wentokikun, Moriande