"Orzhekov!" Anatoly Sakhalin grinned at her.
"Gods, I thought you were dead!"
"Not a scratch. The gods sent an angel to watch over me. Move aside!" The gates opened, and his jahar clattered in. What was left of the Habakar defenders fled, leaving the jaran in possession of the gates and the market square. On the walls above, jaran men and Farisa auxiliaries swarmed, and archers took up position to shoot down onto the roofs of nearby houses. "A horse!" shouted Sakhalin. He swung up on a mount. "To the citadel!"
Nadine sprang up the stairs siding the gate until she came to the parapet on top. Out on the flats, the golden banner rode high, and the sun it reflected rode higher still, at its apex. She watched as her uncle moved safely away, toward the south, to rally his army at the next gate. Below, the Veselov jahar rode forward, following Sakhalin into Karkand. Nadine hurried down to meet them.
Vera Veselov rode at their head. "Where is your dyan?" Nadine called from the stairs.
Vera glanced up at her and lifted the staff of command in her right hand. "Anton is dead. Killed in the sortie. Men! I want half of you dismounted and to the left. We'll take each street on foot, clean out every house. Drive the women and children out onto the street and kill any man you find."
Behind Veselov's jahar, Farisa auxiliaries waited to enter.
"Orzhekov!" One of her men appeared, leading a horse for her.
She mounted and gathered her troops together with a lift of her staff. "We'll follow Sakhalin to the citadel!" She cried. "Risanovsky, ride to the engineers. No firing into the city, and we'll need the siege engines drawn up to the citadel."
Soon enough she saw that Vera Veselov had the right of it. She dismounted half of her men and sent them in mixed groups to clear the streets. Fires burned and smoke choked them, mingled with dust, but the defense proved haphazard. She rode around a corner into a blizzard of arrow fire and jerked her horse back into cover and sent twenty men to root it out. She listened as they clashed. Beside her, a rider dragged a screaming, kicking woman out of her mudbrick hovel and left her on the ground, where she lay, black hair streaked with dust, stunned and terrified on the threshold. A clot of women cowered at a well, sheltering their children. Three Habakar men lay dead at their feet.
A messenger rode up. "Orzhekov!" He wore the gold surcoat and gold plume of Bakhtiian's jahar. "Orders to all dyans. Burn the city."
She nodded. "It's not safe to go forward yet," she said.
Already, the next street over, roofs caught fire, thatch flaming. Smoke roiled over them. The women at the well wailed and two riders drove them away from the well and kept after them until they fled away toward the gates, out of the city. A wagon trundled past, driven by an old woman, emptied of everything except blankets and a crowd of weeping children. Two riders commandeered the wagon, sending the old woman and the children on, on foot, and piled it high with valuables stripped from the houses. A baby cried.
The messenger cocked his head to one side. "Do you hear that?" he asked. The baby cried on, an awkward, reedy scream. Abruptly, he dismounted and paced down the street. Nadine watched him, bemused. One of her riders trotted out from around the corner to give her the all clear; they had found and killed the Habakar archers.
Fire leapt and crackled on a nearby roof. In the warren of streets beyond, mudbrick collapsed into a tower of dust. In the distance, she saw a minaret licked by flames. The messenger ducked into a house and, just as he entered, its roof went up in flames.
"Go!" said Nadine, pointing, and her trooper dashed down, but before he reached the house the messenger ran back out, body bent over a scrap of cloth as sparks showered down on him. The roof collapsed in behind him. He jogged up to Nadine and swung back on his horse and then displayed his prize: a little red-faced infant shrieking its lungs out.
"Barbarians!" he said with a grunt of disgust. "Leaving their own children to die."
"Take it back to the hospital," said Nadine. "I'll pass the orders on down the line."
A troop of horsemen clattered past. Refugees streamed in the other direction, ducking away from the jaran riders, running, stumbling, and sobbing, dropping wooden chests and cloth bundles in their haste. A jeweled necklace lay spilled in the dirt. A rider picked the necklace up with the point of his spear and let it slide down the haft into his hands. He glanced over to see Nadine and the messenger watching him, then shook the necklace free and tossed it to the men loading die wagon.
"Take that horse!" shouted Nadine, seeing a Habakar woman leading a fine mare, and her riders summarily took the horse away. The woman was wise enough not to protest. The messenger left, riding with the infant in the crook of his arm, Nadine headed on into the city.
By now it was midafternoon and the resistance had worn away almost to nothing. Fires rose on all sides, and auxiliaries and archers stripped houses and loaded purloined wagons high with the riches of Karkand. It was time to press on quickly. She called in her jahar, pleased to see that she had almost four hundreds still with her, the others wounded or scattered behind. They formed up and rode on up the hill to the great square that fronted the citadel. This close, the walls looked thick and forbidding, impregnable.
To her surprise, all was quiet here, except for the constant growling noise of the conflagration in the city.
She found Anatoly Sakhalin with about fifty riders. "What's going on?"
"Bakhtiian is by the outer gates of the citadel, negotiating with the commander. On the other side of us."
"Negotiating with him?"
"He's agreed to spare the women and children if the garrison will surrender."
"Ah," said Nadine. "But surely from those walls they can see the refugees leaving the city. They must know that some are being spared in any case."
Anatoly shrugged. "How can we know what khaja think like? They make no sense to me." Then he looked abruptly guilty for saying it. As if to draw attention away from the comment, he glanced back. From this height, halfway up the hill on which the citadel lay massed, the city spread out in a maze of spirals and circling streets beneath them, all the way down to the great walls and over to the height where the royal palace lay sprawled across the sister hill. The city burned. A third of it was already obscured by smoke.
Nadine stared, realizing all at once how huge Karkand really was, how elaborate. Minarets thrust up into the sky, ornamented with delicate lacework that slowly disappeared into smoke and flame. The royal palace bore tiles all along its western front, gleaming in the late afternoon sun, but even as she watched, smoke began to curl up from its environs. Gardens lay green under the light of day. A colonnaded avenue led in pale splendor to a vast temple inscribed with tilework that formed huge letters, the words of their god. People milled in clumps, as small as insects, scattered everywhere she could make out from her vantage point. At a distant gate, she saw a steady stream of refugees leaving the city. Farther, the suburbs ringed the inner city, hazed now by the dust and the smoke, obscuring their white villas and verdant parks. Metal flashed against the sun as riders moved in the far distance, and here and there on the walls, where some skirmish fought itself to an end. No city she had ever seen, not even Jeds, was as beautiful as Karkand as it died.
Anatoly shrugged, turning his gaze back to the citadel, where the blue lion flag of the Habakar royal family still fluttered in the wind. "It's going to take a long time to burn," he said.
At the height of the citadel, the blue lion flag shuddered and began to descend. Nadine caught in her breath.
A man appeared on the parapet, high above, and in his right hand he bore Bakhtiian's gold standard.