"Aye, your Excellency, so they are." Qutuz took his cue from Hajjaj, but he had less practice at seeming dispassionate while actually frightened or furious.
More roars of bursting eggs beat against Hajjaj's ears. They were coming closer to the palace now, too, so he no longer had any doubt what they were. The ground started shaking under his fundament, as if at an earthquake. Pen cases and leaves of paper on his desk trembled and quivered.
"Perhaps," Qutuz said, "we ought to look for shelter."
"Where?" Hajjaj asked, not at all rhetorically. He'd read that people in Setubal and Sulingen and other places that often came under attack from the air took refuge in cellars. Cellars, however, had never been a part of Zuwayzi architecture, and no one had ever dreamt the Unkerlanters would really pummel Bishah.
"I'm getting under my desk," Qutuz declared, and hurried off to do just that. Hajjaj nodded approval. It wasn't a bad notion at all. He crawled under his own. For once, he wished he were in the habit of working at it in a chair rather than sitting on the floor; he would have had more room under there. His joints creaked as he tried to fold himself into as small a space as he could.
Then the first eggs fell on the royal palace. For the next little while, Hajjaj had nothing whatever to do with whether he lived or died. The ground shook. Windows blew out. Walls fell in. Chunks of the roof came crashing down. One of them landed where he'd been sitting while talking with his secretary. Another came down on the desk, but wasn't heavy enough to crush it- and, incidentally, Hajjaj.
Someone was screaming. After a moment, Hajjaj realized that was his own voice. He bit down hard on his lower lip to make himself stop. Then he wondered why he bothered. Plenty of people, surely, were screaming right now. But he kept on biting his lip instead. Pride is a strange thing, he thought, a strange thing, but a very strong one.
An eternity later- an eternity probably measurable as a couple of minutes- the eggs stopped landing on and around the palace and started falling farther north in Bishah. Hajjaj had to fight his way out from under the desk; some of the rubble all but caged him there.
"Qutuz!" he called. "Are you all right?"
"Aye, your Excellency." The secretary came running into Hajjaj's office. "Powers above be praised that you're safe."
"I'm well enough," Hajjaj said, "but you're bleeding." He pointed to a gash on Qutuz's left calf.
His secretary looked down at it. When he looked up again, astonishment filled his face. "I didn't even know it was there," he said.
"Well, it needs bandaging- that's plain." Hajjaj used a letter-opener to cut up cushions to get cloth to wrap around Qutuz's leg. He would have had a simpler time of it had either of them worn clothes.
"I thank you, your Excellency," Qutuz said. "There are bound to be plenty of people hurt a lot worse than I am. We'd better see what we can do for them."
"You're right." Hajjaj went over to the little closet that opened onto his office. His ceremonial wardrobe lay in chaos on the floor. He didn't care. He tossed his secretary a couple of tunics and kilts and grabbed some for himself. Seeing Qutuz's bewilderment, he spoke aloud his thought of a moment before: "Bandages."
"Ah." Qutuz's face cleared. "That's clever. That's very clever."
"It's cleverness I wish we didn't need," Hajjaj said grimly. "Come on. Let's make for the audience chamber and the throne room." That was as close as he would come to admitting he was worried about King Shazli. His secretary's eyes widened, but Qutuz didn't worry out loud, either.
And they both had plenty to do before they got anywhere near the throne room. People were down and groaning in the hallways. Some of them, the ones with broken bones, needed more than bandaging. Some were beyond all help. Hajjaj and Qutuz found not only bodies but buried bodies and pieces of bodies. Before long, their sandals left bloody footprints at every stride.
Someone around the corner of a corridor barked peremptory orders: "Get that rubble off him! Grab that roof beam and lift! Maybe we can still save his leg!"
Hajjaj's heart leaped within him. He knew that voice. "Your Majesty!" he called. Behind him, Qutuz whooped.
"Is that you, Hajjaj?" the king asked. "Powers above be praised you're whole and hale. Powers below eat the Unkerlanters for doing this to us." He went back to the rescue he was leading: "Heave there, all of you." A shriek- not King Shazli's- followed. "Easy there, my friend," Shazli said. "It'll be better now."
Dust and dirt and blood covered Shazli when Hajjaj finally reached his side. But the king needed no fancy trappings to gain obedience. When he gave a command, everyone who heard hurried to carry it out. People respected him for the man he was as well as for the rank he held.
"Very good indeed to see you in one piece, your Excellency," he told Hajjaj when the foreign minister reached his side. "Swemmel's whoresons have struck us a heavy blow here."
"Aye, your Majesty." Hajjaj knew more than a little gratitude that the king didn't blame him for the Unkerlanter attack- or, if he did, didn't say so in public.
"We are going to have to strengthen our defenses against dragons around the city," Shazli said. "If the Unkerlanters did this once, they'll come back to do it again."
"That's… true, your Majesty." Hajjaj bowed with no small respect. "I hadn't thought so far ahead." That such a thing could happen once to Bishah was appalling enough. That it might happen again and again… He shivered.
"Do you know whether General Ikhshid lives?" King Shazli asked.
"I'm sorry, but no," Hajjaj answered. "I have no idea. The eggs stopped falling, and the first thing I wanted to do was make sure you were safe."
"Here I stand." Shazli had lived the softest of soft lives. He was inclined to be pudgy, and had never looked particularly impressive. But there was iron in him. "King Swemmel will think he can put fear in us, so that we will do whatever he wants. He will find he is wrong. He will find he cannot make us bend our necks by dropping eggs from the sky."
Several of the people in the damaged hallway clapped their hands. Hajjaj almost clapped himself. He did bow again. "This is the spirit that led your father to reclaim our freedom after the Unkerlanters ruled us for so long."
King Shazli nodded. "And we shall stay free, come what may. Are we not still the men of the desert our forefathers were in days gone by?"
"Even so, your Majesty," Hajjaj replied, though he and the king both knew the Zuwayzin were no such thing. This generation was more urban, and more like townsfolk in the rest of Derlavai, than any before it. But Shazli had to know saying such things was the best way to rally his people.
Neither of them mentioned that the king's father had needed to free Zuwayza because the Unkerlanters had been strong enough to hold it down for generations, and neither of them mentioned that enough blows like the one the Unkerlanters had just delivered might break any people's will- to say nothing of ability- to keep on fighting. Hajjaj understood both those things painfully well. This did not seem the best time to ask Shazli whether he did, too.
"I shall find out what we need to learn about Ikhshid," the king said. He pointed at Hajjaj. "I want you to find a crystallomancer and speak to Marquis Balastro. Assure him we are still in the fight, and see what help we can hope to get from Algarve."
"As you say." Hajjaj's cough had nothing to do with the dust and smoke in the air. It was pure diplomacy. "Seeing how things are going for them in their own fight against Unkerlant, I don't know what they'll be able to spare us."
Shazli, fortunately, recognized a diplomatic cough when he heard one. "You may tell the marquis that we need tools to stay in the fight. They have more dragons than we do. They also have more highly trained mages than we do; they're bound to be better off when it comes to things like heavy sticks that can knock a dragon out of the sky."