Anxious at being hemmed in by so many strangers, especially dirty strangers, she picked one who looked extremely old and frail and thus less likely to try any tricks. She pulled him aside, leaving the others grumbling, and handed him a small copper coin with a crab on it. “Go to that household,” she pointed back up the road toward the broad eaves of her family’s house, “and ask for Eril the steward. Speak to him only. Tell him Pelaya says he is to meet her at the Sivedan Temple on Good Zakkas Road, and that he must bring his sword. If you do this properly, I will bring you two more of these tomorrow, right here. Understand?”
The old beggar gummed the coin reflectively, then nodded. “Temple of Siveda,” he said.
“Good. Oh, and tell Eril that if he brings my mother or anyone else I don’t want to see, I will hide and they will never find me, and it will all be his fault. Can you remember all that?”
“For three copper crabs? Half a seahorse?” The old man laughed and coughed, or it might have been the other way around—it was hard to tell the difference. “Kura, I’d sing the Trigoniad from stem to stern for three coppers. I’ve ate nothing but grass for days.”
She frowned, wondering if he was making fun of her. How could an old, toothless beggar know the Trigoniad? But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting King Olin to safety.
In fact, Pelaya thought, if this worked, Olin Eddon would almost certainly invite her to his own court someday out of gratitude. She could tell her family, “Oh, yes, the king of the Marchlands wishes me to come for a visit. You remember King Olin—he and I are old friends, you know.”
She set off for Good Zakkas Road, half a mile away in the Theogonian Forum district. She had thought of bringing a knife herself, but hadn’t known how to get one without risking her plan being discovered, so she had decided to do without. That was why she needed Eril and his sword. It had been years since he had fought in her father’s troop, but he was big enough and relatively young enough that no one would try to rob her in his company, at least not in daylight. Still, robbery might be the least of the dangers.
Am I mad? The streets were full of soldiers, but most of the rest of the citizens had returned from their scuttling morning errands and were locked in now, terrified of the cannons, of the foul smoke and fire that fell from the sky. What am I doing?
Doing good, Pelaya told herself, and then remembered the Zorian injunction against self-importance. Trying to do good.
The rag had slipped from his mouth down to his chin and the dust was getting in again. Count Perivos spit out a mouthful of grit and then pulled the cloth back into place, but he had to lay down his shovel to tie it. He cursed through ash and dirt. When you had forty pentecounts of men at your disposal, you didn’t expect to be wielding a tool yourself.
“Smoke!” the lookout shouted.
“Down, down!” Perivos Akuanis bellowed as he threw himself to the ground, but there was little need: most of the men were down before him, bellies and faces pressed against the earth. The terrible moment was on them, the long instant of whistling near-silence. Then the massive cannonball hit the citadel wall with a bone-rattling crunch that shook the ground and smashed more stone loose from the wall’s inner side.
After waiting a few moments to be certain the debris had stopped flying, Count Perivos opened his eyes. A new cloud of stone dust hung in the air and had coated everything on the ground; as the count and his workmen began to clamber to their feet he could not help thinking they looked like some sort of ghastly mass rising of the recent dead.
One of his master masons was already on his way back from examining the wall, which had been pounded over these last days by a hundred mighty stone cannonballs or more.
“She’ll take a few more, Kurs, but not many,” the man reported. “We’ll be lucky if it’s still standing tomorrow.”
“Then we must finish this wall today.” The count turned and shouted for the foreman, Irinnis. “What do we have left to do?” he demanded when the man staggered up. “The outwall can only take a few more shots from those monstrous bombards of theirs.” Count Perivos had learned to trust Irinnis, a small, sweaty man from Krace with an excellent head for organization, who had fought—or at least built—for generals on both continents.
Scratching his sagging chin, Irinnis looked around the courtyard—one of the citadel’s finest parks only a tennight ago, now a wreckage of gouged soil and broken stone. The replacement wall being built in a bowl-shaped curve behind the battered outwall was all but finished. “I’d like the time to paint it, Kurs,” he said, squinting.
“Paint it?” Akuanis leaned toward him, uncertain he had heard correctly: his ears were still ringing from the impact of the last thousandweight of stone cannonball. “You didn’t say ‘paint it,’ did you? While the whole citadel is coming down around our ears?”
Irinnis frowned—not the frown of someone taking offense, but more the face of an engineer astonished to discover that civilians, even those gifted and experienced in warfare like Count Perivos, could not understand plain Hierosoline speech. “Of course, Lord, paint it with ashes or black mud. So the Xixies will not see it.”
“So that...” Perivos Akuanis shook his head. All across the park the men who had not been injured in the last blast, and even those whose injuries were only minor, were scrambling back to work. “I confess, you have lost me.”
“What good are our arrow slits, Kurs,” said Irinnis, pointing to the shooting positions built into the curving sides of the new wall, “if the autarch’s landing force does not try to come through the breach their cannon has made? And if they see the new wall too quickly, they will not come through the breach and die like proper Xixian dogs.”
“Ah. So we paint...”
“Just splash on a little mud if that’s all we can find— something dark. Throw a little dirt onto it at the bottom. Then they will not see the trap until we’ve feathered half of the dog-eating bastards...”
The foreman’s cheerful recitation was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Count Perivos’ factor, who had been overseeing the evacuation of the palace, but now came running across the yard as if pursued by sawtooth cats. “Kurs!” he shouted. “The lord protector has given the foreign king to the Xixians!”
It took Perivos Akuanis a moment to make sense of that. “King Olin, do you mean? Are you saying that Ludis has given Olin of Southmarch to the autarch? How can that be?”
His factor had to pause for a moment, hands on knees, to catch his breath. “As to how, my lord, I couldn’t say, but Drakava’s Rams came for him before I could finish moving him and the other prisoners, Kurs. I’m sorry. I’ve failed you.”
“No, the fault is not yours.” Akuanis shook his head. “But why are you sure they meant to take Olin to the autarch and not just to Ludis?”
“Because the chief of the Rams had a warrant, with the lord protector’s seal on it. It said precisely what they were to do with him—take him from his cell and take him to the Nektarian harbor seagate where he would be given to the Xixians in return for ‘such considerations as have been agreed upon,’ or something like.”