Valyn dragged in a breath, trying to catch some hint of the wicks of the Kettral munitions smoldering silently beneath the ground. No use. There was only blood and horse sweat, piss and horror. He could only trust that the fuses were still burning somewhere under Balendin’s feet. Newt knew his work, of course, but if he’d made any mistake, if those charges failed, then the battle was finished. The leach would punch a hole straight through the wall, and the Urghul would pour through, murdering everyone they found.
“Bring me someone strong,” Balendin said, his voice carrying over the bloody ground. Valyn could hear the smile, the certainty. “Bring me someone who won’t break the moment I put a knife in his flesh. I want to take my time with this. I want the soldiers on those walls to plumb the full depths of their despair.”
The words were Annurian, of course. The leach had learned the Urghul tongue, but he was speaking to the legionaries, speaking directly to their fear. The realization hit Valyn like a slap.
“We need to distract them,” Valyn said.
Huutsuu shook her head. “The Urghul?”
“The soldiers. Our soldiers. We need to give them something to look at, to think about, that’s not Balendin. He needs their fear, their horror, but we can take it away.”
Too late.
As the leach’s captive screamed, a massive section of the wall of Mierten’s Fort collapsed. There was no explosion, no concussive blow, nothing like what a Kettral starshatter might do. Instead, there was a grinding of stone against stone, slow at first, almost reluctant, maybe forty paces to Valyn’s west, as though some implacable giant had put a shoulder to the huge blocks, dug in his heels, and shoved. There was time for the Annurians atop that chunk of wall to shout the alarm, to give voice to half a dozen baffled questions and desperate warnings. Then the structure hit some invisible point beyond which it could not stand, and the whole thing crumbled inward, the sound of falling stones mingled with the screams of those crushed beneath.
“There,” Balendin said, when the noise finally subsided. He lingered over the word, as though he were trying to choose the juiciest pear from a marketplace stall. “Now we can finish with this foolishness.”
The Flea was already shouting orders, sprinting toward the breach. Sigrid coughed up something that might have been a curse, and then the world exploded into sound once more, the panicked shouting of legionaries mixing with the vicious, triumphant screams of the Urghul as they wheeled their horses for the final attack.
“Where is the explosion buried by your Flea?” Huutsuu demanded.
Valyn shook his head. “It’s too soon.” He turned blindly toward the sky, but the sun had passed behind a cloud and he could no longer feel it, no longer gauge its height. It might have been noon or midnight for all he could tell. “We need to hold the wall. Need to keep him there.”
Huutsuu spat. “There is a hole in the stones wide as ten men. My people will ride through-”
“No,” Valyn said, cutting her off, turning away before she could finish. “They will not.”
He planted a foot on top of the wall, hefted his axes, and leapt to the ground in front of the fort. The blind landing almost broke his ankle. He hit with one foot on the ground, one foot on the soft flesh of some dead warrior. His body responded more quickly than his mind, rolling over and away even as his ankle absorbed the strain. When he rose, he stood in darkness, the wall behind him, the Urghul a wordless thunder rolling in from the north.
His first steps toward the breach were blind, uncertain. He could hear Huutsuu cursing on the wall above and behind him, but she didn’t matter. All that mattered was reaching the hole, the gap, and the killing that had to happen there. He needed it suddenly, needed it in the way a man struggling for days in the desert needed water. He could already feel the violence tugging at him, as though every death were a tiny hook hauling him onward. He stumbled over stones and corpses, caught himself on his axes, and ran on, westward, into the darkness as though it were light, life, freedom.
Just before he reached the hole, just before the Urghul hit, the darksight came.
Balendin’s kenning had brought down a dozen feet of wall, but there was still a pile of rubble for the Urghul to struggle over. The Flea had taken up a position atop the heap, Sigrid a few paces behind him, the Aphorist just at his side. The Wing leader was shouting orders to the legionaries. Some were stumbling, some covered with their own blood, but they tried to form up, to make some sort of line as the Urghul hammered down out of the north.
“Valyn,” the Flea shouted. “Fall back on me.”
Valyn hesitated, caught between the line of Annurians and the approaching storm. Then slowly, his axes light in his hands, he turned away from the legions, away from the dubious safety of the wall and the other men, turned north toward the galloping horses even as he spoke: “No.”
The fight that followed was a dream of blood and bliss. For the first time since il Tornja had taken his eyes, Valyn was able to see for more than a few heartbeats at a time, and not just see, but move through the violence that buoyed him up, lashing out and pulling back, stabbing and hacking until the blood ran down his face, his arms. There was no saying how long he fought. Sometimes Huutsuu was at his side, sometimes not. He could hear the Flea calling out orders behind him, well behind, but the Flea had given him up to the fight. The man’s words weren’t for Valyn, but for the line of Annurians still struggling to hold the wall, and Valyn made no effort to listen to them, to understand. Words were crooked, useless things beside the clarity of blood. He waded in it like a warm sea. He’d been fighting forever, but he wasn’t tired. As long as they kept coming, he would keep killing, and killing, and killing.
He buried his axes in one Urghul after another, slaughtering man and beast alike, throwing the weight of his shoulder behind heavy steel wedges, pivoting and rocking, shattering skulls, then pulling free. He was laughing, he realized, had been laughing for a long time, the joy horrible inside him.
When the hill finally exploded, the force of the blow knocked Valyn back half a step. Stones and dirt fell all around him like rain. It took him a moment to realize what it meant.
Newt’s munitions, he thought. Balendin’s dead.
There was no joy in the understanding. If anything, that explosion meant an end to the battle. It felt like something stolen, like a great door closing. It was victory, and it tasted like rust.
46
A low stone plinth-the altar, maybe, of the ancient temple-stood at the room’s center. Triste sat atop it. She wasn’t chained, wasn’t tied up or tethered in any way-evidently il Tornja considered the thick stone walls and the half-dozen guards outside the only door ample protection against her escape. The space was nothing compared to the subterranean cells of the Dead Heart, or to the steel cages of the imperial prison inside the Spear, but then, it didn’t really need to be. Triste wasn’t likely to fight her way past three dozen armed Annurian soldiers, and if she did, what then? She could search for ages in the ruined city without finding the kenta.
He has us, Kaden thought. We raced straight into his trap. They were alive only because il Tornja thought they might still be usefuclass="underline" Triste as bait, Kaden as a willing traitor to his race.
The failure should have stung, but Kaden found himself beyond stinging. The confrontation with the Csestriim general had left him numb, exhausted to the bones. The effort of holding up the lie, of maintaining his own face while hiding the god inside, had burned through the last of his reserves. He felt like the blackened, twisted scrap of wick left at the bottom of the clay pot when all the wax was gone, the flame guttered out.