“I suppose I deserve it. After everything.”
“No one deserves it.”
The Shin aphorism came unbidden to Kaden’s lips. “There is only what is.”
The Skullsworn chorus had fallen silent at last. Quiet crouched between Kaden and Triste like a dangerous beast.
“But that means…,” she said at last. “If you want him to survive.…”
Again, Kaden nodded. “The obviate.”
Her face hardened. “I won’t do it. I won’t be shamed into it. I don’t fucking care what you do.…”
“Triste,” Kaden said. It felt like they were floating on a scrap of stone in a great void. She trailed off, as though the sound of her own name were a leach’s kenning. Kaden spread his hands. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” she asked warily.
The thought was almost too big to put into words. “The whole thing,” he said finally. “The whole thing I’ve been fighting for. Defeating il Tornja. Saving these gods. Keeping our race alive … Why?”
She stared. His question was no more than an echo to her own, but there was something awful in hearing your own doubt and despair spoken back aloud. Maybe silence was the only answer, but Kaden felt drawn to force the rest into words, to speak it all at least this one time.
“I thought we should be saved, that humanity should be saved, that we were worth saving, but that was just a habit. Just a hope.”
“Like everything else,” Triste whispered.
Kaden nodded. “What if it’s wrong?”
50
Chilten, whose missing top front tooth caused him to whistle when he spoke.
Jal, whose voice was high as a little girl’s, but who took his ribbing from the other men and sang the songs of his hillside village anyway each evening before they slept.
Yemmer, who fought with two swords.
Sander, who could throw a head-sized chunk of rubble farther than any of the others.
Fent, who laughed in the middle of each day’s battle, but sobbed all night in his sleep.
Dumb Tom, who could work any numbers in his head, who tallied up the dead each night, figured the odds, ran the betting books.
Ho Chan, who knew how to set traps in the crumbling fort for the rats that they roasted every night.
Belton, whose voice broke after two straight days of shouting orders.
Brynt, who pissed himself each morning at the first Urghul horns.
Ariq, who couldn’t stop talking about the town where he grew up, the palms around the tiny lake, the way the moon looked closer there somehow.
Kel, who cut the ears from the Urghul dead, then threaded them on a leather thong that he wore around his neck.
Gruin the Brick, who was as wide as he was tall and knew three hundred Kreshkan poems by heart.
After four days fighting the Urghul from the top of Mierten’s crumbling wall, these were the last of the legionaries left.
Four days. It seemed too little time to know a man, but Valyn found, as the sun’s bloody rim dipped beneath the western hills, that he did know these twelve. Not all the little facts of their lives, obviously, but what use were those facts? Maybe somewhere else, hundreds of miles from any war, knowing a person might mean something different. Among other people-farmers, say, or merchants, or fishermen-all those tiny details accrued over a lifetime-the names of parents and pets, stories of drunken antics and earnest grief, tales of broken bones and broken hearts-they might actually matter. Not here atop the wall. Not with Ananshael sitting silently in the darkness beyond their fires, patient, inescapable.
The warrior had a different way of knowing. Death was always coming, always ready to obliterate the piles of facts that elsewhere in the world might constitute a life. What mattered wasn’t a record of the days lived, but something more immediate and fleeting: the pitch of a scream, the shape of a bloody grin, the timbre of a prayer. It was as though, if you paid attention, if you looked at the person just right, you could see an entire life in the smallest detail, could find everything that mattered in a single act.
Had they been somewhere else, Valyn would have loathed some of the soldiers, liked others. Here, atop the wall, those words-loathed, liked-seemed stupid, pointless. Could you really hate a man who stood at your side, his face bathed in sweat, his spear bloody from having saved you over and over? Could you like him? The words just didn’t apply. They were for another world, one where women and men could afford to choose their friends, where you could walk away because of something someone said or did. By the end of the fourth day on the wall, they were, all of them, beyond any walking away, beyond running or fleeing, beyond any judgment that was not uttered in blood.
It was amazing they had lived that long.
It was one thing to hear the Urghul army, to smell it on the northern wind, another thing entirely to see it flowing over the churned-up earth, thousands upon thousands of riders, lances stabbed up into the sky, hair flowing out behind them as they charged the wall again, and again, and again. All during that first day, Valyn expected his sight to fail, to go suddenly dark as it always had before. It remained; in fact, it sharpened, until he could see every scar on the faces of the charging horsemen. In the long months of his blindness, Valyn had forgotten what it was to see, how the world was full to bursting with shape and movement, packed from dirt to sky the long length of the horizon. It was dizzying watching the horsemen wheel and turn with each attack, all those riders shifting like the tide.
The Urghul would have finished the battle instantly but for one simple fact: Balendin was gone. After the botched attack on the hill, he had vanished utterly from the field of battle. When the leach remained absent for a second day, a few of the legionaries ventured to suggest that he might have been killed by the explosion after all, a notion the Flea flatly dismissed: He’s alive, the Wing commander said, and we’ll have to fight him again. Just be glad the fight’s even for now.
Even wasn’t the word Valyn would have chosen.
Leach or no leach, the Urghul numbered in the tens of thousands, taabe and ksaabe, the women every bit as hard, as vicious as the men, each with a bow and spear, each with a handful of remounts. They came against the wall from before dawn until after dusk every day, retiring only when the sky was so dark that any charge would risk the horses’ legs. There was no nuance to the attacks, no scheming or subtlety. They galloped along the wall, stood on the backs of their mounts, and then leapt screaming onto the battlements where the legionaries scrambled to cut them down.
“It makes no sense,” Valyn said to Huutsuu after the Urghul had retreated for the second day. “They could be building siege engines.” He gestured to the forest. “There’s enough trees to build a thousand catapults, trebuchets, ballistae. Instead of dying on the wall, they could be lounging a hundred paces away and pounding us into oblivion.”
Huutsuu watched the retreating riders in silence. When she finally turned to face him, her eyes blazed with reflected starlight. When she spoke, every word was stitched with scorn.
“Whatever hardening you have had, you still think like an Annurian.”
“If your people thought more like Annurians, they would have taken the wall already, and less of them would be dead.”
“War is not a matter of the taking of walls.”
“They’ve been trying hard enough to get on top of this one.”
“What matters is the way it is claimed.”
Valyn glanced over the edge of the wall at the carnage below. Some of the corpses-those that had fallen near the day’s end-were almost undisturbed. There might be an arm missing, or a gash across the collar, but they still looked like people, men and women who, but for a rent in their flesh, might still stand up, stumble away. The other bodies, the older ones, were worse. Days of battle had ground them into the mud. Hundreds of hooves had shattered skulls, pulped flesh, annihilated almost all that had been human. Crows were at these older carcasses, finishing the work. Valyn shook his head. “You want to claim it’s good to lose a thousand riders in the fight? Two thousand?”