Che expected Garmoth's armour to fend off the blow easily, but the Mantis plate crumpled at once, cracking like fire-warmed paper. With a grating roar, Garmoth collapsed to his knees, and Accius slit his throat, stepping back to avoid the huge body as it toppled to the floor in a cacophony of metal.
In the echoes of that crash, that seemed to go on and on, Che waited for repercussions, but the other Masters made no further appearance. Perhaps they slept already. Perhaps they were as heedless of their fellow as they had been of their servants.
'Rusted through,' Thalric observed. She blinked at him, realized he meant the armour. 'Look,' he pointed, 'the backplate is cracked without a blow being struck. This was no good place to store armour.' He laid a hand on one of the massive pauldrons, and half of it came away without effort.
'Greatest of warriors,' she whispered. Was he genuinely so, in his day? Or did he rely merely on the awe he was held in to win his battles for him? What have we slain here today? She felt they should move the body to the pedestal where he had lain for so long, but the three of them could not have managed it, even with Accius's strength.
Forty-Five
He had awoken several times, but retained only a sketchy memory of each occasion: aware that he was in the infirmary of the Scriptora, and that she was beside him. When he moved, he felt as if every bone and joint had been under the hammer. Amnon, the First Soldier of Khanaphes, opened his eyes.
They had not given up on him, he saw, for this was one of the little rooms reserved for Ministers or people of importance. His soldiers, most of whom had suffered worse than he, would be tended in the communal infirmaries of their barracks, or in converted storerooms. There would be more than enough work today to keep all Khanaphes's cutters and salvers busy.
He remembered, in fits and starts, that the city still stood, that the Scorpions had been washed away, that he had held the bridge just long enough. He squeezed the hand that he found in his, startling his companion from her doze as she sat beside the bed.
'Hello, Praeda.'
She looked haggard and he guessed she had not slept much these last few days. She bit her lip, watching him, and he levered himself up to a sitting position, determinedly ignoring all the complaints of his body. 'Don't tell me I look as bad as that,' he chided.
'I am so angry with you,' she said tightly. Her grip on his hand became painful. 'I can't believe just how angry I am.'
'You have every right to be.'
'Don't be reasonable about it now!' she snapped. 'You have no right to be reasonable now, after what you did. You were going to die, you and those other idiots. You were going to stay behind and die. What … What sort of a way is that for anyone to behave?'
'It is what the First Soldier of Khanaphes does, if it is needed,' said Amnon calmly. 'It is what the Chosen of the Marsh people does. For Totho and Meyr, I cannot say why they did it, and perhaps they cannot either. How long have I slept?'
'It's now evening of the day after the battle.'
'And what do the healers say about me?'
'Damn the healers. I stitched your wounds myself,' she informed him. 'We know our medicine in Collegium.'
'So what do you say about me?'
'That you're a cursed fool. And you got off lightly. I saw your armour after they'd cut it off you. It looked like someone had thrown it off a cliff and then put it into an industrial grinder. They should have taken you out of it in pieces.'
'You sound disappointed,' he noted.
'Because you won't learn,' she said bitterly. 'I know you soldiers, you'll remember that you won and that you survived, and you'll call it glory, and you'll do it again.'
He put both hands on hers, and his mind was abruptly full of all those who had not survived or won: Dariset and Kham and all his Royal Guard, the elite of the Khanaphir fighting forces now pared down to a fragile handful. And of course, Totho's foreigners, the Fly, the sailors, the loyal giant Meyr. 'No,' he said hollowly, 'never glory. That I lived was due to chance — chance and Totho's armour and his help. That we won was … I cannot explain it. The glory belongs to the dead.'
Tears shone in her eyes. 'Amnon, I love you. You made me love you. You just gnawed and gnawed away at me until I caved in. So promise me you'll never do anything so stupid again.'
He took a deep breath. 'I am guilty, as you say, but it is a promise I cannot make. Would you think the same of me if I were merely to stand by while those I loved — or those you loved — were harmed? Surely you would not.'
She gazed at him sadly for a long time. 'I suppose not,' she said at last. 'Although it's hard to live with it, you'd not be the same man if you did. You selfish bastard.'
He managed a smile at that, but then he glanced past her, and she turned to see a shadow hovering in the doorway: it was a stooped old Khanaphir who looked as sleepless as any of them.
'First Minister,' she named him, and Amnon said, 'Ethmet.'
'They told me,' said the old man, 'that you were well, Amnon.'
'I live,' Amnon confirmed.
Ethmet looked very old, standing there. The burden of the city's reconstruction would weigh on his shoulders. 'Your banishment …' he began quietly.
Amnon nodded. 'I had not forgotten.'
'Amnon, if it were my decision … but the Masters have spoken. You went against their tenets when you adopted the foreigners' ways.'
'And so I lived, when so many others died. And so I held the bridge, with the foreigners, who shed their blood for us. But that doesn't matter, does it?'
'Amnon, I am sorry-'
'Dress it up as the Masters' will if you want,' Amnon interrupted. 'I care not. I am banished, so be it.'
'There is a chance,' said Ethmet, holding a hand up. 'If you were to ask forgiveness of the Masters, if you were to repudiate the foreigners, I think that you might yet be taken back. The Masters are just.'
'Are they?' Amnon said heavily. 'Consider this: if I were a man to beg forgiveness, then I would not have held the bridge until the waters came, and the only thing the river would then have achieved would be to wash all our corpses into the Marshland. So no, I ask no forgiveness. I apologize for none of my actions. I held the bridge and, if I am banished for that, then I shall go like a man. I shall go with Praeda Rakespear to her far country, where perhaps they understand things better than you or your Masters.' He saw the leap of joy on Praeda's face, and knew it was something she had wanted to ask him, and never dared.
'Please, Amnon,' Ethmet whispered, 'your city needs you …'
'My city needed me and, needed, I came. Now I have done what was required of me. Now it seems what my city needs is a man who will bow the knee, and I will not. You have set the price for my actions, and I shall pay it, as I have always paid my debts. Now we must both part on our own quests: I for a new city, you for a new First Soldier.'
Ethmet hovered in the doorway a short while longer, wringing his hands but without words, and then he skulked away.
This has been a disaster: it was Totho's personal assessment. Drephos would find something positive in it, of course. Drephos would see the whole Khanaphir expedition as an extended field-test to destruction: the ship, the armour, the people … He would be pleased, overall, with the performance. Drephos did not care about money, so long as he had enough, and the Iron Glove would not be bankrupted by this petty conflict.
Still, no market in Khanaphes, and the Iteration sunk with most of her crew, Tirado dead, Meyr dead, and also Meyr's people from the Nemian expedition. Still, Totho knew that he was merely dressing the books now, that the true disaster was a personal one. And Che gone, too. Lost to a Rekef knife, no doubt. They had hunted her down one night, and he had not been there to save her. That being so, the final disaster was: I survived. He had not meant to. His armour had been too proof, his instincts too cowardly. He had lived when all his fellows had died, save only Amnon himself. He wondered if Amnon felt as wretched as this.