“Do we help or run?” Ibana asked.
Styke looked from Gustar to Ibana. He could see that they both had just had the same thought as he.
“I wouldn’t mind letting Lindet rot in a Dynize cell,” Ibana mused.
“I can’t disagree,” Gustar grunted.
Styke tried to agree with them. Ten years in the camps. Torture, starvation, and hopelessness. Lindet deserved to reap what she had given him, but Styke also knew that without Lindet, Fatrasta was doomed.
And no matter how much she deserved it, he couldn’t leave his sister to such a fate.
“Ibana, you’re with me,” he said. “Give me twenty of our best fighters. Wrap their carbines in wax cloth and make sure everyone has a good knife. Gustar, the Dynize will either arrive with the storm and attack at night, or first thing in the morning. Either way, I want the Mad Lancers to wait until the Dynize have engaged the Third and then hit them in the flank. Can you lead a night charge, in the rain?”
“That’s suicidal,” Gustar muttered.
“Can you?”
“I can.”
“Good. You have command of the Mad Lancers. Ibana, tell Sunin to take Celine south and get her off the continent if the battle goes badly. Then find me my fighters. And bring me the bone-eye.”
Styke, Ibana, Jackal, Ka-poel, and two dozen of the old core of the Mad Lancers galloped into the camp of the Third Army. Chaos still reigned as a heavy wind blew in from the ocean and the black clouds approached. Outside the curtain wall, officers attempted to form up their companies to face an as-yet-unseen enemy from the mainland, while inside the curtain wall crews attempted to bring their cannons to bear on the citadel towers.
Styke didn’t spot Willen as they rode through, but he did see that the Dynize had finally showed themselves on the citadel walls. Sharpshooters on both sides exchanged fire, while gun crews on the interior towers worked to bring their own artillery to fire point-blank at the soldiers at the foot of the walls. A few courageous officers led charges with ladders, only to be raked by musket fire from above.
He rode past all of this, ignoring the mighty blasts as the citadel cannon opened fire, closing his ears to the screams of the Third as grapeshot fell among them like rain. He leaned into Amrec’s neck, urging him faster, and listened to the pounding of hooves as they skirted the base of the citadel wall.
“Here!” he bellowed, leaping from Amrec as they reached the groundskeeper’s trail at the north end of the citadel. His lancers dismounted, fetching their wrapped carbines, knives, and swords.
Ibana looked uneasily at the base of the citadel. “It’s going to rain soon. It’ll be damned suicide to scale this wall in good weather. Pit, Ben, we haven’t scaled a wall for a decade.”
“We’re not scaling it,” Styke said, wrapping his own carbine tightly and making sure his knife was secured at his waist. “We’re going around and under. The wax cloth isn’t for the rain – it’s for the ocean.”
Ibana took a half step back, her chin rising. “Pit,” she breathed. “You want to fight your way up the inside of a fortified citadel?”
“That’s what I said.”
She looked around at their comrades. “We should have brought everyone.”
“Too many bodies,” Styke replied, throwing his carbine over his shoulder. “Jackal, what do the spirits tell you about what’s inside?”
Jackal pointed at Ka-poel. “She’s too close. I have one gibbering mad spirit sitting on my shoulder telling me we’re all going to join him. The rest have fled.”
“I always knew the dead were useless.” Styke crossed to Ka-poel, lowering himself to one knee so that they were eye to eye. She regarded him coolly, her face placid, and he thought he saw a hint of violence in her eyes. “Can you help us in there?” he asked.
She tapped the machete strapped to her thigh.
“No,” Styke said, taking his knife and stabbing his own palm with the tip of the blade. He put his knife away and dabbed at the blood, holding out his stained fingers to her. “This. Can you help us with this? Protection, strength, speed – can you give me anything?”
Ka-poel hesitated. Slowly, she reached out and touched his bleeding palm. She drew back, pressing the blood to her lips, then gave him a nod.
“Good.”
Styke stepped to the edge of the cliff, looking down the groundskeeper’s path. Ibana joined him. “Are you sure about this?” she asked.
Styke thought of the times they’d charged into enemy cannonades or been unhorsed in the middle of a sea of bayonets. He thought of his old horse, Deshnar, and the power flowing through his muscles as they charged twenty times their number at the Battle of Landfall. He tried to wonder if he’d ever hesitated, if he’d ever shown the weakness that he now felt as he considered fighting his way through a fortress of Dynize.
“I’m certain,” he replied.
Ibana met his eye. “Why? Lindet isn’t worth this.”
He remembered a time, as a child, that he’d been knocking at the gates of the pit with a fever. His baby sister had snuck into his room to put candies beneath his tongue, despite knowing their father would beat her if caught. “Not to you,” he replied, and headed down the path to the ocean.
Chapter 66
Vlora sat on a stone to one side of the highway that ran through the crack in Ishtari’s Crease, humming softly to herself as she drew a whetstone across the blade of her sword. Her jacket was neatly folded behind her makeshift chair, her pistols and kit on top of the small bundle. Her sword lay across her knees as she listened to the sound the whetstone made and watched as the Dynize Army emerged from the hills.
They snaked down onto the relatively flat bit of highway about a mile and a half from her position – a column of infantry six across and probably miles and miles long. Officers rode horses alongside the column, with a handful of scouts out ahead. From their formation, they were clearly not expecting a fight, and had ordered their men to march double time to try to catch up with Vlora’s smaller force. Their advance scouts had probably seen her army continue through Ishtari’s Crease and head down into the forest below.
She was running a light powder trance – enough that she could see the moment one of the scouts spotted her. The column ground to a halt, officers were consulted, soldiers stared in her direction through looking glasses. She’d changed into an old pair of crimson trousers, so they probably wondered what the pit a single Adran soldier was doing out here alone.
She wondered how much time their hesitancy would cost them. Scouts were dispatched heading north and south along the Crease, no doubt looking for a trap. The general in charge of this field army had grown wary of her ambushes.
It made her smile.
It was almost a half hour until the column began to move again. It prowled forward, rolling toward her as inexorably as a boulder down a mountain but at a maddeningly slow pace. Though she tried to maintain her outward calm, her muscles cried out for the fight to start – for the beginning of the end. It reminded her of sitting in a theater next to Taniel, Bo, and Tamas, waiting for the most anticipated play of the season to begin while she clutched her handbill and hoped – in that way teenagers do – that the lead actor would look her way during the performance.
Every minute or so, Vlora took another hit of powder. She increased the dosage by a tiny amount each time, until her senses practically hummed with all the information flowing through them. She could hear the wings of every bug for two hundred yards, smell every flower, feel the tiniest speck of dust on the tips of her fingers. Her hands felt as if they were trembling, but every time she held them out to look, they were steady as steel.