The Godless (37 page)

“I should be so lucky,” the mercenary captain said beside her.

Ayae did not reply. For a moment, she doubted that she could. The memories—the distorted memories of her childhood—were rushing in against the reality before her. At the wall, the dirt had settled, and she could see the barracks surrounded, the closed doors holding, but under threat. Mounted raiders and others on foot moved through the lot in small groups, riding down soldiers and using the remaining two buildings to provide cover from archers who shot arrows and bolts toward them. In the middle of the yard, where there was no cover and where the men and women of Steel had been standing for the start of dinner, lay the bodies of three dozen men and women, not all dead. Their screams would not be easily forgotten.

Not by her.

 

2.

 

From his place on top of The Pale House, the Captain of the Spine gazed intently through his eyepiece, counting horses, raiders and the hole they had emerged from. “Move the Fifth to the gate, and the Eighth to the wall,” he said quietly. “Then cauterize it.”

From his roof, a mournful note rose over the city.

 

3.

 

Ayae had eased herself to the floor when she heard the alarm sound, the dull horn rolling through the streets. She and the half of Steel that were neither trapped in the barracks nor lying on the dirty ground of the mill had filtered into the streets and separated, slipping into the narrowest lanes they could find, which the raiders were not keen to follow them down. It was in one of those, a handful of Steel around her and Jae'le silently sitting in the empty, stripped branch of a tree above, that she heard the horn blast. She believed that it was a sign that Heast was moving his soldiers into position, but the mercenaries' reaction—swearing and laughing bitterly—caused her to turn to Queila Meina.

“What did you expect he would do?” She addressed her soldiers from the top of an overturned crate, her injured left leg pushed out before her. “They dug
through
the Spine.”

That Ayae understood: the Spine sank deep into the ground, deep enough that many believed that it was fused to the vertebrae of Ger himself. The sheer enormity of the task for a force to push through centuries of stone and dirt packed into the ground was not lost on her.

“And they did it,” the Captain of Steel continued, “quietly, with none of us—not to mention the Captain or Lady of the Spine—knowing it was taking place. If you stop and think about the fact that we've been there for over two months now, the implications are not pleasant.”

“The mill was bought out a year ago.” Ayae pushed herself up from where she was sitting and approached the mercenary. “Everyone in the city knew. Heast is going to close one of the gates, isn't he?”

Behind her, a loud shuddering, wooden creaking began to emerge.

“He'll do more than that,” Meina said.

“More?”

Her smile was sour as her good foot tapped the ground. “He'll collapse part of the city. This part. He'll crash it into the tunnels below.”

Ayae could not respond.

“That's what the gates are for,” the other woman continued. “You were all told that they form catchments, that they let Heast box in soldiers in parts of Mireea when they are overrun, and it's true. What you weren't told was that he has spent months restructuring and lining the underground passages so that he could collapse each part of the city safely without causing a chain reaction. He had the idea years ago when he realized portions of Mireea were built over empty caverns, but it wasn't until this threat that he was given reason to do it.”

“How long?” Her voice failed her. “How long do we have?”

“Until the morning. We have some time, though whether it will be enough to regroup and pull half of Steel out of the mill, I don't know.”

She stepped back behind the mercenaries as Meina talked to them and organized them despite their protests. She had two concerns, Ayae heard: those they had left behind and the split of their forces. To free those in the mill would require all of them, more than the dozen listening to her now; they would need a small force to draw the attention of the raiders and another to go in; and then they would have to fight a rearguard action to the gate. Ayae was not sure that they would be allowed through the shut gate if they arrived with a force, but she did not question it. Captain Heast had laid much of his plans in advance and told the people of Mireea very little of it, but she did not doubt that he and those under him had contingencies to ensure that their own soldiers would be evacuated safely.

It was clearer now than ever before that neither the Captain of the Spine nor those who knew the full extent of his plan expected to win once the siege began against Mireea. Until that moment she had nursed the belief that they had a chance, that Heast and the others she spoke to were pessimists and pragmatists, paid to plan for the worst. But that was not true, and the weight of that realization settled heavily on her, coupled with the knowledge that Heast planned to demolish all of Mireea as it was overrun, leaving nothing but rubble and debris for those who claimed it. Partly, she knew that he was doing it to ensure that he would not have to fight a retreat in the form of a long, bloody chain, spending the lives of mercenaries and soldiers and civilians as he made his way to Yeflam …

But.

But her
home
.

Her home would be gone.

Not lost, not stolen but
gone
.

Devastated, she walked down the narrow lane, closing her eyes to center herself.

“You have nothing to fear.”

She felt the raven's claws pierce the fabric of her shirt.

“Head to the gate now,” Jae'le continued. “None here will stop you. You're not a soldier. Once you are past it, find my brother. Find him and the two of you can be gone before the fighting starts. Before you are both forced to take part in this conflict.”

“Before we're forced to take responsibility?” She spoke quickly, bitterly. “That's what you really mean, isn't it?”

She brushed the raven from her shoulder before he could reply and returned to where Meina was giving out orders. Her uncle—Bael, to judge by the axe he wore—had begun to argue, and as she drew closer, Ayae heard his voice: “—in no condition to lead anything that requires speed, and you know it,” and saw Meina shake her head. It became clear that she was alone in her opinion, for much of Steel were in agreement with the large man. Soon, she capitulated to their demands.

“Fine, uncle. Start gathering as many as we can, and prepare to move. We can't stay in this alley much longer.” She turned to Ayae. “I can have someone take you to the gate, if you want?”

“Have them take the bird,” Ayae, who had once been a cartographer's apprentice, replied. “I'll go where I can help the most.”

 

4.

 

As Zaifyr approached the third village, the afternoon's sun began to truly set, leaving hand-printed smudges of orange and red on the horizon, a child's painted sky.

He had been outside Mireea for over an hour, having dropped down the Spine and into the cooling brush while the sun still remained. Before the light had begun to fade, he passed through two villages, finding them empty. No more than two dozen cheaply made buildings accounted for the two towns, but they were all bigger and better kept than those in the third settlement. This was smaller than the two before it, and he suspected it was the oldest, but from the silence that greeted him it did not promise to be any different than those he had already searched.

Earlier, after the first gate within Mireea had been lowered, Zaifyr had found himself on the roof of
The Pale House
. He was drawn to a large tabletop map where he, the Captain of the Spine, and the two old miners who he still referred to as the First and Second circled half a dozen villages that were along the western edge of the Spine. There, they believed, a tunnel had been made. “A difficult tunnel,” First insisted.

“A dangerous tunnel,” the Second added. “Finished with an explosion.”

“That explosion was structurally unsound,” the First muttered. “Never mind that they dug between two caverns with two cities and had only meters of rock and dirt to separate them.”

“It's just one large city,” said the Second. “But I bet they broke through. I bet if we look we can see holes.”

“There's no town there on your map.” Zaifyr tapped the mountain area that they had circled. “Are you sure I'll find something there?”

“According to my report, the villages were cleared with all the others,” Heast replied. “They are the newest settlements, though, which is why they're not on the map. They're our best guess as to where the tunnel begins.”

Zaifyr briefly considered telling him no, that he should send someone else. The illusion of their relationship—that one had hired the other and that the positions of power they occupied were based on such a transaction—did not need to be preserved; but he thought of the haunts in his hotel room and of Ayae, who was on the other side of the gate, and he said nothing. Of the last, he had only found that out after Heast's corporal had located him outside Ayae's house, peering through her window determined to explain himself to her.

“It is entirely possible,” the Captain of the Spine continued, “that all these towns are part of the one force we are currently dealing with. If that turns out to be true, I will be sending out a force to deal with them, but I need to know first. I leave the east of the city nothing more than a skeleton if I do that and I would rather not take the risk if I am to collapse the western part of Mireea anyway.”

“There's no one from these towns inside Mireea?”

“No.”

Privately, he had thought that Heast and the old men were overreacting, but after he had discovered the traps he'd changed his mind.

It was only luck that kept him from serious injury when he pushed the first door open. A crossbow bolt had sat poorly in its cradle, the winch having broken from the strain earlier. If it had not, the short black bolt would have punched into his leg or stomach. Since then, he had found another twenty crossbows, and left each of them alone.

The third village was no different than the previous two. Its silence echoed his steps, the movement through scrub around him. The similarity of it to those before gave more credence to Heast's claim that all six villages were connected, for he could find no sign of living inhabitant either through tracks or haunt. As he progressed, he began to think that a deep stillness lurked within the village, and the ones before it, as if it had been preserved, sanctified somehow, by the men and women who had lived there before.

Leaving the third, he made his way to the fourth village, careful not to use the trail.

“I do not want to show my hand early,” Heast had said to him. The First and the Second had left minutes before, given the task of examining all of the Spine that Mireea was built against. “Collapsing the roads is inevitable, but I had hoped that the Keepers would have left by then.”

“They would still be against you retreating to Yeflam,” he replied.

“But they would be unable to stop me.”

Zaifyr had almost said that they would not, but the words died on his tongue.

At the fourth village, Zaifyr stopped suddenly, a lancing brightness startling him. It was not a natural brightness, but rather the frail light of a haunt magnified by tens upon tens that milled in and through the dirt before him. A dirt that was threaded by lines of collapse in the final smudges of light, and the light of the dead. Dirt that had given way and sunk suddenly into a depression.

He did not need to reach out to the dead around him to know the shock, the fear and the unforseen deaths that they had experienced after the explosion erupted on the Spine's foundation.

 

5.

 

Crouched in his cell, Bueralan stared at the Spine and watched the fires. They were small, isolated, and looked to be more for purposes of light than signals of destruction. He had heard that they had been created by raiders who were attacking the city, but none of the soldiers he overheard were sure what they signaled. There had been a lot of excitement when the first line of smoke emerged, but emotions had tempered as the moon rose and the flames remained at the foot of the sky.

If it was an attack led by raiders, Bueralan believed that the general had played his hand too early. The army was two days' solid ride from being in a position to deploy their catapults, and that did not take into account the soldiers digging in, building trenches, fences and fortifying their camp. It surely would have been better to wait until they were in a position to do that to launch a surprise attack on the back of whatever they'd set up. But as he stretched his back against the bars, he was reminded of the pitch darkness he saw when the mother was speaking, and the brief sense that he had of being all round the Mountains of Ger.

“Do you watch our fire?” The general emerged from behind the cart, holding a plate in his left hand, a cup in his right.

“I was told a long time ago that in war fire is not your friend.” The plate was pushed through to Bueralan's unshackled hands. “Do you not subscribe to that?”

“The grunt's perspective. Spoken by a soldier who liked the spoils of war, but had very little interest in battle.” Waalstan leaned against the side of the wagon. “Do you know that they are our raiders up there?”

“Your cannibals?” The meal was cold, barely cooked meat, the bread beneath pink from the juice. His stomach rebelled at the sight of it, despite what his mind said. “Did they dig through the ground with their filed teeth?” he asked.

“Over a year ago, I organized the purchase of a mill within the city. At the same time, I purchased a series of land lots, half a dozen close to the Spine and another four further down the mountain. The raiders that we sent out had three jobs: to create a small series of skirmishes, to ensure that the villages followed a specific design and—”