Part 39 (1/2)

Nowhere ... Nowhere good.

He said nothing as he led her through the encampment, away from s.h.i.+meh, toward the greening heights to the west. She too said nothing, and spent much of the journey watching the gra.s.s stain the toes of her white silk slippers. She even made a game of it, kicking through the tangle of blades and stalks purposefully. Once she even wandered to her right so that she might walk across untrod ground, and for a moment it almost seemed they were Achamian and Esmenet once again, condemned and derided rather than exalted or revered. The sorcerer and his melancholy wh.o.r.e. She even dared clutch his chill hand.

What harm could come of it?

Please ... keep walking. Let us flee this place!

Only when they pa.s.sed through the final battery of tents did she actually notice notice him, the forward-fixed eyes misted by inscrutable thoughts, the strong jaw working beneath the plaits of his beard. They began climbing-toward the very gutted mausoleum where she had found Kellhus the night previous. him, the forward-fixed eyes misted by inscrutable thoughts, the strong jaw working beneath the plaits of his beard. They began climbing-toward the very gutted mausoleum where she had found Kellhus the night previous.

It seemed different in daylight, somehow. The walls ...

”You never came to Zin's funeral,” he finally said.

She squeezed his hand. ”I couldn't bear to.” Her voice faltered, speaking the words. They seemed cruel, horribly so, despite what she herself had suffered the night the Marshal of Attrempus died.

His only friend.

”Was the fire bright?” she asked. The customary question.

He climbed several more steps, his sandalled feet swis.h.i.+ng through yellow-blooming bitterweed. Several bees spun in angry circles, buzzing through the thunder that rumbled across the distances-the clamour of battle. Through some trick of sound, the faint raving of one man floated to the fore, at once hoa.r.s.e and metallic.

”The fire was bright.”

The bricked ruin rose before them, its foundations ringed with thronging sumac and weeds. Poplars shot young and straight from the interior, brus.h.i.+ng the highest of the truncated walls with their branches. She wondered at details that had escaped her in the gloom with Kellhus. At the webbed nest of caterpillars bobbing in the breeze. At the ovals which might once have been faces, set into the eastward walls.

What am I doing?

For an absurd instant she found herself fearing for her life. Many men would have murdered her for crimes she had committed ... What about Achamian? Could loss have unearthed such a man within him? But then, unaccountably, she was angry at the way he had yielded her. You should have fought for me You should have fought for me!

”Why are we here, Akka?”

Oblivious to her mad thoughts, he turned with one arm held wide, as though boasting of hard-won lands.

”I wanted you to see this,” he said.

Following his hand, she looked out across the encampment, whose tent-enclosed avenues wheeled out in broken seash.e.l.l patterns, over the razed groves, fields, and buildings of the intervening ground. And there it was, scored by pluming smoke, motionless and gloomy beneath the preternatural dark of the sky ... s.h.i.+meh.

From their seaward faces the Tatokar Walls wound white as teeth about the warren of street and structure that engulfed the heights of the Juterum. Both the ground and the parapets winked with flas.h.i.+ng arms. The two siege-towers given to Proyas were pressed against the ramparts, surrounded by lines and squares of men. The northern one burned like a miniature paper votive. A great pillar of smoke rose from what had been the Ma.s.sus Gate, leaning low over the city, its nethers burnished by the wicked glare of sorceries. To either side, several of the great eyes had been broken, and the towers appeared abandoned. Farther to the south, on the far side of the ruined aqueduct, the two siege-towers given to Chinjosa had also reached the walls, and dark ma.s.ses of Ainoni teemed about their bases, queuing to climb their runged backs.

And in the near distance, clear through pa.s.sing sheets of smoke, stood the First Temple.

She raised a balled fist to her brow. Perhaps it was some trick of scale or perspective, but it all seemed so slow, slow, as though it happened through water-or something more viscous than human understanding. as though it happened through water-or something more viscous than human understanding.

Nevertheless, it happened happened ... ...

”We've gained the heights,” she said-a murmur that somehow became a cry. ”The city is ours!” She turned to Achamian, who seemed to watch with the same horror and wonder-awe-that numbed her expression.

”Akka ... Can't you see? s.h.i.+meh falls! s.h.i.+meh falls! s.h.i.+meh falls!”

There had been so much in these words-far more than fervour, far more than the tears that clotted her eyes. Love. Rape and revelation. Disease, starvation, and ma.s.sacre. Everything they had survived. Everything she had endured.

But he shook his head, his eyes still fixed on the vista before them. ”It's all a lie.”

Horns pealed to the lowing clouds.

”What?”

He turned to her, his look possessed by a terrifying blankness. She recognized it, for the same blankness had owned her eyes the night he had returned to Caraskand.

”The Scylvendi came to me last night.”

Fanim drums throbbed. The clouds continued to darken, answering to the Cishaurim and their malevolent will.

Urged on by the cries of their Captains, phalanxes of Javreh charged the slopes, clambered across the heaped ruin of the Ma.s.sus Gate, then sprinted into the towering veils of smoke that slowly drifted across the city. The first of the Scarlet Cadres followed, picking their way forward carefully, keeping their sorcerers s.h.i.+elded at all times.

The outlines of the surviving walls resolved from the haze, and as the formations pa.s.sed beneath them, geysers of glittering fire reached up to lave their heights. More stonework came tumbling to ground. The world itself seemed to mutter curses.

Sarothenes was the first of the Scarlet Schoolmen to set foot in s.h.i.+meh, followed by Ptarramas the Older and Ti, who, despite his great age, continually scolded his Javreh for their sloth. Before them loomed a warren of alleyways and buildings that stretched to the foot of the Juterum. Their Javreh pickets fanned out in their hundreds, cutting down hapless Amoti, sifting through the buildings. Screams pealed out from hidden places.

Ptarramas the Older was the first to die, struck in the shoulder by a Chorae as he pressed his cadre forward. He fell to the street, cracked like statuary. Bellowing arcana, Ti sent flocks of burning sparrows into the black windows of the adjacent tenement. Explosions spit blood and debris across the street. Then, from the ruins of the outer wall, Inrummi struck the building's westward face with brilliant lightning. The air cracked. Burnt brick walls sloughed to the ground. In an exposed room, a burning figure stumbled over the lip of the floor and plummeted to the ruin below.

Sheltered by his Javreh and their wide s.h.i.+elds, Eleazaras gained the summit of the ruined Ma.s.sus, surveyed his cadres deploying before him. He leaned against the iron p.r.o.ngs jutting from the debris at his feet-the remains of the portcullis. Though he couldn't see Ptarramas, he knew that something had already happened.

They had hoped to draw the Snakeheads out in a decisive engagement, but Seokti was too canny. The s.h.i.+geki fiend, it appeared, hoped to bleed them. Pick them off one by one.

Eleazaras looked across the maze of structures before him, the welter of walls and rooftops extending to the slopes of the Juterum and marble bastions of the First Temple upon its summit. He could sense the Chorae out there, buried in cellars, crouched in lethal vantages, waiting ...

Everywhere. Hidden enemies.

Too much ... too many.

”Fire cleanses!” he cried. ”Raze it! Burn it all to as.h.!.+”

The long-awaited horns sounded, a coa.r.s.e peal over the throb of heathen drums. Towering amid his s.h.i.+eld-brothers, Yalgrota Sranchammer raised his axe to the darkling sky, howled bloodthirsty oaths to Gilgaol-mighty War. His kinsmen answered with raucous shouts. Then the Thunyeri surged into the Scarlet Schoolmen's wake, racing over the smoking ruins of the Ma.s.sus Gate. Shattered tile cracked beneath their booted feet.

To their north, Proyas and his Conriyans battled across the parapets. Of their two siege-towers, one had been lost to inferno, but hundreds clambered up the back of the other, das.h.i.+ng through arrows to reinforce their Prince. To their south, Chinjosa and his Ainoni watched with amazement as the Fanim defenders fled the ponderous approach of their two siege-towers. Bellicose Uranyanka and his Moserothi would be the first of their number to set foot upon the Tatokar Walls.

The black-armoured Thunyeri spilled unopposed into the city. Prince Hulwarga and Earl Goken struck south, leading the Skagwi and the wild-haired Auglishmen into the unruined streets behind the Ainoni section of the wall. Earl Ganbrota, meanwhile, drove north with his Ingraulish, their s.h.i.+elds adorned with shrunken heads. The east they left to the Scarlet Gurwikka and their dark-skinned slaves.