own. Not many. Steam rose from the corpses of friend and foe alike. But
they'd reached the tunnels. One last push, down deep into the belly of
the city, and it would be over. The war. The andat. Everything. He felt
himself smiling like a wolf. His shoulder and arm no longer hurt.
"General! Sir! It's blocked!"
"What?"
One of his captains came forward, gore soaking his tunic from elbow to
knee, his expression dismayed.
"It can't he," Balasar said, striding forward. But the captain turned
and led him. And there it was. A great gateway of stone, a sloping ramp
leading down wide enough for four carts abreast to travel into it. And
as he came forward, his hoots slipping where the fight had churned the
snow to slush, he saw it was true. The shadows beneath the gateway were
filled with stones, cut and rough, large as boulders and small as fists.
Something glittered among them. Shattered glass and sharp, awkward
scraps of metal. Clearing this would take days.
I Ie'd been betrayed. Sinja Ajutani had led him astray. The taste of it
was like ashes. And worse than the deception itself was that it would
change nothing. The defending forces were scattered, the towers would
run out of bricks and arrows, given time. All that Sinja had
accomplished was to prolong the agony and cost Balasar a few hundred
more men and the Khai Machi a few thousand.
Ah, Sinja, he thought. You were one of my men. One of mine.
"Get me the maps" was what he said.
Knowing now that it had been a trap, knowing that the forces of Nlachi
would have some way to retreat, some pathway to muster their attack,
Balasar scanned the thin lines that marked out the streets and tunnels.
His fingers left trails of other men's blood.
Not the palaces. Sinja had sent him there. Not the forges. His mind went
cool, calm, detached. The blood rage of the melee was gone, and he was a
general again. The warehouses. There, in the North. The galleries below
would be good for mustering a large force or creating an infirmary.
"There would be water, and the light from it wouldn't shine out. If it
were his city, that would be the other plausible center from which to
make his campaign.
"I need runners. A dozen of them. We need to reach the men at the
palaces and tell them that the plan's changed."
SINJA HAD RIDDEN HART) FUR THE. NORTH. EVEN AS HE HEARD THE DIS"I'ANI'
horns that meant the battle within Machi had begun, he leaned down over
his mount and pushed for the paths and rough mining roads that laced the
foothills behind the city. And there, low in the mountains where
generations ago it had been easy and convenient to haul ore, one of the
first, oldest, tapped-out mines. Otah's bolt-hole for the children and
the poets, and the only thing between it and the city-Eustin and a
hundred armed Galts. Visions of cart tracks crushed in the snow and
disappearing into the mine's mouth pricked at his mind. Let Eustin not
find them.
He reached the first ridge behind Machi just as a distant crashing sound
came from the city, the violence muffled by distance and snowfall. The
horse steamed beneath him. Riding this hard in this weather was begging
for colic; the horse was nearly certain to die if he kept pressing it.
And he was going to keep pressing it. If a horse was the only thing he
killed before sunset, it would be a better day than he'd hoped.
Sinja reached the tunnel sometime after midday. Time was hard to judge.
Silently, he walked down into the half-lit mouth of the tunnel and
squatted, considering the dust-covered ground until his eyes had adapted
to the darkness. It was dry. No one had passed through here since the
snow had begun to fall. He stalked hack out, mounted, and turned his
poor, suffering animal to the south again, trotting down the
snow-obscured tracks, cutting hack and forth-west and east and west
again-his eyes peering through the gray for Eustin and his men. It
wasn't long before he found them-a dozen men set on patrol. There were
eight patrols, they told him, and Eustin in the one that ranged nearest
to the city. Sinja gave his sometime compatriots his thanks and went on
to the south.
His gloves were soaked, the cold creeping into his knuckles, when he
found Eustin. I3alasar's captain and ten of his men had stopped a beaten
old cart pulled by a mule and driven by a young man with a long Northern
face and a nervous expression. Eustin and four of the men had dismounted
and were talking to the panicked-looking man. Sinja called out and
Eustin hailed him and motioned him down with what appeared to be good
enough will.
We're allies, Sinja told himself. We're Balasar Gice's men on the day of
the general's greatest triumph.
He forced his numbed lips into a smile and let his horse pick its way
gently downslope to where the soldiers and the unfortunate refugee waited.
"Not going with the general?" Eustin asked as Sinja came within
comfortable speaking distance.
"'Thought I'd let him kill all the people I knew without my being there.
I'd only have been a distraction."
Eustin shrugged.
"I'm surprised you're staying around at all," he said. "You aren't about
to he the most popular man in Machi. Wintering here might not he good
for you."
"Ah," Sinja said, swinging down from his horse. "I'll have all my dear
friends from Galt to keep my hack from sprouting arrows."
Eustin's noncommittal grunt seemed to finish the topic. Sinja considered
the man on the cart. He looked familiar, but in a vague way, as if Sinja
had known the man's brothers but not him.
"What have you got here?" Sinja asked, and Eustin turned his attention
back to the refugee.
"Coward making a run for the hills," Eustin said. "I was talking with
him about what he's carrying."
"Just my son," the man said. "I don't have any silver or gems. I don't
have anything."
"Seems unlikely that you'd live well out there," Eustin said, nodding
toward the North and the snow-veiled mountains. "So maybe it's best if
you come hack to the camp with us, eh?"
"Please. My sister and her husband. They live in one of the low towns.
Up by the Radaani mines. We're going to stay with her," the man said. He
was a good liar, Sinja thought. "I'm not a fighter, and my boy's no
threat. We don't want any trouble."
"Bad day for you, then," Eustin said and gestured with his fingers.
"'The cloak. Open it."
Reluctantly, the man did. A sword hung at his hip. Eustin smiled.
"Not a fighter, eh? "That's for scaring squirrels, then?"