The greatest knot of fighting was down by the gates, where Porto could see a large number of living men surrounding a single pale rider, who was slashing away on all sides with a blade that was invisible in the darkness but clearly swift and deadly. Then one of the mortal spearmen got in a lucky thrust and knocked off the rider’s helmet. The Norn’s horse reared, and Porto saw a gleam of moon-pale hair. It was the female Norn-warrior he had seen at Tangleroot Castle, he felt certain, the woman who had brought reinforcements to save her kin trapped in the ruins. Half a dozen Northmen’s bodies lay beneath her horse’s hooves, but she was fighting defensively, and even as he admired her speed and skill, Porto headed toward the fight to help his fellows. Thane Brindur and a few of his men were still trying to bring her down with hand-axes, swords, and jabbing spears, but the Norn woman made her horse spin so swiftly it seemed like magic, and each time her arm swung a man reeled back with a fountaining wound or collapsed where he stood.
Somebody called from the gate. This time it was no mortal voice, but a high, birdlike screech, and the Norn woman immediately wheeled her mount toward the sound, her sword cutting the air so swiftly that the soldiers she had been keeping at bay could only throw themselves on the ground and then crawl away to avoid being trampled or decapitated. The pale-haired warrior galloped back toward the gate and the shadows waiting for her there. The Northmen got to their feet and chased her, shouting in triumph.
We’ve driven them back, Porto realized. He had never really thought he would survive this storm of death and madness, but the Norn horde was retreating into the open gate, fleeing back into the mountain. Brindur led the chase, but he was on foot and the Norns moved like wind itself, seeming to glide across the uneven ground. The Northmen could not catch them.
Porto slumped to his knees. The massive sally-gate groaned as it began to swing inward, then slammed thunderously shut behind the last of the Norns. A dozen or so Northmen leaped and shouted and pounded on the gates with their weapons, still seized by battle madness, as if they could conquer the entire mountain by themselves if only they might pass the threshold.
Porto could feel all his new wounds, the sharp cuts the shadowy Norns had dealt him and the scrapes and bloody weals left by dead fingernails. He was so tired that he almost lay down among his dead and wounded comrades to sleep, but feared he would be buried by mistake.
As he stood trying to get his breath back, his legs shaky as a newborn colt’s, he saw something crawling toward him. It was so low to the ground he wanted to believe it some scavenging animal that had crept out onto the field in search of human flesh, but it did not move like any natural thing.
He lifted his sword. The blade felt heavy as a chestnut-wood beam.
His terror that the dead thing would prove to be Endri, or some other comrade, ended when the crawling shape lifted its face to the starlight. He did not recognize its agonized mouth or staring eyes, but there was something strange about it that still caught his attention. He stood all but unmoving as the thing kept crawling toward his feet, his blade quivering with the effort of his aching arms to keep it upright. The slick wetness of the blood trail left on the snowy earth behind it caught his eye. As it drew near, it raised a wavering hand toward him; then, when the effort was apparently too much, it let its pale hand drop onto Porto’s boot.
“Help . . . me,” it gasped.
The terrible thing was not a moving corpse, Porto realized in shock, but a living man. This was one of his fellow soldiers, a mortally wounded Rimmersman leaving his blood smeared behind him.
Then, as if merely saying those two words had exhausted his last strength, the dying man collapsed to the churned earth. Porto shouted out for help, his voice cracking, but nobody came. In the gray before dawn, the mountainside looked like some mad artist’s depiction of Hell itself—a cold hell, not a lake of fire but a place of corpses and near-corpses slowly whitening beneath drifting snow. The man who had collapsed at his feet let out a last, rattling wheeze of breath, then lay still.
Porto crawled a little way off from the dead soldier and sank into a crouch, rocking himself back and forth. The rising sun was just beginning to warm the sky but the new light only made the charnel wreckage around him more horrible, the bodies more pitiful. At last, strengthless and exhausted, he fell back onto the cold ground and wept.
“Before discussing this fateful hour of the siege, when Akhenabi and his Singers raised the mortal dead and General Suno’ku led a sally out of the gates in an effort to destroy the Northmen’s great ram, your chronicler must speak with her own voice for a moment, to tell something of the difficulties our order faces when trying to relate the tales of such times.
“It is not for poetry alone that we name our queen’s restorative slumbers the keta-yi’indra—“dangerous sleep.” The word keta’s origins date back to the Garden itself, and it contains in its meaning not just the idea of “dangerous” but also “chaotic” and “unknowable.”
We Cloud Children do not use keta to describe other perils. A wounded giant or thousands of Northmen besieging Nakkiga are both dangerous to our folk, but they are not unknowable. But our queen’s sleep of recovery brings a special kind of threat to our race—chaos and the unknown—simply because she is not present to guide us. The order of things is compromised, as if the stars themselves left their celestial tracks and made for themselves new and random ways across the sky. When the queen sleeps, instead of her loved and trusted voice, many voices speak to us, and many hands strive for mastery of the People’s fate. Nothing is in its proper place.
“‘In the season of keta-yi’indra,’ Kusayu the Fourth Celebrant once declared, ‘the sky and earth change places and the mountain stands on its peak.’ It was in Kusayu’s day that Drukhi the Martyr, the queen’s son, was murdered by mortals. In her grief, Utuk’ku slept even longer than she has in our present time, and during that sleep many things changed in Nakkiga. The people were lost as though in a great darkness and all was uncertain.
“And so it was on that more recent day we speak of here, during the Northmen’s siege of Nakkiga, when sudden victory and sudden defeat were both in our reach at the same moment. But in the end, both possibilities vanished.
“The risk of opening the gates for General Suno’ku’s attack on the black iron ram did not end in disaster, as some feared, but neither was the weapon destroyed before the general and her surviving Sacrifices were forced to retreat.
“And Lord Akhenabi sang a song of such power that hundreds upon hundreds of mortal corpses rose from their burial places and walked beneath the sky, slaying many of our enemy and striking terror into them all. But it was not enough to drive the Northmen out of our lands again.
“The uncertainty of those days also spawned many tales and rumors that are still told, and which make the work of a humble chronicler much more difficult. In such times, truth is always elusive. Some might even say that when the queen sleeps there are suddenly many truths, precisely because it is our great queen herself in her wisdom, power, and ubiquity who determines the order of all things. In her absence, facts are no longer trustworthy. In her absence, authority is diffused or even lost entirely. How can we know what is real? And how can a mere chronicler discern the truth of such moments after the fact, even less than a Great Year later?