“I thank you for your honesty, General. I will not make the mistake of calling you ‘Lady’ again.” He folded his arms across his chest. “But do not mistake my troops, either. They are fierce fighters all, hard men. They have faced your kind many times already and do not fear them. And they have many losses to avenge.”
Suno’ku looked at him again. The duke thought he could see something moving behind the bland face, a hint of what almost looked like surprise.
“Losses?” she said, her voice cold as the sky. “Losses, you say? I saw a hundred of my best Sacrifices die before my eyes at Asu’a. I saw my foreparent, our greatest general, pulled down and swarmed by your rabble. I found his body in pieces.”
“Asu’a. You mean the Hayholt.” Isgrimnur fought down his own anger. “My son and heir died there at your people’s hands. My son. And Thane Brindur’s son was burned alive by your troops only a short time ago, remember? We could hear his screams all over the battlefield.” The sky rumbled again, and this time even the ground seemed to shudder. Isgrimnur wondered if the Norns were working some foul new weather-magic. Was he being stalled? What other reason could this hard-faced killer have to trade words with him after their business was plainly finished?
“Then we both have little reason to speak more,” she said. Strangely, she seemed almost relieved. “We are finished here.”
“I suppose we are,” said Isgrimnur. “But I would ask one more question. You are brave, General—maybe even more than the rest of your fierce race. I knew that from the first moment I saw you. I do not expect any pity from you for my kind, but is there no pity in you for your own people? Would your pride condemn every one of them to death?”
“It is not pride, Duke Isgrimnur. My people are everything to me,” she said. “I would die for them a thousand times, but they would do the same for their queen and their land without question.” She said it so simply that he knew for her it was an utter truth. It also meant that she was right: the time for talk was over.
This time the rumble came not just from the sky but all around. Isgrimnur looked up, surprised. Sludig was running toward him.
“The gate!” he shouted. “The White Foxes are opening the gate! Treachery! The Norns are attacking!”
But the gate was still closed, Isgrimnur saw, nothing open but the salley-port, and that barely, with the other three Norn legates still standing before it, watching. He looked to Suno’ku, but she seemed as puzzled as he was. She stared up into the sky for a long, searching moment before turning toward the great bulk of the mountain.
Sludig reached Isgrimnur, grabbed his arm, and yanked so hard that the duke almost fell. Another guard reached him too, and the two of them began to wrestle him back toward the Rimmersgard lines. “Hurry!” Sludig cried.
But no force of Norns were issuing from the gate; it was still closed, though the noise was growing louder all around, deafeningly loud, like the hooves of ten thousand mounted riders or more.
Stumbling backward as his men pulled at him, Isgrimnur looked up at the mountainside and saw a massive cornice of stone, far above the gate, abruptly break loose from the slope’s evening-darkened face with a crack louder than a thunderclap. It began to shudder and slide downward, breaking into pieces as it came.
“The mountain,” Isgrimnur cried. “By Dror’s Mallet, the mountain itself is falling!”
The first great pieces of stone smashed down around the gate, digging huge gouges in the snowy ground, throwing up splatters of mud. A massive length of stone had come loose from the mountain face directly above the gate, a piece of rock big enough to hold a good-sized Rimmersgard town; it broke into pieces as it shuddered and scraped its way downward. Men were screaming and shouting all around. Isgrimnur himself might have been one of them, but the roar was growing louder by the instant and he could not tell. The rumble became a deep, rasping growl that seemed to shake every bone in his body until he thought they would shatter—and yet, astonishingly, his feet were still under him.
Isgrimnur was half-running, half-staggering toward his troops when suddenly his legs were swept from beneath him and he fell heavily, face down into the mud. Then something shook the ground so brutally that he was bounced up into the air and flipped over onto his back. He saw a black boulder the size of a house cartwheel toward him down the sloping side of the valley, but he could not move because Sludig was clutching his legs.
The great oblong stone bounded past them. It hit the looser soil of the valley floor and teetered up on one end for a moment, then fell back, crashing to the ground in an eruption of snowy earth and small stones just a scant dozen yards from where the duke and his rescuer Sludig lay. Shards of rock as big as Isgrimnur himself rained down around them, but the duke could only cover his head and stare back at the mountain.
As the last and largest chunks of stone tumbled down the steep mountain face, some of them a hundred cubits or more in length, Isgrimnur thought he saw the pale form of the Norn general Suno’ku still standing in the same spot where they had last spoken, facing the mountain, as unmoving as if she had been god-struck. Then the great sliding mass of stone came down where she stood, grinding and crashing, and she was gone.
For long moments afterward the noise echoed along the valley like the groan of a retreating storm. Then, at last, it was silent.
The ancient gate and the entire lower front of the mountain had vanished from view, buried under uncountable tons of black stone, a monstrous mass of ship-sized boulders and crushed and broken rock piled far up the mountain’s slope.
Isgrimnur wiped his face. His hand came away bloody, although he felt no pain. Sludig crawled up beside him. The duke could hear screams from the troops who had been crushed beneath the outer edge of the rockfall but had not been lucky enough to die. But from the mountain, from the city of the Norns, there was only the near-silence of settling stone and the occasional patter as a rock bounced down the piled rubble until it found a resting place.
“Duke Isgrimnur,” Sludig asked, pulling at his arm. Isgrimnur could barely hear him, his ears still deafened. “Do you live? Are you badly hurt?”
Isgrimnur stared at the blood on his fingers as though it were something he had never seen before, then lifted his eyes to the grave, silent stillness of the mountain, which stood wreathed in stone dust and swirling snow.
“It’s over,” Isgrimnur said, though his mouth was so choked with dirt he could barely form the words. Despite everything else, he could only think of the pale shape of the warrior Suno’ku, her back straight as a sword blade while she waited for death. He spat to clear his tongue. “God save us all, Sludig, we will never clear that . . . and they will never escape. The war is over.”
Part
Five
The Long Way Back
“The thoroughfares of Nakkiga’s first tier were hung with snowy mourning banners, and even the poorest of the poor had some white token tied at arm or neck. The general’s own Sacrifice host formed an honor guard for their fallen leader, lining up along both sides of the Glinting Passage so that all who came to Black Water Field to honor her walked between them.
“Suno’ku seyt-Iyora’s coffin was empty, of course, but the people of Nakkiga still turned out in great numbers to bid the beloved warrior farewell. Despite the loss of such a figure, some even sensed an air of triumph to the ceremony: after all—and against all expectations—the mortals’ siege had ended, the enemy was leaving, and Nakkiga still stood.