Hurrying over, he used his status to make a way through the crowd of onlookers. The women had already unearthed the girl by the time he arrived. Her face was white with dust except where saliva had etched a clean track down one side of her mouth. Her eyes saw nothing. When the women picked her up, her head and limbs hung as limply as a doll’s.
“Is she breathing?” Malden asked. One of the women shrugged, but another thought to check.
The girl was breathing. She was alive. It looked like half the bones in her body were shattered. Malden didn’t know if she would live long enough for them to set, but he didn’t care. The girl was alive.
“Take her to the Isle of Horses-Coruth the witch will help her, if anyone can,” he commanded. A cart was brought up. There were no horses to pull it, but a band of old men offered to stand in the traces. They were turning the cart around, making ready to go, when a fourth stone flashed across the sky.
It came down inside the defensive wall of Castle Hill and bounced around the ruins there for a while. At least no one was in there to be hurt, Malden thought-and then he remembered his prisoners inside the gaol were inside that wall. He called for help and rushed to the gate to help them, if he could.
The stone had stopped bouncing when he got inside. It had settled in the great courtyard before the palace, where the Burgrave’s personal guard once marched in parade order. The stone was four feet across, and some effort had been made to carve it in a regular shape. It didn’t look nearly as big or as dangerous as when it had been flying through the air.
Malden ignored it and ran down the steps to the gaol. The men inside were screaming to be let out, or to be put to death instead of suffering so, or just to learn what was going on. Dust filled the air and a wide crack ran across one wall. The gaoler was nowhere in sight-most likely he’d gone to help the people in the square. Malden found the keys to the three occupied cells and opened them one by one. He had no idea what he was going to do with the men inside. One was a rapist, one a bravo who had killed for money. The third was Malden’s first charge, the madman who’d killed his own daughter for the Bloodgod’s favor. The lunatic was raving as Malden hauled him out of the cell and dragged him toward the stairs. “You two,” he said to the rapist and the bravo, “go up top and help the people there. There could be more people in that mess.”
“What’s going on?” the bravo demanded.
“The barbarians are attacking with some kind of catapult,” Malden told him. “They knocked down the spire of the Ladychapel. Now go help!”
The madman couldn’t find his own way out of the gaol. Malden had to lead him every step of the way. When they reached sunlight, a crowd was waiting for him.
“There! There, do you see!” the madman shrieked. He pointed at the ruined stump that was all that remained of the Lady’s church in Ness. “Sadu has spoken! He made it fall. He made it fall!”
Malden tried to push his way through the crowd but the madman kept grabbing at onlookers, snagging his fingers in their tunics or their hair.
“He must have His blood. He must have His blood. He must have His blood,” the madman blathered. Malden wondered if he could find a safe place to put the man in the Ashes, where his raving wouldn’t bother anyone. Then he considered the folly of that. A safe place? What place could possibly be safe when stones fell from the sky?
“He must have His blood, or we are all doomed. Give Him His blood!”
“Be quiet! I’m trying to think,” Malden demanded, but the madman shouted over him.
“His blood! Give Him His blood! His blood!”
There was something wrong with the sound of the madman’s voice. Had he been deafened by the noise of the falling stones? Malden wondered. It was like a strange echo accompanied the madman’s chanting.
“His blood! His blood His blood His blood His blood!”
Then he understood.
“His blood!”
“His blood!”
“Give Him His blood!”
“He must have His blood!”
It wasn’t just the madman. Half the crowd was chanting for blood as well. They’d taken up the raving cry.
Did they think Sadu could make the barbarians stop? Did they think the Bloodgod could grab the stones out of midair and save them?”
“His blood! His blood! His blood! His blood! His blood! His blood!”
Chapter Eighty-Six
“Fascinating. In the space of one night they built three trebuchets? I would have thought the technique far beyond them.” Cutbill mused silently for a moment. “Unless they had help. Perhaps an engineer seized at Helstrow. Or a dwarf.”
“For all I know Morgain has a degree in divinity from the university at Redweir. For all I care she may have two,” Malden insisted. “You’re missing the point. They’re throwing stones even now!”
“What does Slag say? I assume he’s had a look at the engines. Was he impressed or disdainful of their construction?”
Malden ground his teeth together. “Disdainful, on the whole,” he admitted. “They’re using traction engines, apparently. That means that instead of using counterweights, they actually have teams of men pulling on ropes to launch the stones. He seemed to find that grossly inefficient. I understood very little of his reasons why. I was too busy looking at the great heaps of missiles they had ready to fire at us. Those heaps were as big as houses!”
“They’ll run out eventually. There are no proper boulders out in the farmland where they camp,” Cutbill pointed out. “Most likely they’ve already taken to demolishing stone buildings for ammunition.”
“You’re not seeing this,” Malden insisted. “My people are dying.”
Cutbill leaned back in his chair and turned his eyes to face the ceiling. He sighed deeply for a moment, then said, simply, “Malden. You must think, not feel.”
The thief-the Lord Mayor-jumped to his feet. “What? What say you now? Is your blood so cold you can’t even mourn your fellow citizens? A little girl-just a little girl, crushed-broken as if she’d been worked over by torturers for a month. An entire family in the Stink, dead, save their piteous wretch of a mother, spared by uncaring fate just so she could watch her babies die-”
“Malden,” Cutbill said again, perfectly calm.
“What, damn you?”
“Malden, this is a war. I thought you understood that.”
“I’ve thought of nothing else in days!”
Cutbill sighed again. Malden had grown to hate that sound. “In war, people die.”
“Volunteer soldiers, perhaps. Foreign mercenaries. The enemy. But-”
“You’ve had your first real taste of war, and it galled. That’s perfectly understandable. Only a bronze statue of a man would not have this reaction. Yet you must not let this horror consume you. If you don’t steel yourself now, you’ll be mad in a week,” Cutbill pointed out. “Many people will die. You may lose half your constituents before this is over. And if you don’t win this battle, the other half will be enslaved. Or worse.”
Malden’s heart seized in his chest. He cried out, an inarticulate noise of rage and fear and utter sorrow. “I never wanted this! I never even wanted to be Lord Mayor. I didn’t want to take over your guild! I never asked for any of this responsibility, and I don’t want it now. I’ve done all this only because no one else would, or could-because if I didn’t the people of Ness would be without a protector. And now I’ve failed them!”
“It is to the good, in some part, that you feel so much for them,” Cutbill said. “That will help you when you must inspire them to fight on in the face of despair. Your sincerity will be a far greater weapon than your magic sword.”