At the base of the ladder a hundred more men waited their turn.
An old man carrying a pitchfork came up to Malden and saluted. It took Malden a second to remember how to salute back. “Thank the Bloodgod you’re here,” Malden said. “Do you see that ladder, where its end sticks up over the wall?”
The oldster nodded and gave Malden a wicked grin. He hefted his fork and made toward the ladder.
“Wait,” Malden said. “Not quite yet.” He waited until the topmost berserker on the ladder had nearly crested the wall. Below him the ladder bowed with the weight of half a dozen more. “Now,” Malden said.
The old man caught the top rung of the ladder with the tines of his fork and heaved. The ladder weighed too much for him, so Malden grabbed the end of the fork and lent the strength of his own back to the effort.
The ladder twisted and bent and then fell backward. Some of the men clinging to it jumped free. Some lacked the presence of mind to do so. Bodies made horrible crunching noises when they struck the frozen ground below. The ladder shattered as it spun away from the wall.
“Good,” Malden said. “Like that! Every time. Wait until they’re nearly at the top, so you get as many of them as possible. But don’t wait so long that even one of them gets over the side.” He turned to look around him. “Where is Velmont?” he demanded.
His Helstrovian lieutenant appeared a moment later. “I came as fast as I could,” he pleaded.
Malden grabbed his forearms and dragged him out of the hoarding, making room for more archers to crowd inside. “Something’s changed,” he said. “I don’t know what, but it’s not good. Last night they were still intent on waiting us out-letting us starve in here, until we begged them to come in and feed us. Now they’ve lost their patience. I don’t know why. But this is what we’ve been dreading. A real attack! Get every single archer you can up here. Get me watchers at every tower along the wall, get me reports-I need to know if the attack is just in this one place or if they’re everywhere. Go! Quickly!”
Velmont dashed off to do Malden’s bidding. Malden needed that information. And yet, in the pit of his heart, he already knew what Velmont would report.
This was the moment Ness would be lost. All the planning he’d done, all the hard work, had been designed around one simple principle: that the besiegers would wait him out. Clearly that belief had been founded on the wrong principles. There would not be enough archers, nor enough old men with pitchforks, if the barbarians were serious about scaling the wall. And in his experience, he’d never known Morget’s people to be less than serious about anything.
Chapter Ninety-Four
“They’re scaling Ditchwall now, and there’s no one to stop them!” Cythera sent her consciousness winging over Ness, trying to watch in every direction at once. “There are two more ladders at Wheatwall. One just fell, but- No! Malden!”
“He’s not your lover anymore,” Coruth growled. “This is why you had to renounce him. Do not tarry with him-tell me where else the barbarians are attacking.”
Cythera watched as Malden hurried toward Ditchwall, shouting for forks and archers. If the barbarians reached the top of the wall and surrounded him, even Acidtongue wouldn’t save him from “Tell me what you see, girl!”
Coruth’s voice was tinny and small, as if she were very far away. Even though she sat directly next to Cythera in the main room of their house on the Isle of Horses. It was so hard to stay aware of her body, to keep talking even while her eyes saw things in a hundred places at once. How could anyone do this? How could any witch bear seeing so much and not slip free of her body altogether?
“You may be one of the initiated, but you’re still learning,” Coruth told her, and suddenly the older witch’s voice was much louder. Cythera felt like her being was yanked sideways, pulled away from Ditchwall, as if she were a kite whose string had been tugged. “Look, daughter. Look everywhere-we must know what they’re doing.”
“But why?” Cythera demanded. She couldn’t see Malden anymore-was he overrun? Was he already dead? “What’s the point? Just knowing where the barbarians are doesn’t help anyone. We can’t tell them where to concentrate their forces. We can’t fight them ourselves.”
“Do as you’re told!”
Cythera tried not to think of Malden, to spread her consciousness wider. It was so hard-she’d just learned how this was done a few hours before. “Mother, the city will fall in the next hour-there are so many of them!” At Ryewall a barbarian climbed up on the battlements, only to be struck down by three arrows fired from different directions. At Westwall a fork pushed away another ladder, even as the barbarians raised two more. “We have to stop this. We have to do something, not just watch!”
“And what would you do?” Coruth demanded.
“Cast a spell. Set the ladders aflame, or-or call down a storm, they can’t climb if the ladders are too slick with rain to hold onto.”
“You think those things are in my power?”
Cythera couldn’t bear it. Ness was about to be overrun-the siege broken. The barbarians were about to take the city and there was nothing she could do. “They’ll kill everyone, Mother. They’ll kill every single person in this city.”
“So now you’ve seen the future?”
“I’ve seen enough to know how much blood they’ll shed once they’re inside the walls,” Cythera insisted.
“So the time has come,” Coruth said.
“What time? Mother, we have to help!” Cythera said. She felt as light as a scrap of silk floating on the wind. Her head reeled and her senses were on fire.
A slender thread snapped somewhere, and twanged like a broken bowstring. Cythera felt as if she were being pulled through the air faster than a trebuchet ball, and then she was falling, falling so fast.
With a start she lurched forward and found herself sitting in her chair, back on the Isle of Horses. Her consciousness was firmly back inside her body. She tried to extend her vision again, to see farther, but she could not. It was like she’d never been trained to be a witch at all.
Beside her, Coruth sat, her eyes rolled up in the back of her head. “You’re done for the day,” she said.
“What? But the attack-the barbarians-”
“There’s supper to get ready,” Coruth said, as if it were just an ordinary day. “And you need to sweep out the grate. There’s a week’s worth of ashes piled in there. I expect it all done by the time I return.”
Cythera couldn’t believe it. The siege was about to be broken and her mother could only talk of chores? “Wait-when you return from where?”
“I had hoped there would be more time to train you before things came to this dark pass,” Coruth said. “I can only hope you’ve learned enough.” And then her body erupted in a welter of blackbirds that winged around the room, smashing against the walls and ceiling as they desperately tried to find their way through the open window.
The chair where Coruth had sat was empty.
Chapter Ninety-Five
There seemed to be no end to the berserkers willing to scale the wall, even when every ladder was knocked away, even when Malden’s archers kept cutting them down. Messengers kept running in to tell him of new ladders reaching for other sections of the wall-the barbarians were too smart to let him mass his archers anywhere, and instead were sending up ladders on every side of the city. They must have constructed hundreds of them overnight. The ladders were easily destroyed, pushed back by forks, and every time one fell a half-dozen barbarians fell with it.
Yet they kept coming.
“Two at Swampwall!” a messenger shouted. Malden dispatched archers that were already too thinly spread where he stood on Ditchwall. He raced around the circumference of the city, calling for more forks, more people to push the attackers away. He had no lack of volunteers-women and men were pouring out of the Stink, looking for any way to help. They found things they could use for forks, things Malden would never have thought of-threshing flails on six foot long poles, the long brass candle snuffers from the ruins of the Ladychapel-and he put them to work as soon as they presented themselves. Still more ladders came.