Bottles, burning at one end, were falling from the top of the western cliff face. As they hit the flat, tiled roof, they broke, and burst into flame. Already there were lakes of flame burning across the western Palopy roof. The property above was that of Family Gershelden…an old Ameryn Family, and allies to Family Maerler. She had not expected treachery from that quarter. But loyalty to Maerler, of course, did not necessarily dictate complete obedience. There seemed no end to the steady fall of bottles.
Talmaad threw buckets of water on the fires, yet the flames clung with unnatural persistence. More were erupting every moment. Tiles would crack with prolonged heat. Roof beams beneath would burn. If not extinguished, the roof would collapse and the fire would spread below. She could move talmaad from the firing wall to help extinguish the flames, but every archer was needed or the wall would fall. There was so much smoke now in the air that some of the mob could possibly scale the wall without being seen and open the gate from the inside. She had forty talmaad in Palopy, and thirty human staff, most of whom weren't much in a fight…that seemed short-sighted now. But hiring cripples and other unwanteds had won them such goodwill from their families. Had she been wrong to continue the policy? What good had goodwill done them? Who amongst the locals would rise to save them now?
Aisha could smell smoke on the wind as she ran, ducking fast along a winding alley. She was south of Sharptooth. Above her The Crack ran upslope toward the high Petrodor Ridge. She caught glimpses of grand mansions lining The Crack as the slope began to rise, a ridge intersecting the Petrodor Incline. She paused only to listen at the way ahead and avoid the mobs. The roads were swelled with armed men, mostly Riversiders to look at them, but not always. Saalshen's properties were ablaze from one end of Petrodor to the other. She had caught a glimpse of the roads around the old Saalshen house of Tiraen-heard the furious chanting of a thousand angry voices, a song from her darkest nightmares come to life. All the smaller Saalshen properties had been abandoned to the defence of Tiraen, Palopy, Cresfel and Edana. All the talmaad of Petrodor defended those four properties now. Now, she doubted that all the talmaad in Petrodor would be enough.
Her breath came desperately hard, and her legs cried protest at the sight of a new slope rising before her, but she could not have stopped if all the elders of Saalshen had demanded it. Terror drove her, and picked her back up after she missed a step and fell. She dashed across the next winding road, and ran along the shadow of a wall until she found a new alley entrance and darted within.
Before Tiraen, she'd stopped at House Berendani, one of Maerler's main allies. There she had met not Patachi Berendani himself, nor one of his sons, but a common soldier. Her pleas had fallen on deaf ears. No Berendani soldier would move against the mobs, he'd said, with stony formality. The mobs marched in the name of the archbishop. They wielded the Verenthane star. No Berendani man would stand against the will of the people of Petrodor and their gods. Saalshen, alliance or no alliance, was on its own.
They'd lost, Aisha realised, as she panted up the steepening slope. Two hundred years of Saalshen's presence in Petrodor was at an end. This game of powerful houses had been just that-a game, until someone had invoked religion. There, the game of calculation had ended. Now it was a rabid, mad orgy of violence that threatened to destroy everything, friend and ally alike. No wonder the patachis all retreated into their mansions and locked the gates. No patachi could withstand power like this. The archbishop had shown them all their place. The archbishop's weapons were not elegant, but they could crush everything and everyone, if he chose. Now, they all learned.
Patachi Maerler was her final hope. The Nasi-Keth were confined to Dockside, well aware that they would be next once the serrin were dealt with. They would be barricading Dockside for the attack that would follow, the attack that she knew the archbishop, and some others, had been urging Patachi Steiner to make for some time. Patachi Steiner had sensibly refused, and now events propelled the archbishop to mobilise his ragged army of the faithful to reclaim what had been displaced by the previous political games. The Docksiders stood a far better chance than did Saalshen's properties, that was certain. If she could not convince Patachi Maerler himself to help, then Saalshen would soon be receiving news that its entire Petrodor talmaad was dead. A slaughter to foreshadow the slaughter in the Saalshen Bacosh…and then, perhaps, within the borders of Saalshen itself.
She came upon a pair of dead men in the alley, recently killed. One had been cut nearly in half by a single stroke. Riversiders for certain, Aisha saw, leaping quickly over the vast pool of blood. They had that raggedy, unwashed look about them, even in death. And slope-dwelling locals avoided these alleys for a reason; at least it seemed there were still some other nightwraiths out on this grim afternoon.
Ahead, the slope became a cliff, rising like a single, yellow tooth from the harbour. Aisha stopped and counted the pyres of smoke across southern Petrodor. She counted nine. There were ten Saalshen properties south of Sharptooth. Tiraen, she guessed, was the last one left. Below were the many ships docked at the port of Angel Bay. Here, below the looming cliffs of Sharptooth, smaller trails of smoke made a black smudge against the ocean. Even in calamity, the funeral pyres burned. The dead waited for no one.
The last lane along The Crack emerged onto the road to Maerler Mansion. It was a dead end, well chosen and well exploited-a single, narrow road overlooked by the walls and archery positions of friendly houses. Any large force advancing this way would be annihilated one piece at a time. Whenever Aisha had visited before, she'd come the back way, up the passage from the base of Sharptooth cliff, but if she took that route today, Palopy and Tiraen could easily fall before she reached Patachi Maerler.
She took a deep breath and emerged from the lane mouth. Atop the walls, men with crossbows manned battlements not unlike the old castles of Enora. Aisha saw their weapons pointed down at her and wondered if she should say a prayer. Papa had. Mother had never entirely swayed Papa from his Verenthane beliefs, although she had tried. Helen hadn't thought that fair, and they'd argued.
Serrin were supposed to be completely accepting of human faith, Helen had said. Mother wasn't doing that. Mama had replied that she had no problem with Papa's faith, but as serrin, she would challenge any inconsistency that troubled her. To which Helen had accused her of completely misunderstanding the nature of human faith. To be faithful, she'd insisted, was not to question, but to accept. Mama hadn't liked that, and the argument had gone on long past dinner, until the coals had begun to dim on the fire grill, and Papa had gone off to bed. Papa had never been interested in such debates. He worked his lands, and if it did not help with farming, Papa wasn't interested. That, ironically, was why Mama had fallen in love with him in the first place. Mama said that he listened to the music of his own soul.
Approaching the Maerler gate, Aisha realised that she did not need to pray. If she were about to die, impaled by human arrows far from home, she would die with thoughts of her family in her mind, and love for them and her fellow talmaad in her heart.
The grille on a small side gate slid open before she could knock. “If I let you in,” a low voice growled, “Patachi Maerler will have your hide. You're supposed to use the other gate, serrin.”