With the service done, Duris and his friends poured out onto the minor square. Minor, and still big enough to fit most of a village into. The giddiness that always followed a morning listening to the priests left them in playful moods as they strutted past the street vendors with their beaded jewelry and promises of futures told and tin plates of spiced chicken and lamb.
“Did I tell? Had a letter from home,” Kipp said.
“Did not,” Sandin said. “And it wouldn’t help if you did. You can’t read.”
Kipp shoved the larger man while the others laughed, but Kipp was laughing too, so it was all right. “I can hire a scribe, same as anyone else. My sister sent it. Saved up a tenth of her sewing money for a month to do it too. She said Old Matrin’s died.”
Duris missed a step. The pleasure he’d taken in the day faltered. “Did not,” he said, unaware that he was echoing Sandin. Old Matrin with his knives and the white crop of thin hair rising off his brow like smoke had been the butcher in Little Count and the master of Duris’s apprenticeship.
“Did. Caught a fever over the winter and slept himself to death,” Kipp said. He kept his voice light because they were men now, and men didn’t act sad about things. The look he gave Duris was sympathy enough. “Guess you’re the only one knows how to cut those chops of his now, eh?”
“Suppose I am,” Duris said. A wave of homesickness washed over him—Old Matrin’s slaughterhouse, the treelined lane between his old father’s house and the huts where his mother and sisters lived with his new father. The pond where he’d played whistles with the miller’s daughter back when they’d both been too young to think of anything less pure to play at. He shook himself, put a smile back on his face, and kept on. There was no use thinking too much on that now. His mother had said Sorrow calls sorrow so much that he assumed it was true.
The blare of the alarm trumpets cut through the air. It was so unexpected, Duris looked at the others to see whether they’d heard it too. Noll and Kipp had gone pale in the face. Sandin’s jaw was set forward in a vicious grin.
“Guess the fuckers came early, eh?” he said. The alarm came again, and they broke into a run for their siege stations.
At the stone side of the great walls, ladders wide enough for four men to climb side by side stretched up. The walls rose as tall as ten men one standing on the other, and divided so that low walls of iron marked off each length twenty yards long of the street-wide walk along the top. From his post, Duris could see the gates closing, the city of Nus folding in on itself like a turtle expecting a storm. And as he looked out from the top of the wall, the storm front was clear. Clouds of dust rose in the east. The largest plume came from the along the dragon’s road, but three smaller arced in from the south. Sandin, beside him, laughed.
“Well, look,” he said. “All the roaches are in a hurry to sit at the bottom of our wall. Idiots.”
“I don’t know,” Duris said. “Looks like there’s a lot of them.”
“If they make the top of this wall, it’ll be by climbing over the bodies of their own dead,” Sandin said, and spat. It was a phrase Duris had heard before, spoken by the priests. The thought reassured. The captain came last, and the fifteen men of the segment stopped talking among themselves. Callien Nicillian was the second son of some minor house—Baron of Southreach or some such. He had a sharp, dark face and an eager manner that brought Duris and the others with it.
“Take your posts, boys,” Nicillian said. “The roaches will be here by midday, and they may take a little knocking back.”
“Hope so,” Sandin said.
Along the wall, outsize speaking trumpets were being mounted, and the priests were beginning to call into them. The enemies of the goddess cannot win against us! Everything you love is already gone! If you stand against us, you have already lost! The syllables rang out clear and sharp. Duris almost felt sorry for the bastards riding so quickly toward their defeat. He sharpened his sword and wondered whether he’d get to use it. Three of the other men on his segment put together the ballistas and set them into the seating hole in the iron. The inner face of the wall looked down over the city. There were few buildings in Nus as tall as the wall. The people in the streets below him were only the oval tops of heads. He wondered what it would be like looking down at Camnipol from the Kingspire. He’d never seen it himself, but he’d heard it was taller than ten of Nus’s walls stacked one on the next, though that was likely an exaggeration.
When the call to make ready came, Duris was already looking down over the edge. The enemy had come in a force as large or larger than the Antean army that Lord Ternigan had led. The difference being that Ternigan had marched his men—Duris among them—through the opened gates and fought in the streets. The full garrison of Nus. The guards and soldiers of the traditional families that had ruled it. The shopkeepers and merchants and indentured slaves defending their homes. For a moment, Duris wondered whether the three hundred soldiers topping the walls were quite enough to defend a whole city from a full army, but then the priests began to call again, and his unease evaporated.
“Those catapults,” Sandin said, pointing down below them. “You see how the leather at the top looks like a sling? Those are Borjan make.”
“And you’d know that how?” Duris said. “All the time you spent as a boy with your lovers in Tauendak?”
Sandin hit his ear lightly and turned back to the army below. “I’ve heard about them. And see, those aren’t all roaches.”
It was true. There were Timzinae soldiers below them in profusion, but also Tralgu and Jasuru and wide, tusk-jawed Yemmu. Even a few that might have been Firstblood or Dartinae. The banners they carried were in the vertical style of Borja and the Keshet.
“This isn’t an uprising,” Sandin said. “That’s an army that’s fought as an army. Could be this is a good day after all.”
“Think that?”
“Break the back of the Borjan army and show them what it means to take the side of the Timzinae? I’ll put you a full night’s drinks the real people down there are offering up dead roaches by the end of the week as part of their surrender.”
“Not taking that bet,” Duris said. “I’ve seen how you drink.”
“Ready weapons!” Captain Nicillian cried over the calling of the priests, and Duris moved to his ballista. It almost seemed cruel, killing them from his safe perch. But they’d made the choice when they came, and damn but there were a lot of them. “Loose!”
The bolts of the defending ballistas fell on the attackers below. Duris couldn’t tell if they’d done much good. With only four to a segment, it seemed like each bolt would have to spit half a dozen enemy like pork on a skewer to make any difference at all. On the other hand, apart from cobbling together their Borjan catapults, they didn’t seem to be doing anything but standing about waiting to be killed. He waited while the others winched back the swing arm, then he shoved a second bolt in place and barked that he was clear of it. The string made a sound like snapping fingers, and somewhere in the throng below, another man died or was wounded or the bolt pierced only earth. The winch creaked again, and Duris waited with the next bolt.
He didn’t see where the fire came from. A cunning man at the rear of the army, maybe. Or one of the catapults, set aside for the purpose. The first sign Duris had was the intake of breath from the man beside him. When he turned to see what had caused it, he already knew. The ball of bright-blue flame like a sun made from sky floated above the wall, a trail of black smoke showing the arc it had already traveled.
“The hell is that?” he said. And behind him, the Borjan catapults answered: it was the signal to attack. All around the city, the Borjan catapults fired, first one and then a few, and then dozens. The stones arced up, and for a moment Duris thought the enemy’s aim had failed badly. None of them were going to strike the iron wall. None of them were even arcing low enough to pick off the soldiers at the ballistas. One of the stones passed over his own segment, and he saw the line that it drew behind it. The stone dropped down into the city, swinging hard on its leash and cracking into the stone inner face of the wall. The line, as thick as two of his fingers together, snapped taut under its weight.