“Cut the cords, boys!” Nicillian shouted. “They’re coming up.”
Duris’s disbelief overcame his discipline, and he looked over the edge. It was true. Down below, a Jasuru man hauled himself hand over hand up the line. You cannot win. All who defy the goddess are already doomed. Your only hope is surrender. Duris drew his sword and started hacking at the line as another stone flew overhead, another line wrapped itself over the wall. It wasn’t rope, but a braid of leather and wire that defied the blade. It wasn’t magic, though. Before the Jasuru made the wall’s top, they severed the cord. Only by then, there were two more cords drawing black lines across their segment.
Duris hacked as if his life depended on it. For the first time, real fear quickened his blood. The voices of the priests and the calling of his fellow soldiers were the only sounds. No enemy drums or trumpets sounded. When they cut through a cord, there was a scream or a shout or else silence. The stillness of it left him unnerved.
The speaking horn from the next segment over fell silent. When Duris looked over, a Timzinae man stood over the fallen priest, an axe in his black-chitined hand. Duris didn’t think, only ran. The barrier between segments was tall, but not so great he couldn’t clamber up the sun-hot iron and fall on the other side. The segment was overrun; Borjan soldiers were everywhere. Duris barreled into them. Those who stood with the goddess could never lose.
He swung his sword down, using the blade’s weight, and only hitting with the farthest tip, the way Old Matrin had taught him to use the big butcher’s knife. The Timzinae man’s back opened from shoulder to waist, and he fell screaming to the ground. Duris kicked him away, and stood straddling the fallen, bloody form of the spider priest, his sword at the ready. Something tickled his leg, then something else. Before he could look down to see what was happening or jump back, a Tralgu man stepped forward, a mace in his fist. He batted Duris’s sword out of his hand with an air of near boredom, shifted to follow and redirect the momentum of the swing, bringing it up and over and down.
The blow didn’t hurt, but it made a deep, solid sound, like stones being dropped onto dry ground. Everything grew quiet and distant and the world tilted oddly. The dead priest stood, or no. No, Duris fell at his side, but he had the clear sense that he was standing. Something danced across his hands, and then more. Spiders. Hundreds of them.
The Tralgu who’d hit him had stepped back now. He was waving a yellow banner over his head, and his teeth were bared in disgust. And fear. Duris tried to stand, but the pain finally found him. The wall tumbled in empty space, though his eyes told him nothing was moving. He rose to his knees. Something sharp happened in his ear, like a sting. Spiders swarmed his eyes, scratching at the lids like a dog trying to dig out a rabbit hole.
I can’t die, he thought. The goddess can’t be beaten. Nus won’t fall.
Two Timzinae men appeared carrying wooden buckets, and another came behind with a burning torch. Another signal, he thought, but of what he couldn’t guess.
“You bastards won’t stop me,” he shouted, or tried to. The words came out poorly. He tried to say I am dedicated to the goddess and the Severed Throne, but what he heard himself say was, “No one else knows those cuts!”
The liquid that splashed out from the barrels was thick and greasy and smelled weird and familiar. It was something he knew, though his mind was so addled he didn’t place it. Was it piss? Or butter? He spat out a mouthful of it, and a lump of oily spider came with it. His hand found the grip of his sword.
Lamp oil. They’d drenched him in lamp oil.
“No,” he shouted as the third Timzinae came closer with his torch in hand. “No, please wait!”
The torch flew toward him in a long, lazy arc, trailing smoke behind it.
Clara
War was made from individual lives, but that didn’t make it special. Any number of endeavors were just the same. The loaves of day-old bread she’d handed out at the Prisoner’s Span had been as much the product of disparate lives as any battle. The boy who gathered the eggs might have done so while in despair of ever winning his father’s love. Or in silent contemplation of the murder of his rivals. Or still flush from the revelation of a great secret. Or bored beyond measure by another day’s empty work with only chickens for companionship. And so for the farmer who’d brought in the wheat and separated the chaff. A carter had brought grain to the mill and taken flour from it, and done it as part of a full span of years punctuated by its own tragedies and moments of exultation. In Camnipol, a baker had worked the common magic of yeast and heat and time, transforming what individually would have been inedible into a moment of warmth and beauty that passed unappreciated, cooled, faded, staled. And then a noblewoman still deep in her grief had taken it, used the little bun as a way to create some connection with the lower classes of the city with whom she imagined she had nothing in common. And from her to a thief or robber or thug hanging in a cage over the gaping fall of the Division, who had had a childhood and a mother and friends and a moment of defiance before the magistrate or one of fear and sorrow. All that was in a bit of bread, and a city was immeasurably more.
Whenever Dawson had spoken of the nobility of war, or the honor and glory of the battlefield—or even, on rare occasions, obliquely of the atrocities it carried in its saddlebags—he had given the project a life of its own. A name, like a god’s name or a city’s. War became a person of a sort, and because it was a person, it became worthy of a kind of politeness. One didn’t speak ill of one’s family or one’s friends, however rude they might be. Even sowing derision toward one’s enemies was a process rich with rules and obstacles of form. As she became more familiar with the process of battle herself, Clara became less and less respectful of it.
Every soldier in an army had a life that had brought them there, that had tested them and remade them and put them through times of glory and of despair. And if they’d remained farmers and blacksmiths and huntsmen and bakers, then they would have done there as well. More would have died of illness and accident, and fewer on a stranger’s blade.
No, Clara had looked war in its face now, and she found herself unimpressed.
For the better part of a week, they skirted the edge of the Dry Wastes. She woke in the mornings to the stink of salt and rode through the day, Vincen at her side, as they ghosted along the road. Twice, Jorey’s scouts had sighted the scouts of the enemy. Both times, Jorey had drawn the enemy on as far as he could manage, charged to drive them back, and retreated again to lead them on. The other groups, she presumed, as did Jorey, were doing the same. Forcing the Timzinae to move slowly, to take few chances, to waste time and fodder in making moves and countermoves that by Antea’s aim came to nothing.
And now and then, people died for it. Some on Jorey’s side, some on Dannien’s. None for any reason Clara could respect. They played for time and waited for something unexpected to happen, unsure whether it would.