The Vastness

by Hausladen, Blake;

  But if I could see the guardsman, so could Yarik’s men across the river. I almost yelled out for someone to knock the idiot off his horse.

  Rahan, instead, motioned a captain close and told him the same with a single calm instruction. The captain withdrew and would remove the man without a fuss.

  We reached the crest of the hill. Benjam was succinct. “Sonsol has not moved. His divisions are in camp beneath the barracks as anticipated. The militias are in place. The river is clear.”

  And then I spotted Liv. She and a dozen men from Havish gathered below the entrance to the center tower. The idiot with the knives bowed to her and then to Rahan. Bow is the wrong word. The motion could be mistaken for sneezing, yet it happened.

  She would not meet my gaze. She knew. She had told Rahan about my plan. He’d known the whole time that I meant to yank him out of the city by his hair. Damn them.

  Evand, are you a child?

  Don’t answer that, I told myself. And for fuck sakes, would you slow the fuck down!

  I caught myself in time. Rahan had stopped before the entrance to the eastern tower, and I managed to keep back and keep silent.

  The man who met him there was the kind of creature that climbed out of a sewer. The putrid creature withdrew and Rahan led his growing retinue up.

  He walked the entire way. I nearly shouted at him to get moving.

  The top of the tower was crowded. The table and maps had been removed and the broad shelf of stone was lined with unlit braziers and downed pennants on long staffs. Troops of scouts crouched behind the parapets. Lieutenants in the mix signaled that all was well. Rahan examined the scene with a hard eye before he stepped to the corner of the tower. I joined him ten paces down. Others filled in the space between us.

  The dam below appeared unchanged, though the light was failing. The only thing I could see with certainly was Yarik’s watch fires along the long arm of rock. The men there were moving east, back to their camps and their cots. The day was theirs, it seemed certain, and the occasional note of laughter drifted up to us.

  The brief trench between the end of the dam and the shore would be filled in the morning, and two-hundred thousand men would cross and take the fortress.

  No. No, they would not. I saw my brother’s plan and let go of the wall to applaud. I made fists instead and crossed by arms behind my back. I was out of breath. I held as still as a statue and worked to regain my composure.

  Yarik was celebrating somewhere on the far side. His night and his fortunes were about to turn.

  Rahan motioned to his signalmen, and it began.

  A single brazier was lit, and a single green pennant went aloft behind it. Shapes moved below, and I was wise enough to cover my ears before the first great snap of timber.

  The tower trembled once, posts shattered by the hundred, and a great rending of stone shook the earth. The entire structure pitched toward the river and crashed down into down into the gap. A wave of dust and debris rolled up at us. The noise of it all subsided while the strong winds pushed the cloud back, and in the failing light I found the result. The gap was filled.

  I expected Rahan to let out a long laugh like a boy who’d dammed a gutter with a handful of twigs and dirt, but he did not move a muscle.

  A man at the back end of fallen tower held up a torch. Rahan signaled, a second pennant went aloft, and the man began to move across the wreckage. I could not see the ground through the growing darkness, but could imagine the treacherous pile of broken timbers and stone.

  He was the one I’d seen covered in filth. This was his work, and I was certain for a moment I could hear him humming as he scurried across. His torch moved across the fill and up onto Yarik’s dam. The touch swung left and right, Rahan signaled to the lieutenants, and the tower top erupted with light and sound. Twenty braziers erupted into bright flame, pennants of all kind went aloft, and drums began to pound.

  Torch stands behind the fallen tower were lit by the hundred, and in the sudden light thousands of men surged toward the dam. Each held a wide basket, lines formed, and in the time it took me to recognize the baskets were filled with fresh earth, hundreds of them had been dumped across the top of the hazardous fill. A thousand more were poured while I caught my breath, and thousands more finished the earthen ramp while I calmed enough to notice Blathebed command fast march into place behind the workers.

  Rahan’s signaled to him, checkered pennant went up above each company, and they began to move. Blue snakes with flicking tongues they seemed, in the gloom and dust. The first marched out onto the dam and across, and I wanted more than anything to be out in front of the action. What a thrill to be the man to order the charge!

  Stop, Evand. Stop.

  I stood up. Like a drunk, I struggled to straighten my back and keep my balance. Down the wall, Rahan and a score of men I did not know all looked on with calm faces and relaxed postures.

  Were captains and generals so different? Was this why the 5th had perished? Because I was the former and not the ladder? I made fists at my sides and bit my tongue in time to keep myself from shouting a dozen useless things.

  I smelled Liv and nearly turned.

  She stepped in beside me and said nothing.

  I almost died today, my love, I almost said.

  I was on my tiptoes. It took me an eternity to put my heels upon the stone and catch up with the action below.

  Our men were halfway across the river, and Rahan’s workers had resumed work behind them, laying timbers over the earthen ramp as a swarm of ants.

  Liv leaned in close.

  “Rahan wants to know what a general would do next.”

  Liv was more a part of what was happening than I was. She and the vermin from Havish had supplanted me. I spotted a company of easterners moving across the dam with Blathebed and a fresh wrath bubbled in my guts. Every person in the fortress and in the Warrens was with Rahan.

  Except for me.

  Are you so much a fool?

  The bouncing of a hammer was easier to judge than I was. How was it that my brother had let me live?

  Liv asked you a question, you idiot. What had she asked?

  She leaned closer and said with the thin whisper she reserved for the dark of night, “you are out of time, my love.”

  My fists clenched again.

  Evand! For fuck sakes, stop!

  I got a whiff of the nervous stench that poured from me. I felt a hundred eyes upon me. I let go of the juvenile lieutenant’s dream of charging Yarik’s encampment. I let go of the goals of captain hurrying reinforcements into the maze of streets. I let all the logistical worries of colonels fade, and looked past the tactics of a general watching from above. Rahan has something grand in motion. I though again about the barges he had shown me at the moat.

  I whispered back to Liv, “We hold the top of the dam against all counter attack and wait for the waters to rise.”

  She withdrew, and the rest of that night was worse than the tortured decamping of an exhausted company. I had wits enough to watch, but nothing more. Some of the details of it made sense, others did not.

  A yellow-robed priest arrived and spoke to Rahan for a long time. Benjam was next and his report almost coaxed a smile from my brother. He was followed by the galley captain I’d seen earlier. He was haggard and badly wounded but refused the aid of a healer. He told Rahan a short tale that made my brother chuckle.

  What could it be? Had Rahan thought his way to this place that he had more still in motion? In the morning, Yarik would throw everything he had at our men upon the dam. I could not imagine how we could hold. Or would he? I’d had the thought before, but had lost it in my madness. Where would the water rise first?

  Priest’s Field, the barracks, and all the ground around the palace where General Sonsol’s army was camped.

  I’d known it as well as Rahan. The ground around the palace was the lowest in the city, just above the lip of the river. The men camped there might already be hip deep in water. They would b
e lucky to get to higher ground before the dark cold water rose above their heads.

  Had the galley captain rowed his way around the palace? Of course he had. Rahan, blind without Emi, would not have trusted the result without eyes upon it.

  I was numb.

  Rahan had let Yarik build a dam for him, and in a single evening, he had stopped up all the water of the eastern branch of the Bessradi River. The river was swallowing Yarik whole. He was trapped in the palace, surrounded by our ships.

  Bessradi was ours.

  The difference between captains and generals, I understood at that moment, was as great as the difference between generals and the Exaltier.

  Rahan dismissed us all find sleep, and I went as I was bid.

  31

  Emi

  Ash

  “Please, Emi. Make it stop,” Avin said from his knees.

  I looked about the trembling tunnel and knocked the grit and dust from by arms and hair. The shaking subsided.

  “Good. That is good.”

  “Shut up, Avin. That wasn’t me.”

  He glanced around at the haze of smoke and terrible wreckage of bodies.

  “That was me, but not the shaking.”

  Natan coughed, and I spotted him propped against one wall. I started across. “She is right,” he said. “The quake—it was Rahan’s tower falling. He went ahead with his plan without us.”

  “What plan?” I demanded, and Avin flinched back from me.

  He spoke softly. “Natan’s thought it a good and correct one. I’d not thought it could have caused it. Rahan build that tower to knock it into the river and flood the city. Did it work? Have our Hemari crossed the river?”

  I closed my eyes and searched the spot. The fortress was a beehive, and some of Rahan’s men were moving out onto the river. On the far side, Yarik’s men were retreating from a growing half circle of darkness. The river water was moving fast.

  “It would seem so,” I said, “but I don’t care about that right now. Can you heal the men? We must keep moving. The children are just on the other side.”

  “Emi, your magic is getting too strong. If I sing, I could explode. You would be killed.”

  Natan tried to stand. “I can go on.”

  His stomach was torn open and he was missing a foot. His bluecoat and yellow ribbons were scorched. I could not bear to see his idiotic bravery. I wanted to scream. I wanted everyone and everything to stop. I felt the air warm, and I had visions of everyone in the city bursting into flame.

  The dark touch of the dead men tickled me, and the warm earth and shadows seemed to wish it, too. They hovered like a pair of overseers with whips and canes at the ready. They wanted the wash of fire and death.

  “Do not give the Shadow what he wants,” Avin said. “Those are his whispers. I hear them, too. He would have you kill us all.”

  “Your White Lady wants the same.”

  “No, Emi, it is the Shadow you feel. It is his touch upon you.”

  “You are as blind as the priests we pursued,” I said, and got angrier still as I thought more about him and his magic. “What is it you want from the children?”

  “Emi, we must flee this place.”

  “You will never again in my lifetime tell me what to do. Answer my question as you promised you would, or I will turn you to ash.”

  He raised his hands. “Emi, we need them. The tall ship is going to try to get back to Enhedu. I would send the children there to learn the magic of the Earth.”

  “So you can win a war? You would make them soldiers?”

  “It is not so simple a thing, Emi. The Earth needs singers so she can fight the Shadow.”

  “Simple enough. You would use them up and they would die fighting for you. I will not allow it, and you will never speak of it again. Now heal the men now. Whisper if you need to.”

  He went chalk white and shrank away. I hated his fear as much as Natan’s bravery.

  “Now.”

  The old priest pressed himself back against the wall, closed his eyes, and mouthed the words. White light crackled from his skin. It took hold of us in quick succession and cooked away our hurts and pains in an instant. I stumbled back and Natan was laughing before Avin could slam his hands over his mouth.

  “I’ll need a ninth ribbon,” Natan said with pride. He could not see how black the threads of his soul had become.

  Avin began to weep and slid down the wall, looking at his hands. He knew the cost of his magic.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  One man stood, but then sat back down. Natan was still smiling but could manage little more. They needed time to recover.

  “Avin, get them up and moving after me,” I said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “No one is taking these children anywhere,” I said, grabbed one of the fallen lanterns, and started down the tunnel.

  Avin thought to tell me to stay, but kept his mouth shut.

  The slope turned up and the air got cooler. A gust startled me, and I closed my eyes to see if anyone was near. I was on the far side of the river. Avin and the men were beginning to stumble along behind me, and ahead the children were in a solid group.

  I felt the gust again and crept forward until I could see a light coming from beneath a door. I set down my lantern and edged the door open. It opened into a foul sewer tunnel made of massive gray stones. Daylight beaming in through a grate far above. A ladder was there, and I climbed it until I found an open hatch and the back of a filthy cellar. I heard the crying of the children before I heard the grumbling of the priests. They were all in a wide space above. The threads of the priests connected to another group of men moving toward us across the city. In large wagons it seemed, the way they swayed back and for as they moved down Glass Road.

  I rubbed my eyes to get them to work while open, found a grimy stairway, and crept up into the cluttered corner of a wide warehouse with an open roof. The children sat in the middle of the space bathed in sunlight around the grate I’d seen from below. All of them were filthy and wounded. Some lay silent and exhausted, while the rest wept as though the Spirits’ screams filled their ears. Their threads tried to connect to everyone around them, but they found no purchase.

  It was dark in my corner, but when I started crying, the priests did not miss the sound.

  “Where did she come from? You idiots. Get her with the rest.”

  Two of them approached, and I reached out as if for help. One of them saw my anger and hesitated, but I snatched hold of his hand as the other grabbed me by the shoulder. Their bodies crackled and then turned to ash. The rest of the priests yelled and ran as the men with the wagons arrived outside and began to hurry in.

  I’d never played a game of tag. I’d seen children in the plaza above Copper Road playing in the morning sun. I had always wanted to run in the warmth and play. When I was done running around that warehouse, the air was filled with ash and there was no one adults left to play with.

  I was sitting cross-legged on the ash-covered floor when the children started to move toward me. All they wanted was comfort. All they wanted was to not be afraid and to thank me.

  “No,” I said. “Stay away.”

  But they kept coming and I was surrounded.

  One of them began to smoke and scream. I could not stop it. I could not stop them. One by one they puffed into clouds of hot ash.

  I closed my eyes so not to see it, but the blizzard of lights was a worse torture for their absence.

  Where were the threads of my soul?

  I could not find them anywhere. I was connected to nothing. The fortress and the Warrens had divided against me. I was severed from them.

  I found a single gray thread reaching across the water and tried to find out who still cared about me but could not understand who it could be.

  “I am sorry,” I yelled out. “What have I done?”

  I tried to wipe my eyes but they began to sting. Opening them showed me the wet smear of ash upon my hands. I
was covered in it. I screamed and tried to brush it off. All I did was smear it.

  I shut my eyes against the sight and found again the city’s hatred. Opening them, I saw smeared remains of the children I had murdered.

  I left my eyes half closed and blurry with tears.

  “What am I? Why?”

  But there was no answer. My history had been stolen. I wanted the tale of me. I wanted to know what the world wanted of me. I wanted to know me.

  My ears began to ring as the feeling in my guts got worse. I clutched at it, worried I was burning everyone in the city to death—everyone in the world.

  I did not want to close my eyes to find out. I didn’t dare look. All I could hear was water moving nearby and the dry creaking of a door disturbed by the wind.

  32

  Admiral Soma O’Nropeel

  The Yud

  We were not welcome in the Eastern Reaches. The frozen wind shoved at our backs in hard gusts like a slaver prodding a prisoner already in chains. The dark gray blanket of clouds hid the sun and star, and the waves flopped in every direction like a mob bearing us to the gallows.

  Our failure and retreat had driven Graves and his men below deck. This was just as well. The prideful Chaukai were too ready to spill their blood for any advantage that would redeem us. The crew was as ill of mind, despite the escape they won for us. There were no songs and no swagger left aboard. I could not stand to see their bowed heads. I could not stand them seeing me.

  Until our retreat, it had been a year and a half of nothing but victories for us. Magic and mastery over the sea had allowed fantastic advances for Adanas and Edonia. We’d raced along, smashing aside one challenge after another and had cobbled together a fleet and a way of keeping order. But we did not have generations of maritime culture to fall back on. We did not have a hundred years of ships’ logs and tales of the sea to bolster us. We’d built ships born from an inspiration gifted by the Spirit and used magic as unproven as our ships. The rest of our efforts were no older than the children we fought to save. Boatswain’s mates and pages. Sail chiefs and watch rotations. Traverse boards and a peg glass. It was a system of discipline and navigation so new that nowhere could it be found written, other than our brand new log books as we dared our bits of wood above the deep.