by Myke Cole
She tilted her head back, and had drawn breath to call out when Onas appeared at the top of the wall. He looked older somehow, as if years and not days had passed since she had last seen him. His head was bound in linen, stained yellow by some unguents. It covered his eye and ear, and Heloise could tell by the set of the cloth and the red stains on it that he had lost both.
“Hello, Heloise.” His voice was thin, rasping. “It seems we are both one-eyed now.”
Heloise was shocked at the sorrow she felt at the sight of him, this boy who would have taken her for his own, who had ripped her army in two when she had refused. He was a fool, and selfish. And for a short time, he had been her friend.
“I am … sorry, Onas. I hope you are healing.”
“I am healing as well as I can without my mother’s help. I never thought to see you again, and certainly not without your army. Where are they, Heloise? Why have you come here?”
“The army is gone, Onas. The devils are in the capital.”
“I am sorry for that, Heloise. I know that must grieve you, but it is nothing to me.”
“It is not nothing to you. I know how to beat them. I know how to send them back to hell and keep them there.”
“And that brings you to me? Do you think a single knife-dancer, or even twenty, will make a difference against creatures who scattered your entire army?”
“I do not need knife-dancers. There is a wizard here, called the Nightingale. I need her.”
“I do not know about Nightingales, but the Order was keeping a wizard here. My people have liberated her. She is quite unharmed, I can assure you. She is practicing the Talent with Giorgi. I’m afraid it keeps her much too busy to go anywhere.”
“She is the only one who can send the devils back, Onas. Whatever you think of me, you cannot be a friend to them.”
“No more than you could be a friend to the Order, surely? Tell me, did your precious Brother Tone put you up to this?”
“Onas, don’t. So long as the devils are in the world, you will never be safe.”
Onas spread his arms, indicating the palisade, the rickety tower. “Oh, I think we are well enough defended here.”
“Lyse didn’t stand, and it was stronger than this rat-trap.”
“Lyse was assailed by an army, trained and provisioned. The devils are … like wild dogs, animals. They cannot organize a siege. And at Lyse we did not have this new wizard. She can summon storms, Heloise, you have never seen the like.”
“I have already seen the like. A little squall that couldn’t even blow out two of Giorgi’s living candles. She won’t save you, Onas.”
Onas’s smile fell away. “That may be, but it is no call to return her to the Order to be destroyed. We protect wizards here.”
It was too much. “Damn you, Onas,” she said. “You know I hate the Order. You know I am no friend to Tone. You know, and you don’t care, because you are still a boy. Because your mother was right. She said men were weak. She said that the same loss that makes a woman into a Mother will drive a man mad. She said you shrink from pain. She said it takes so little to break you.”
Onas pounded his fist on the top of the palisade. “My mother is dead!”
“And I mourn her,” Heloise said, “but we both know she would be laughing at you right now. She would slap your head and curse you for a fool. Leahlabel knew what it was to put aside foolishness when something more important was at stake. Your mother knew how to fight.”
“Do not speak to me of my…”
“I will speak to you of your mother, Onas. She was my friend. She saved me and spoke for me when your people wanted to turn me out. And she would have told you what we both know, that this has nothing to do with the Order, or Tone. You are angry because I will not love you. You are angry because I will not be your wife.
“You are angry and you have let it sour inside you until you are willing to give the world to the devils rather than swallow your pride. And if your mother sits astride the Great Wheel and is watching this, then she is surely wondering what she did wrong to raise a boy who will not grow into a man even though it is past time that he did, that it is the world, and not me, who is standing outside this gate and asking him to.”
Heads began to appear along the palisade, Sindi and villager alike, men and women she recognized. Her old friends and traveling companions. They glanced from Onas to her and back to him. Heloise felt the moment hang on a knife’s edge, waiting for him to explode.
Heloise watched the rage and grief mingle in his face and remembered the night she had kissed Basina. She remembered her best friend, her love, pushing her away, her hands coming up, the shock and horror on her face. She remembered fleeing into the woods, the thorns and branches cutting at her face like an echo of consequences. She remembered how it was to love someone, and suffer for it.
And just as quickly as the anger had come, it was gone. “Onas, please. I have lost my mother. I have lost my Maior. I have lost my best friend. I cannot bear to lose anyone else. I need you.”
Onas’s shoulders slumped, and his head hung, but he said nothing.
“I am tired of shouting from outside a palisade,” Heloise said. “At least let me in so we can talk face-to-face.”
Shouts from the woods. Heloise turned to see Xilyka sprinting toward three figures. Squinting, she could make out Danad and Ingomer Clothier, dragging a gray figure between them.
Tone. They had circled around them, or had been out on patrol. They had found him, and they were bringing him to Onas.
She turned back to the boy, but his face was already shifting from recognition to shock to rage. “Clever words, and to think I nearly fell for them. Your precious Pilgrim comes to oversee your mission. Where are his troops hiding?” He cupped a hand over his mouth. “Danad! Ingomer! Slit the bastard’s throat!”
“Xilyka!” Heloise shouted, but the Hapti girl was already picking up speed, knives fanning out in her hands.
“I’ve got him!” Xilyka called back, casting her first knife. It sliced past Danad’s thigh, laying open the skin and sending him to one knee. Tone shook one hand free, but Ingomer seized it again, pinning his arms behind him. The clothier was young and strong, and much bigger than Tone, and soon he had the Pilgrim on his knees.
Heloise swallowed the urge to run to Xilyka’s side. She knew what the Hapti girl could do. She would have to trust her. Heloise’s task was clear.
She drove the machine forward, feeling the engine translate her strides into a powerful sprint, the weight of the metal adding to the momentum. She hurtled toward the gate, lowering her shield as she came on, angling for the seam where the portal joined the wall.
She knew the gate was weak, but she was shocked by the ease with which it burst open. Heloise barely felt any resistance, only heard the splintering of wood, the squeal of badly forged iron hinges, and the sound of wood banging on wood as the portal swung wide and slammed against the wall. There was a scream as whatever sentry had stood behind it was pinned behind the weight of the wood, and Heloise heard a grunt as a man stationed atop it toppled to the ground.
The courtyard within was tiny, a wide circle of green dotted with dirty tents. A few Sindi wagons had been drawn up around a fire pit to one side. Opposite them stood a small stone structure, made of the same polished black stone as the palace.
There were people scattering, but Heloise was too fixed on her purpose to note them as anything more than flashes of color. She had to find the Nightingale and get her out, carrying her if need be. Heloise thought of the gusting wind she’d seen outside the fort, and prayed that was all the ancient woman could do.
Something banged off the machine’s shoulder, and Heloise caught a glimpse of metal spinning away. A knife? No. The Sindi are not casters. A villager had thrown that, maybe one of the people who had come all the way with her from Lutet. Whether they were the people she had grown up with or no, they were coming for her. She had to keep moving. She leaned, and the machine leaned with her, te
aring up the grass as she bolted for the black stone door. Perhaps the Nightingale was not inside, but it was as good a start as any.
She straightened the machine and pounded for the door. It grew in her vision, but not nearly enough, and Heloise was struck by the possibility that it would not be large enough to admit the machine. Heloise wasn’t sure if she could …
Onas dropped in front of her, so close that she could make out the rippling edges of his cloak, the hooked blades of his silver-handled knives. Heloise knew she should simply keep going, let the weight of the machine run the Sindi boy down.
But she could not help it. She jerked the machine aside, felt it overbalance, take three sliding stutter-steps, and then she was falling, the horizon tipping sideways. She staggered as she fell, covering the short distance to the tower, the helmet banging hard enough against the side to dig a splintered furrow in the wood. Heloise’s teeth clicked together, her head rattling against the leather pads inside the metal helmet. She cried out as the machine slid down the tower wall and landed on its shoulder, propped up by the reliquary box.
She shook the fog from her head, saw Onas racing for her. Her head still swam, the horizontal horizon making it look as if the Sindi boy were running across a wall of grass. Get up. Get up!
Heloise pushed off with the corner of the shield, managed to get the machine onto its knees by the time Onas reached her. He leapt, stepping lightly on the machine’s knee, thrusting the point of his blade into an eye slit. Heloise jerked her head aside, felt the flat of the hooked blade slide against her cheek, the point sinking into the leather cushion behind her head. Shock mixed with the shreds of fog left over from the fall. Onas was really trying to kill her. The thought brought the anger back, and she clung to it, so much more useful than the confusion. The damned fool would kill her for not loving him.
“Damn you!” she screamed, lifting the shield across her chest. Onas sprang backward as it swept past, turning in the air and landing on his feet. “You’ll kill me for this? Because I wouldn’t be your wife?”
“I will kill you,” Onas panted, darting left, then right, looking for an opening as she lurched the machine to its feet again, “because you are in league with the Order, who have hounded my people for as long as any of us can remember.”
The lie stoked the anger hotter, and Heloise gave it rein, goaded by the slash in the pad beside her head. She crashed the knife-hand into the shield’s edge. “Come on, boy! This isn’t a dance and I am not some Imperial murderer. I am Heloise Factor, knife-handed, devil-slayer. I do not love you, and if putting you in the dirt is the only way to prove it, I will do it gladly.”
Onas sprang at her, reaching for her shield. He had spent enough time around the machine to know that he could not take it head on. He would try to climb up on top of it and thrust his blade into the frame from behind her. But Heloise was ready. She swept the shield up and caught him mid-leap. He grunted as the metal slammed into his chest and sent him tumbling. He fell into a roll that saw him up on his feet, blades still in his hands.
Heloise charged toward him, determined to strike before he could get his bearings, but another Sindi knife-dancer appeared in her peripheral vision, a villager at his side. Heloise was sure that she recognized them, but she didn’t allow herself to register their faces. Her blood was up, and she knew that was the thing that was keeping her alive. If she let it cool now, it would mean the end of her.
She turned at the waist, swinging her knife arm. She was grateful when the blade missed, but the metal hand still caught the knife-dancer in his hip hard enough to send him spinning, the cracking of bone loud enough to be heard over the engine. The villager chopped at her with a scavenged Imperial halberd, its edge ringing off the machine’s metal arm. Heloise ignored him and turned back to Onas, who had spun on her and was sprinting around to come at her from the side. The villager tried a thrust as Heloise turned to track Onas, but she already had his measure. Whoever he was, his heart wasn’t in the fight. He was seeking to show others that he had tried, without actually putting himself at risk. It was the sort of thing Jereb Mender might do, or maybe … She pushed the thought away. His name didn’t matter. That he was an enemy was all she needed to know.
Onas saw her tracking his movements and switched back to come at her from the other side, moving so quickly that Heloise could feel the frame shudder as she moved to match him. He is so much faster than I am. If I let him keep doing this, he will get behind me, and then I am through.
With a shout, she charged him, making a great show of leaning to her right.
Onas let her approach almost to striking range, and suddenly switched directions.
As Heloise had known he would.
She threw the machine in the opposite direction, letting its weight carry it, sending it stumbling as she had when she had fallen into the tower’s side. It overbalanced as it had before, and this time, she leaned into the fall. Onas tried to dodge backward, but it was much too late. The machine collapsed onto him, catching his outstretched leg with its shoulder as it fell, pinning him to the dirt.
Onas cursed, slashed at the machine’s helmet, drawing sparks and dulling his blade in reward. The ground was soft enough that Heloise doubted the limb was broken, but she could tell from his frantic flailing that he could not move. She reached out gently with the knife-hand, hovering it over his face. “That’s enough, Onas. You are beaten. Let me speak with the Nightingale and no one needs to die. All I want is to—”
A brief glimpse of flickering limbs, and suddenly she was burning. The leather and wool batting of her straps and padding smoldered, saved mostly by their sweat-soaked dampness. The thin fabric of Heloise’s shift caught fire almost instantly, her skin beginning to register the heat. She rolled off of Onas, the machine flailing as she tried to free her limbs from the control straps to beat at the flames. She caught a glimpse of the fire then, man-shaped, long, sinuous limbs wrapped around her, curled up close around her like her mother had done when she was little and had nightmares. One of Giorgi’s creatures, his wizardry turned against her.
She freed a hand from the strap, felt the shield-arm go slack in response. She swatted at the fire, at the skin where it touched her. It did nothing. The flames clung to her as if they were made of oil. She pawed through them as if through jelly, a thick, viscous feeling like fresh tallow. And like tallow, it stuck to her, the fire coming with it. The burning became maddening. She felt her hair smolder, smelled greasy smoke. The world began to dissolve in pain. She recalled the gusts of wind attacking Giorgi’s flame creatures, remembered how they blazed and held true despite the roaring funnel. The Imperial troops at Lyse had been helpless against them. There was nothing she could do.
She rolled the machine onto its knees and then its feet; the brief rush of air from the movement brought no relief. She could see Giorgi now, the Sindi Mothers standing around him, watching her burn. She remembered the contempt on their faces as they turned her people out of their camp, as they tied their dead to the wheels they would use to send them on to the next world. The rising smoke and her watering eyes obscured their faces now.
Then she remembered the Black-and-Grays fighting them in the forest outside the Sindi camp. One of them had fled for her fallen machine as the flame men attacked his comrades. Heloise had sought to head him off … before he could get … what?
The water.
How could she have been so stupid? She reached behind her head for the waterskin and yanked hard. The thong that held it to its hook was nearly cooked through, and it came away easily. She upended it and squeezed, the cool water squirting out over her head. The relief was instant and so overpowering that she sagged in the straps. The driver’s cage filled with smoke, greasy and stinking of cooked meat. The instant the water sluiced off her skin, she felt the heat rising back to the burned surface. Don’t look down. Heloise knew she was burned, but she didn’t dare to examine how badly. There would be a reckoning, she knew, but as when she lost her eye, it would c
ome after the threat had passed.
The thing of flame that Giorgi had made may have been able to survive wind, but it was powerless against water. What was left of it huddled on the grass before her. The flames still flickered, but they were lopsided now, misshapen, sodden embers struggling to hold on to their light. Smoke rose from it, greasy and dark.
Heloise stepped on it. The thing threw up its arms as the shadow of the machine’s metal foot covered it, and then it was gone as the metal smothered the air and it vanished in a wisp of smoke. She blinked, felt the hot tightness of her burned face. Her vision came clear, and she could see Giorgi stepping back, Tillie and Analetta at his side. The Mothers turned and ran, and Giorgi waved a torch, gesturing at it. A new thing of fire began to detach itself from the flames, stepping off the brand and onto the ground, careful to steer clear of the scattered droplets where the water still dripped from the machine.
Heloise ignored it, moving toward Giorgi. “Onas is a stupid boy, but you are a man-grown. You know better. I will step through your fires, Giorgi. They will burn me, but not before I reach you. But before I reach you, I want you to tell me why you are burning a girl you once called your friend. Why, when you set your wheel turning with mine, you turned it away just as quickly. What did I do to you? To your people?”
Over Giorgi’s shoulder, the Sindi Mothers pressed themselves against the palisade wall. The few remaining knife-dancers clustered around them.
She glanced at Onas. The Sindi had gotten to his feet, but would not put any weight on his injured leg. He did his best to look ready to continue the fight, but she could see his hips trembling, and she knew he would not be coming for her soon.
She turned back to Giorgi. “I don’t want to hurt you, Giorgi, but I will, if you make me. I will because I cared for Leahlabel too. And unlike you, I will do something to avenge her death. I will stop the devils who killed her. I will not sulk like a child, then run and hide in a pile of sticks to await the hungry world. I will fight the real enemy, and I will do it over your dead body if you make me.”