by Myke Cole
“Protect the Nightingale,” Heloise said to her. “She’s all that matters now.”
But as the figures drew closer, Heloise saw they were unarmed, faces lit with fear. They wore torn red tabards over their metal armor, streaked with brown swipes of dried blood.
“Red Lords’ soldiers.” Heloise’s stomach sank.
“That … does not bode well,” Xilyka said.
“Turn around!” one of them was already shouting. “Go back!”
“What is it?” Heloise fought against the panic rising in her gut.
“All is lost,” one of the soldiers said, not slowing as he drew close. “The devils have the city.”
“They already had the city—” Xilyka said.
“What about the palace? What about my father?” Heloise cut her off.
The two men finally slowed to a walk, but did not stop. Up close, Heloise could see the blood matted in their hair, smearing their clothing, some of it fresh. “The devils have the palace,” one of them said. “Everyone is gone. I am sorry. If you’re smart, you’ll come with us.”
“But you two are alive!” Heloise turned as they moved past her.
“We ran out the back when they breached the doors,” one of them said. “We didn’t stay for the end.”
“Cowards!” Tone shouted after them. “You cannot just—”
Heloise stopped him with a wave. The panic was like a caged bird inside her, fluttering and slamming itself against the walls of her stomach. “Did you see everyone killed?”
“We didn’t stay!” the soldier called over his shoulder. “There’s no way they could have survived.”
“Come with us!” the other man called to them across the growing distance. “There’s nothing more for you to do back there!”
“We have the Nightingale!” Tone shouted. “We can end this! Come back, you damned cowards!”
“We will”—the soldiers were dwindling with distance now—“once you have ended it.”
“Let them go,” Heloise said, and the panic spasmed and died, giving way to resigned dread. “We don’t want cowards with us.”
“They didn’t see everyone die,” Xilyka said, but she did not sound hopeful.
“It doesn’t matter,” Heloise said, starting toward the city again. “Even if everyone is dead, we must still bring the Nightingale before the Congregation.”
“If those men speak true”—Xilyka did not move—“then the Congregation is dead, too.”
“Xilyka. There isn’t time. Come on.”
“No,” Xilyka said. “If the palace is lost, then why should we go back in there? Why should we all die fighting our way through to an empty building?”
“Because we have to,” Heloise said with sudden heat. “Because if there is even a chance for us to end this, to save everyone, we have to try. They didn’t see the Congregation lost. And if they didn’t see that, it means there’s still hope.”
She turned to go again, but Xilyka didn’t move.
“Xilyka,” Heloise began.
“No.” Xilyka’s voice broke, and Heloise was surprised to see her chin quivering. “There’s no point.”
“The Congregation lives!” Tone said.
“How can you know that?” Xilyka asked.
“Because … because they have to,” Tone said.
Xilyka snorted, a tear tracking down one cheek. “The Wheel turns as it will. You saw what those monsters did to the army. What makes you think the handful left in that palace could survive them?”
“It’s a smaller space,” Heloise said with a certainty she didn’t feel. “Maybe they built a barricade. Maybe if only a few devils can attack them at once—”
“You saw what the devils did to the other barricades people built,” Xilyka said. “You can’t go dragging this old woman in there for nothing—”
“This old woman,” said the Nightingale, “is going on. Heloise is right. If the Congregation has been destroyed, then that is the Emperor’s will, but I will see their corpses with my own eyes before I turn back.”
“Xilyka. I need you with me,” Heloise said.
Xilyka refused to move. “Heloise, please. You don’t have to die.”
Heloise felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes, shook her head to chase them away. “Then help me to live, Xilyka. Help us all to live.”
Xilyka swallowed, nodded.
“Good,” Heloise said, and then they were running again.
* * *
At first, the capital appeared as they’d left it. The ramshackle slum, the unlocked postern gate, the abandoned walls. Heloise felt her heart lift at the sight. Maybe the refugees they’d met on the road had spoken too soon, fled before they took the full measure of things.
Tone must have been thinking the same, for he whispered, “Throne be praised,” and set off running for the palace.
Heloise followed, careful not to jostle the Nightingale as she lengthened the machine’s stride. The beautiful houses whipped past her, but Heloise only had eyes for the long road, the pattern of cobbles leading arrow-straight to where the huge palace squatted, smooth and black, at the center of the city. Her father was there, and Barnard, all that was left of her old life now. All she had to love. She would not let herself pray, not to the false Emperor that may never have existed, but her hope was too powerful to deny, and so it became a repeating chant. Please be all right. Please be all right. Please be all right.
She made a promise to herself then, that when this was over, she would go to her father. She had not been able to be his daughter when she was leading an army, but with the devils defeated she could love him again. I will tell him that I love him. That I am still his daughter. That I am sorry. A mad image rose in her mind, all the more delightful for its impossibility—Heloise, returned to Lutet, living with Xilyka and her father, knowing peace and love for all her days remaining.
The thought lent strength to her legs and she ran all the harder, the machine eating up the distance, until Tone and Xilyka fell behind, and at last the palace reared up before them.
Heloise slowly jogged to a stop, the ember of hope sputtering, then finally going out.
The fleeing soldiers had not lied.
The palace was ringed with devils. Heloise could see the postern door shut fast, streaked with blood, the remains of two bodies just outside it. The cobbles leading up to it were cracked where one of the bolt-throwers’ giant missiles had pierced it. Bolts and heavy stones cracked the cobblestone everywhere she looked, as if it had been cultivated, a garden that sprouted fruits of war. Scattered Imperial corpses showed that the garrison had attempted a sally to drive the devils back.
It was a fight the defenders had clearly lost.
Two sights froze her heart. The first was that so many of the devils were idle. They stood or sat, resting, mismatched nostrils lifted to scent the air, stalked eyes contemplating the gray sky. It’s because they’ve won, her mind whispered to her. It’s because there’s no one left for them to kill.
The second sight was worse. One of the palace front gates lay on its side, the huge black door ripped from hinges and dragged all the way around to the back.
Which meant the palace was open. Which meant the devils were inside.
Heloise could hear the growling now, the eagle screams, muffled by the distance and the palace’s thick stone walls.
Father.
Heloise was running again before she knew she’d moved.
“Heloise!” Xilyka shouted after her. “Not that way! Go through the postern!”
Heloise stopped, choking back tears. “That’s one of the palace gates! The front way is open!”
“It’s too long that way round, too many devils,” Xilyka said. “We go straight in through the back.”
“There’s too many devils everywhere.” Heloise could hear the whine rising in her voice, borne on the cresting wave of panic. They are all already dead. You have already lost.
“I will draw them off,” Tone said, already moving
away from them, away from the palace.
“Tone!” Heloise called to him. “I can’t protect you!”
“The Emperor will protect me,” Tone called back. “Get the Nightingale to the Congregation. You stand in the Shadow of the Throne, Heloise, truly.”
And then he was running, bellowing at the top of his lungs. It took Heloise a moment to recognize that he was shouting verses from the Writ, calling the devils to him with the text that condemned them.
Heloise heard the familiar eagle screams as several of the creatures noticed him. A moment later they were on their feet and after him, not with the blinking speed with which they had struck the army outside the wall, but with the slower, stalking pace Heloise knew they used when they wished to savor the chase. At least five of them detached themselves from the palace, trotting after Tone, who was racing toward the ruin of one of the fancy houses, collapsed in on itself around a catapult stone.
But not all of the devils had given chase. At least a score of them remained around the postern door, eyes tracking their brethren, perhaps seeing too little sport in chasing a single man to warrant competing with so many of their own. As Heloise watched, one of them swiveled its head her way, gave its piercing call. It was joined by another, and another.
Heloise looked down at the Nightingale. The old woman was clinging white-knuckled to the shield’s edge, pushing with her thin legs to brace herself against the machine’s chest. If I lose her, Heloise thought, it will all have been for naught. She bit down on her panic, on the desperate need to reach her father’s side. I can’t lose you, Father. You have to be alive. You have to be. “Hold on,” she said, and set off.
Three devils raced to meet her. The others were rising now, their screams joining the chorus as they realized that there was more than just one fleeing man. She saw one of Xilyka’s knives whisk past, striking one of the devils between the slits of its nostrils, making the creature scream and duck its head.
The Nightingale was groaning now, clinging desperately to the inside of the shield, bracing as hard as she could against the jostling of the machine. “Hold on!” Heloise shouted to her as she lowered her shoulder, raised the shield. She pressed her knife-arm behind it, bracing it to keep the pocket of empty space that was all that kept the Nightingale safe. The devils closed, and Heloise dropped her shoulder lower, so that she was stumbling forward now, only her run keeping her upright. The palace grew in her vision, and the cluster of devils converging on her grew with it.
Heloise glanced up, seeing the devils nearly upon her, aimed herself between the two closest, and dropped her shoulder even lower, jerking it up just as she hit.
She struck the devils with the sound of a hammer on an anvil. She pushed hard with her knife-hand, thrusting the shield out and up, feeling the metal corner slam into the devils. She could hear their screams, the screech of their claws against metal. The sudden impact made the frame shudder, and then Heloise could hear their screams over her head as they went flying. Heloise heard another chorus of screams as they slammed into their comrades.
Heloise staggered a few more steps, but she had overbalanced the machine, the headlong pitch too extreme to correct. I’m going to fall. She glanced down at the Nightingale. The old woman was still braced behind the shield, her eyes wide, face so pale that it nearly matched the white of her hair.
Heloise took three more staggering steps, watching the postern door growing in her field of vision, before the machine staggered onto its knees, and Heloise opened the shield to keep the Nightingale from being crushed against the machine’s chest. The old woman tumbled free, rolling along the cracked cobbles. Heloise watched her rise to her knees, shoulders trembling, crawl the few remaining paces to the postern door. Xilyka raced to the Nightingale and stood over her, knives fanned out in her hands. Her head whipped left and right, unable to pick a single target out of the throng.
A weight slammed into in the machine’s back, and Heloise threw her arm back, driving the shield’s point behind her. She was rewarded with a shriek, and the weight lifted. Heloise staggered the machine to its feet, punched out with the shield corner, cracking a devil in the side of its head just as it made for Xilyka.
She staggered the last steps toward them, screaming. She didn’t bother with her knife-hand now, swinging the heavy shield left and right, the devils so close it was impossible to miss, each stroke connecting, rewarding her with the shock of the blow reverberating up her arm. She lost sight of Xilyka and the Nightingale, vanished in the thickening forest of devils surrounding her. A blow struck the side of her helmet, sent her staggering into another devil, its body keeping the machine upright.
Heloise slammed it aside with the shield and took another step, felt the ground shift beneath her. She risked a glance down, saw she was standing on the long ironwood beam of the gate’s locking bar, dragged by whatever devil had decided to pull it here. A blow on her back drove the machine to its knees again, and suddenly the beam filled her vision, the smooth grain of the petrified wood whorled like carved stone. It’s no use. There are too many of them to fight. Another blow on the back of the helmet sent her face slamming into the inside of the visor. Heloise tasted blood.
She glanced up, saw movement through the forest of devils’ legs around her. A glimmer of something white. You haven’t seen your father dead. You haven’t seen Xilyka dead. Until you do, you have to go on fighting.
Another blow on her shoulder sent the corner of her shield banging into the cobblestone beside the locking bar. The tip of a claw scraped past her face, slipping below the gorget to dig a furrow across her chest. She screamed, not from the pain, but from the frustration of having come so close, only to lose now. She remembered Xilyka swallowing her tears on the road. You don’t have to die.
Yes, I do, Heloise thought, if living means I lose everyone who matters to me.
She tried to push off with her shield corner, but it slid sideways, scooping under the locking bar. Heloise watched the bar rise, felt the pressure of it against the shield. She reached out with the knife-hand, pinned the bent blade against the locking bar’s opposite side, pinching it against the shield corner. She pushed with all she had, felt the machine translate the movement, the engine roaring in response.
Heloise screamed and stood, swinging the massive beam up. For a moment, she thought it would be beyond even the machine’s great strength, but at last she felt it rise, swinging up and around. It was as long as a tree trunk, and Heloise let the momentum carry the machine to its feet. The beam’s own weight carried it now, and it swung crosswise, slamming into the crowd of the devils, knocking them aside, sending them tumbling into one other. They screamed as they pulled back, shocked by the unexpected weapon in their midst. Heloise let the momentum of the swing carry her around again and again, feeling it shake as it found a devil each time. With each blow she feared it would break, but the beam shivered and held. A devil darted toward her and the beam caught it beneath its arm, sending it flipping sideways and landing on its face. Another tried to duck low, but Heloise caught its horns on the backswing, snapping them off and knocking the creature onto its face. She stepped back with each blow, the space around her clearing as the devils backed off to assess the new threat, their screams receding into the now-familiar stalking growls.
Somewhere in the distance, she could still hear Tone’s mad chanting. They hadn’t killed him yet.
Heloise took another step back and felt the palace wall scrape against the tinker-engine mounted to the war-machine’s back. “Xilyka!” she shouted.
“The door is shut fast.” The Hapti girl sounded dazed, but also close.
“You’re alive!”
“For now, by the Wheel, but you have to get this door open.”
Heloise glanced to her right and saw the knife-caster standing over the Nightingale. The old woman was curled up against the wall, an arm thrown over her face, panting like a rabbit with hounds on its tail. Panting means breathing.
Heloise swung the bar cro
sswise again, and the devils once again drew back, the palace wall keeping them from circling around her.
“Can you get the door open?” Heloise asked. “Can someone inside let us in?”
“I have tried.” The resignation in Xilyka’s voice made the panic in Heloise’s belly surge. “It won’t budge. I do not know that there is anyone alive inside to let us in, Heloise.”
Heloise rested the locking bar long enough to ensure the machine’s grip on it, and barely got it up in time to bat aside a charging devil, catching it across its face and knocking its head sharply to the side. It dropped like a sack of stones, and Heloise used the bar’s momentum to swing it up over her head and down, smashing the creature’s chest. She felt the crunching of bone, and the spray of black blood told Heloise the damage had been done.
The devils circled, wary, waiting for an opening. Heloise inched closer to Xilyka, making sure she and the Nightingale were inside the beam’s range. Heloise glanced at the postern door. The ironwood beam would make a perfect ram if she could get a running start, if she could couch it behind the shield. But she watched the circling throng of devils and knew they would not give her the chance. She was trapped here, the palace at her back, until she tired enough to make a mistake, or the devils grew brave enough to rush her at once. She thought of fighting her way around to the open front doors, but she knew the moment she didn’t have the palace wall at her back, she would be surrounded and overwhelmed.
“I … I can’t, Xilyka,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
The knife-caster’s voice was kind. “You’ve done what you could, Heloise. We all have. The Wheel turns.”
A devil lunged for Xilyka and she flinched back, throwing a knife that skipped harmlessly off the creature’s shoulder, but she did not budge from her position over the Nightingale. The devil reached for her, then spun away as Heloise swung the beam and bowled it aside.
“I never thought I would meet my end,” the Hapti girl panted, “astride a withered old bag of bones beside a one-handed madwoman wielding a tree.”