“You cannot stop me,” Winter shouted. One of the smaller trebuchets nearby lifted into the air, and lurched toward the oncoming group, picking up speed as it went.
They aren’t here to stop you, Urstadt realized. She glanced at the War Goddess, prepped for launch but without ammunition. Engineers fled from the siege engine as a pair of circular blades cut down two of the fleeing tiellans.
They’re here to stop that.
Three of the advancing men had almost converged on Urstadt’s position. She edged around the small trebuchet, which hadn’t moved since that first initial attempt. Either the telenic with this group realized she wasn’t powerful enough to move it fully, or she’d become distracted by other things.
Two of the men circled around the trebuchet one way, while the other took the opposite direction. They knew Urstadt was here, and these men meant to deal with her.
Urstadt did not give them the chance. She swept around toward the lone warrior, bellowing as she swung her glaive at his face. Her attempt to catch him off guard failed as he ducked and lunged toward her, and Urstadt immediately knew the types of warriors she faced. These were not simple soldiers; some of them, of course, were Nazaniin, while others were likely some of the Legion’s top soldiers, reserved for covert operations of utmost importance. Like taking out a weapon of mass destruction targeting their city.
Urstadt twisted out of the way, yanking her glaive back to avoid embedding it in the wood of the trebuchet, and she and the other man faced one another just as his two comrades circled around behind her.
Urstadt sidestepped and turned, getting the three in front of her as best she could, but the men moved with her, widening their positions, keeping her within their triangle. Two swords and an axe. Crossbows were slung on the backs of the swordsmen, but she doubted they would utilize those weapons at such close quarters. The man with the axe was huge, a head taller than Urstadt and thickly muscled, while the two swordsmen were thinner, more sinewy.
She had no more time to consider. The taller swordsman lunged at her from behind and slightly to her left. Urstadt stepped to the side and parried with her glaive, dancing around a strike from the axe. At the same time, the other man charged.
It had been some time since Urstadt had fought more than one foe at once outside of a mass battlefield. She used to practice against three, four, even five expert swordsmen at the same time in Roden, emerging the victor perhaps half of the time. The bouts had gained something of a reputation in Roden before she left. Both victories and defeats were almost always by a hair’s breadth, but a loss was a loss no matter how close the call, and a loss in an actual fight meant death. She could not afford a loss now.
Urstadt twirled her glaive, blocking, parrying, and dancing around the attacks of her three opponents. Instinct and muscle memory took over, and Urstadt moved with the wind, her glaive an extension of herself, obeying her every command. She was a blur as she whirled around and around, dodging attacks at lightning speed. Urstadt stayed on the defensive, parrying and weaving, while she looked for an opening.
She found it. The shorter swordsman and the axeman crossed paths just as Urstadt twisted around an attack from the third man, turning to face the other two, glaive prepped for a thrust. She stabbed with her glaive, impaling the axeman through the gut and the other through one shoulder.
She left her glaive where it was, pinning the two together, and drew her short sword as she slid away on the grass.
The uninjured swordsman did not miss a beat. He leapt at her, swinging down. Urstadt brought her sword up just in time to block, one hand on the flat of her blade.
With a grunt—her limbs and lungs burned with exertion and pain—Urstadt forced her body forward, sliding her legs beneath the tall swordsman’s. While he did not fall, he stumbled, and that was enough for Urstadt to be on him, driving her sword through his neck. He gurgled as Urstadt withdrew her sword, but she could not afford to watch him die. She turned in time to see the axeman, her glaive still rammed through his belly, running toward her with a bellow of rage and pain.
But he was wounded, not thinking clearly, Urstadt could tell from the shuffle in his step as he charged. She ducked out of the way, her legs screaming with exhaustion, and stabbed her sword into one calf as she moved past him. She turned quickly, planting a kick in the man’s back, and he fell, her glaive tearing a gaping hole in his back.
Urstadt took a step back, getting her bearings. The tall swordsman struggled on the ground on his hands and knees, gurgling and spluttering, but the blood pouring from his neck told her he had almost no time left. The short swordsman, however, was nowhere to be seen. Urstadt twisted around, her eyes darting back and forth, but she saw—
—a flash of movement above her. Urstadt brought her sword up too late, and felt the blade cut through her side, just below the ribs. Her own sword found a truer mark beneath the other’s chin, ramming up through his skull. The two of them fell to the ground in a heap. Urstadt rolled the man’s twitching body off of her.
She cradled her side, inspecting the wound. Her micromail had absorbed most of the blow, but the sword had left a long, shallow gash surrounded by deep bruising. It would scab over, and while it hurt like all Oblivion, the wound was far from mortal.
Urstadt stood, shaking herself to regain her senses, looking for Winter.
The queen was still by the War Goddess. One of the massive barrels, a 300-pound boulder, cotton, saltpeter, and buckets of pitch inside, rose up into the air, and moved slowly toward the open trebuchet sling.
Winter was moving it with her psimancy.
The tiellan queen was facing down five attackers; she must have dispatched two or three of them already. But she seemed to be concentrating almost entirely on the War Goddess and the missile she now carried with her tendra.
There were no living engineers in sight; a dozen lay dead on the ground, and the others must have fled.
The remaining attackers advanced on the War Goddess, three of them firing bolts, some at Winter, others at the war machine itself. Whoever the psimancer was apparently still lived, as weapons and debris flew toward the trebuchet, but Winter easily blocked and deflected all projectiles aimed at herself or the trebuchet.
For Canta’s sake, why doesn’t she just kill them? Urstadt wondered. What was so important about firing the trebuchet that made Winter all but ignore everything else?
Urstadt tugged her glaive from the axeman’s gored body, wiping it on the grass. She secured her short sword in its sheath over her shoulder, and then advanced on the remaining attackers. She was approaching them from behind, and slightly to their right. Hopefully, they were too occupied with their offensive against Winter, and wouldn’t notice her creeping up on them.
The thought came too soon. Another man was moving toward her stealthily.
He wore dark greens and browns, and was shorter than Urstadt. Brown hair, brown eyes. More or less nondescript. He carried a long black staff, likely made of blackbark.
Then she caught a glimpse of the sword at his waist. Long, slightly curved, with a bone-white handle and silvery blade.
A Nazaniin sword.
A psimancer.
The man realized Urstadt had seen him, and changed course to attack her more directly. Urstadt swung her glaive, the man readied his staff, and they both picked up speed as they clashed.
Urstadt’s glaive clanged against the man’s staff, and they both disengaged, twirling their weapons. The man wielded his staff expertly, his footwork and hand placement precise and easy. She mirrored him, matching him step for step, flourish for flourish.
But Urstadt did not have time for flourishes. Winter had placed the missile on the War Goddess’s sling, but the five remaining attackers were practically on top of her.
Urstadt lunged at the psimancer, and quickly lost herself in the flurry of attacks, defenses, dodges, and feints that followed. Their movements were precise and purposeful as a dancer’s. Urstadt had never met a person who moved the way thi
s man did; she imagined, after a few moments of fighting, that she probably moved very much the same way. Their styles were different; where Urstadt went for the blunt blow when she could, he turned a twisting dodge into an almost impossible attack, contorting his body in a way she had never seen. He also used his surroundings, perhaps not better, but more creatively than she did. He launched himself against one of the smaller trebuchets, flipping over her while slipping a dagger from, Goddess, Urstadt didn’t know, from somewhere, to throw it immediately at her when he landed. She deflected the blade with her glaive and charged, hoping to catch him off-guard, but he met her blow for blow.
The two of them moved as they fought, and Urstadt did all she could to direct the fight toward the War Goddess, where she could help Winter as quickly as possible, if she could ever free herself from this Nazaniin.
Nazaniin, and yet he seemed to not occupy himself at all with psimancy. Either he was incredibly good at hiding it, he was leaving it all to one of the other psimancers, or he had somehow run out of faltira or whatever other energy he needed to access the Void.
Blood trickled down Urstadt’s side from her open wound. Her lungs would not last much longer, let alone her muscles. The Nazaniin stranger, too, seemed to favor one shoulder over the other. Every move she made screamed with agony, but this was what she had trained for. To outfight when she could, to outlast when she couldn’t, and to outrun as a last resort. Every breath came as a struggle, a gasping wheeze from the pits of her lungs, but she fought through it all, darkness threatening the edges of her vision.
She and the Nazaniin warrior danced, twirled, and savagely attacked one another. Urstadt had learned a great deal about him during their short fight. His favored side, for one. His preference of finesse over strength, for another.
Strength was one of Urstadt’s specialties.
In a final burst of power, Urstadt lunged at him, both hands on her glaive, ignoring the blade. She chose to do so at the exact moment his left side faced her, and in a surprising moment of weakness, the man crumbled beneath her. She was about to finish him off when he spun away. Urstadt stopped herself just in time to watch the Nazaniin impale one of Winter’s attackers, who had turned from the War Goddess to rush at them instead.
Urstadt blinked, her breath leaking from her in ragged gasps.
“You…” she said, but could say nothing more. And, as she said it, another of the attackers turned on them, just as the man turned to look at Urstadt.
Hefting her glaive like a spear, Urstadt threw her weapon. It launched just over his shoulder, fingers away from his ear, and embedded itself in the chest of the other attacker.
The man looked back, then at Urstadt.
“You’re… protecting her,” he rasped.
Urstadt nodded, unable to form the energy to say anything else.
Without another word, they turned and took out two more soldiers advancing on the War Goddess.
Urstadt looked around for Winter, felt a moment of panic when she did not see the queen anywhere, but then she spotted the surviving attacker—who must be the psimancer, considering the weapons and debris still pitifully attempting to attack the trebuchet. She was climbing up the frame of the engine, toward the pivot.
Goddess, what was Winter doing up there?
But then Urstadt realized. The sling had been reattached to the trigger-hook. Winter had climbed up to buy herself time.
And to lure the last attacker onto the machine.
A slow, laborious cranking sound filled the air, and the counterweight began to fall. The remaining psimancer woman realized this too late; she stood directly between the missile, slowly moving away from her now, and the counterweight, moving faster and faster down and through.
Several sounds at once assaulted Urstadt’s ears. The deep whumff of the counterweight as it swung down and through the War Goddess’s frame, followed immediately by a sickening crunch as it collided with the psimancer. The War Goddess’s sling snapped as the missile launched high and far, toward Triah.
Then there was silence, and for a moment Urstadt wondered if she had gone deaf. The entire world seemed to stop as the missile sailed across the sky, almost disappearing.
Looking up at Winter, perched halfway up the frame of the War Goddess, Urstadt witnessed the exertion on the woman’s face, the concentration, could almost see the sweat falling in great drops.
When Urstadt looked back to the city, she had lost track of the missile, until the bright, booming explosion erupted about two-thirds of the way up the tower of God’s Eye.
* * *
Horror gripped Carrieri’s heart as the trebuchet fired again.
“Should I give the order for the essential personnel to evacuate the Eye?” someone asked. He was not sure who.
“Yes,” Carrieri whispered, knowing the order would come too late. Knowing that the people he’d already ordered to evacuate would likely not make it out in time, either.
It’s too late, he thought.
It’s too late.
* * *
Cinzia, Jane, and the other disciples rushed through the streets of Triah as quickly as they could. Few people had been injured by the impact at the manse, and other than consoling their hosts on the lost bell tower, there was not much to be done. At Jane’s insistence, they headed toward the city center. On their way, the crump of another impact sent them diving for cover.
“Where did that strike?” Jane demanded, as they got to their feet again.
“Northwest of us, I think,” Cinzia said. Goddess, why were they in the city when it was being bombarded, especially by something the size of that monstrous thing on the cliffs.
“You know the city,” Jane said, her voice calm. “Think, Cinzia.”
“I…” She met Jane’s eyes. “Why do you want to know, sister? Surely we should get out of the city, back to the camp. Isn’t our task to keep our people safe?”
“We should keep all people safe,” Jane said. “We might be able to help, whatever is happening. Now, tell me. Where do you think it struck?”
Cinzia’s cheeks burned. She knew her sister had not meant to shame her, surely.
“I think it fell close to the Coastal Road,” she said. “I could not possibly say where exactly, but… maybe near the Fifteenth Circle?”
“Good enough,” Jane said. “Take us there.”
And that’s where they’d been headed, when the third missile flashed above them, and slammed directly into God’s Eye, not three circles away from where they stood.
Dark smoke poured from the side of God’s Eye where the missile had struck, flames glowing brightly in contrast.
“It’s still standing,” Elessa whispered in awe.
“Thank the Goddess,” someone else said.
“That’s where we must go,” Jane said. “Cinzia, quick! Lead us to that tower.”
* * *
Terris knew where the projectile was headed the moment the massive trebuchet fired. The missile arced through the air at incredible speed, wavering slightly.
Anywhere from one to two thousand people occupied the tower of God’s Eye at any given point in time; some worked or lived there, in the space leased by the city itself, while others— the Eye operators and military personal—worked there in a very different capacity. Civilians and senators often toured the structure, witnessing its grandeur and the apparatus at the top. And the fact that Carrieri thought it necessary to begin evacuating all but necessary personnel from God’s Eye told Terris enough. An order that had just arrived only moments ago; too late, Terris realized, squinting, trying to discern the location of the projectile. It was impossible to truly tell where the trebuchet was pointed—it seemed to have hardly moved during the three launches, but each missile clearly struck a different location in the city—but as Terris looked up at the beastly machine before the third launch, he could have sworn to the Goddess it had been aimed directly at him. Not just the tower, but him.
A small sigh of surprise escaped his lips
as he realized his legs were wet and warm.
He would have thought time would stretch at this moment, that he might see his life flash before his eyes, or think of the people he cared about most, and how if he’d lived differently he might not be a lonely old man, obsessed with his work, or wish that Hindra were not here so that she could live to be with her husband and children, but those thoughts were only the thinnest of shades in his mind as the missile streaked silently toward them.
An incredible crash and roar broke the world of silence. The stones beneath Terris’s feet shook with such violence he felt it in his chest, in his testicles, in his throat.
As Terris came to, he realized he was lying prostrate on the floor. Scrabbling about, he grasped a brass ring of the Eye’s apparatus, and hauled himself up. As he did so, a ringing in his ears he hadn’t realized was there began to fade, and in its place he heard nothing but screams. Hindra, wide-eyed, crawled toward him. General Marshton lay with his back against another brass section of the apparatus, half seated, half lying down, bellowing at the top of his lungs, his eyes unblinking as they stared out at nothing. Other officers and aides screamed, and above it all, Terris’s nose caught the whiff of something burning.
No.
Terris took a tentative step, afraid the entire floor, the entire tower, might buckle beneath him. But his left foot found purchase and stayed, and as he stepped with his right, he felt more solid. The impact had caused the tower to shudder violently, and while that initial quaking had stopped, Terris could not help but think the building still wavered, still trembled, almost imperceptibly. It took him far longer than he liked to finally make it to the ramparts.
“Terris!” Hindra called. “What are you doing?”
“I have to see the damage,” Terris said, but the words came out in a whisper, and he knew they would not reach Hindra, not above the people still moaning and screaming, not above the dull roar of fire below them.
“You’ll fall!” Hindra shouted.
Goddess, were his hands trembling that much, or was it the building itself?
Chaos Queen--Fear the Stars (Chaos Queen 4) Page 32