His Conquering Sword: 3 (The Novels of the Jaran)

by Kate Elliott

  Nadine slashed down to her right and cut a man off his feet. More soldiers raced out through the small gate, forming into ranks. Ahead, the siege tower loomed, and she squinted up to see men retreating back along the bridge, back toward the tower, being forced back by the defenders.

  A man speared at her, and she batted the thrust aside and cut him down. Her horse squealed, throwing its head away from a boil of dust, and she had to fight it until it steadied under her hands. A rider pounded up beside her and reined his horse in. The front lines of her jahar had gone on, leaving her in an eddy behind them. Habakar soldiers lay strewn in their wake.

  “Sakhalin!” she shouted.

  “I’ll take my men through the gate!” he yelled.

  “You’re crazy!” Then she grinned. “I’ll reinforce the tower. We’ll meet at the gates!”

  Anatoly Sakhalin saluted her with his saber and they parted in the chaos of battle. She pushed through to the front and pulled as many of her men as she could away from the melee. There, she saw Anatoly Sakhalin charging with twenty riders at his back for the small gate, hacking his way through the defenders. And then he was through, disappeared into Karkand.

  “Forward!” They galloped for the tower, and she threw herself off her horse and ducked inside. “Grab shields where you find them!” she shouted to the men pounding after her. She scrambled up the ladders, and her heart thudded fiercely and she gasped for air by the time they got to the top.

  To find their own army shrinking back from the defenders.

  She jumped out onto the bridge. An arrow hit her, sticking in her armor. Far below, men labored at a battering ram, and others ran scaling ladders forward. The height made her dizzy. She laughed and bent to tug a shield from a fallen man. Her men pressed forward with her, and they shoved back the Habakar defenders and reached the wall. One jaran man still stood upright, staggering under wounds. They surrounded him and swept past, shrieking and yelling so that their own voices deafened her to anything else.

  At once she saw the danger, that there were two approaches to the bridge. “Split into two. You, just hold that section of wall. Don’t give way. To the stairs!”

  Under their onslaught, the Habakar soldiers gave ground step by bloody step and then, like a dam breaking, abruptly gave way entirely.

  “Forward!” They took the stairs with a fury. One poor fool tried to take the steps two at a time and overbalanced under his own weight and tumbled head over heels, crashing down and taking four of the enemy with him.

  At the base of the wall, a maze of streets spread out before them, but Nadine navigated by the sound of weapons clashing.

  “This way!” She led them at a jog, leaving contingents to guard the side streets, and emerged at last into a market square fronting the main gates. Anatoly Sakhalin and one rider were all that was left, mounted, of his assault; they laid about themselves. Then Sakhalin’s horse staggered under a blow and collapsed, throwing Sakhalin.

  “Stay together!” she shouted, seeing two men break forward from the line to try to rescue Sakhalin. “Open the gates!” A whirlpool of fighting flowed past her, and she cut at a soldier dueling calmly with an unhorsed rider. He went down, and the rider turned, raised his saber—and recognized her and spun to join up with her troops.

  A great creaking shuddered through the ground. The gates began to open. Nadine pressed forward with her line into the center of the square, sweeping resistance aside, pressing everyone back so that there would be room for the rest of Sakhalin’s jahar to flood in. She stepped over a body and then detoured around a downed jaran horse. A man struggled up from the ground.

  “Orzhekov!” Anatoly Sakhalin grinned at her.

  “Gods, I thought you were dead!”

  “Not a scratch. The gods sent an angel to watch over me. Move aside!” The gates opened, and his jahar clattered in. What was left of the Habakar defenders fled, leaving the jaran in possession of the gates and the market square. On the walls above, jaran men and Farisa auxiliaries swarmed, and archers took up position to shoot down onto the roofs of nearby houses. “A horse!” shouted Sakhalin. He swung up on a mount. “To the citadel!”

  Nadine sprang up the stairs siding the gate until she came to the parapet on top. Out on the flats, the golden banner rode high, and the sun it reflected rode higher still, at its apex. She watched as her uncle moved safely away, toward the south, to rally his army at the next gate. Below, the Veselov jahar rode forward, following Sakhalin into Karkand. Nadine hurried down to meet them.

  Vera Veselov rode at their head. “Where is your dyan?” Nadine called from the stairs.

  Vera glanced up at her and lifted the staff of command in her right hand. “Anton is dead. Killed in the sortie. Men! I want half of you dismounted and to the left. We’ll take each street on foot, clean out every house. Drive the women and children out onto the street and kill any man you find.”

  Behind Veselov’s jahar, Farisa auxiliaries waited to enter.

  “Orzhekov!” One of her men appeared, leading a horse for her.

  She mounted and gathered her troops together with a lift of her staff. “We’ll follow Sakhalin to the citadel!” She cried. “Risanovsky, ride to the engineers. No firing into the city, and we’ll need the siege engines drawn up to the citadel.”

  Soon enough she saw that Vera Veselov had the right of it. She dismounted half of her men and sent them in mixed groups to clear the streets. Fires burned and smoke choked them, mingled with dust, but the defense proved haphazard. She rode around a corner into a blizzard of arrow fire and jerked her horse back into cover and sent twenty men to root it out. She listened as they clashed. Beside her, a rider dragged a screaming, kicking woman out of her mudbrick hovel and left her on the ground, where she lay, black hair streaked with dust, stunned and terrified on the threshold. A clot of women cowered at a well, sheltering their children. Three Habakar men lay dead at their feet.

  A messenger rode up. “Orzhekov!” He wore the gold surcoat and gold plume of Bakhtiian’s jahar. “Orders to all dyans. Burn the city.”

  She nodded. “It’s not safe to go forward yet,” she said.

  Already, the next street over, roofs caught fire, thatch flaming. Smoke roiled over them. The women at the well wailed and two riders drove them away from the well and kept after them until they fled away toward the gates, out of the city. A wagon trundled past, driven by an old woman, emptied of everything except blankets and a crowd of weeping children. Two riders commandeered the wagon, sending the old woman and the children on, on foot, and piled it high with valuables stripped from the houses. A baby cried.

  The messenger cocked his head to one side. “Do you hear that?” he asked. The baby cried on, an awkward, reedy scream. Abruptly, he dismounted and paced down the street. Nadine watched him, bemused. One of her riders trotted out from around the corner to give her the all clear; they had found and killed the Habakar archers.

  Fire leapt and crackled on a nearby roof. In the warren of streets beyond, mudbrick collapsed into a tower of dust. In the distance, she saw a minaret licked by flames. The messenger ducked into a house and, just as he entered, its roof went up in flames.

  “Go!” said Nadine, pointing, and her trooper dashed down, but before he reached the house the messenger ran back out, body bent over a scrap of cloth as sparks showered down on him. The roof collapsed in behind him. He jogged up to Nadine and swung back on his horse and then displayed his prize: a little red-faced infant shrieking its lungs out.

  “Barbarians!” he said with a grunt of disgust. “Leaving their own children to die.”

  “Take it back to the hospital,” said Nadine. “I’ll pass the orders on down the line.”

  A troop of horsemen clattered past. Refugees streamed in the other direction, ducking away from the jaran riders, running, stumbling, and sobbing, dropping wooden chests and cloth bundles in their haste. A jeweled necklace lay spilled in the dirt. A rider picked the necklace up with the point of his spear and let it slide dow
n the haft into his hands. He glanced over to see Nadine and the messenger watching him, then shook the necklace free and tossed it to the men loading the wagon.

  “Take that horse!” shouted Nadine, seeing a Habakar woman leading a fine mare, and her riders summarily took the horse away. The woman was wise enough not to protest. The messenger left, riding with the infant in the crook of his arm. Nadine headed on into the city.

  By now it was midafternoon and the resistance had worn away almost to nothing. Fires rose on all sides, and auxiliaries and archers stripped houses and loaded purloined wagons high with the riches of Karkand. It was time to press on quickly. She called in her jahar, pleased to see that she had almost four hundreds still with her, the others wounded or scattered behind. They formed up and rode on up the hill to the great square that fronted the citadel. This close, the walls looked thick and forbidding, impregnable.

  To her surprise, all was quiet here, except for the constant growling noise of the conflagration in the city.

  She found Anatoly Sakhalin with about fifty riders. “What’s going on?”

  “Bakhtiian is by the outer gates of the citadel, negotiating with the commander. On the other side of us.”

  “Negotiating with him?”

  “He’s agreed to spare the women and children if the garrison will surrender.”

  “Ah,” said Nadine. “But surely from those walls they can see the refugees leaving the city. They must know that some are being spared in any case.”

  Anatoly shrugged. “How can we know what khaja think like? They make no sense to me.” Then he looked abruptly guilty for saying it. As if to draw attention away from the comment, he glanced back. From this height, halfway up the hill on which the citadel lay massed, the city spread out in a maze of spirals and circling streets beneath them, all the way down to the great walls and over to the height where the royal palace lay sprawled across the sister hill. The city burned. A third of it was already obscured by smoke.

  Nadine stared, realizing all at once how huge Karkand really was, how elaborate. Minarets thrust up into the sky, ornamented with delicate lacework that slowly disappeared into smoke and flame. The royal palace bore tiles all along its western front, gleaming in the late afternoon sun, but even as she watched, smoke began to curl up from its environs. Gardens lay green under the light of day. A colonnaded avenue led in pale splendor to a vast temple inscribed with tilework that formed huge letters, the words of their god. People milled in clumps, as small as insects, scattered everywhere she could make out from her vantage point. At a distant gate, she saw a steady stream of refugees leaving the city. Farther, the suburbs ringed the inner city, hazed now by the dust and the smoke, obscuring their white villas and verdant parks. Metal flashed against the sun as riders moved in the far distance, and here and there on the walls, where some skirmish fought itself to an end. No city she had ever seen, not even Jeds, was as beautiful as Karkand as it died.

  Anatoly shrugged, turning his gaze back to the citadel, where the blue lion flag of the Habakar royal family still fluttered in the wind. “It’s going to take a long time to burn,” he said.

  At the height of the citadel, the blue lion flag shuddered and began to descend. Nadine caught in her breath. A man appeared on the parapet, high above, and in his right hand he bore Bakhtiian’s gold standard.

  Anatoly swore under his breath and urged his horse forward. Just as he reached the thick gates, they swung open. Nadine was shocked to see her uncle ride through them, Konstans Barshai and Kirill Zvertkov on his left and Mitya on his right. On foot, in front of him, walked three Habakar priests and a soldier in a fine nobleman’s surcoat and rich armor, heads bared to the sun.

  Bakhtiian saw Nadine, and he beckoned to her. She rode up to him and fell in beside Mitya. They rode out of the square, paced by their prisoners, and down the great colonnaded avenue until they came at last to the huge temple that lay between the citadel and the palace.

  It was a glorious thing, the temple of the Habakar god, so profusely tiled along its walls and up its minareted sides that Nadine wondered how long it had taken to build and decorate. Arches filigreed with elaborate screens gave access onto the inner grounds, and through the arches she saw a green courtyard bordered by slender columns, their capitals wreathed in leaves. She wished suddenly, fiercely, that David could be here to survey it, to draw it, to keep its memory alive.

  In the square in front of the temple lay a fountain built so cunningly that the play of the water splashing down level to level raised rainbows in the air. An unveiled, white-robed woman sat, head bowed, on the edge of the pool at the base of the fountain, a ceramic pitcher and two shallow wooden bowls resting beside her.

  Their party came to a halt before the fountain. Bakhtiian looked on the huge temple with an expression that Nadine could not read. He did not look triumphant to her, though his victory that day had been momentous.

  Stiff with fright, the priestess dipped a bowl into the pool, rose from her seat, and brought the water to Bakhtiian. Her hands trembled as she lifted the bowl up, cupped in her pale delicate fingers, offering it to him. He accepted it, took three sips, and handed the bowl to Mitya, who drank off the rest. Then Bakhtiian urged his horse forward to the pool and let it drink. The white-robed woman went as pale as death, watching the stallion drink from her fountain, and a moment later she collapsed to the ground in a faint. The Habakar priests wrung their hands, terrified and distraught, but they did not object to this impiety.

  Bakhtiian pulled his horse away and motioned to the rest to water their own mounts. He moved up beside his prisoners. Shadows drew out across the courtyard, thrown by the minarets and the ring of tall columns. The horses drank noisily from the pool, serenaded by the pleasant murmur of the fountain and the muted dissonance of the bedlam in the city beyond. Plumes of smoke clouded the sky. The sun sank toward the western hills in a haze of red fire.

  “You may leave,” Bakhtiian said. “That much mercy I will grant you and your people.” His expression remained fixed and distant.

  “But, Lord,” protested one of the priests, the eldest of them, “the holy books of the Everlasting God, which reside in the temple…” He bent his head over his hands. Nadine saw tears in his eyes and a look of bitter despair on his face. The others whispered fiercely to him. The nobleman knelt and bowed his head, not to Bakhtiian, but to the temple itself, as if saying farewell to it.

  “Books!” Bakhtiian’s gaze jumped back to the priests for an instant. “Konstans. Give these priests wagons, so that they may save their books. Take five hundred men and strip everything else that is valuable from the building.”

  “But, Lord, our temple took years beyond counting to build. And the palace—” The others hissed at him, but the old man set his mouth and continued. “Let him kill me if he wills. I am old enough to die without fear. Lord, surely once you have taken what you wish, we can return to our homes. Surely you or the young prince—” He glanced up at Mitya and away, as if he feared his impudence in looking directly upon the young prince might be punished, “—will wish to rule from here.”

  “Karkand is no more,” said Bakhtiian in a quiet voice, deceptively quiet, Nadine understood now, seeing in his face the depths of his rage and of his anguish. “Nothing will be left of her once I am through. No one will live here, no thing will grow here, where I lost my son.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ALEKSI KNEW HOW TO get places without being seen. Charles Soerensen knew how to be seen. Once they had ridden far enough in toward the battle, once the prince had been recognized and waved forward by enough people, Aleksi got them lost and brought them out on a different side of Karkand, three jaran riders of no particular importance headed out on patrol. He did not find it difficult to avoid jaran patrols. But the khaja who had been driven from the outlying districts of Karkand flooded every path and road and least byway, and in the end they cut up into the hills early and wound a laborious way through the scrub until they came at last to a small defil
e hidden between two ridges.

  “Here,” said Charles, and they dismounted and led the horses down the steep hillside to the flat grassy floor. It was midafternoon by now, and already shadows covered the western flank of the little valley. They stood there, resting while they watched the horses graze.

  “We’re only about eight kilometers from camp,” said Marco, “had we ridden straight here, but we rode over twice that. Goddess, what a lot of refugees.”

  “Let’s hope,” said Soerensen quietly, regarding the sky pensively, “that none of them decide to hide in the hills until we’re gone. Or at least, in these hills.”

  Marco sighed. “Just think of all the people still left inside the city. I wonder what will happen to them.”

  The prince folded his arms on his chest and regarded the other man. A breeze slid through the grass. Here, in this peaceful valley, it was hard to remember that a battle raged a short ride away.

  Marco clenched his hands. “Or what will happen to the people in camp if Bakhtiian loses.” He looked white.

  “I’m sorry, Marco,” said Soerensen, more quietly still.

  “You’re sorry!” demanded Marco. “You’re the one who abandoned Tess!”

  “And Cara and David and all the rest of them, true. But I have faith that Bakhtiian will win. Hell, I have to believe it. And in any case, that’s not really who we’re talking about.”

  Marco swore and stalked off to talk to the horses who were, no doubt, more soothing company.

  “Romance,” said the prince, looking after him,” is vastly overrated.” He sat down and reclined on one elbow.

  Aleksi crouched down beside him. “Is Erthe really such a place as this?” he asked, waving toward the ridges and the silent stretch of grass and brush lying within the valley walls. “Or is it like the plains? And if it lies up in the heavens, why can’t we see it?”

  Soerensen smiled. “You remind me of Tess,” he said. “Hell, you remind me of me.”