by Sylvia Kelso
As she and all Amberlight look to rue the recoil. Since Dinda has not been content with threats.
For the war, then? A war pressed with alarming alacrity, barely a fortnight from the ultimatum before frantic reports from upRiver intelligencers that Dinda’s forces are on the march. Not merely summoned, not merely mustering. Marshaled, provisioned, and on their way downstream.
Far too swiftly, Tellurith thinks yet again, for this not to have been already planned. And its intent far more than threat, or Dinda would not have raised such a force, would have yielded to the pleas and appeasements from a panic-stricken Thirteen. Which he has brushed aside on his way downRiver as so many flies.
As the pleas for help, or at the least neutrality, have been ignored by Verrain.
Sorry, then, for remembering what he already knew? For running when he knew quite well what a wasps’ nest he left behind?
Or sorry—and for five months this has been the ulcer’s core—that he had remembered long before? That he deceived her in everything? Deliberately influenced her to resist the Thirteen? To provoke Dinda, and trigger the prepared avalanche of her City’s ruin?
No, she tells herself, as she has also done endlessly. It wasn’t just him. When I refused, it backed me.
The qherrique said, No.
Or did I simply not read it aright?
Over the House-roofs the qherrique burns back at her, a colorless quaking refractive lake. Eyes quailing, she wipes the tears, turning outward once again.
Sorry, then, for playing some role in this great onslaught? The thing she and Iatha feared all along? Sorry because he remembered that his intent, his information, action, was the lynch-pin of the attack?
Because he went to re-assume that role?
Because that return completed the alliance as the alliance did the siege-wall? So that Dinda’s tribesmen, officered by a core of Cataract mercenaries, are supplemented by Verrain desert-scouts and camel-corps. And both by the massive contributions of Dhasdein.
Sorriest of all that his artfully broken memory concealed that truth? That Dhasdein was the instigator all along? Dhasdein whose drilled, heavy-armed troops man the greater part of the siege-wall? Dhasdein who has supplied the high command, and the commanding officer?
Dhasdein, above all, who has supplied the ships.
“You trying to get sunstroke, ’Rith?”
She starts. Obediently, leaves the balustrade.
“Dhasdein dangle’s smarter than you are. He won’t stand to talk in the heat.”
Tellurith shrugs. Wanders across the main room, in the shadows where the qherrique, feeding—forget how it woke that night—sucks heat up like a sponge. Surprising how little there is, now, for a Head to do. All the shapers’ orders are stalled. All the tribute trade is stopped. The food . . .
Better to remember the crowded refugees. Amberlight is crammed with House dependents from the Kora, who have fled before Dinda’s, Verrain’s, Dhasdein’s advance.
“Did we sort out the laundry queue?”
“Yesterday. Sending out.”
“I should go down to the Power-shop—”
“You’ve lived in the blighted Power-shop. It’s in hand. There’s nothing more for you to do.”
Nothing, having planned it, except to avert the mind from that as well. Amberlight’s weapons, prepared for its greatest war.
“I ought to see Zuri. Check the guard—”
A hand on the shoulder all but slams her into a chair.
“You think Zuri don’t know how to do it by now? You sit down here and put something in your belly, so you’ll have fed your brain when you go out there.”
* * * *
Silencing Tellurith. Since in the five months after his flight Zuri’s troublecrew have had all too much practice in deflecting attacks, ambushes and attempted assassinations, whether from Cataract or the Thirteen. Have, ironically, re-applied the principles their traitor taught them, with considerable success.
Since the most hunted woman in Amberlight is still alive.
Not only alive, but summoned by name to the parley the Dhasdein commander has requested for this afternoon.
* * * *
In the beginning, she recalls, they were a good deal more sanguine. That is, after that initial explosion, when word came that Cataract was on the march. When she faced death a good deal closer than a blocked street or an escalade of knife-handlers across the garden wall or an archer trying to establish a long draw on the House front; Maeran’s eyes slitted, for once without languor, Maeran’s filed-steel voice echoing in the Council-chamber roof.
“Precisely what connection there may be between Cataract’s march and Telluir House’s outlander, Telluir appears determined we shall never know. What is clear is that the City is under attack, with its secrets bared as never before. And the traitor remains in our midst. I propose execution of Telluir House-head for treachery. And the abolition of Telluir House.”
Maeran’s first, or perhaps second crucial blunder. Had she aimed for the Head alone, Tellurith is sure the Thirteen would have agreed. But to destroy a House . . . Her yet unthawed backbone recalls the hiatus, the dropping of eyes; the leap of her heart from terror—and was it despair that retorted, What is there to live for, why not?—to more terrifying hope as her politician’s experience pre-recorded the vote: it’s too close to the bone. They see their own fall. They’re afraid.
But it is Zhee’s passionless voice that fills the gap.
“How will this stop Cataract?”
Tipping the balance so faithful Jura can swing the waverers with acrid reminders that Telluir House may have brought calamity, but Telluir House therefore owes a double load of help and resources to set it right. A fine in time and money and personnel that Tellurith is only too glad to pay.
Especially when all her attempts to sway the view of Dinda’s assault fail.
“How often have we seen it?” Liony of Zanza leans back, sweeping an impatient hand. “Ten years Dinda’s run Cataract. And how many before him? How often have they thrown a tantrum and marched downRiver? What good does it do them? Shift the Riverside people and stock. We may lose some crops, but we have supplies. With the people safe he can sit and fume on the canal-bank until he’s ready to go home.”
“Or until,” Damas shows her teeth in a very un-Headly leer, “he wakes up that his statuette’s failing. And he may very well lose Cataract as well as his—army—if he sits around.”
Since only the statuette ensures control of the wild Heartland tribesmen and landless poor of Cataract who form the majority of Dinda’s troops.
And only a brilliantly clever military leader, she reflects, staring out into the haze, Shia’s valiant work on a stringy old fowl forgotten in her mouth, only a military master could have kept those troops here, let alone used them effectively in a siege.
But seeing only the past, the Thirteen vote Telluir House a double share of defense work while ignoring her arguments, her assertions, her shouts that Dinda means more than a punitive tantrum. That—desperately double-edged weapon—the very riddle of her lost outlander argues there may be other, far more dangerous fingers in the puddle, that they should prepare for more than a simple Riverside raid.
To which, growing exasperated, Maeran votes yet another censure motion, silencing Telluir till the meeting’s close.
* * * *
“You think it’s real.”
It had been Ti’e’s voice. Ti’e’s presence at her elbow, too quiet to be abrupt, her partner Dyra as always a shadow beside her, as Tellurith leans both arms upon the archer’s parapet. Staring, despair and fury mingled, into the green spring blur upstream. Ti’e, quiet young daughter thrown into Kuro’s position, the new, all but cypher-mysterious head of Diaman.
But no scorn or combat in the tone. So Tellurith turns about, feeling a tiny hope rekindle. And prepare
s to go through it all again.
“He marched too fast for it to be just an answer to the ultimatum. You don’t assemble a Cataract army in a fortnight. He was ready. It has to have been planned.”
“They’ve always done it. Why should this be worse?”
“Because . . .” She stares into the grave young eyes. Stiffens her back, and thinks, Too new to be a traitor. Even if Kuro of all people was . . . In the Work-mother’s hand, then.
“Because we don’t know why Alk—my outlander—was here. But a Dhasdein background argues collusion. And if Cataract has backing from Dhasdein . . .” She reads that jaw’s tightening and her pulse quickens. No need to exhume the nightmare. Ti’e has it too. “And . . .” the last pause, the most dangerous, “because I feel it. The—I know.”
The eyes assess her. A true House-head. Impossible, even so early, even for Tellurith to tell what she is thinking. Until the eye corners relax. And Ti’e says, casual as if settling ship-turns at a quay.
“What do you want to do?”
Wherefore, while nine of the Thirteen vainly try to negotiate, Telluir, and Diaman, and to Tellurith’s wonder, Hafas, have scoured their Kora holdings, shifting people and stock and supplies into the city, cramming clan and House lodgings, setting up makeshift pens and byres, filling warehouses with fodder and seed-grain and any other moveable possession.
Especially those that would help repulse a siege.
With the other unexpected ally, Tellurith thinks, chewing at last. That day down at the Dead Dyke, dispatching yet another crowd of Telluir villagers to their temporary lodgings, to be astonished by the appearance of a second House-head’s guard.
And among her spic-and-span troublecrew, leaning lightly on the mahogany stick that is pure idiosyncrasy, the languid, elegant form of Averion. Head of Keranshah.
Who, having exchanged greetings and watched the villagers’ file depart, stares upRiver a long time before she wonders, “What—precisely—are you expecting, Telluir?”
And to Tellurith’s somewhat confounded, “I don’t know,” slits her eyes into the distance. And goes on, at last.
“I rather think—if he’s not just here for the tantrum—that his only tactic is a siege.”
Averion’s taste for military theory is exceeded only by her strategist’s talent. Tellurith has found more than an ally. She has found, she discovers with dazzled gratitude, a general.
It is Averion who decrees they will form forage parties to use the Kora as long as possible, who urges them to pull in supplies from farthest upstream first, who demands makeshift bridges to move materiel faster, who forms auxiliary naval units from commandeered ships and Downhill or River Quarter volunteers. To be paid three fiels a day, if war actually comes, from Telluir’s treasury.
And Averion who grimly backs Tellurith’s other visions, who plans for the worst and sketches the barricades, the new wall along Dead Dyke, and the means for manning them. Whose urging opens Diaman’s workshop along with Keranshah’s to see those plans made real.
* * * *
Tellurith averts eyes and mind. The delicately sauced fowl is ashes in her mouth.
Ashes. She gets up again, drawn to the window despite herself. Averion’s other fall-back was truly drastic. “We’ll lose this harvest,” Tellurith hears her saying coolly. “They’ll be here first”—somewhere it has become tacit among the allies that Dinda will not be alone—“but we’ll deny them what we can.” So foragers are made ready to ride out at first sign of the worst scenario, and fire the ripening fields.
“We don’t do it till we’re sure it’s serious.” Averion’s worst-case scenario is the arrival, in force, of Dhasdein. “Have to skip the Sahandan anyway. Those paddies will never burn. But we can take out the fodder. And the grain.”
Tellurith’s scalp shrinks at the recollected image. Dust and skirmish swirls spread across the Kora as on some miniature, general’s world. Averion growling softly beside her at the balustrade. Response to the warning mirror-signals, scouts springing from a dozen picket posts. Gallop of small black ants. First plumes of black-bronze smoke. Burning grass. Burning wheat. Averion’s indrawn breath, strong as at a wound.
As from the western horizon a furious spray of faster more ferocious ants swarms upon the fire-setters like a four-legged mist whose action is less frightening than its speed. Half an army thrown lawless as a flood-head across a plain.
And as smothering. Amberlight scouts taken or dispatched. Fires out.
Averion beside her, cursing fastidiously, a bouquet of archaic military oaths. “Now by the two-edged sword of Koriess. Skirmish cavalry. He’s made skirmish cavalry, out of those blight-bitten desert nomads. How did the bastard get Verrainers to do that?”
While with ice down the backbone, Tellurith wonders: How did the bastard know?
Amberlight’s first casualties. Amberlight’s first taste of the mind directing this campaign.
* * * *
Shia is inside, fussing with her Head’s chosen clothes. Fine enough to impress an enemy, not so fine as to invite covetousness. To impress an impressive enemy, whose anticipation of their anticipation of his reaction to their action in anticipation of his action has made a mental nightmare, a constant high-wire dance, of these last three months.
Which began in the first minutes’ shock at seeing that charge of Verrain light cavalry, the bridleless pony riders who escort caravans. Augmented with almost hysterical astonishment when the vanguard behind them proves to be Verrain cameleers.
* * * *
“Verrain don’t attack us! They’ve never done it! They never do it! This is ridiculous—impossible!” Falla and Sevitha and Eutharie, the least forward-looking, most timid of the House-heads, a panicked chorus whose descant takes half a glass to die. Before Maeran’s furious onslaught on Telluir, whose intransigency has brought this plague. Cut off by Averion’s ice-edged drawl.
“That’s fine, Maeran, and we respect your care for your House interests.” At a time, says the slicing inflection, when nothing matters less. “But meanwhile, the rest of us have a war to fight.”
“And the one person who may know more than anyone about the rationale for the attack,” Ti’e’s quiet, rare intervention is almost a greater shock, “is the Head of Telluir House.”
* * * *
“Whatever they want, they can’t get at us without a siege,” Averion re-summarizes the situation. “And even if they now have the supplies for it, you can’t maintain a siege with a rabble of spear-throwing tribesmen and a horde of cameleers.”
But you can do it, Tellurith thinks, leaning her forehead on her window frame in sudden weariness, with heavy-armed, disciplined, Imperial infantry.
Beyond the river, the sun gleams fang-bright on massed, tempered steel. Helmets. Spear and sentry heads. The broad circular shields of the Dhasdein regular army. Blazoned with the too-familiar badge that she has seen every nine years on the Imperial embassy: Dhasdein’s snake and thunderbolt. Discard memory of the further confrontation, her mind tells her, when word came in from their waterborne scouts downstream: that the worst-case scenario was no longer scenario. That the two Dhasdein border brigades have marched into Verrain.
Averion’s answer comes after a thirty-minute pace about the Arcis parapets.
“I’ve never been one to sit and wait.”
So, since the enemy must already know about the light-guns, Wasp and two sisters are dispatched downstream. To bring long-distance confusion, horror and casualties on the marching columns, to force them, at the least, from the easy Riverside going, and at the most, to provoke desertions and ruin morale with a fearsome preview of the weapons of Amberlight. “Just think how you’d feel,” Averion murmurs, “if you knew that was going to be used on you.”
Remembering an ambush in River Quarter, Tellurith has no doubt of how she feels.
In the meantime, Averion an
d the Verrain commander play how-d’you-do with nuisance raids. Picket lines stampeded, camels hocked, first by desperately grudged troublecrew, then, Averion’s genius, by gang-volunteers, set cross-River at night, by dinghy, and then by Navy ships. “I never thought,” says Damas of Jerish in outright amazement, “that those scoundrels could be some use!”
More catch-as-catch-can then, as the Verrain camp is shifted and the guerillas bicker with irregularly moved guard-posts. A light, nagging, almost playful prelude, if there can be play in war. “He’s teasing me,” says Averion. “Learning my moves. But then, I’m learning his.” Almost, faintly, tigerishly, amused.
Until Dhasdein arrives.
* * * *
“We never expected to stop them.” Averion in council, wearily tolerant of Falla’s shrieks. “When you launch two brigades at something, you’re not going to turn around for nuisance raids.” And when the uproar dies at last, she adds the real blow.
“They know perfectly well the numbers are on their side.”
Tellurith’s stomach turns over again as it did that day, entirely, sickeningly the same. Against numbers, the most terrible weapons, the best defenses, the most brilliant strategist will not prevail.
“Which is why,” Averion again, ice-calm, ice-cold, “we did not make major attacks downRiver. Which is why those of us who looked ahead,” at the intonation half the Thirteen quail, “have hauled in supplies and prepared weapons for those who would not. Our only hope is to maintain our defenses. To wait them out, while taking as few casualties as we can.”
Which is why, Tellurith thinks, we could stop the first assault in its tracks. With Wasp and Hornet and Mosquito and the Spider trio, and above all, with the big new light-guns on Horsefly, Averion’s sardonically renamed Queenbee, and the auxiliaries ploughing in their wake. A living, moving, burning, fighting-wall that seared the troops on the bank and rammed or ignited the assault flotilla, tearing back and forth like fire-armed juggernauts even when the assault commander threw his main forces in, trying to overcome them with sheer mass, when the paddle-wheels churned blood rather than water, at the height of the attack.