"In the course of our struggle against you, my people became divided. They cast me out. I traveled to San Diego, where they had every reason to spill my blood, and discovered they were split against themselves as well. At first, I tried to use this divide to take them over and lead them against you. But I had a dream of my own. And my dream was a nightmare: that if I was willing to use these people, to manipulate them without a care for the hurt it caused them, then I had no right to lead anyone.
"I abandoned my plans. Instead, I did what was right for San Diego. A new queen elevated herself from slavery. And when she stood positioned to destroy all those who had wronged her, she showed them far more mercy than they deserved."
The jeers had gone quiet. Raina lifted her eyes to the audience. "Helping her to mend this rift healed, in turn, the rift between San Diego and Catalina. And when I brought my new friends back to Catalina, and came before those who had cast me out, we reunited without firing a shot.
"Anson knows only the blade. In his eagerness to use it, he has taught me that great leaders are more than warriors. They are also physicians. Those who would cut must also know how to heal. Look around you. Look inside. Think on what has brought us to this night. Ask yourself if you are better in there, doomed to battle all you ever come in contact with, or out here. Then lay down your arms. Walk from those walls. And we will find a way to live together."
She didn't expect to sway them. She knew only that she'd had to try. On the wall, the Sworn glanced among each other. Some began to talk. She could feel their uncertainty the same way she felt the abrupt chill of a streamer of fog worming between two houses.
To her left, a man dropped from view behind the wall. A second joined him. Her face spread in a smile.
A small red flame flashed in Anson's hands; a buzzing object whipped past her head. The bang of a gun cracked through the trees. She smelled singed hair.
The dream of union was shattered by a storm of gunfire. Raina sprinted back into the trees, bullets flying behind her.
Someone ran toward her through the darkness. Mauser. "Are you all right?"
"By inches," she said.
"He fired, didn't he? Right when you'd opened a path out of here. What a dick!"
"He felt his grip slipping. Time for him to learn that I haven't forgotten how to cut. We'll circle through the trees toward the gates. Make our attack there."
She met with Georgia to explain, then began a withdrawal, putting more lines of trees between her warriors and the Sworn within the Heart. They swung clockwise around the walls. When the gates stood across from them, Raina directed her people forward.
Open ground lay outside the gates, too. Charging through it would be suicide. Her people filtered through the trees, taking position behind trunks to snipe as opportunity presented. When the Sworn ducked behind the wall, some of the knights and warriors tried to shoot through the wood, but the firing platform's inner wall was reinforced or sandbagged. As guns popped from both sides, Raina stood near the back of the lines to consider her next move.
"Here," Mauser said, holding out a heavy sleeveless jacket. "Bulletproof. Against lower-velocity stuff, anyway. I have the sneaking suspicion you're going to need it, following Bushido as you do."
Raina eyed the vest. "Will it hinder the use of my swords?"
"Not as thoroughly as a bullet in your heart."
She tried it on. It was a little large, but Mauser helped her adjust it more snugly. Once she was fitted, she slashed her sword through the air to test her mobility, then sheathed it and went to find Georgia.
"I think we'll run out of bullets before they run out of wall," Raina said. "I'd like you to take your knights around the back of the wall and try to sneak in."
"Sounds dangerous. Won't take many of them to hold us off."
"I'm not ordering you to breach it. I'm asking you to try."
Georgia grinned. "If we pull this off, I get first dibs on the booty. See you inside."
She whistled to her people, gathering them together. Slowly, as not to arouse suspicion, the knights withdrew from the lines. Raina's warriors continued to plink away at the Sworn.
A few minutes later, automatic rifle fire rattled from the far side of the Heart. Raina swore. Georgia returned shortly, hair disheveled, cheeks smudged with dirt.
"They spotted us," Georgia spat. "Lost a man in the process."
"Keep trying."
"Raina, all it takes to hold us off is one loser with an AK-47."
"And all it takes to break the siege is for them to screw up once. Be as cautious as you need. If nothing else, your attacks will draw their soldiers away from the gates."
Georgia drew a face. "Tell me you're not relying on us to get inside."
"We're not. But mobility is one of the only advantages we have. We would be foolish not to use it."
Mollified, Georgia returned to her knights and headed back into the woods circling the walls. Raina found her First Blade and located Henna.
"Bullets won't strike down these walls," Henna said. "Fire will."
That had been the original plan—either to plant the dragon's fire before the People of the Stars knew they were there, or, if unable to bear it to the walls, to pelt them with flaming arrows. With the knights unlikely to penetrate the interior, it was time to bring down the exterior.
"Gather the archers," Raina said. "We'll see how eager they are to hold their walls once they're on fire."
Henna jogged among the troops, gathering all those who carried bows. As guns continued to fire from the front lines, she and her people shredded rags and soaked them in pungent rubbing alcohol. Henna brought the archers forward to the edge of the woods.
"Fire!"
They rolled from behind the trees they'd taken as cover, released their arrows, and swung back into their original position. Arrows rapped into the walls. They burned bluely, fluttering, then faded away, unable to find purchase against the fog-dampened wood.
Not one to be discouraged so easily, Henna ordered a second round, then a third. Every single arrow failed to ignite the walls.
Beside Raina, Mauser planted his hands on his hips. "What the hell's going on? That stuff's essentially napalm. It would practically burn on the surface of the moon."
"We're using alcohol. I don't know how we would deliver the dragon's fire. We can't get close enough to throw the bottles and they're too heavy to tie to an arrow."
"Here's a suggestion: use smaller bottles."
"How foolish of me. Please, wait here while I get the necessary supplies from our wagon of miniature flasks."
He put his back to the Heart and jerked his chin downslope. "That's canyon country. Perfume bottles galore up in there. Might even be able to get away with plastic, as long as you launch them fast enough."
Raina dispatched a crew of scavengers on bikes with orders to bring back all the small and lightweight bottles they could find within a half hour. The battle entered a lull. Both sides continued to fire on each other, but listlessly, as if they understood their bullets were the equivalent of the growls of two strange dogs facing off from across the street. Henna and the archers circled the walls, firing off a volley before melting back into the trees and moving on, searching for a spot where their flames might find purchase.
She couldn't decide if the People of the Stars' lack of aggression was comforting or worrying. Perhaps they were still recovering from their rush to beat her army back to the Heart. Perhaps it was as Anson had boasted; they knew that all they had to do was stay put and wait for Raina's warriors to run out of supplies.
But maybe there was another reason they were in no hurry to act. In a repeat of the turning point in the first battle of San Pedro, perhaps they were waiting for their alien allies to arrive and drive Raina into the sea.
The scavengers returned with an assortment of vials. Carefully, they transferred the dragon's fire to them and strapped them to the heads of arrows. Raina summoned Henna's archers back to the gates. Anson's defenders poured
fire into the trees and the warriors answered in kind, forcing the enemy back into cover.
Henna's people touched lighters to their arrows. A dozen points of fire lit with an airy gasp. The archers drew back and released. Red meteors arced into the walls, bursting with a rush of white fire.
The thick, searing matter stuck to the wood, burning fiercely. Men called to each other behind the walls. By the time the archers readied a second round, the walls were smoking. Watching behind a tree, Raina grinned. Henna gave the order to fire and more globs slammed into the wood like tiny irregular stars. Men poured buckets of water over the top of the walls. Exposed to Raina's warriors, their forms jerked with gunfire. Bodies slumped over the ledge and tumbled to the ground.
Some of the fires had already burnt themselves out, but others smoldered on, obscuring the gates in smoke. As the archers prepared to fire again, Raina sent the scavengers downhill to retrieve more bottles from the empty houses.
"Is this going to work?" Mauser said. "Because I feel like it's going to work."
Under a hail of bullets from the Sworn, the archers shifted further to the left. "Even if it doesn't bring the walls down by itself, the enemy will be so busy fighting fires that Georgia's knights should be able to sneak inside."
"Excellent. But next time we do this, I'm going to insist on a battering ram. One of the fancy ones, with a roof. Maybe some horns on the—"
Light flashed from the top of the wall, illuminating a T-shaped object—a man with a tube on his shoulder. Raina's insides contracted. A light speared toward the forest, trailing thick white smoke. The rocket plowed into the trees. Raina flattened herself to the ground and covered her eyes.
An explosion thudded through the woods. Warriors screamed. Dirt showered into the air and hissed down onto the leaves.
"Henna!" Raina yelled. "Henna!"
"Jesus Christ." Mauser picked himself up, hunkering low and peering toward the walls. "No wonder they're sitting pretty. They've got RPGs?"
Raina dashed forward, swatting at low-hanging branches. A shallow crater was blasted in the turf. Archers staggered away from it, coughing and bleeding. Two bodies lay at its fringes. Raina stopped and gaped at a torso wearing Henna's shirt.
People rushed in around her, helping the wounded away. Raina drew her sword and spun to face the still-burning gates, but holding the weapon in her hand only reminded her how remote she was from putting it to use. She knew she must act, yet in the wake of the explosion, her mind seemed unable to hold any shape but unformed anger.
The T-shaped figure popped back up from the wall. Rifles banged from the forest. Another rocket sprung from the tube and scorched into the trees some distance to Raina's right. She flinched from the flash of the impact. Another boom. A second shower of dirt. More screams. A pall of bitter smoke marked the rocket's trail into the forest.
"First Blade!" Raina commanded. "To me!"
She scooped up fallen bows, keeping one eye on the wall for signs of the man with the rockets. Her people assembled around her, ready to act, but no number of them could disguise the absence of Henna.
"We must destroy the rocket-man," she said. "We'll use the fire flowers. Fire them straight at the wall. The enemy will be blinded by light and stunned by the bang. We can advance under the wreath of smoke."
"And then what?" Mauser said.
"Swamp them with dragon's fire. Boost each other over the walls. Whatever it takes to destroy him."
"Is there any world where this isn't suicide?"
"My world!" She reached out and flicked his balls. "Tell the warriors to be ready to cover us with everything they have. This is a chance to take out their rocket-man and to spread the fire to the other side of the wall. We must try!"
Mauser's face crinkled with doubt, but he had fought at her side for years and knew when to shut up and trust her. He moved to spread the orders. As her team prepared for the assault, Raina fired unlit arrows into the walls, timing their passage.
Another rocket plunged into the right flank, scattering the warriors there. A runner arrived with the fire flowers and Raina distributed them to her best remaining archers.
"Fire them straight at the top of the wall." She pointed to the fuse of her arrow. "That means a short burn. Barely a second. Timing is critical—don't launch until I give the word."
Each archer was given a lighter. They took position behind trees. Raina counted down from five; they touched their flames to the fuses. White sparks fitzed to the ground. Raina's heart beat as she watched the string burn down.
"Position!" She rolled from behind the tree. The others mimicked her. She took aim just above the wall. The fuse neared the base of the firework. Behind the wall, the rocket-man popped up and pointed his tube at them. "Fire!"
Arrows sizzled through the night. Instantly, the Sworn fired on the archers, driving them back into cover; Ira the knight fell, reaching for nothing.
The thunder of the gods roared across the hilltop. Mad green shadows reached into the trees. Raina wanted badly to look, but knew she had to preserve her sight for the assault. As the thunder echoed away and the ghostly blossoms began to fade, she stepped from behind the tree trunk, preparing to charge into the dense haze of smoke.
Behind the walls, a man shrieked. The scream was beyond the simple fear of fire. It told Raina to get behind the tree and close her eyes. She dived. The wall erupted in raw white fire, illuminating the forest more brightly than high noon. Heat roiled over Raina's skin. A ghost punched her in the gut. The explosion was as loud as she'd imagined the guns of the battleship docked at San Pedro. Leaves shook loose from the trees and showered to the dirt. Where the wall once stood, burning hunks of wood sailed into the sky like children of the spent fire flowers.
The gap was thirty feet across. Smoke swirled through it like mist in a cave, puddling in the broad, shallow crater. A smoky owl condensed from the air and flapped twice before dispersing back into the miasma. Raina gasped as every nerve in her body came alight with knowledge.
She hollered a battle cry and sprinted forward, unsheathing both swords. On the other side of the wall, men moaned and called toward each other. Raina didn't glance back to see if her warriors were following her.
The smoke thickened, smelling of gunpowder and charred wood. Planks clattered to her left, near what remained of the wall. Raina veered to the sound. A figure resolved from the smoke, machine gun in hand. Raina swooped upon him. Before he had the time to lift his weapon, she buried one blade in his gut and sliced the second through his neck.
"Leo?" a man called from behind him. "Cover the breach! Hey, asshole!"
Raina locked on the voice, struggling not to cough on the hot smoke. It parted briefly, revealing a man not ten feet away. His eyes widened. He jerked up an automatic rifle. Raina leaped forward. He held down the trigger, spraying bullets, the gun sputtering upwards with each shot.
Raina popped up and hacked at his forward arm. The blade clicked into bone. She whirled behind him and jabbed her other blade into a kidney. He screamed, bending backwards, as if that would cause him to slide loose of the sword. She slashed her unengaged blade across his throat.
As she spun away, she stepped on a broken board. It shifted beneath her. She dropped to the ground, pain shooting up to her knee. A man in a soiled white cape staggered toward her. He carried a pistol, but his eyes were miles away. She cut him down before his awareness could return.
Behind her, warriors charged into the Heart, spreading to both sides of the breach. The smoke was starting to lift. Sworn ran along the top of the wall toward the gap. Her warriors on the ground turned and fired on them, sending bodies skidding to the earth.
Two small buildings stood across from the now-useless gates. Men fled for their sanctuary, white capes flapping behind them. Raina found cover behind a slanted chunk of wood and ordered her people up onto the walls. They flanked the buildings from right and left, firing down on the whitecoats. As the enemy broke from cover and retreated into the grassy fields, G
eorgia's knights trampled into the Heart and rode them down. Further across the grounds, men retreated past the lake, making for the houses on the other side, taking pot shots behind them.
Time to regroup. Raina called her Blades to the pair of buildings. The knights swept back to them, turf leaping from their hooves.
"Why don't they surrender?" Georgia said. "We have them!"
Raina wiped her swords on a rag. "They may think they have a chance to hold out in the houses. We'll find out where they are, then pin them down while the knights clear the grounds."
Mauser wiped ash from his cheek. "If they dig in, it could get bloody."
"We'll burn them out of we have to. Unless it is their goal to die for Anson's name, they will surrender rather than face the fire. There will be civilians, too—if we can convince them to give themselves up, the Sworn may understand there is nothing left to fight for."
"And if Anson continues to exert his Svengali-like hold on them?"
Raina shook her head. "Then there is no saving them."
A stable and a barn stood removed from the housing that fronted the lake. She took the bulk of the troops there. Snipers climbed into the windows. She sent the entire Fourth Blade up onto the outer walls to make sure they were clear and to provide cover for the knights as they swept the outskirts of the Heart.
A gunshot went off, followed by a small flurry, followed by several minutes of silence. Raina circulated outdoors and through the barn, taking stock of her people. A tenth of them were gone, either dead in the forest or lugged off to triage in the nearest house on the slopes leading to the Heart. Another dozen warriors sported blood-stained bandages that looked to be covering bad wounds. This was neither the best nor the worst outcome Raina could have imagined, but the fighting wasn't over yet.
"Contact!" Bryson said from the loft of the barn. "Got a man coming from the houses. Alone."
Raina scrambled up the ladder and went to the window. Outside, a solitary man trudged through the grass. He stopped a hundred yards from the barn, removed his white cape, and waved it over his head.
Relapse (Breakers Book 7) Page 37