"You think that will make you sound smarter?"
Flaming arrows launched from along the wall, falling through a long arc before burying themselves in the ground. Their shafts burnt on, denoting range. The norren halted a few yards from the nearest. Atop the wall, arrowheads glittered in the torchlight. Silhouettes moved between the rounded merlons.
"Turn back or be slain!" a commander bellowed from up the hill.
Orlen strode up to the nearest arrow, yanked it from the ground, and broke it in his massive hands. "Within an hour, every redshirt behind that wall will be dead. To avoid that fate, I advise leaping from the cliffs, and taking your chances with the ground."
Norren hollered from up and down the lines. The twang of twenty bows hummed through the night. Orlen turned his back and walked away. Seconds later, a forest of shafts planted itself in the ground where he'd stood.
Hopp loomed beside Dante. "Ready for the big surprise?"
"I hope you've picked some strong men to hold that shield."
"I can vouch for Coe," said the chief. "We'll see how I do."
He beckoned Dante along the ranks to the giant wooden shield-wall. A gigantic norren waited at one of the handles. He nodded at Dante. Hopp grabbed hold of the other side and counted down. The pair hoisted it inches of the ground and shuffled forward.
Dante's heart pulsed. He walked with them, his breath echoing from the close wooden wall. Through the three slits, his vision swayed with the pace of the two norren. Despite the claustrophobia of it all, at least he could still run if it came down to it. In a siege of the eastern kingdoms several hundred years ago, a sorcerer named Federick had had the brilliant idea of enclosing himself inside a wheeled platform of pure iron to protect him as he set to the time-intensive work of blasting a large hole through the massive enemy walls. Once he got into position, an ethermancer among the enemy forces had let Federick work for long enough to drill through four feet of stone, and then, with Federick's strength depleted and his attention diverted, the ethermancer knocked off one of Federick's wheels, trapping him in place, and then turned the ether to the heating of the iron enclosure. Within moments, Federick halted his attack. Within minutes, the entire battlefield smelled like sweet pork.
Dante could at least be certain he wouldn't be cooked. Still, when the first flaming arrow rapped into the wall, he jerked back with a snarl.
"Did you think they wouldn't shoot?" Hopp chuckled.
"Shut up and carry."
"Are those the last words you'd speak to your chief?" Hopp said, mock-aghast.
Another arrow smacked into the wall, several more right behind it. Dante cut his arm. Nether swirled from the grass as if hungry for the tide of blood that would soon sweep from the wall. "This should be close enough."
The two warriors set down the shield with an earthy thump. Dante leaned close to the slits. The doors stood within two hundred yards. Closer yet would have been even better—the nether got clumsier the further away you sent it, and required proportionally more energy to manipulate—but he didn't want to open himself to sidelong fire from the turrets at either end of the wall.
Arrows whacked into the shield and whumped into the earth. Dante shaped the nether between his hands and winged it towards the far-off doors. The gates were inward-swinging, hinges hidden behind the doors themselves, unreachable. Unreachable to anything except a paper-thin blade of nether. It sluiced through the crack between door and wall and cleaved through the thick iron. From his investigation with the mouse, he knew each door had four hinges; four doors in all. One hinge down, fifteen to go. Dante smiled.
Something slammed into his back, pitching him into the shield. His left lower back felt hot and numb. He swore dully.
"Where did that come from?" Hopp shouted at Coe. Coe shook his head quickly, moving to put Dante between himself and the shield.
"Where are you going?" Dante said. He turned. Wood clacked into the wood of the shield, jarring him. He craned his neck. When he saw it, his knees sagged, his vision swarming over with foamy white spots.
An arrow stuck from just below his lower ribs. While he faced the fortress, he'd been shot in the back.
20
He fell to his knees, head hot and fuzzy. A huge hand clamped his forearm, stopping him before he hit the ground. Hopp shouted something Dante couldn't make out. As if he were rising from a pool of warm water, the fuzziness fell away, draining the spots from his eyes as it went. Downhill, two slim figures burst from the ranks of norren. Lira and Blays. They sprinted to their left, headed for the edge of the cliffs.
Hopp leaned into the straps, lifting the shield a couple inches from the ground. He began to move it backwards.
"What the hell are you doing?" Dante said.
"Getting you out of here!"
"Set down that shield. I have a job to do."
Hopp leaned down to meet him eye to eye, as if examining him for signs of sudden insanity. "You've been shot."
Dante gestured toward the edge of the butte. "And my best friend just ran off to slice the one who did it into little red ribbons. Right now I fear more for the shooter's safety than for my own. Now are you going to break off this shaft, or am I going to knock down these gates with an arrow wobbling from my back?"
Hopp shook his head in disbelief. "Is your brain in your back, too? What are you thinking?"
Hopp grabbed hold of the arrow and broke it effortlessly. The pain finally hit, returning the swam of white spots to Dante's sight. He half-collapsed again. Nether surged to the blood dappling the damp grass. He brought a thread of shadows to his wound, just enough to tamp down the pain. He couldn't risk healing himself wholly. Not before he had the gates down.
He willed himself to his feet. The spots faded. Hopp kept the shield upright while Coe maneuvered tight behind Dante to serve as a norren shield. The pain was a dull burn in his back. It seemed to fuel the nether as potently as his blood. He slung another paper-thin blade through the hinges of the door. A third. A fourth. He leaned against the slits. The door held firm. Had he missed a hinge? Left one half-severed? He wasn't thinking straight. His mind was clouded by the denial of the wounded. As he'd sent the blades through the hinges, he could feel the shadows biting cleanly through the iron, but seconds later, he couldn't be certain. He summoned another handful of shadows.
At the front of the wall, the door tilted, exposing torchlight behind it, and fell to the ground with a bang.
Heartened by the rumbling cheers of seven hundred norren, Dante struck at the next door. Not the one next to the one he'd cut down. That doorway was already open. He could faint at any minute. He might not have time for all four doors.
Instead, he hurled the next blade at the door directly behind the first. He felt it shear through the iron like a knife through stiff paper. A single scream echoed from the hallway between the gates.
He cut the next hinges in a haze of pain and exhaustion. He threw the final knife of nether, guiding it to the last hinge, and found the door had already fallen.
Norren roared. Warriors surged up the slope, shields held above their heads. Arrows conked into the wood and slashed into flesh. Dante sagged. Hopp grabbed him with one hand and held onto the giant shield with the other. Warriors poured around them. By the time Hopp set Dante down in the trampled grass back out of arrow range, the entire army of clansmen had run past. Uphill, metal clanged on metal. Men screamed and swore and laughed awful laughs. Dante's ears buzzed. He twisted around for a look at the arrow.
"What do you think?" Hopp said. His fists were wet with blood.
"That it's very dark." Somehow, Dante found the torchstone in his pouch and blew it into life. He raised it to Coe, who watched in silence, accepting the gleaming stone. In the white light, the blood slipping around Dante's wound was as bright as coral. The snapped shaft jutted a hand's-width from his back. Fighting off the urge to faint, he met Hopp's eyes. "Well, what are you waiting for? Pull it out."
"Of your back?"
"Why? Do I ha
ve another one in my ass?"
"You will bleed. You might bleed until you've bled to death."
"I'm my own best shot. If I pass out now, I might not wake up. Now get this out of me and we'll see which one of us is the fool."
Hopp smiled tightly. "How long do you think you can keep giving your chieftain orders?"
"I won't know that until you make me stop."
Hopp yanked. Dante screamed and doubled over, writhing. The white spots turned gray, then black. Hopp was slapping him, shouting, his branded face so comically alarmed Dante chuckled, wincing at the lance of pain that followed. Were the shadows in his vision the waiting nether, or an oncoming and lasting sleep? He groped for them and they shivered like wind-struck leaves. Nether, cool and fluid, mocking and distant and hungry and indifferent. He brought it to his wound, but it was like shaping dry sand.
Hopp wiped the blood with a wet cloth. This fresh pain was icy, not fuzzy, and it jolted Dante halfway from his fog, centering him. He sat in the grass down the hill from a panic of screams and clangs. He smelled smoke, dry and spicy. A great white column rose from behind the wall.
His hand was warm. It was pressed to his wound, which was bleeding quite a lot. His other hand was cold.
Clumsily, ploddingly, he balmed the nether to his wound. The heartbeat of pain eased to a stinging itch. Two figures ran in from the cliffs to his left. Dante tried to stand and fell to his knees. Hopp drew his sword with a whisper of leather.
"Is he all right?" Blays' voice was strained. "You're sitting up!"
"More like falling sat," Dante said.
Lira glanced upslope at the sound of a horn. "We found the shooter."
"You did? What did he say?"
"Well, if I remember right," Blays said, "it was something like 'Aaaahhh!'"
Lira jerked her chin toward the cliffs. "He leapt off."
"He leapt?" Dante said. "Did he make it down?"
"Bits of him sure did!" Blays knelt down across from Dante. He glanced across the trampled fields, as if enemy legions might be hidden in the bent grass. "You know what this means, don't you?"
"Blays, I was just shot." He twisted to see his wound in the darkness. Blood glimmered, but the flow had ceased. "I'm not sure I'm not still passed out and dreaming."
"It means you were betrayed."
"What are you talking about?"
"Set up. Sold out. Hung out to try. Betreasoned. Turned-coat-against." Blays pointed to the left and downslope. "How else would they know to deploy a lone sniper? To specifically target you? We found his little camp over there, hidden in the grass."
Hopp drew back his head. "Who knew about this but the chiefs and our clans? Which of them would possibly sabotage the entire battle?"
"That's what I'm about to find out. Also, I should probably go help with that war thing up there."
"I'm staying with him until he's safe," Lira said, standing beside Dante. "I still owe him."
Blays hiked up his belt. "Leave me to fight a legion of redshirts by myself. Very loving."
"If you need a hand, just ask one of the hundreds of norren warriors."
Blays grinned and dashed uphill. Lira touched Dante's shoulder. "Are you all right?"
"Better than a minute ago." Throughout the talk, he'd been weaving himself back together, stopping up squirting veins, bringing flesh back to flesh. It was more than muscle, skin, and fat—something else had been punctured, too. He feared it was his kidney. He didn't allow himself to look too closely at what the nether mended. He simply guided it from afar, bridging his torn matter back together, restoring what had been ruined to its natural form. "You should go up with the others."
She just laughed. "I'm not interested in having this conversation again."
"Hopp's here."
Hopp smiled his fox's smile. "And now that he's made sure his newest brother won't be the battle's first loss, he should join the fight before his other siblings start to wonder where he is."
The norren unfolded from his crouch and handed over the torchstone. He reached back to touch the greatsword on his back and lumbered uphill. Fighting had broken out atop the wall, swords flashing in the torchlight. A body plunged off the side and didn't rise. The norren had flung open the remaining two doors in the half-wrecked gates and the passage was clear of battle.
"Looks like they're kicking ass," Dante said.
"Forts only work as long as the gates are closed." She peered at him in the light of the torchstone. "You could kill me right now, couldn't you? After breaking down a wall and saving yourself from a mortal wound. You could still kill me with a gesture."
He saw no point in lying. "Yes."
She gave him a strange smile, an ethereal thing better meant for a fairy-circle in a pitch black wood. "It's a wonder all your type hasn't been burnt alive."
"In Mallon, we're kept as the attack dogs of the nobility. You can be killed for flashing the wrong talent at the wrong time." He shifted, testing his wound. It pulled, but the pain was a faraway ache, more the memory of pain than something real. "Cassinder isn't the type to brook threats to his power. If the Norren Territories fall and Narashtovik follows, I expect we'll be forced to serve in Setteven or be hanged from the highest branches."
"He's a ways from the throne yet."
"He'll move closer if he acquits himself in the field. Anyway, Moddegan hasn't exactly displayed a Mennok-like patience and wisdom towards threats himself. Would be easy enough for an ambitious man to plant him in a grave." Dante leaned forward onto his knees and found he was able to stand. "Shall we join them?"
"Are you insane?" Lira rushed to grab his arm. "Ten minutes ago you had an arrow through your back. Sit back down before you keel over and I have to explain to Blays why I'm holding another man in my arms."
Dante shrugged free. "If we never fight except when we're in perfect health of mind and body, we'll never fight at all."
He didn't test himself yet by running. He could walk fine, if stiffly, but there was an alien weakness to his legs that was neither the exhaustion of overexertion nor the soreness of the day after. Bodies lay scattered in front of the gates, mostly human. Arrows jutted from the grass. A bow twanged and Dante jerked down his head so fast his teeth clacked. He could smell metallic blood and the hot, fetid belch of punctured guts. Cries and orders barked through the streets beyond the wall. He and Lira drew their swords with the hiss of steel on leather. Blood tacked the floor of the hallway through the gates. Dante touched one of the severed hinges as he passed. Its edge was as sharp as scissors.
Dozen of bodies lay beyond the second set of doors, human and norren alike. Most of the norren showed arrows in their chests and necks. Most of the humans had been gashed open by giant swords and axes. More than one had been beheaded or outright struck in half. Suddenly fearful he'd see Mourn among the dead, Dante tried to catch a look at each face, but the numbers were too many, the darkness too deep.
Past the wall, a few dozen homes scattered the plateau. They were a mix of human and norren styles—some stone, some wood, some earthen; some boxy and squared, some round, others set flush into the sides of short rises. All had high-peaked roofs to keep off the snow. Several of the wooden ones crackled with flame. Corpses sprawled in gardens. Down the street, a gang of goats trotted past, bawling in confusion.
Off to the left, clan warriors shouted to some twenty of the king's men, demanding they lay down their arms. Dead ahead, a host of norren surrounded a large wooden structure that may have been a church—though Dante doubted that; even city-bound norren worshipped with little organization, heading instead to the forests and hills for their rare rituals and official celebrations—and were busy hacking at the door with heavy axes. Others knelt, bows in hand, to exchange fire with redshirted soldiers sniping from the upper floors.
Dante broke into a jog. An arrow whisked past his head. He raised a bloody hand and knocked a hole through the archer's forehead. The man flew back from the window in a mist of blood. With a creak and a boom, the
doors gave way. Norren surged inside. Steel rang against steel. Dante hit the edge of the crowd and tried to force his way through. Hillocky shoulders bounced him back. He opened his mouth, then let it close without a word. Demanding passage based on his name or title wouldn't budge them an inch. These were norren clan-warriors. They had no more use for the prestige of Narashtovik than they would for lace slippers.
He pulled the nether to his fists and used it to shove men and women aside until he reached the door. Behind him, Lira laughed in a way that might have been disapproving. Inside, norren and men battled between rows of benches. Shouting carried from a stairwell to Dante's right. The voice was Orlen's.
Dante pounded upstairs. The third floor opened to an A-frame room with bare rafters propping up the steeply pitched roof. Ten soldiers in red cloaks stood across the room with their hands up, swords at their feet. A step in front, a man with a tidy salt-and-pepper beard and several silver medals on his doublet faced Orlen, who held his gleaming sword high above his shoulder. Close to twenty norren crowded behind him. Dante recognized several members of the Nine Pines. With a lightening of his heart, he saw Mourn was there, too.
Orlen's sword twitched toward the commander. "Stay completely still or I will make sure you are no longer capable of movement besides whatever parts of you the worms and ants carry away."
"What kind of man are you?" The commander's face was a mixture of anger and fear. "What kind of man strikes a—"
"Your tongue counts as you!" Orlen shouted. Dante couldn't remember hearing the chief raise his voice before. "Kneel!"
One of the Nine Pines leaned forward. "Orlen—"
Orlen whirled, his scarred face contorted like a wolf driven mad by its own wounds. "Why would you think I want you to speak, either? Does it look like I want anyone else to speak?"
The commander held his clenched fist out toward Orlen. "If this is how you honor your—"
Orlen pivoted on his heels. His sword wheeled. Its blade passed through the commander's neck without slowing down. The man's head tumbled across the floorboards. His body stayed upright, his arm lowering as slowly as a man falling asleep in a chair by the fire. Then he fell, a cut puppet.
The Great Rift Page 44