City of Lies

by Sam Hawke

  Marco, grim but calm, listened to Tain’s quick summary and leaned in close, talking into the Chancellor’s ear. I couldn’t hear above the tide of blood in my head and the increasingly shrill and desperate questions and cries. But Tain nodded, said something, nodded again. Marco strode a few steps up the wall and held his arms up for attention.

  “Quiet!” he roared. The Order Guard in the tower stopped ringing the bell, and slowly the crowd below quieted to an anxious murmur. “There is an army outside, and we are without our own. We have no time. If you are between fifteen and fifty years old, and physically capable, you will stay here and wait to be given a weapon. You are our line of defense if the gate is breached. If you are younger or older, you will go back to your home right now and pull together anything that can be used as a weapon. Knives, tools, anything you can hold and swing. You will bring it back to the nearest road gate.” He raised a hand again to the increased shouts and cries in response. “Take children who are too young to be alone and the elderly who cannot run to the school. Get them inside and keep them together. Now!”

  Someone nearby started sobbing. Kalina’s hand shook in mine. “You heard Marco,” I told her, stupidly, desperately grateful for his words. “Etan’s knives. Whatever else you can find. Then get to the school.”

  She yanked her hand free, her eyes teary as she glared at me. “I’m capable enough. I’ve been swimming, running.… I’m stronger now.”

  There was no time to argue. Marco was back down to our level now, his eyes sweeping over us all, seeing resources, making calculations. He barked orders at the Guards around us. “You two, go to the other road gates and give the same instructions there. There is a weapons storeroom in every gate tower containing confiscated weapons from visitors to the city. Hand out what we have. Prioritize people who have held a weapon before. Take a few youngsters to be your messengers and you keep me informed. Yes? You, there, you take a dozen citizens with you and get back to the Guildhall. Take my chit”—he yanked a thin chain from his neck and pressed it into the Order Guard’s hand—“and tell the clerk at the armory you’re taking everything they have. Confiscate the first carts you come across and get those weapons back to the wall.”

  Tain stared out at the crowd. “They’re not moving.” He squared his shoulders and pushed past me, back up to the stairs. “Silastians!” he cried. “I am your Chancellor! This is our home, and it is under attack. For the honor that we all live by, do as the Warrior-Guilder says and protect our home!” My friend’s voice shook. He was no natural orator, and he’d been thrust into a new role he’d not expected to shoulder for a long time. He wasn’t prepared. None of us were.

  But Silastians lived by a system of honor, and they loved their Chancellor. They listened. Marco repeated his directions and the crowd dispersed, though wails and shouts still filled the air. I felt their confusion and terror reflected in me. We were merchants, craftsmen, students, and artists, living rich and sheltered lives in the most beautiful and cultured city in the continent. We knew nothing of the war and tyranny our ancestors had fled long ago; it had not followed them. Only the Warrior-Guild remained of that lifestyle, least respected and honored of the Guilds; and now, when they could have proven their worth, they weren’t here.

  “Will the gates hold?” Tain was asking Marco.

  The big man rubbed his close-cropped hair, frowning. “I do not know, Honored Chancellor. I am not … I teach weaponry, you see. I do not know much of walls.”

  “Where’s Eliska?” Tain asked. “Someone find the Stone-Guilder!” He looked up at the Order Guard hanging out of the tower. “How far, Chen?”

  “Two hundred treads, Chancellor, maybe less. Coming steady.”

  “Honor-down, we have to be able to talk to them.” Tain stared up at the walls with a kind of fascinated horror. “What if I—”

  “You can’t go up there again,” I said.

  “We can’t let them attack without trying.”

  “I agree,” said Marco. “But you were shot at before, Honored Chancellor. We don’t know who those people are. They may have disguised themselves as peasants in order to gain access to the city, and only when they realized the city was closed down and the gates shut did they decide to attack. We have to assume this is a well-provisioned army. So we have a short window to send out a peace negotiator before it is too dangerous to open the gate.”

  Tain hesitated, then nodded. “Set it up.”

  It seemed to take an eternity to find a diplomat from the Administrative Guild. A rounded, elegant woman, she visibly trembled as she took the hastily made negotiation flag, green fabric torn from a commandeered litter and a black sigil for peace in standard Trade, drawn with purloined makeup. Tain murmured encouragement, holding her shoulders, and his words seemed to calm her.

  “We have no quarrel with anyone, and certainly not our own people if that is them out there,” Tain said. “Remember, we want to talk, and we’ll hear any grievances.”

  As she ducked under the partially raised portcullis and through the lonely dark tunnel toward the gate, a shiver came over me. Grievances from our own people could have been brought to a determination council in any town, or appealed directly to the Council. This was something else entirely. A rebellion, or an attack from a foreign power?

  The clank of the metal gates closing behind her reverberated in my chest.

  An Order Guard handed out weapons from the tower as Marco scurried about, pointing and shouting, trying to organize the crowd. I was no strategist but I knew the layout inside the city didn’t favor us for any kind of battle. There was too much open space around the road and the buildings were set too far back from the wall. There would be no way of containing the spread of attackers if they made it through the gate.

  I accepted a simple shortsword from the Order Guard then followed Tain up into the top of the tower with the unfamiliar weapon. We peered together through the slit window.

  Below, the lone messenger, flag dragging her crooked in the wind, teetered into view. I crouched lower, watching the progressing army, hoping with everything in me that an answering green flag would emerge. The cocoon of the tower room insulated us from the panic below. Every sharp breath Tain took rasped like a scratch in my ears. Why was it taking so long?

  “There!” Tain grabbed my arm.

  A small contingent advanced from the army. From the distance I could make out little about the veiled figures. Were they leaders? Negotiators? Real peasants or soldiers disguised?

  Closer they drew together. A vein in my lip pulsed against my gums. I tried to ignore it. The figures stopped, then …

  “No!” Tain screamed in the same instant I did; the smooth draw of bows from their billowing clothes, the nocking of arrows, and it was over in a moment. “Fuck, fuck!” Tain pounded the stone, useless, hopeless, thirty treads in the air and fifty from her body, punctured with arrows, green peace turning brown with her blood.

  I squeezed my eyes shut while Tain raged around the room. The shock had stolen my breath. There was to be no honor and no negotiation, then. “We need to prepare,” I said, finding my words at last.

  The first of the wall defenders streamed up the external stairs on the other side of the gate, some carrying bows, some rocks, as we passed the news to Marco. He took it in stride. “They do not wish to give us time to prepare. You must get across the lake if the gate falls, Chancellor.” Outside, the thunder of feet seemed to shake the very ground. “I will check that the other gates are ready,” he said. “Chen, call the volleys.”

  “In range!” someone cried from the wall moments after Marco disappeared. Tain charged down the steps and I was left scrambling after him. “Honor-down, Tain! You can’t go out there.”

  He didn’t even turn around, just slipped from my grasp and leaped out onto the battlements. I swore and followed.

  People lined the wall, fumbling awkwardly for spaces and tripping over dropped items. Some had bows and shot downward through the crenellations, seemingly at
random, despite Chen’s timed commands in the background. Many hurled rocks and pottery and metal utensils over the edge. Others had scrambled back to the far side of the battlement, too fearful to act at all.

  A crash sounded as the army collided with the gate. An arrow whizzed past me and sailed into the empty space behind the wall, dropping with deceptive softness and grace. My heart in my throat, I hunched, trying not to get in anyone’s way as I followed Tain. He moved fearlessly through the chaos, pressing to the edge of the walls to get a view below. Breathless, I finally caught up, grabbing his shoulder as I joined him between two men with bows.

  “You have to get away from here!”

  I snatched a glance below. I could see straight down but the blinding western sun obscured much of the movements below. Close to the wall, what looked like a great overturned boat, covered in leathers, sheltered attackers working with axes on the gate. One of our arrows found the side of a man supporting the device and he staggered and fell. I pulled back from the wall, feeling nauseous.

  Faint tremors rumbled through the wall as axes struck the gate. I reached over and yanked Tain’s paluma. He stumbled and dropped back beside me.

  “They can’t really be our own people,” he said in my ear. “What if—”

  Before he could finish, the man next to us fell backward with a grunt, colliding into several other people, an arrow protruding from his neck. Blood pulsed through his scrambling fingers, and his mouth worked silently, like a fish.

  I crawled over and caught his hands, putting pressure on the wound to slow the bleeding. “Don’t pull at the shaft,” I told him. “You’ll make it worse.” Part of me wondered how it could possibly get worse. “Are there any physics here yet?” I yelled.

  Tain knelt on the other side. My eyes fixed on the bone shaft jutting out from the poor man’s throat. I measured his struggling breath, the pallor of his skin, the speed of the blood from the wound, seeking the familiar dispassion of analysis while beside me Tain comforted him, holding him still at the shoulders and speaking slowly and calmly. The wall shuddered as the attackers pounded at the gate.

  Finally, a man in a physic’s blue sash scrambled up the stairs and over to us, a bag in hand. I moved out of the way as he took charge, checking the man’s pulse and breathing and then padding around the arrow with cloth from his bag. “Good—you didn’t move the shaft. Hard enough to get an arrowhead out without having to scramble around to try to find it. Here, give me a hand with this fellow.”

  The physic hadn’t recognized Tain in the confusion. I hid my relief by assisting with the injured man’s legs and the three of us carried him back down into the city grounds. We had barely reached the bottom step when others hurried forward to help with our burden. I scarcely had time to breathe before Marco found us.

  “This is the weakest gate, Honored Chancellor,” he said. “It replaced the original gate some decades ago and it is not built to withstand this kind of force. They are attacking the joints between the panels.”

  “We can’t sustain this,” Tain said. “We’ve barely any weapons and our people don’t know how to use the bows they’ve got. We’re relying more on luck than anything else. Where’s Eliska?”

  Marco collared a nearby Credola. “Find the Stone-Guilder,” he ordered, and though her mouth twisted with affront, she sprang off quickly enough. Yesterday Marco had been the least important Councilor—the temporary substitute leader of the least respected Guild. Now our lives depended on his leadership as much as Tain’s. The fortunes only knew whether either would be up to the task.

  Eliska found us soon after. Her well-muscled arms and broad, strong hands bore some scratches and dirt marks, and her round face seemed to have gained ten years in the past hour.

  “We need this gate reinforced,” Tain said. “Can you get your best people—pull them off the walls if they’re up there—and do something from the inside that will help it hold?”

  The Stone-Guilder frowned, calculating in silence. Eventually, she nodded.

  “I can secure it—it’ll make a mess of the gate for the future, but I can stop anyone getting in there.”

  “Do what you can.” Tain clasped Marco’s shoulder. “Can we pull all the Order Guards here? We need people who can actually use bows to protect the gate.”

  “We need to break that contraption they’re sheltering under,” I said. “What if we dropped something seriously heavy on it—statues from the wharf street gardens, maybe?”

  “That should buy Eliska time,” Tain said. The Stone-Guilder already had a small group of Builders’ Guild members around her, scurrying to her quick orders. “I just hope it holds.”

  * * *

  It held. As Eliska said, it wasn’t pretty, but the reinforcements strengthened the gate where the metal had bowed and chipped from the force of the attacks. Eventually, after having lost their upturned boat to some of our fine marble sculptures, the attackers abandoned the attempt and fell back to a position away from the wall. Though it had felt like hours, the whole attack and retreat had been swift.

  We had left the Order Guards and senior Guild officials in charge while we held the emergency Council meeting. I wasn’t sure they would be able to contain the panic; some terror-driven scuffles had already broken out as people streamed in every direction through the lower city and across the lake. The gate reinforcement had given us some time, but likely not much. How fast could we fit untrained citizens with our light stores of armor, and show pampered scholars and merchants how to use weapons they’d never even held?

  The Council chamber had been tense and unruly a few days ago at my first meeting. Now that seemed tame by comparison. The comfortable setting contrasted sharply with its disheveled, quarreling inhabitants.

  Marco, his earlier authority swallowed by politics, sat like a nervous child in school while Councilors loomed over him on either side, peppering him with question after question. A few Guilders were engaged in heated words with the Credolen about whether the landowners ought to have known there was trouble on their estates. Tain’s gaze and attention flew back and forth, trying to listen to multiple conversations at once and contributing to none of them. I watched, anxious, willing him to take control.

  “Why haven’t our spies reported an uprising on the farms? We do have spies, don’t we?”

  “Why would we need spies when the landowners are right here around the table? I know none of you like to actually go there, but you all have stewards. Don’t you get reports? Rebellions don’t come from nothing.”

  The Credolen around the table looked uncomfortable; lots of shifting eyes and wringing hands. Some of it I shared; after all, what attention had I ever paid to our estates? Etan and I had always been focused on our duty to the Chancellor’s family, and left the management of our family’s business largely to our steward, Alozia, and my mother. Tain, too, knew next to nothing about how his estates worked; it was the usual practice for the Chancellor and Heir, who had to look to the health of the entire country and not just to their own businesses and affairs. “Farmers, miners, workers, they always grumble,” Credo Lazar blustered at last. “No one could expect things to come to violence.”

  “No point wondering where it came from for now,” the Craft-Guilder, Credo Pedrag, said. “We just need to stop it, quick smart. We need more archers up there to shoot them down.”

  Marco rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair, sighing with the frustration of a man relaying information for the fiftieth time. “We lack the people and the weapons.”

  “What I cannot understand is why,” Budua, the Scribe-Guilder, the calmest at the table, balanced her wrinkled chin on her hand with the air of an academic studying an interesting problem. “Yes, I know the Council voted to send the army south. But no one asked me to vote on the understanding that there would be no protection left for the city. We skirmish over those mines every few years. Why did this necessitate leaving the city unprotected?”

  “I was not party to all your deliberation
s,” Marco reminded her. “But it is my understanding that Chancellor Caslav sent the full army as a deliberate show of force to prevent these skirmishes in the future. As for our own garrison, well, Silasta sits in the center of the most protected country in the continent, Scribe-Guilder. Between the mountain ranges and the marshes, no external force could realistically enter Sjona other than through the three border cities, which are garrisoned. An attack on the city has not been a realistic possibility in decades.”

  “And yet here we are.”

  “Here we are,” Marco repeated. His gaze sank to the table. A few days before, the worst part of this role must have been the prospect of being forced to listen to spoiled, wealthy old men and women insulting him; now here he was suddenly in charge of a defense plan no one had even contemplated us ever needing, and having to defend decisions made well above his level of seniority.

  “It’s not the Warrior-Guilder’s fault. No one could have foreseen this,” Tain reassured him. Irritation flickered inside me; of course in Tain’s eyes Aven could not have been responsible for a misjudgment. The fact was, she had misjudged, and perhaps it was her error that cost us everything.

  “Do we even know what this is?” Varina asked. “Forgive me, Chancellor, but is this really some kind of rebellion?”

  “Of course it’s a rebellion,” Nara scoffed. “That’s our own bloody peasants out there.”

  “We don’t know yet what—” Marco began, but his soft voice was quickly lost in the increasing din.

  “Rebellions are for tyrannies! What’s there to rebel against here? Too wealthy? Too much food? Good work, safe homes, medicine, what am I missing?”

  “… out there in their veils, chanting like primitive bloody lunatics—too soft we’ve been on the estates, letting people run wild, this is what happens when you let these people do what they want…”

  “Obviously we weren’t letting them do what they want,” Javesto said, his tone acid, “or they’d hardly be attacking us now. If we could understand why this happened, we might be able to stop it before it gets too serious.”