City of Lies

by Sam Hawke

  The sun had been in our sentries’ eyes, and none had noticed the ladders until the army had rushed across most of the gap. They had simply emerged, rising from the ranks like magic.

  “We’ve sounded the alarms, but it’s mad up there,” the woman said, her voice high and shaking. “They’re coming up the ladders so fast.” Pulse drumming in my head, I accepted the sword handed to me and joined the stream of makeshift defenders scurrying up the stairs onto the wall.

  The walls were a press of bodies and fear. We weren’t soldiers, only ordinary men and women poorly armed, clotted together in a panic, clutching swords or daggers or firing bows over the walls.

  Rebels swarmed like insects up a tree, protecting themselves from our arrows and pitch with small bucklers strapped to their arms. The sight of them so close, so determined, sent my stomach churning in a wash of cold fear. They still wore veils, and it gave their faces a frightening, sinister air. I could face being poisoned a hundred times over this. Though our precious arrows flew like rain in a windstorm, few seemed to hit their targets. I pushed away from the parapet to make room for an archer and headed into the press above the nearest ladder. My hand, wrapped around the hilt of the unfamiliar sword, felt hot and weak.

  In the thick of clumsy, desperate fighting it was hard to see through the crowd, but as many attackers seemed to be scrambling over the wall as were stopped. The horrible sound of screams as rebels fell or were pushed from the walls rang through my ears. The man in front of me staggered to his knees, crying out, and a sword thrust toward me. I leaped back and to the side, just avoiding the blade, and stabbed forward. Only as I pulled back my strike did I realize with shock that it had found its mark. Our eyes met. He looked as surprised as me, and as scared. Then he collapsed to his knees on top of the fallen Silastian.

  My throat clenched and my stomach turned over. I’d killed someone. Blood rushed in my ears but there was no time to think before someone jostled me from behind and I stumbled over the bodies toward the wall. A clumsy attempt at a block earned me a burning slice on my arm. The big Silastian to my right hacked my attacker’s arm clean off with a huge axe blow, and the blood spurted over me in a sickening burst of red and the overpowering metallic smell of blood. A mass of bodies surrounded me, screaming, shoving, with seemingly no direction or focus to the attack.

  Stumbling forward again, I found myself at the wall, faced with a rebel scrambling over the edge. I met his howling lunges with slow and unresponsive arms, my breath in short gasps. Somehow I blocked one strike after another, then our swords came together and mine slipped down into the man’s chest. He fell, nearly taking my sword with him, and I couldn’t look down at his body.

  Panting, I slashed at anything trying to come over the wall; an emerging arm, legs, a questing hand—trying not to think of the people to whom the appendages were attached. I drove the butt of my sword into the face of another attacker as she tried to vault up. They had the advantage of numbers but our positioning was strong; it should have been easy to stop the climbers or to dislodge the tops of the ladders and tip them. But in the mad cluster and overpowering noise, the rebels kept managing to get over. Everything was so close it was hard to distinguish between Silastian and rebel, especially since in the close quarters of battle veils were torn or had fallen from their faces, making it all too obvious that we fought our own people.

  I found myself caught between foes—my right arm entangled with one woman, our shortswords locked together, my left shoving back a man with an arm and a knee up on the edge of the parapet and a long knife in his free hand. I wavered, my attention split, panic choking me, until someone else shoved into the woman and knocked her away from me. I pulled my arm free and spun back, throwing my weight against my left forearm to tip the climber back over.

  I was already turning to find another opponent when a sudden tug knocked me off my feet and my body was jerked like a puppet to the wall. My hip smashed into the stone and my feet bounced off the ground. Nausea, dizziness, then sheer terror took over; my attacker had latched on to my arm and dragged me with him, over the edge. Light and sky and stone and ground spun in my vision as I plummeted.

  Sheer luck saved me. I tumbled into another climber and the impact, hard enough to knock the wind out of me, broke the speed of my fall. Tangled together, both of us managed to wrap limbs around parts of the ladder, crying out as desperate, grasping hands lost skin in the attempt. I squeezed my knees around the side of it and clung, upside down, but lacked a decent purchase. I half-fell, half-slid down the rest of the ladder and landed on my side, dazed. But not dead.

  At least not yet. A glint of steel flashed in the corner of my eye and I rolled instinctively away as a sword smashed into the spot I’d vacated—which was the body of the man who had fallen with me, I realized with horror. Gasping for breath, I scrambled to my feet and backed away from my assailant as he pulled his sword from the body. My own weapon was long gone. He rushed at me and I dodged, clumsy and dizzy, barely avoiding his lunge and almost tripping over yet another body. He was much bigger than me but looked, from the way he held his sword, as uncomfortable with its use as I’d been. His veil had fallen around his neck and his face was twisted with hatred. The image of the head in the sack flashed before me, and for a second fear paralyzed me. People who could do that to a messenger were capable of anything. I backed up, scanning the ground. There must be weapons on the bodies scattered about. But even as I ducked to try to pry a knife from a dead man, the swordsman lunged again and I just barely stayed on my feet.

  “Heretic!” the man yelled, gesturing toward me with his sword. His cry attracted the attention of several others who peeled off from the throng heading for the ladders and circled around me as I backed toward the wall. They wore little armor. Two wielded farming tools, another a crude spear, the last an axe. “Spirit killer,” one spat, and all five advanced, their eyes dark with fury.

  Five to one were bad odds even if I’d had a weapon. My helmet had come off; nothing protected me but a leather vest, half-hanging with a broken strap, which would hardly slow down even their farm implements. But my broken armor had given me another option. My hand fumbled through the purse strapped to my side. As the men closed in I spread my arms wide. “Wait!”

  They didn’t, and neither did I.

  I sprang right, lunging toward the man with the spear. He hadn’t expected it; his eyes widened and he stumbled backward. Too close for the range of his spear, I used those precious moments to fling the contents of one paper packet at him. He swatted at his eyes, momentarily distracted. The man beside him caught the spray of an open phial; acid peppered his hands and forearms and he screamed, dropping his axe and spinning backward, shaking his arms like a madman. The first man had rubbed the lavabulb seeds into his eyes in his attempt to clear his face, and as the burn set in I grabbed his spear and pivoted, easily breaking his grip as he fell, blinded and screeching.

  The other three edged back, eyes darting between my new weapon and their moaning companions. Suddenly they didn’t seem so keen to engage. Spear trained on the swordsman, I edged sideways, the ladder in my peripheral vision. My fingers found the purse again, and as the swordsman charged past my clumsy one-handed spear thrust, I blew the contents of the paper twist at him. He blanched, stumbling enough for me to dodge, but the other rebels came at me at once, and I collected a fiery slash to my upper right arm with a scythe even as I clumsily blocked a hoe, losing my grip on the spear in the process.

  The swordsman raised his weapon again, then started to cough, then gasp, then choke. The man with the scythe stared at his companion in horror as he sunk to his knees, clutching at his throat and chest. “Summoning!” he hissed, like an accusation, and for a moment I just stared, confusion overwhelming my fear. Then he raised his voice and bellowed, “We need a Speaker!”

  Survival instinct took over once again. Whatever they thought I was doing, they feared it. I rummaged in the purse and shook my fist at them menacingly as I edged sidewa
ys. I only had flare oil left, and nothing to ignite it. I needed to get to the ladder. My heart pounded so loudly I thought it might be failing before I realized it was not my heart but a real drum somewhere nearby. One of the men glanced over his shoulder just as a figure emerged from the crowds of rebels. Walking deliberately, she was unveiled, face and bare chest streaked with pale mud forming symbols I didn’t know, and tailed by a child beating a skin drum, his song lost to the roar of the crowd. Clouds of dust beneath the feet of the rebels seemed to part around them. There was something wrong about her, something old and otherworldy, like a creature from a nightmare. I suddenly very intensely did not want to know what a “Speaker” was.

  Where the sight of the approaching woman had increased my fear it had the opposite effect on my enemies; buoyed by her approach, and seeing through my bluff, the remaining two men approached cautiously again. Though I feinted to gain a few steps closer to the ladder they figured me out soon enough and moved to block my exit, weapons raised. All the while the woman approached slowly, the beat of the child’s drum matching her footfalls as though she shook the very earth.

  This was it. I had nothing left. I met the eyes of the man who was about to kill me—with a hoe, of all things—and he lunged, driving it toward my throat.

  Then feathers sprouted from his chest. His eyes widened with shock as he fell. The man with the scythe stopped midstrike, staring at his fallen companion, then he, too, was hammered down by the force of an arrow plunging into his shoulder. I looked up. A figure—no, two figures—hung dangerously off the edge of the wall, shooting down at my opponents. A louder pounding sound broke my stupor; I spun to see the child with the drum only a few treads away, and the woman crouched to the ground, fists full of dirt, burning gaze on me.

  I ran for the ladder, clambering over bodies. A hiss and cry sounded behind me as another arrow found its mark. Grabbing a rung with my slippery left hand I hauled myself up, clinging three-limbed to the underside of the ladder. Rebels surged up its front side, face-to-face with me but oblivious to my identity as they climbed past.

  From the ramparts above came a cry that might have been my name, then a hoarse scream of a woman falling off the ladder. My rescuers above were clearing me a path. Gritting my teeth with the effort, I scrambled a hand around to the top side of the ladder and pulled myself over.

  Screams, shouts, and the twang of arrows bloomed around me, but I shut them out and concentrated on the rungs, counting them in eights as I climbed. At one point a horrible crack broke my concentration and terrified screaming cut through the battle noise as one of the other ladders burned and broke, dropping dozens of rebels to their deaths. My breath came out in wheezy little puffs and gasps, and several times my bleeding hands weakened and slipped, but none of the arrows struck. The soldiers above didn’t notice I didn’t belong, and those below didn’t catch me. Left, right, left, right, five, six, seven, eight … How was it taking so long?

  Then a jolt as someone below me grasped at my ankles, yanking one leg free from the rung. I slipped and cracked my chin, but hung on and kicked down hard, trying to knock them away. The grip only tightened; it felt abrasive, grainy, like a glove made of crushed shells. I dared a look down but in the confusion and with the other climbers I could not see who held me, only a glimpse of hard brown fingers around my shin, tightening, tightening, with each beat of the now-distant drum below, crushing the bone.…

  Then the drum stopped, and the pressure was gone, like that. I peered down but saw no sign of my pursuer; no one was looking at me or appeared to have fallen suddenly. Discomforted, I paused, but then I heard “Jovan!” and shaking my bruised leg I hurried after the man above me. We were almost at the top. Tain was there, leaning too far out a crenel, Marco on the other side with a huge curved blade, slashing down at the men trying to scramble up over the wall.

  “Hang on!” Tain called. The man above me surged up the last few rungs and sprang over the top. I heard him grunt as Marco’s blade took him, then he half-slid, half-fell, his foot scraping over one of my hands. He hit my shoulder and tumbled off the ladder, but I clung on. Below me his body hurtled to the ground, and as he landed I saw the body of the strange woman beside him, felled by an arrow.

  “Get up here!” Tain yelled, and I forced my half-numb body to obey, working my way to the topside of the ladder then scrambling up the last few rungs. Strong hands gripped my forearms, helping me, dragging me over the cool stone and into the safety of the ramparts. I slumped against the wall, curling my knees up to my chest. I didn’t have the energy or the balance to stand.

  “Now!” Marco bellowed. “One … two … over!”

  A huge rock went over the edge, and a massive crack signaled the destruction of the ladder. I shut my eyes, breathing hard, and tried not to listen to the screams of the falling and crushed people below. Having just been below the wall, with its immense height and weight looming above like a malevolent giant, I empathized too easily.

  “That’s the last one,” Tain said, dropping a hand on my shoulder. His voice sounded raspy, hollow. “The last ladder. They’re falling back.”

  “Arrows after them!” Marco yelled, and I summoned enough strength to crawl across the ramparts so our archers could move back to position. Tain crouched in front of me, pulling off his battered helmet. His face was drenched in sweat and splattered with blood. “How badly are you hurt?”

  I blinked, trying to catalogue my various injuries, but unable to focus. “I’m fine,” I managed. My tongue felt thick in my mouth and when I tried to thank him my words didn’t come out, my head swam, and then black spots in my vision became black clouds and took over altogether.

  Clouddust

  DESCRIPTION: Spray released by the cloud lizard, a highly aggressive white/gray alpine reptile. Inhalation of or exposure to the spray is extremely dangerous. Can be harvested into a highly corrosive serum, which is deadly if undiluted.

  SYMPTOMS: Topical, manifesting in reddening and blistering of exposed skin, usually causing permanent damage if not immediately treated. Ingestion of the serum causes immediate painful burning of mouth, throat, and stomach and intense abdominal pain; inhalation of the raw spray causes lung failure and can be fatal.

  PROOFING CUES: In high quantities burning sensation in mouth is obvious and the smell rancid and pungent.

  6

  Kalina

  When I finally burst into the hospital, it was barely recognizable. Pallets filled the cool, spacious entrance hall, physics and assistants threading between them in moving lines like great serpents. People bustled past and I tried to dodge but ended up jostled, always in someone’s way. I backed up against a wall to escape the chaotic mass for a moment, trying to see through the crowd.

  “Lini?”

  Tain slipped through the crush, people flowing around him effortlessly, and as he put his hands on my shoulders I grabbed one, relieved. “Have you seen Jov? Someone said he was here, but I can’t find him.”

  He squeezed my hand, brushing my disheveled curls off my face. “He’s all right,” he said. “Jov’s all right.”

  My breath fell out, relief drenching me like a sudden shower. “Where is he? How badly was he hurt?”

  I was looking right at Tain, our faces close, and I knew his tells as well as my brother’s; the tiny glance to the side, licking his lips before he spoke. Though his words were reassuring—Jov was not badly hurt, no permanent damage—he was hiding something.

  “We broke the rest of the ladders after that,” he finished. “And we got Jov to the hospital straight away. Thendra says he’s going to be all right.” He smiled wanly. “Come on, I’ll take you to him.”

  He held my hand across the room and the noisy path gave me no space to speculate further about what was wrong. Once I saw Jovan, it no longer mattered. I dropped Tain’s hand and ran to my brother.

  Jovan sat on a stretcher pallet, his head bowed so his hair fell over his eyes, his legs crossed, while the physic Thendra stitched a wound on
his right shoulder. Purplish black shadows and zigzags of blood and dirt dappled his entire torso. At my approach, he looked up.

  “Thank the fortunes,” he said. “You stayed away from the fighting.”

  “You were worried about me?” My laugh caught in my throat. “Tain said you fell off the wall. Thank the fortunes you’re alive, you clumsy oaf.”

  I perched next to him, taking his hands. His tight smile turned to a grimace as the physic pulled together ragged pieces of skin. “Thank Tain and Marco,” he said. “They’re the ones who rescued me.”

  It was only then I realized Tain hadn’t followed me.

  “Hold still,” I murmured as the physic worked her way down the wound. An ugly, jagged gash began with a burst of torn flesh a handspan below his shoulder and traced around to finish under the point of the joint like macabre bloody jewelry. I felt sick looking at it. Jovan’s face was drawn and his eyes unfocused, signaling that he had retreated into his mental space to try to stay calm. His whole body thrummed with tension as he suppressed whatever compulsion plagued him. I cleaned the blanket of grime, blood, and sweat from my brother’s arms with damp linen.

  Thendra tied off the end of her stitching, neat and precise. “How many people got hurt?” I asked, trying to avoid looking at the ruin of my brother’s shoulder.

  “I do not know for certain,” Thendra said. She rubbed the heel of her hand over her tired eyes. “At least two dozen dead, perhaps more.” She gestured to the far corner of the room. I followed her arm and winced at the sight of the covered, still figures, laid out on the floor together like dolls.

  “They were ferocious,” Jovan murmured, scrutinizing the newly puckered flesh on his arm with dispassion, a look reminiscent of Etan. “Even with the ladders, I didn’t think they’d do much damage—we should have been able to hold them off. But they fight like…” He blinked, and his face turned thoughtful. “Like it’s more important than anything. When I was down there, they wanted to kill me. They hate us, and they’ll give us no peace, just like they said. They called me spirit killer and heretic. It’s religion driving this, I think, but I don’t understand why.”