by Sam Hawke
“Jov!” I called out with sudden urgency. But my cry was lost in Eliska’s, and the cries from the animal handlers as they started the herd off on its pull, then the screech of stone as the harness tightened around the acid-weakened pillars. I caught another glimpse of the woman, closer this time, coming behind Ectar, her face a stone mask—or was that just the distance?
A great jolt shook the bridge as the supports buckled under the strain. Some of the crowd behind me cheered as it groaned; others merely cried out with wordless grief as the stone cracked and shuddered. The woman came closer still, just behind Ectar.
“Ectar!” I yelled—it came out as a desperate screech, and his head whipped around to find me below. “Behind you!”
He pivoted just as she lunged forward, and they came together in a confused scuffle just before the great stone pillar gave way in an explosion of rock and a drenching spray of water. The great stone pillar gave way in a sudden explosion of rock and a huge spray of water. I must have been the only one looking up instead of down, and saw Ectar wrestling frantically with the woman, their bodies tugging to and fro as onlookers scuttled away.
Then with a final pivot they fell against the wall and the woman’s body bounced over the barrier in one horrible jerky motion. I covered my face, but not fast enough to miss the sight of her plummeting like a rock to the lake below.
Amidst the shouts and screams and roars of the animals and the cracking of the bridge, I looked up again to see Ectar leaning against the edge, hand on his heart, staring down at me with eyes huge in his pale, stricken face.
Feverhead
DESCRIPTION: Common water weed with bulbous roots and serrated, fleshy leaves. All parts of the plant but particularly the leaves are toxic on ingestion or inhalation of fumes from heating.
SYMPTOMS: Short-term overstimulation of the brain and heart, increasing heart rate and causing intense hallucinations. Longer term with repeated doses, interferes with bodily functions including absorption of food, and kidney and lung function. Causes weakness, listlessness, weight loss, shortness of breath, starvation or suffocation, heart failure.
PROOFING CUES: Peppery, hot taste with a metallic aftertaste.
15
Jovan
No one seemed to know what had happened. Shouts clashed around me and the platform was suddenly a press of panicking bodies: some hanging off the edge, trying to see below, some fleeing from unspecified danger. Several figures in physics’ blue sashes splashed into the water, trying to pull out the body. Oku and graspads had broken free of the harness and trampled about, hooting in panic and confusion from the noise.
But my sister stood alone, ten treads clear of the crowd, staring up at us, and I’d heard her voice in the moments before. She’d warned Ectar of something behind him. Which meant Ectar hadn’t initiated whatever had happened here.
I pushed through to where Marco was holding the Talafan noble’s shoulder. “Marco, please,” I said, and the Warrior-Guilder obliged, releasing his heavy grip as he regarded me quizzically. “I saw what happened,” I lied. “Lord Ectar was attacked.”
“We’ll take care of him,” Tain agreed. “I need you down there to keep that crowd back. See if Lord Ectar’s attacker survived the fall?”
Tain’s gaze flicked down to Kalina; he must have heard her, too. Marco nodded. His big form sprang away down the steps, nimble as a child’s, and moments later his voice boomed out, pushing back the approaching gawkers.
“Everyone move off the platform now,” Eliska shouted, trying to herd her Guild members away from us. “Down the stairs, please, and wait with the Warrior-Guilder down there.” She leaned over the opposite side. “Someone get those damn animals under control!”
Finally, a moment of space around us. I kept my voice low. “Lord Ectar, what happened?”
“That woman…” His face blanched. “She pushed into me. Your sister, Credola Kalina, called out a warning. I did not…” He trailed off, looking again over the wall behind him. “I did not mean…”
“Did you recognize her?” Tain asked the question of me as much as Ectar, but we both shook our heads. I had been on the wrong side of the platform and hadn’t seen anything through the press of bodies.
“She came up behind me,” Ectar said. “I do not understand. Was she trying to push me over the edge?”
Kalina, puffing and shaking, stepped onto the platform. “No. She was trying to push you into the Chancellor.” I caught her under the shoulders as she slumped a little. My heart pounded with worry as much as confusion. But she shook me off and moved to the edge of the platform. She pushed at the stones experimentally, and checked the ground. “Here.”
I crouched beside her. “It’s greasy.” I touched the slick substance to my tongue out of habit. “Gadfish oil.” The kind of thing that might have been accidentally spilled on a bridge near a major fishing spot.
“You were standing right behind the Chancellor, on slippery ground. If you’d shoved into him, he could have gone over.”
“And you’d have taken the blame,” Tain murmured. He squeezed Kalina’s hand. “How did you know to warn him?”
She glanced around. We were temporarily alone, above the chaos below. “It was the sewer guard. I saw her following Lord Ectar. I don’t know. I don’t like coincidences.” We exchanged glances deep with shared memory and pain. Oh, Etan. What I wouldn’t have given for his steady presence and years of experience here.
Ectar mumbled a string of Talafan, shaking his head. “I do not understand,” he said again. “What is a sewer guard? Who was this woman?”
“She probably started the rumors herself,” I said, and Kalina nodded. We should have realized Thendra never would have been so careless as to let someone else see the body in the hospital. I looked Ectar over, weary. He had never looked so young. I doubted he had known much of anything. “Your servant Geog tried to bribe that woman into helping him get out of the city via the sewers.” He took a stumbling step back in apparent shock. “He was killed in the attempt.” And almost certainly not by accident.
“I am sorry for not telling you,” Tain said. Someone below called up to us, and he went on quickly, his voice low. “But we didn’t know if you were working with someone outside.”
“We were meant to think that,” Kalina said. “I suspect your man was just trying to get help from your family. You said he was loyal. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guard initiated the so-called bribe herself. Imagine what would have happened if half the city had seen you knock the Chancellor off the platform.”
“They’d have torn him apart.” A chill came over me at the thought of how close we had come.
Another insistent shout from below. “We have to go down,” Tain said. “Lord Ectar, I don’t know who that woman was working for, but I’m sure she wasn’t acting alone. Whoever tried to kill me wanted you to take the blame—and the blame for my uncle’s death, too. I want you to move into safe custody at the Manor. No more training, no more duty on the wall.”
“I’ll take him back to the Manor,” I said. “Stick with the story that I saw the whole thing. No one is to blame Lord Ectar. In fact, he’s the hero who saved your life.”
Tain nodded. “Yes. Yes, you were heroic, Lord Ectar. The city—and I—offer our sincerest thanks.”
The nobleman didn’t seem to know what to say. He looked between us, lips moving silently.
“Come on,” I said. “You can get a medal later. For now, let’s get you to safety.”
* * *
Ectar’s assailant was dead, her neck broken in the fall. “And half the bones in her body,” Thendra told me, as disapproving as if I had thrown the woman over myself. We had set the shaken Ectar up at the Manor, with one of Tain’s servants assigned to guard him. No one from Credo Pedrag’s sector, to which the sewer guard had belonged, offered any useful insight about her. She had lived with an elderly cousin until his death the year before, and while she socialized casually with others in the sector, none could speculat
e on why she had tried to attack the Chancellor.
Over the course of the rest of the day, this time without fanfare, more supports came down at Bell’s, and finally the surface of the walkway itself. By the time we finally reached our beds, the bridge was impassable. I took some uneasy hours of rest, with the looming threat of the war machines competing with our faceless enemies within the city to cause me the most anxiety. My dreams were filled with disturbing images: Kalina tumbling over the wall in place of the mysterious assailant, disintegrating stone hands pulling me down into a pit while a Speaker chanted in the background, Tain being knifed in the back, and over and over the decapitated head in the bag that had been the first real brutality of this war.
In the morning, feeling as if I had not slept at all, I visited Trickster’s, which now had the attention of the majority of the Builders’ Guild. Despite the early hour the bridge was covered in people. On my request, Baina showed me the devices fastened around the arch point. “I don’t think it’ll be enough,” she told me, frankly. “We’re all assuming we’re going to have to hold the position. But no one’s got any better ideas, and I’ll be the bloody hero of the day if it works.”
Though the destruction of Trickster’s was partly my handiwork, I couldn’t bring myself to be hopeful. Honor-down, I could only hope it didn’t come to that.
Tain was already by the short side of the wall at the Finger, gesturing as he spoke to a group of engineers. A short distance away, workers bustled back and forth with armfuls of tools and weapons to stock the tower. The lake looked deceptively peaceful, the water moving in lazy ripples like a silvery green cloth and the tower wall smothering most of the noise of the people hurrying across the bridge. We’d walked its length so many times in our lives; it was hard to imagine this being the last frontier of our city.
Eventually the engineers moved on, and Tain said, “You know, you missed my very stirring speech about Ectar’s bravery yesterday. Lini helped me write it. We’re hoping it’ll go some way to stop people thinking anyone not born here’s our enemy.” He sighed. “Do you think Lini’s right? Was that guard really trying to kill me? She targeted two Talafan, couldn’t she just have had a grudge against them?” I raised an eyebrow and he gave a half snort. “All right, all right. I could hope.” His eyes were distant as he stared beyond the bridge. “Do you think they’ll destroy it? The city, I mean. Assuming we can knock the bridge down, or hold it. When the rebels break through, will they wreck the lower city?”
I shrugged. “They might have to take time to regroup and restrategize. Ten thousand bored, angry rebels with a grudge against the city.… I’d guess they’d give it a go.”
“So, even if we survive, I’ll be remembered as the Chancellor who let half our city be destroyed.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. You’ll also be remembered for having the biggest ears.”
He grinned. “Small mercies.”
“Sure, the losing-the-city thing will probably get written down in a few books. But it’ll be the ears everyone remembers.” I squeezed his shoulder. “Even if they try, how much can they do? They could set fire to the gardens and things, but the buildings are stone. It’d take a long time to do any serious damage. Whatever happens, we can rebuild.” If we survive.
He nodded, but the lines on his forehead remained. “Everyone knows the evacuation signal, right?”
“Kalina visited every sector yesterday and spoke to every squad leader personally,” I said. “They all know it. If—when—it sounds, everyone knows to fall back.”
“And the evacuation plan? What about the routes? We can’t have anyone cut off from the retreat.”
“Tain, it’s all done,” I told him. “There’s not much more you can do. Except, of course…”
“I know,” he said heavily. The lines between his eyes grew deeper. “We have to decide now, while we still have time.”
The cavern system, what An-Hadrea called the catacombs, was on the west side of the lake. If the Darfri hidden there didn’t evacuate to the upper city with us, they’d be trapped beneath the invading army. Which either meant loyal citizens would be put in danger, or we would be handing sympathetic people who knew the layout of the city and the state of our resources to the enemy. Or, more likely, both.
But it was a maze down there, and we’d no idea who was hostile to us.
“We could go down there and round people up,” I said, but guessed his reaction even while suggesting it.
“And what if some of them resist? They’re terrified down there. The city already turned against them, for all they know, without us even trying to defend them. If we show up with armed guards to round them up, some might fight back. And I’m not going to be responsible for any more of our own people getting hurt.”
I squeezed the fingers of my right hand against my palm, then my left, keeping the pace even. We were going in circles again, and I had no fresh answers, just the same old tired arguments. “We could leave them there,” I said. “You’re the Chancellor and you didn’t know there were caves down there. The army likely wouldn’t find them. And even if they were found, they’re Darfri. The rebels probably wouldn’t hurt them even if they found them.”
“It isn’t right,” Tain said. I went back to counting in my head as we fell into silence. There was no easy answer.
“I will go.”
We both spun around.
“An-Hadrea,” Tain said. “What are you doing here? I thought you were staying out of sight?”
For days I had suffered through her glowering presence in our meetings with Salvea—too obedient to disrespect her mother openly, she displayed her hostility and resentment through sheer presence—and contended with her melting from the shadows to throw barbs at me at all hours of the day. Her tendency to follow me was annoying, especially as I rarely noticed her until she wanted me to.
The trouble was, no matter how hostile she was to me, and no matter how she used that distance between us like a shield—never offering to let me drop the “An” from her name, as would befit a friend—I was starting to enjoy her company. Her wit was sharp and unexpected, and her passion for the country way of life infectious. Watching her with her little brother—Davi, she called him—she radiated affection, balancing out the harshness with which she regarded Silastians. And I had begun to suspect she liked being around me, too. It was as though she found my inability to respond to her taunts to be some kind of amusing challenge. She hadn’t called me a heathen in days, and I occasionally found hints of warmth in her glances, or a twitch of her lips or creases at her eyes suggesting a suppressed smile.
I hadn’t told Tain she’d been following me around the city. He knew me too well, and he’d have seen the mixed emotions her continual presence generated in me. She glanced at me, a quick, sidelong flash of calculation.
“Honored Chancellor,” she said, tilting her head. “You do not know how to talk to our people. I will speak to them for you.”
“Why?”
“Jov!” Tain glared at me, but he’d not been subjected to her commentary about our self-indulgence and ignorance and lack of tah for days, peppering his every movement, so her sudden offer of help probably didn’t sound so incongruous to him.
“Why would you help?” I asked. “You told us you wouldn’t admit to speaking with us. And you tell me at least once a day that the city deserves to fall, that we brought this all on ourselves.”
“You care so much about these petty matters, Credo Jovan,” she said to me, her voice cool but her eyes sparkling. “You should not pay so much mind to the things people say.”
“Should I stop listening when you talk?” I muttered, and this time I definitely caught a twitch of her lips.
“This is not about me,” she said, returning her attention to Tain. “This is about helping my people. They will hide if you go into the catacombs, but I could spread word that the lower city is being evacuated. Then those who want to come into the upper city can do so.”
But I frowned. “You were worried about being branded a traitor just for talking to us. How could you pass on a message from us without putting yourself in danger?”
She pushed fabric back from one hip, revealing a long, curved dagger hanging from her woven belt. “You will see that my mother and brother will be protected, yes? You move them to your Manor. I can care for myself.”
“Are you sure?” Tain asked her. “You don’t have to do this. Your family’s already risked so much.”
“Forgive me, Honored Chancellor, but I do not offer for you. I offer for the sake of my people.”
“I respect that,” he said. “If I had any other viable options, I want you to know I wouldn’t allow you to bear this risk, but the truth is, we couldn’t think of a way to do this.”
“I know,” she said, with no trace of embarrassment. “I was listening to you talk. You two, you talk, talk, all the time. Like old folk around the fire.”
Tain laughed. “I guess we do. Let’s hope we’re good enough at it to convince everyone to stop fighting.” He stood up straight, stretching his back and shoulders. “Tell them to listen for the gongs, for the retreat signal. Three quick strikes in a row, pause, three more. It’ll keep ringing as long as we can manage it. At that signal, they should retreat over the bridge and head for Potbelly Square. There’ll be people there to help everyone find their way.”
“Three gongs, repeating, and go to Potbelly Square,” she said.
“Try to convince people to come now, if you can. Especially families. I’d prefer it if we didn’t have any panicking children running about if we have to call a retreat.”