City of Lies

by Sam Hawke

  My companions were readying the bottles. When I dared another check the tower was creaking closer and closer. My group gathered our supplies and moved farther along the wall just as two men in physics’ blue sashes ran by with a litter to take Pedrag to safety.

  We moved west along the wall until we were almost right above the weakened part. We had arrived in a temporary lull, perhaps as the rebels adjusted their weapons. The seige tower approached, its trajectory as far as possible from our towers to the south and west but close enough to take advantage of the weakening wall. A sealed cask of unknown evil, it could hold a hundred soldiers at least. Just as Eliska had speculated, a lower level of the tower was hinged and strapped up, likely containing a swinging ram.

  Our catapult operators must have either found their rhythm or a way to load more efficiently, because the intervals between our staggered shots decreased. As we readied the bottles, cheers rose around us as one of the city rocks struck close to a rebel machine. Up on the north tower, there was a flurry of movement from the roof as the engineers moved to make slight adjustments.

  Then the pounding of drums started up far below, and a sudden coordinated chanting, spookily loud, in words or sounds that made no sense to me. “What are they doing?” someone demanded, and uncertainty rippled up and down our lines. My heart sank as I spotted unarmed, half-clothed women approaching in a slow procession well behind the front lines. Smaller people, possibly children, were scattered among them with drums strapped to their torsos. I tried to push down the fear clutching inside my chest. Superstitious foolishness, I told myself. Intimidation and trickery, nothing more. I shook my head and went back to where the archers were shooting at the approaching tower with flaming arrows.

  Then the wind changed.

  East to north, it changed without warning, one moment streaming off to the side and the next in our faces. The chanting below switched pitch, seemingly growing triumphant, and all the while the ominous pound pound pound of the drums punctuated their voices. “It’s them, they’re doing it,” someone moaned, and similar fearful cries spread from our ranks.

  “Keep going, keep going, it’s just the wind!” an Order Guard shouted as she sprinted past us. But then it wasn’t just wind; it carried grit and dirt in a stinging cloud blown into our faces, as if it really were being controlled by the women below. I spat and shielded my eyes with everyone else, and couldn’t pretend I didn’t share their increasing panic. Anxiety choked me as effectively as the grit in the air.

  “The flames aren’t catching, Credo!”

  I dared a quick check and indeed, though some arrows struck the menacing structure, many others dropped off, diverted by unpredictable bursts of heavy wind. Even when they did reach their target their flaming heads did not catch; whether due to poor landings or the wood being treated with something nonflammable, I couldn’t tell.

  Distracting myself from the fear building from my stomach through my chest, I gave the bottle a swish; the dark liquid within wobbled lazily in response. “What did you add to thicken it like this?”

  “Resin,” a tattooer said. “Same one we use for the inks we have to extract in water. It’s hellish sticky.”

  Archers were shooting frantically and orders were barked down from the line: “’Ware the tower! Hand-to-hand fighters, move in!” From both sides the battlements filled with approaching men and women, armored and bearing swords, cudgels, and other close-range weapons, coughing and spluttering in the dirty wind. As if controlled by giant bellows, the wind rose and died in sudden bursts and spurts like at the crossing of the Maiso. The fear spreading among us was palpable. “I can see things in the air,” a man said to the woman beside him as they passed me. “Do you see that? It’s like there are hands in there.”

  I shuddered. Trickery, I told myself again. We were frightened and the ritualistic Darfri chants were creepy and intimidating; panic was simply making us see things. But the flag on the tower in the distance caught my eye, and my overwhelmed brain registered its stiff, jerky motion parallel to the walls. A shiver ran over my skin. The wind was only blowing at us, at our section of the wall above the breach. How was that possible? How were they doing that? They couldn’t be; it must be a trick of the angles that made the flag act that way. The rebels could not control the very wind.

  “Archers, prepare to retreat!”

  I could hear the tower shuddering toward us into range, and soon its shadowy shape was visible through the clouds. This was our moment. I squeezed the shoulder of the man beside me and together we replaced the nearest archer against the wall. My companion threw hard and accurately and though the burst of dark goo was not properly visible, the sound of smashing glass told us it had landed. But would it be enough? Somehow, even logically knowing the size of the great machine, faced with it now I struggled to process its immensity. Our quantities were so limited, we’d never be able to generate the kind of destructive heat we had hoped. Trying to quiet the roar in my head, I took my turn, hurling my bottle against the tower.

  Someone behind me was coughing and the cough grew increasingly frantic; I turned just in time to see him fall to his knees, clutching at his neck and wheezing. “Choking,” he gasped, blinking at me with wide wet eyes. “Someone’s … choking me.”

  “It’s just the dirt in the air,” I told him as I helped raise his arms up behind his head, but the sudden memory of a strange hand gripping me on the ladder was so vivid that I almost clutched at my ankle. “Try to slow down your breathing.”

  “Hands,” he whispered, and collapsed in a slump.

  “Physic!” I yelled. Someone pulled on my arm and dragged me back to the tower, which wobbled closer, ever closer, as bottle after bottle hit it.

  The resin base seemed to be working; dark stains spread slowly on the wood, dripping down the sides and covering more and more surface. A great screech and thud sounded as the drawbridgelike lower panel dropped open, exposing the metal head of a great ram, suspended by internal chains.

  “Light it! Light it!” The cry went through the archers farther down on either side of us and they leaned out and shot with increased vigor. We all watched for a few breaths, temporarily protected by the siege tower, as the arrows peppered the sides, some digging in and some bouncing off uselessly. But the flames caught this time, rippling across our black smears with enthusiasm, even seemingly jumping between patches like a live thing. What started as a few patches soon spread to a waterfall.

  Too late, I realized our mistake. “The top!” I yelled. “We need to get the top burning!” We had aimed for surer targets instead of lobbing some onto the top platform, and as I watched with a stifling sense of dread, that top panel burst open, spewing forth soldiers like a volcano. Lower panels burst open too and there were soldiers everywhere, bearing great ropes and hooks—did they mean to climb?—and the first swing of the ram crashed into the cracking wall below just as the wave of rebels poured over the parapet and fell upon us.

  Our fledgling organization erupted into chaos again. The visceral memory of my last battlement fighting experience filled me with pure, gut-melting terror: being surrounded and alone and injured, and falling. I fought down panic. I wasn’t armed for close combat and neither were the rest of my eccentric little team. Unable to make myself heard through the roar, I grabbed arms and pulled my comrades away from the fighting and up toward the east tower. “We have to light the ash now!” Fortunately other members of my group had the same idea and were already dropping torches onto the ash bed below. The oil caught and a whip of red flame leaped from the ashes and shot down the line to smoke and burn under the siege tower itself.

  A cheer broke out among our people and it took a moment to realize why: one of our catapults had finally hit the rebels’ catapults. This small victory gave everyone heart; people raced past me with manic grins and increased vigor.

  To my left, someone released a huge metal ball on a chain, fastened in place with a cunning hook in the parapet, and it swung like a colossal pendulum a
cross the front of the wall and punched into the side of the now-flaming tower. A man with arms as thick as my thighs was already winding the reel to recover it.

  Below, behind swirling clouds of black stinging ash and fire, much of which was now being blown up at us as well, rebels on the ground persisted with their great hooks. Now I understood their purpose as the metal teeth bit into mortar and cracks in the wall and with coordinated effort the troops hauled on the rope, pulling out hunks of stone each time. Screams and cries sounded regularly as arrows found marks. The wall shook with the regular droning pound of the ram. Smoke from the flaming tower and ash carried up from our own trap below stung my eyes. And the brutal clash of fighting on the battlements continued.

  We had one set of tricks left: the sedative pouches. Some were sewn and some twisted closed; the former would react with vinegar to release gas and the latter would simply burst on impact and spread powder. However, if we released them into the fray, our own people would be affected as well.

  “The top platform,” someone suggested, and I nodded; if we could hit the rebels still emerging from the structure we could stem the tide of attackers over the wall and buy ourselves more time to destroy the tower. But there was no clear line of sight between us and the platform. We’d never make it through the fighting to get close enough to throw.

  The smallest of our team, a young woman with beautiful decorative tattoos across her shoulders and hands, shoved the pouches into her satchel and slung it on. “Wish me luck,” she said, then clenched the neck of a vinegar bottle in her teeth and leaped up onto the parapet.

  The rest of us were too shocked to protest. As we watched, terrified for her, she scramble-climbed and leaped her way along the stone, bypassing the clashing troops on the walkway. Surely, any moment she’d be shot down.

  But the rebels weren’t firing at this section of the wall, presumably to protect their own people. Still, any moment someone on the battlements could spot her and knock her off.

  “By the fortunes, the kid’s brave,” someone said.

  She was. Fearless, she scampered like an animal into range of the tower. As we watched, she doused the cloth bags in vinegar and threw them in quick succession onto the platform. Then the paper ones followed, sending a temporary cloud of pale gray rising into the air. She gave us a quick wave of triumph, then just as suddenly she was gone, out of our sight, dropping into the crowd fighting below.

  “What happened? Did she fall?” The chemist beside me clutched my forearm. “Did she … Was she…?”

  I shrugged, helpless, unable to answer. It was impossible to see through the thicket of bodies. But my heart felt like stone in my chest. She hadn’t been armored. I wasn’t sure she’d had any kind of weapon. Then the hand on my forearm became a claw and my companion pointed wordlessly at the sky.

  The rebels’ catapults were firing again, and this time they aimed higher; as we watched in horror a huge, boulderlike stone powered into the north watchtower with an enormous crash. Fragments of rock spread almost as far as us, and as the debris cloud cleared it exposed the missing corner of the tower.

  “Time to get off the walls,” I told my remaining companions. “We’re out of ways to help for now.” The roar in my head drowned out my own words, and it was hard to take my own advice. As I urged my team toward the stairs in the distance, somewhere in the orchestra I recognized animal screams. It took a long moment to figure out from where. I leaned through the battlements to see the siege tower, aflame and steaming with gaseous clouds, jiggling like a boiling pot on a stove. The tower must have been propelled by oku or some other beasts harnessed in the base, and the poor desperate beasts were trapped and cooking in fire and stinging ash. Though the stream of people through the top had stopped, the ram kept pounding at the walls with its menacing, repetitive swing. Our pendulum had punched a widening hole in the side, exposing one of the support beams, and the persistent flame from resin-assisted oil spread inside the tower. Arrows streamed past me with a gut-churning whistle, but I was fixated on the sight as the siege tower shook and burned.

  Then two things happened at once: another shot from the rebel catapults struck the north tower, this time blistering through the parapet and into our own machine. And the top half of the seige tower, engulfed now in foul black smoke, collapsed from one corner and with two or three shuddering crashes, crumpled like a collapsible fan.

  Someone grabbed my arm and pulled me along, and I tried my best not to throw up on my shoes as I ran, blinded by smoke and a choking mix of fear, relief, and sadness.

  Stingbark

  DESCRIPTION: Swamp tree with loose bark covered in fine “hair” resulting in a painful sting when touched. Stinging exacerbated by touch and cold temperatures.

  SYMPTOMS: Localized pain at exposure site; if left untreated will build into high fever resistant to cooling, hallucinations.

  PROOFING CUES: Currently no evidence of toxicity in a disguised form.

  16

  Kalina

  The shroud of smoky haze and the distant sounds of conflict were detectable even from the upper city, where I had spent an anxious morning assisting with the evacuation of children and the elderly. On Marco’s heavily worded advice, Tain had refrained from participating in the fighting at the wall; perhaps finally, after two attempts on his life, he was making smarter decisions.

  I felt his frustration, though. Evacuating the city was as important as repelling the attackers; the damage to the wall made it only a matter of hours before it was breached. And I was no use as a fighter. Still, the helplessness of being far from that last desperate defense, not knowing what was happening, was a constant low ache in my bones.

  An-Hadrea had appeared at Trickster’s Bridge earlier with a procession of children and their caregivers from the caverns. They milled behind her in groups, linked at the elbows, like rattling beads, bright and brittle, looking around with suspicion and anxiety.

  “Thank the fortunes,” I told her. “And thank you.”

  “They will be safe, you have promised,” she had said to me fiercely, and I surprised her for once by embracing her as I reiterated my promise. She took it stiffly and stepped quickly away from me afterward, but I took no offense; I’d observed that she and her mother were used to a greater space around them than Silastians.

  I would have preferred to take guards to lead them, but everyone was at the wall, and in the end perhaps they found a lone woman less intimidating. “I know it’s far from glamorous,” I said to An-Hadrea when we arrived at the first of the halls that had been set up with supplies and sleeping pallets. “But it’s safe.”

  “We will take safety,” she said. Then she smiled at me without warning, a warm beam that transformed her face. “You can help with the glamour later, Kalina. You have some very fine jewelry.”

  I laughed.

  Tain arrived soon after, and took the time to move around the quarters, meeting people and reassuring them. His natural self-deprecating charm, coupled with genuine relief that they had come, made the young Chancellor a success among this group, at least. Perhaps things would change if or when the rest of the adult Darfri from the caverns arrived, as most of the potential danger of treachery came from that group. Still, it boded well for the future if we could find peace with the army outside. Tain could bridge the gap between the city and the country if anyone could.

  He was still there when the messenger arrived to tell us that we had lost our north tower catapult but destroyed one of theirs and half of the siege tower. “They had to abandon it in the end,” Erel said breathlessly. “It wouldn’t stop burning. But they’re still going with the hooks and smaller rams, and the Stone-Guilder said to tell you the wall won’t hold much longer. Warrior-Guilder Marco says we need to start full evacuation.”

  My stomach plunged and I shared a look with Tain. Jov had insisted he must help his little team in the hopes of holding the rebels back with minimal casualties. He had promised us he would stay out of real danger, but who could t
rust that nothing had gone awry up there? But then Erel smiled up at me. “Credola Kalina, Credo Jovan asked me to tell you he will be at the Finger helping with the retreat there.”

  I let my breath out and Tain squeezed my shoulder, sharing the relief.

  An-Hadrea accompanied us back to the lower city, saying she would assist any additional Darfri in the caverns who wanted to come to the upper city. I had caught her keen interest in Erel’s message and seen tension drop from her shoulders just as mine had, and wondered.

  Jov was on the bridge with Baina, dangling in a harness over the edge to examine their work. I had to blink away tears at the sight of him whole and well, and hugged him hard when he was hoisted up.

  “We’ve had no time and not enough supplies to get any real measure of force, Honored Chancellor,” Baina reported. “I can’t say this’ll work.”

  “The fortunes have to be with us sometime.” Tain slapped her broad shoulders with false cheer. Jov looked unconvinced. But either way, we needed to get everyone possible out of the lower city and into safety.

  “How much time do we have?” Baina asked, arms crossed over her chest and gaze darting about.

  Less than we’d expected, as it turned out. Before we could even make it down closer to the breach spot, a messenger from Marco intercepted us to report the wall was showing catastrophic damage, and indeed, by the time we were within view, huge fissures had spread through the base of the stone and extended into the earth beneath the sagging section. We met Marco at the command point. “They can smell victory, Honored Chancellor,” he said, grim. “We need to hold this spot while we get everyone else over the bridge.” Eliska and her engineers marched past with a team of oku pulling the remaining catapult off the road and across the bridge. “We cannot risk people engaging in hand-to-hand combat within the city. Once we are unable to hold the breach, we must have a retreat that gives us time.”

  Here, at least, I could help.