~32~
Twelve hours before the sack of Death's Head
Still alive.
Leramis woke to drums and flapping canvas on 9 Leafmonth 7983. Water dripped onto his cheek and ran down his neck. Green light and dark shadows washed over him.
They seemed to have gotten tired of him, after a while.
After Steelhill's ultimatum, the Eldanians had put Leramis in an empty tent and let him think, then returned to ask him questions about Death's Head. He'd fed them false answers. You could choose how you wanted to be remembered, as Steelhill had said. You could try anything you might to live, only to fail in the end, or you could accept that no one lived forever and go to the grave with your sense of who you were intact.
But Steelhill's one-day deadline had come and gone, and Leramis hadn't been turned over to the Temple or killed. There'd been no more pokers in the coals, either. Someone from the Temple waited outside the tent, always, and someone else from the Eldanian army sat on a stool inside it. They never spoke to him, and after a while they'd stopped even looking at him.
But they fed him and gave him water.
Someone was keeping him alive, and he wondered why.
The drums were followed by loud curses.
"Half-mad!"
Muffled squabbling from outside the tent.
"Hentworth! Dammit, I want him to see!"
A canvas flap whipped open, and bright light framed a tall shadow in the door. Leramis squinted. Behind the silhouette the clouds looked high and thin with the light of morning.
The shadow stepped inside the tent. Leramis's eyes adjusted.
Charles Steelhill stood before him, half-clad in gleaming plate armor. Two gray-faced soldiers at his back hurried to finish placing and tightening his protection. His eyes blazed. His face was flushed. His teeth gnashed.
"They're marching, Half-mad," he growled, and he strode forward, forcing one of his assistants along with him. Leramis saw the slap coming but could only flinch away from it. Steelhill's open hand struck his ear and set it ringing. "They're marching to their deaths, and you could have saved them!"
Leramis was hauled up by his collar and shoved into the arms of one of Steelhill's attendants. His bindings were removed. It took a moment for feeling to return to his wrists, and he stood barefoot in the mud, rubbing his arms and his hands.
"Even if I'd known anything, Charles—"
"Spare me," spat Steelhill. "You remember how to ride?"
Leramis nodded. He remembered, though his legs felt wobbly and he wondered whether he'd be able to.
"Then ride with me."
Leramis did. Water was brought to him, and porridge, and boots. With the first two in his stomach and the third on his feet, he felt stronger. He followed Steelhill from the stinking, muddy tent into a cold dawn of bright mist and shouts and the thunder of hooves.
Steelhill didn't so much as look at him. He seemed preoccupied. And whenever he wasn't glaring at Leramis, the anger bled out of him.
As if he was only acting.
People came up to him, on horses or on foot, asking questions and carrying orders off. Twelve households, Steelhill had said he commanded. Probably ten to twenty soldiers in each. Conscriptees, or, since Steel Hall was a wealthy place, people paid to take their places.
All of them marching to their deaths.
A gray-robed Twelfthman fell in behind Leramis.
The presence of the soulweaver unnerved him. Steelhill had said he commanded a few in this campaign. But one of such power to follow a captive necromancer into battle? And someone to guard him, day and night, for weeks? Surely the young lord of Steel Hall would have run into questions from the Temple about what he was doing. Surely he wouldn't have risked its ire for a chance at intelligence that wasn't forthcoming or the privilege of keeping an old schoolmate alive.
Something odd was afoot, and Leramis didn't like it. Not at all.
The tents and the mist and the horses told him nothing.
He was led to a brown gelding. It stood obediently as he struggled with the stirrups, pulled himself up, and settled on its back. The wind whistled cold and sharp against the mist on his cheeks. Green and gray tents flapped around him. Steelhill mounted a black war stallion twice the size of the gelding, and the Twelfthman straddled a horse of his own.
Leramis's legs felt stretched and awkward against his horse's ribs. When he tried to sit up in the saddle, his thighs quivered. When he let himself sag, his back began to ache.
Still, it was better than being bound in the tent.
Leramis took a deep breath. "Charles—"
Steelhill kicked his spurs into his mount's ribs and shot forward.
Leramis could only follow.
Most of the Eldanian camp was empty—hundreds of vacant tents packed in long lines against the wet, rocky road that led down the Spine toward Death's Head. In the part of the camp decorated with the black banners of House Pendilon, however, preparations were still being made. As they passed through, Steelhill nodded to a tall rider wearing black armor. The rider, in turn, stared hard at Leramis. He had soft brown eyes and a crooked nose, and he was of an age with Steelhill and Leramis.
Ense Pendilon, Leramis remembered. What the hell is he doing here? Aesith Lord Pendilon was as careful with his heirs as other people were with their account books.
They rode on. The porridge and the water settled in Leramis's belly. His legs warmed up. After a few minutes, his head felt clearer than it had in days.
Columns of soldiers appeared in the mist, their helmets and bucklers flashing in the light. Steelhill rode by them in preoccupied silence. The soldiers marched with their heads down, a banner bearing Steelhill's colors flapping listlessly at their head. Only a few turned to look at the riders as they passed.
They even walk as if they're going to their deaths, Leramis thought.
The road wound between two black hills and opened up, and for the first time in more than a month, Leramis saw the great wall of Death's Head.
The fortification stretched across the base of a steep incline that led from the Spine into the city. Its dark stones reached eighty feet into the air, lined with snarling faces and fantastic creatures. Fluted columns ran from the wall's bottom to its top, their stones old and slick with mist and moss. A closed gate forty feet wide, built more for display than defense, occupied the left side of the wall. Shut, it looked like the two halves of an enormous skull.
The wall was too thick to blast through—even for a score of soulweavers working at once and unopposed. Leramis saw only a few siege weapons—small catapults that looked cobbled together, as if they'd been adapted from the shipborne variety. He wondered how the Eldanians meant to take the city.
The Citadel stretched its bony towers into the sky to Leramis's left, a skeletal hand of black fingers at the edge of the wall. It would have been abandoned for weeks. The necromancers had decided early on that there would be no holding out the siege in that bastion. There was no one coming to help them, and there were civilians in the city to protect. People whom they couldn't hide in the Atar or who had refused to evacuate.
Leramis's mouth felt dry. As Steelhill checked his horse and swore violently at a column of swordsmen, Leramis reached for a water skin tied to his horse's saddle. The River contracted around him almost immediately. Tendrils of souls latched on to his arm. The strength drained from his hand. His fingers dribbled limply over the skin.
He turned and found the Twelfthman's eyes pearly white behind him.
Moments later the way cleared. They crested a small rise, and Leramis saw the strength of Eldan marshaled in one place for the first time in his life. The footmen massed at the top of Death's Hill—a surging crowd of thousands, their spears and armor and furled banners bright against the dark stone. Behind them, hidden from watchers in the city, there were companies of longbowmen, additional units and the heavy horse.
The soldiers milled in quiet expectation. Hundreds of black-robed men and women stood atop the wall of Death's Head opposite them. From so far away they looked like ants, crawling along the fortification's stony crown.
Is Rhan there? he wondered. Are the other Taers?
And more quietly, in the back of his mind: How many of them will survive the day?
A trumpet sounded, thin and wailing in the misty morning air.
In response, the Eldanian soldiers formed up, and their banners were unfurled.
It was somewhat awe-inspiring to see them. The colors of the Seven Houses—red, black, green, silver, violet, white, yellow—all in one place at the same time. Then the colors of the minor houses. There were more than a hundred banners in all.
It was customary, at this point, for the besiegers and the besieged to meet and discuss potential terms of surrender.
But the Eldanians weren't interested in negotiation.
The trumpets sounded again, and the mass of humanity below him charged.
It was a bizarre, quiet sight at first. The ordered lines of the throng split and stretched into an ocean that poured downhill, a thousand tiny specks with weapons. They looked like toys, like dolls, until they began to howl. The shout was a tenuous, wordless, uluating thing that grew louder as the surge approached the walls.
The soldiers began to die.
Leramis felt it coming before he saw it. The River surged toward the walls and crashed back with the force of a hundred weavings. Explosions racked the ground. Lightning crackled from soldier to soldier. Earth and stone shot high into the air, dragging bodies with them. The soulweavers of the Temple were nowhere to be found. Not one weaving was bent, not one deflected. When Leramis opened his eyes to the River, he couldn't find the templars in the chaos of its flows.
They weren't even trying.
"What are they doing, Charles?" he grated.
Steelhill was watching the battle with his jaw clenched. Soldiers continued to die.
"Charles?" said Leramis, but the young lord gave no reply.
The soldiers reached the bottom of the walls, and the bombardment picked up strength. Some of the charging mass carried hundred-foot ladders and struggled to put them up against the stones. A second wave rushed forward, and more explosions tore through them, more lightning, more fire. The earth cracked and buckled. Leramis saw a man go down under the legs of his comrades and not get back up. He saw another fly like a ragdoll in the wind and crash sickeningly onto one of the ladders, bringing down the two dozen people who were carrying it.
His throat closed up. Still the Eldanians massed. Still the Eldanians charged.
Why? he wondered, watching Steelhill's angry face. What do they see at the bottom of that hill but their own deaths, and what possesses them to rush to it so heedless—
He found the Temple soulweavers.
The River rushed to the gate. Its huge stones went from dull to blinding white in half a second, and then a loud, terrible crack rent the air. The skullish doors of Death's Head snapped under the pressure of thousands of souls, broke in half, and fell from their hinges. A thunderous crash rolled up the hill. The River hung precariously still, then flew apart into a miasma of flying souls as the city's defenders shifted focus. The mass of soulweavers at the gate lit up like a crystal chandelier.
The force of the soulweaving was tremendous. Shockwaves rippled over the battlefield. The wind sliced in a hundred directions. The shouts of soldiers mingled with the crack of breaking stone, the moans of the injured, the sh-rack of lightning and the whoosh of flames. A section of the wall walk ignited in fire and light.
But most of the defenders would no longer be on the walls.
Leramis breathed and stared. Behind the first gate lay a courtyard and another gate. In that courtyard the battle would be decided. Its drains would run with blood. Hundreds would die.
He could feel it, and it felt wrong.
"Stop them," he hissed. "Steelhill, stop them!"
When Charles turned to face him, there was no power in the young lord's eyes. There was only the nauseous, sagging gloom of a man who would have difficulty forgiving himself for what he had become a part of.
"I tried," Steelhill whispered.
Leramis looked for the green-and-gray banners of Steelhill's soldiers. He found none in the reserves, none among the masses before the gate, none among the teeming crowds still trying to scale the wall by ladder.
But there were many lying broken and abandoned on the rocks.
Steelhill's teeth ground together. His big, gauntleted hands squeezed his reins.
Tears shone in his eyes, and he whispered again, "Itried."