~33~
Six hours before the sack of Death's Head
The struggle for the city went on for ages.
And Rhan the Eye stood in the center of it.
The smoking remains of the Skull Gate lay shattered in their grave. His brothers and sisters held the walls and the ground around the still-closed Death Gate behind them. The earth echoed the footfalls and screams of thousands.
The Eldanians came on like the tide—endless, mindless, surging forward and back in waves, but pressing a little farther with each advance.
Rhan, last of the Taers left alive in Death's Head, held a long black sword in each hand, and he fought for the survival of his order. He killed pikemen, spearmen, swordsmen, Twelfthmen, women wearing the Temple's white robe, boys barely old enough to have left home. They came before him and the blackrobes around him and they died, because they had to.
Meanwhile, he waited.
For what exactly, he didn't know, but he was certain he would see it when it happened. There would come a moment when Eldan grew too confident or began to falter, when its soldiers moved too swiftly or hesitated to throw themselves into the abattoir before the Death Gate. In that moment the necromancers would strike and pray their best would be enough.
Time passed. The sun peeked through the mist and lit the sky in a brief pulse of warmth refracted by a thousand thousand droplets of water.
Rhan pulled a blade from the chest of a dying man, looked toward the entrance to the abattoir, and spotted what he was waiting for.
The sun glinted off the lances of a troop of heavy horse galloping toward the gate. The footsoldiers threw themselves to the side or stood stock still, hoping the horses would pass around them. Those fighting in the abattoir melted away or perished.
Rhan's eyes flicked over those around him. The battered, wearied blackrobes under his command were already beginning to weave, preparing to level the horsemen's charge.
But this was their chance to do far more damage.
"Wait!" shouted Rhan at the top of his lungs. Then again, "Wait!"
His brothers and sisters heard him. They held their weavings in check while the horsemen thundered forward and leveled their lances. The earth shook.
Be calm, Rhan told himself. He felt detached, as though he were watching the battle unfold before another man from far away. He laid one of his swords on the blood-soaked ground, grasped a horn of bone that hung around his neck, and blew it.
Its call was quiet and simple, a breathy vibrato that was all but lost in the growing thunder of the Eldanian charge. He blew it a second time, and a third, let his lungs heave between blows. After the third sounding, the call was picked up and repeated.
The riders had almost reached the gate. Rhan let the horn fall back against his chest, picked up his swords, and began to weave.
The Eldanians had made their mistake—halted their momentum, called upon their treasured cavalry to save them. The cavalry would fail. The horsemen weren't suited to fighting in an environment as confined as the abattoir. While the horsemen were being slaughtered, the foot would falter, and when the foot faltered—
Patience, Rhan told himself as he forced his exhausted body to move. Patience.
#
Leramis watched the charge of the Foltiri horse with a heavy heart. It was beautiful, in a way. So much metal and human and animal moving together at such speed, in such formation. But—
"They're going to die," he whispered.
"They know," grunted Steelhill. The young lord shook his head and turned from the battle for the first time all morning. "Your friends still haven't bared their teeth. So our beloved commanders are going to bait them into it."
Leramis turned and looked into the shadow behind the hill's crest, where what remained of the Eldanian reserves crouched in waiting. A few hundred foot. A few dozen horse.
And eighty gray-robed Twelfthmen.
Leramis shivered, turned back to face the city, and saw what he was dreading and what Eldan had been waiting for.
The dead were rising.
They crawled from beneath the wall in a seething torrent of bone and sword and soul, pouring from trapdoors at the fortification's base. Leramis had been to see the bonehouses once. They were massive caverns beneath the city, each equipped with a ramp that led to the trap doors. The supply of corpses there was nearly limitless.
The strength of those animating them, however, wasn't.
His heart pounded. In the center of the Eldanian line, at the crest of the hill, a wide pavilion flapped amid the banners of the King of Eldan, the Seven, and the Temple. The sun glinted from polished armor around that banner. The royal guards were still unused. So too the Twelfthguard and the personal units of the Seven.
But the rest of Eldan's army had been decimated. The heavy horse were half-dead, trying desperately to extricate themselves from the slaughterhouse before the gates. The footmen behind them were being overrun by the necromancers' skeletons, and more of the undead were on their way. They swarmed over the soldiers and raced uphill.
Toward the crest.
Toward Leramis.
And toward the pavilion.
The foot soldiers fled screaming toward the safety of the ridge. The heavy horse cut their way out of the abattoir and thundered uphill among the corpses, bloody and battered.
Steelhill crossed his arms. Leramis looked into the shade behind the ridge.
The Eldanian reserves sprang to life.
To the credit of those animating them, the undead nearly reached the king's pavilion. Their first grasping ranks got as far as the guards—forced them to draw their gleaming weapons and engage for the first time in the day.
And then the reserves struck.
The counterattack was quick and ferocious. The reserves crested the hill, and shockwaves raked over the undead like raindrops. Bone shattered and spilled across the hill in a million tiny shards, as if an enormous porcupine had shaken itself free of its quills. New corpses crawled out of the wall to replace those that were lost, but they came more slowly every moment, and the tide of the battle turned. Where moments before it had been necromancers tearing the attacking Eldanians to pieces, it became Eldanians smashing the attacking undead to bits.
The undead offensive slowed, then halted entirely.
Leramis heard the call of horns from the walls of Death's Head. Two long blasts, then a short one, then a fourth as long as the other three combined. The sounds repeated.
The necromancers wanted to negotiate.
A moment passed, then stretched into several. The call from the necromancers came again.
And then, from the king's pavilion, it was answered.
The shockwaves stopped.
Leramis let out a long, relieved breath. He curled his hands around the horn of his saddle. His body threatened to slump to the side and spill him into the dirt.
He doubted the talks would go well, but still—there was always a chance.
The fighting lurched to a halt. The undead stood motionless before the wall. Those necromancers left standing flitted along the top of their fortification or pulled their wounded from the abattoir like tiny black ghosts. Eldanian stretcher bearers, going no farther down the hill than they had to, began to retrieve their casualties.
The wind whipped the banners of the king, the Temple, the Seven, the Black Order. Compared to the cacophony of battle, the yells and shouts of the stretcher bearers and wounded sounded small and insignificant.
"What will he offer?" asked Leramis. There was a wasp's nest of activity around the king's pavilion. He thought he could see the Seven gathered around their monarch, along with several soulweavers he assumed were members of the Twelve.
"Little," growled Steelhill. "At least little your people are likely to accept."
A man in shining armor rode out of the pavilion bearing a white flag. He moved his horse at a walk.
The abattoir bustled with activity as well, and then a lone figure strode out to meet the rider. One man, his black robe torn and flapping.
Leramis squinted to see who it was. When the rider and the man met, the blackrobe began to gesture with his hands as he spoke, and Leramis recognized him.
Rhan, he thought. What are you doing?
#
The horse in front of Rhan the Eye was huge. It stood six feet tall at least, and it was as wide as two men. Shining sheets of steel encased its head, its chest, its neck, its flanks. A thick caparison of stitched blue flowers on a white background hung to its knees beneath the armor.
The champion atop the horse was no less garishly bedecked. His plate was shining silver. A jewel sat in the pommel of the long sword that hung from his waist, and he carried an ornately carved helmet in the crook of his arm. He was tall, blond, young, blue-eyed, and his nose twitched disdainfully as Rhan stood before him bloody and exhausted.
They think they have us, he thought.
Looking at the Eldanians on the ridge atop Death's Hill, he found it difficult to disagree with that assessment.
He estimated he'd taken forty-five percent casualties, and his remaining men and women were exhausted. His reserves had all been deployed.
He wasn't sure whether the Eldanians had additional reserves of their own. Scouts had given mixed reports on the size of their host, but only the smallest estimates had numbered it around the size he'd seen so far.
The sun glinted off the sparkling steel of Eldan's weapons and bathed the gray robes of the Twelfthmen in soft light. The cold, dreary morning had turned into a beautiful afternoon—a respite of warmth and gentleness between the early autumn storms. Motes of dust winked gold, floating lazily above the hill.
The Eldanian envoy said something.
Rhan sighed and returned his eyes to the young man in front of him.
The silver-plated idiot spoke again. "I asked to whom I had the hon—"
"My name is Rhan the Eye, and I speak for my order."
The man's blue eyes narrowed. His nose drifted higher into the air.
"His Grace the merciful King Molte II of Eldan offers the following terms of surrender. All within the city of Death's Head will lay down what arms they carry and pledge fealty to him and faith to the Temple of Yenor. Members of the Order of Necromancy shall submit to the judgment of the Temple for crimes against Yenor and the world. Those who have shown no part in the business of the order will be allowed to remain in Death's Head, but shall be pledged to the new Lord of Menatar, whomsoever it may please His Grace to so anoint."
The terms went on. The man spoke for nearly two minutes, while Rhan watched the top of the hill and learned all that he could. Wounded soldiers retreated behind the crest. Horsemen switched mounts, took food and drink and new weapons. Rhan watched, and Rhan saw. There were no additional reserves.
But there were still enough soldiers that Rhan couldn't predict the battle's results. The veil of a thousand thousand individual decisions hung between him and the future. Its gossamer threads would unravel in heartbeats and decide the fate of his city, his order, his life.
They would begin with his choice, there beneath the sun and the walls, where the stench of blood and shit and death filled his nostrils.
He took a deep breath. The blond man in the polished armor finally stopped speaking.
"Tell your king," Rhan said, "that he is fighting the wrong enemy."
The king knew that, Rhan was nearly certain. But the young man in front of him might not, and while some young men ignored everything their elders told them, others remembered and puzzled for years over words given in good faith. "Tell him he owes his people an apology for their losses. And tell him that until he learns to see where danger lies, we cannot and we will not yield."
The envoy looked down his nose with the simple, arrogant smile of a powerful person who has not and will not fight a battle in his life. He sniffed one final time, and then he turned his horse back up the hill.
Rhan began the long limp back to the abattoir and the city he had sworn to die defending. His left leg had taken a vicious knock in some sally so far back in the day he'd forgotten its details. It was swollen and painful to walk upon. He took only a few steps before he was out of breath.
A blackrobe met him halfway to the walls and pressed a skin of water into his hands. He drank from it greedily. The water was cool and sweet and simple. It was an odd thing to taste, there in the sun beneath the battered walls and the dead.
"Well?" the blackrobe asked.
Rhan looked up. The woman had passed beyond fear. She was watching the hill with an emotion more like curiosity.
With a person like that, Rhan could be honest.
"It's going to be difficult," he said.
As he spoke, he felt a terrible rumble in the River of Souls.
A series of loud cracking sounds struck the wall and bounced from it like boulders. Rhan looked back at the hill. Man-shaped figures of stone were tearing themselves from the rocks.
Nearly two hundred of them arose, some as small as Aleani, others a third the height of the wall itself, with every size between represented. Rhan opened his eyes to the River and examined the tendrils linking the golems to the soulweavers who had created them. They were strong. The Temple hadn't overextended itself.
Rhan sighed.
#
It was nearly sunset when the Death Gate finally fell and what was left of Eldan's army poured into the city of the necromancers with violence and fire. Leramis hadn't eaten or drunk or eased himself from the back of his horse all day. He watched the necromancers break, watched them die, watched the soldiers of Eldan disappear into his home, and he knew the city would never recover.
His body felt as if it was cast in lead, and a headache throbbed steadily behind his eyes. When the first plume of smoke curled toward him from the city, swept northward by a cool and rising wind, he turned away.
"Will they spare anyone?" he asked.
Charles Steelhill, on foot next to a resting horse, red eyes rimmed with tiredness, uncrossed his arms stiffly and shook his head. "Not many," he said.
Leramis's head swam. There were thousands of people left in the city—civilians, descended from the original inhabitants of the island or children who'd never joined the Order. He looked up again. The fires were spreading—thick plumes of black belched into the sky from Gatehome and the hollows of The Dell, the long line of Forge Street, the Centerspach. A dream of brotherhood and service in exile was dying before his eyes.
Did we...
He remembered the deep shadows of Eshan Eshati's face, the pale, mirthless cheeks of Crixine the Whitesword, the pockmarked sneer of D'Orin Threi and the practiced, arrogant scowl of Soren Goldguard. The Order had taken them in when no one else would. The Order had trained them and given them the power to do what they'd done.
Did we bring this on ourselves?
The wind nipped at his cheeks. The fires spread. His jailors sat on their horses and watched. An unpleasant calm filled the air, as if in the aftermath of the slaughter and struggle of the day, the coming night would be relatively peaceful. As if the lives of the citizens of Death's Head didn't matter.
"Steelhill—" he began, and Charles whirled on him.
"You want me to intervene on their behalf, Half-mad? Did you miss the death your 'brothers' caused today?"
Leramis closed his eyes. He'd seen. He would never forget.
He opened them again when he heard the light clacking of well-trained hooves. He found Steelhill focused on the sight of Ense Pendilon riding up the hill to his left. The man checked his mount, glanced at the Twelfthman behind Leramis, and then turned to Steelhill.
"Lord Steelhill, the presence of yourself and your prisoner is requested at His Grace's side."
There was a quiet heaviness in those words, as though they meant more than was apparent on the surface. Both Pendilon and Steelhill looked defeated.
Leramis blinked. What's happening? he wondered. And what information could they possibly hope to tear from me now? They've won.
Steelhill grunted, then clicked his tongue twice. He turned to his already rising horse, grabbed its saddle, and swung onto its back. Ense Pendilon turned his mount around without further comment. Steelhill rode past Leramis in silence. His body, Leramis noticed, looked taut as a bowstring.
As gently as he could, Leramis nudged his gelding to follow.
#
Molte II Eldani was a tall, dark man in his late forties. When Leramis spotted him, the king was sitting rod-straight atop a handsome, golden-armored horse the color of snow and a hand taller than those around it. The horse's height plus the king's own let him tower over the cloud of noblemen in his retinue. Leramis recognized those closest to the king: short, overweight Lord Taeryn in a red cape and bronze armor; tall, serpentine Lord Serethon, seated in green armor atop a gray stallion; Galen the Older and Galen the Younger—one a spotted, wasting patriarch and the other his broad-bellied and vibrant first son; Lords Graydawn and Redpath, seated with war-helms in hand on steeds bedecked with their house colors.
And finally, flanking the monarch, Leramis spotted Aegelden Elpioni—Yenor's Highest himself—and tall, broad Lord Aesith Pendilon in black armor atop a black horse.
The guard surrounding the retinue was mixed. The silver helms of the House of Eld mingled with the red of Taeryn, the white of Elpion, the black of Pendilon, and the green of Serethon. The guards spread to let Leramis and the others pass to the foot of the king. Ense Pendilon dismounted and knelt. So did Steelhill.
Leramis did not.
Instead, he sat on his horse and looked into the unforgiving brown eyes of a man who'd once been his king. The sun's rays had died beneath the hills to the east, but the dusk still illuminated Molte's bright, silver armor.
He glowed like the Eye of Yenor itself.
Leramis remembered his childhood, his father's reverence for the monarch, and dreams of standing before that man to receive a commendation, a thanks, respect, recognition. That moment was to have been the greatest of his life.
"You do not kneel before me," said the king. His voice echoed off the hill in rich baritone. "Why?"
"I have not—" Leramis began.
But the question hadn't been addressed to him.
"The Temple bows only to Yenor, Your Grace. So too do its servants."
Aegelden Elpioni smiled as he spoke, and Leramis realized that the Twelfthman behind him hadn't dismounted or bowed either.
A chill trickled down Leramis's spine. He looked back at the king.
There was more at play on this battlefield than lives and pride and territory, he realized. Molte sat impassively on his horse, but Aegelden's smile left no doubt in Leramis's mind that whatever they'd been fighting over, Aegelden had won it.
The king's cheek trembled, just for a moment, with some emotion Leramis couldn't place. Anger. Frustration.
Or fear.
"Rise, Lord Steelhill, Master Pendilon," said the king.
Steelhill and Ense stood.
"You will be compensated for your losses on the field. I grant you both leave to return to your ships and make for home immediately. You are no longer needed here."
There was sadness in the king's eyes that frightened Leramis. Molte wore a long sword on either hip, he noticed. The hilts were made of scuffed steel, the grips worn with use.
Steelhill looked at Serethon, then at Taeryn. He placed his hand on the pommel of his sword and inclined his head demurely.
"My place is by your side, Your Grace," he murmured. His voice was hoarse. "As was my father's, and his father's before him."
"As is mine," added Ense. He placed his hand on the pommel of his sword, as Steelhill had, and glared at his father.
There was a familiarity to that defiance. Leramis had seen it in many of his classmates, was sure he'd once shown it himself. Ense bore some hatred of Aesith, born of an injury Leramis could only guess at. Perhaps he had been disciplined too harshly, forced along a path too far from his choosing, or made to do things his conscience could not stand. Perhaps he and his father were simply too different to coexist in the same household. Perhaps he was just young and in search of a way to claim his adulthood.
Regardless of the reason, there was a rebellion happening here, in a moment that would change lives and history, and Leramis shivered to see it.
Aesith Lord Pendilon's lips pressed into a thin, angry line. His eyes, stark blue, looked cold as the ocean in a winter storm.
A gust of wind whipped the pennants of the pavilion and brought the scent of fear and death from the city. Molte turned his mount into it. The road to the broken gates of Death's Head lay open before him, ringed with bodies and shattered earth.
"Hentworth!" barked the monarch, and Leramis nearly jumped out of his skin.
"Ride with me," said the king.
Leramis felt as much as heard the whispers spread through the crowd of nobles around him. Ride with me. The child he'd once been beamed deep in his chest.
The man he had become felt less sanguine.
Nevertheless, Leramis nudged his horse forward until he was at the king's right hand. Steelhill and Ense Pendilon fell in beside and behind him. Serethon and Taeryn rode forward on the other side.
The other lords did not move.
The king touched the ribs of his horse with his spurs, and they rode toward the city his army was sacking.
The guards—and Leramis's keeper—followed.
"Charles," Leramis whispered. Steelhill didn't respond. "Charles, what—"
"You are Gaius Hentworth's boy," interrupted the king. Molte's posture relaxed as he rode. He swayed easily with the movements of his horse, his body rising and falling like they were one being. The gates drew closer. Leramis smelled the moldy taint of burning straw, the iron tang of blood, the stink of broken corpses. Molte seemed not to notice, as if the filth and violence couldn't touch him.
"Yes," said Leramis.
"Your father was loyal to me until his end," Molte said. His eyes glittered in the dusk. The crown of white swords on his head caught what was left of the day's ruddy light and glowed. "Will you be as well?"
Leramis pressed his lips together and said nothing. Next to him Steelhill rode gravely, with an ashen, emotionless face. Pendilon's face twitched, contorted with rage and hate.
The Twelfthman wove behind him, and the River tightened around Leramis and drained the energy from his limbs.
As if he needed a reminder of how powerless he was. As if the shattered city in front of him wasn't enough.
They passed into the broken ground of the abattoir. Hundreds of bodies were piled inside it, surrounded by chunks of torn earth, rock blasted from the walls, the bones of broken undead and fallen man-shaped stones that had once been golems.
The stench grew warm and unbearable.
Leramis's throat clenched. He'd faced death. He'd seen it and manipulated it and thought that he'd mastered it.
But when he entered the square before the Death Gate, he learned he had been wrong.
He knew them.
His people lay slaughtered in the positions in which they'd fallen. Two had their fingers frozen on each other's robes. Another stretched out on a jagged piece of stone with a rider's spear through his back. Still more lay bloody and trampled or trapped beneath the rubble that filled the square.
Leramis relearned the pain that death could inflict, and though his face twisted away from what he saw, he couldn't escape it.
He shut his eyes.
When he opened them again, he found that he was not the only one so affected by the battlefield. The lords around him looked shocked as well. There were more Eldanians dead than necromancers; their corpses littered the ground, faces blackened or frozen in heart-stopping fear. Horses were scattered among the wreckage, sometimes with riders dead nearby, sometimes not. The people around him had lost sons, nephews, cousins, brothers, friends.
It was so stupid, such a senseless waste of life.
His eyes landed on the back of Molte Eldani's head.
The world's about to burn, and you set them on one another like dogs, he wanted to say. Don't you care?
But he said nothing, and Molte Eldani checked his horse and looked down at some movement on the ground.
A black-robed man lay half-buried under a boulder. His legs and hips and right arm were crushed. Blood oozed from a gash on his forehead. One of his eyes was a shattered hole. His face contorted in the grimace of a man who has passed almost beyond pain, as though he knew death was coming but was clinging to life anyway—holding to every last breath of air because he didn't know what lay beyond, and because he cherished that which he'd loved for so long.
"Rhan," Leramis whispered.
He urged his mount forward, heedless of his jailor and the guards he had to jostle out of the way. He slipped from the horse and nearly fell when his feet hit the ground, and then he knelt woozily in the broken dirt at Rhan's side.
His mentor breathed in quick, shallow snaps. He was shivering. His lips looked blue, his skin pale.
Leramis wouldn't have been able to heal him even if his captors had let him try; there was no strength left in him. He reached for Rhan's hand and held it. The fingers felt cold and rubbery, already dead.
"Who is he?" asked the king.
Leramis stroked Rhan's hand and watched him breathe. Rhan's one remaining eye blinked sporadically.
"His name is Rhan the Eye," said Leramis. "He's one of the Taers."
The pebbles dug into Leramis's knees. Rhan's hand shuddered underneath his. The wind breathed softly on the stubble on his face. He heard the sounds of flames, of snorting horses, of cloth flapping. The guards around him formed a tight ring of steel and flesh and leather.
The lords said nothing. Neither did the monarch.
Rhan's good eye opened and stayed that way.
"Leram-is," he rasped. The eye fixed in his direction, straining against the face around it. "N-o." Rhan's breathing quickened. His hand spasmed. The muscles around his shattered eyesocket twitched. He coughed up a ball of phlegm and blood and tried to sit up, nearly jerked his shattered arm out from underneath the boulder. His voice rose in pitch and volume.
"N-o, n-o!"
Rhan ripped his rubbery hand free and pointed it at Leramis's forehead. His good eye focused, and for a moment Leramis recognized his mentor's mind behind the broken face. The bad eye opened into a gaping, bloody hole filled with cold, reasoned fear.
"Leramis," he croaked. The good eye began to swirl white.
A spearhead blossomed through Rhan's neck. Leramis jerked back and turned his head away. Blood spattered the side of his face.
When he looked again, the spearhead was gone and Rhan's eye had lost its focus. His head lolled back. He collapsed into a broken heap beneath the boulder, his arm pinned awkwardly beneath his shoulder, his face growing slacker every moment while his blood soaked into the ground before his city.
A black-cloaked guardsman wiped his spearhead on Rhan's robe and returned to his place in the ring of steel.
Leramis knelt in the mud. Numbly, he wiped his mentor's blood from his face. His arm shook.
Soon, he thought. I'll join you in the River soon, Rhan.
He looked up. The smoke swirled into a tower of darkness and sparks above him.
You and everyone else.
#
The king gave him a moment.
But only one.
Leramis used it to stare at the shattered corpse of Rhan the Eye.
What did you see? he wanted to ask the body. In the end, Rhan, what did you see? And why were you so afraid of it?
No one told him to return to his horse. He did it without orders, walked numbly back to his place feeling as if he was being pulled along by something greater than himself—that the course of his life had passed beyond his control, and his lot was only to follow it. When he passed Steelhill, his old classmate's teeth were pressed tightly together, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
But he whispered something as Leramis walked by.
Something that sounded like, "Patience."
They passed farther into the city, and new horrors greeted Leramis. The bodies of civilians, soldiers, and necromancers blended into a nightmare trail of death. Fire licked the blackened timbers of crooked, once-proud buildings. The roar of flames and the crack of collapsing edifices filled the air. The king's retinue met no resistance, no pleas for mercy, no life.
Leramis's awareness retreated quietly into the depths of his mind.
How much time passed, he didn't know.
When he became mindful of his surroundings again, the atmosphere around him had grown tense and cold. He looked up from his horse's neck and found himself entering the Centerspach, the great market square where the city's heart had once beat.
That heart was blackened and dead. Barricades across the entrances to the square lay smashed and shattered, along with the few who'd dared to defend them. The market itself looked as if it had been abandoned long before. The skeletal frames of its once-rich stands had burnt and twisted into misshapen black cinders. The hellish, orange-red light of the city's demise illuminated clouds of smoke above and a haze over the square.
In that red light more than two hundred soldiers of the Eldanian army had gathered. Their eyes glittered feverishly. They bore no banners, no identifying markers at all.
As Leramis and the others drew closer, the soldiers watched like hungry crows staring at a man condemned.
In the center of the square, a platform had been nailed together from scavenged wood. On it stood three pillars, and chained to those pillars were the tortured and torn remains of three people. Two of them wore shredded black robes. The third was naked. Bright armor lay at his feet. So did a broken spear and a snapped standard.
A strangled cry filled the night.
Lord Taeryn burst from behind Leramis, plunged through the ring of guards, and galloped ahead to the platform.
The helm beneath the naked man's feet was red. The color of House Taeryn. The man's body was almost unrecognizable, but his face had been left intact. It had the broad, strong bones of Taeryn's house and an immaculately trimmed blond beard.
In death, it looked almost calm.
Lord Taeryn reached the platform and wheeled his horse around. Tears glimmered on his cheeks, and a look of rage crept over his face.
The soldiers in the square pressed closer.
Hooves clacked sharply on the flagstones behind Leramis. Looking back, he spotted two men riding through the smoke at the head of a throng of shadows. One wore black armor, the other a white robe. Aesith Lord Pendilon and Aegelden Elpioni.
Ense Pendilon took a sharp breath and slowly breathed it back out.
The shadows behind the two lords sharpened into men on horseback wearing gray robes. Two dozen at least. Leramis swallowed and swayed in his saddle. He felt like a spectator to a horrifying play he'd never been meant to see.
The figures rode closer and stopped.
"Ense," called Aesith Pendilon. "Come here."
Another breath. A snarl. "No. I will not help you in this. I will not be remembered as a murderer." Ense's hands quivered on his reins.
Lord Pendilon's voice sharpened. "This is not a game, Ense. And this is not a moment to act on some misguided principle. This man," he gestured toward Molte Eldani, "has earned this. And if you defy me here and stand with him, you will die. Come. Now!"
Next to Aesith Pendilon, Aegelden Elpioni frowned.
Ense did not move.
The five lords in the square looked at one another. Taeryn's face constricted into a scowl of hatred, and he shouted an incomprehensible oath. Molte turned calmly to face Aesith Pendilon and Aegelden Elpioni. He laid his hands on the black-wrapped grips of his blades and pulled them from their sheaths. Steelhill and Serethon drew their weapons as well. Ense Pendilon followed their lead.
"So be it," said Aesith. "You have broken your mother's heart."
He inclined his head ever so slightly, and the dying began.
The guards turned on one another, black and white helms against the red, the silver, the green. The soldiers leaped into action. The Twelfthmen dug their heels in and urged their mounts into the square.
An invisible, irresistible force wrapped around Leramis's throat. The flow of his blood was cut off.
Leramis grasped the River. It blazed white and turbulent, and he saw the glow of tightly woven strands around his neck. The tendrils led to the Twelfthman who'd been his tormentor all day long.
He's trying to tear my head off.
He inhaled with all his might, tried to rip apart the weaving with the breath of his soul, but he could barely suck in enough of the River to keep the Twelfthman's noose from contracting. His head grew taut and heavy. His balance faded. He was going to fall, going to lose, going to die—
Steel flashed in the firelight.
Leramis's blood flowed again. His eyes watered. He coughed. The strands around his neck dissolved into a hazy stream of souls, and he spotted the Twelfthman's head rolling on the stones near his horse's feet.
Charles Steelhill sat astride his mount between Leramis and the Twelfthman's falling body, a swath of blood splashed across his shining armor, fire in his eyes and a blade in his hand.
"Hentworth!" he shouted. Taeryn's horse had been cut down. On the platform the soldiers' arms were rising and falling, rising and falling, carrying crimson-stained steel. The ring of battling guardsmen was closing in. The River of Souls was cresting, manipulated by two dozen or more who were as strong as Leramis or better, ready to obliterate them.
"Hentworth!" Steelhill snarled again.
It was the end. There was no escape, no way out, nothing to do but accept that death was inevitable.
A hand grasped his shoulder, and he looked up into the dark, serious face of Molte II Eldani, a king atop a white horse in a city full of flames.
He saw there a crown, a calm man, and hope.
"Hentworth," said the monarch, and Leramis listened. The guards were still protecting them. The Twelfthmen were too far away to strike. "Do your people keep a place to run to?"
Leramis nodded.
"Take us," said the king.
And Leramis dug his heels into his gelding and rode as hard as he'd ever ridden in his life.