The Past the Conflagration #2
Kai leapt forward, grabbed his face long enough to drain his life, and whirled around to the next legionary.
Arsha, Cerala, and Telare plunged into the room after him.
Between Kai and their short spears, the legionaries were down within moments.
The last one managed to get a javelin out of a weapon rack against the far wall, turn, and stab with it.
Kai caught it in his shoulder, wrapped an arm around it to yank it from the man’s hands, and grabbed his wrist. As the dead legionary fell back against the wall, Kai yanked the javelin out and dropped it.
He looked around to see Salatel taking charge of the tower, sending Cerala and Arsha to guard positions with sharp gestures.
The dustwitches crowded into the doorway, staring like they had never seen Arike soldiers and a demon clear a room before.
Keeping his voice low, Kai said, “Get down there and kill legionaries.”
Tangeld moved first and they all rushed forward to the stairwell, vanishing down it in a swirl of dust-colored coats and veils.
Kai started down with them, as Cimeri and Nirana and the others from the lefthand side of the tower caught up. “Find the winches that control the gates,” he told Cimeri, and gestured for the dustwitches and the rest of his cadre to go ahead.
The scatter of legionaries in the next two levels died choking as the dustwitches called sand down from the wind outside the tower. Kai killed the legionaries who made it into the stairwell, making sure none could come up on his people from behind.
He got down to a level with a round, domed central room, with multiple doorways and more dead bodies. One arch led to the mechanism that operated the tower’s great gates. Cimeri and a few dustwitches were already there, examining the mechanism. Kai leaned inside. “You can open it?”
Cimeri pointed to the levers and signaled an assent.
“Good, wait for the signal.” Kai turned and met Owlet coming up the steps with the other dustwitches who hadn’t been able to climb the wall.
That was good, it meant the map had been right about the small door to the side of the main gates, and that Nirana, Hartel, and Telare had reached it, killed any defenders, and opened it.
Hopefully the map would be right about other important things, too.
Kai started to head down but Hawkmoth darted out of a doorway. “Fourth Prince, come and look, it’s strange,” she whispered, sounding disturbed. She had pulled her veil back and her eyes were wide.
Kai’s first thought was that it was a trick, but Hawkmoth was already running back to the doorway and this was a stupid moment for a dustwitch to kill him. He followed her.
The room was set up as a kitchen, with square stone ovens and shafts to let the smoke out, basins and pots stacked on shelves, a trough of water with a pump to fill it.
It smelled like grease and smoke. There were also several Arike women, all chained by one wrist to the beams that ran overhead.
They stared at Kai and Hawkmoth, baffled and frightened.
Almost as baffled as they were, Hawkmoth said, “I don’t understand, are the Hierarchs eating people? ”
“Where are the keys?” Kai said. The Arike didn’t move, frozen. He added, “I was sent by Prince-heir Bashasa of Benais-arik.”
The youngest doubled over, sobbing silently into her hands. Another pointed to the door. “A cabinet. Mounted on a wall out there, all the keys are in it.”
Kai jerked his head at Hawkmoth, who ran out. He said, “Do you know where the Hierarch is?”
Some shook their heads, trembling. But one said, “No, but they built something—Here.” She took a jar and spilled flour onto the wooden counter and sketched a map into it.
Kai stepped to her side; she flinched away from him but kept drawing.
The original map of the fort had shown it had three terraces, each broad half circles, stepping down from the height of the mound to the water level where the docks stretched out, and this rough map showed the general shape was still the same.
“They built something here, just above the port, where the merchant houses used to be.” That matched what the vanguarder Ilanu had been able to discover; the confirmation was good to have, there was no time to make mistakes.
Hawkmoth returned with a wooden rack of keys she had apparently just ripped out of the wall. She started to work on the locks, and one woman asked, “Will you take us with you when you go?”
Kai said, “We’re not leaving.” He told Hawkmoth, “Make sure no one hurts them.”
“With my life, Fourth Prince,” she said.
Kai reached a lower level where the stairway split into two, straddling the large passage that led through the bottom of the tower, from the outer gate into the fort proper.
The lamps had already been extinguished by dust and sand, and several dustwitches waited there, amid the bodies of dead legionaries.
“Something’s strange,” one whispered as Kai stepped past her.
“There’s death on the wind.” He went to the edge of the outer archway, where Tangeld stood.
The tower’s passage opened into a large plaza, lit by tall stone lanterns, with steps leading down to the first broad terrace.
Two- and three-story buildings extended out from the fort’s walls, with latticed windows and open balconies.
Some still glowed with lamplight, but there was an odd hush, not much sense of movement, as if everyone had closed themselves in for the night. “What is it?” he asked Tangeld.
In the faint light her face was etched with fear. “Listen,” she hissed.
Kai concentrated, trying to hear past the waves and the wind. He heard screams, cries.
And he remembered what the vanguarder Ilanu had said. The legions had brought people from the camps outside Descar-arik, to build the dock for the Hierarch.
Kai had meant to go alone from this point on, he had meant to leave the dustwitches here to secure the bottom level of the tower while his cadre waited to open the gates for Bashasa.
But to have any chance of stopping what sounded like a slaughter, he would need help.
He turned. “Get your sisters. All those who aren’t needed to guard the tower. ”
Kai and the dustwitches moved through what had been a small port village tucked into the walls of the old fort, past stone carved houses open to the sea breezes and colonnades that had once sheltered shops and food stalls.
It was now housing for servant-nobles and officers, but all the doors and shutters were closed, fear and a waiting silence hanging in the air.
As they got closer to the sound, light glowed from torches lining the walkways in the lower two terraces of the fort.
A stark contrast to the silence and near darkness of the upper.
Kai came to the top of a broad set of stairs that looked down on the lowest part of the fort.
From the map this had been a maze of houses for merchants and sailors and all the soldiers and workers who had maintained the fort and the docks, as well as storage buildings for cargos and workshops for ship repair.
Much of it seemed converted into barracks, the original buildings cleared away and rebuilt as long rough structures with few lit windows, meant to temporarily house several legions.
A whole swath down the center of the neighborhood had been destroyed, or dismantled.
The stone and brick and wood was still here, just in neat piles, lined up to be taken away for whatever building project the invaders called for next.
Past this, brightly lit by torches, was the port, with two Hierarch troopships anchored not far off the wharf, dwarfing the other ships docked nearby.
They were long squat barges, with low superstructures, meant to move along the coast in weather calmed by expositors.
Both were reached by the new bridge Ilanu had described, that had been built for the Hierarchs’ barge.
It looked more like a wooden palace than a bridge, with wide scaffolds extending out to frame a large platform.
The troopships loomed above it, connected to the top of the platform by dozens of boarding ramps.
Past the platform was another new structure, a large building standing in the water on heavy pilings, a square structure with a high, pitched roof and colonnade around the three visible sides, all hung with lamps.
Its location matched the rough map the enslaved Arike woman in the tower kitchen had sketched.
This was the new Hierarch’s house, built from the remains of the leveled port town.
One troopship was brightly lit, lamplight showing through the open ports along the side and on the cabins above the deck. Dockworkers moved up and down the ramps, carrying aboard bags, clay jars, bales, chests. All the supplies of war for the legions going to attack the Enalin at Nibet.
The other troopship was dark, though the sound coming from it was loud and muddled.
Groans, cries. Legionaries were leaving it, dragging limp figures—bodies—down the ramps, along the bridge back to the fort, to be dumped into neat piles on the wharf.
Like the neat piles of wood, stone, and brick where the houses had been.
So many bodies, a hundred or more, and still more being dragged from the ship.
Kai’s heart said the bodies were demons, empty shells now, their inhabitants driven out by deprivation and torture.
But why would the Hierarch bring the demons here to kill them, the demons meant to protect the fort while the legions were sent to Nibet?
He said, “I have to get closer. Call the sandstorm. Just enough to conceal, not kill.”
Tangeld said, “We’ll come with you.” There was a murmur of agreement from the others.
“No, the rest of you get back to the tower,” Kai said. He didn’t want this to be true, he didn’t want it. He didn’t want anyone else to see it. Not anyone he intended to leave alive.
“Careful, Fourth Prince,” Tangeld whispered as Kai started down the steps.
By the time he reached the barracks, sand whispered across the stone, smothering the lamps.
He pulled the hood of his coat up and kept his head down.
The haze grew in a rapid wave, descended in a cloud over the port.
It was half-blinding, made the air hot and difficult to breathe, seemed to come from the sea and the land at the same time.
It threw the orderly preparations into dismay.
Coughing officers called out halts, legionaries retreated to the shelter of overhangs or behind cargo containers.
Dockworkers huddled wherever there was shelter.
Kai moved past them all, another dim shape in the haze.
He reached the bridge and walked down it as the figures struggled to get their burdens up the ramps and into the shelter of the lamplit troopship.
A last few legionaries fled the dark troopship, running across the platform to the other ship or down the bridge to the wharf.
Kai reached the platform and stopped next to a body dropped and left behind like trash. It was a young mortal, an Arike by their hair and skin color, as dried and desiccated as the legionaries Kai had killed in the tower.
Kai’s knees went weak and he folded up and sank down onto the dock, pressed his face to the gritty wood.
No amount of will would make this anything other than what it looked like.
They were feeding the workers from the Descar-arik camps to the demons in the ship, so the demons would have the strength to fight, so they wouldn’t be tempted to take the legionaries.
He pushed himself upright and went up the first ramp into the dark ship.
The hatch opened onto a lamplit bridge above an open hold lined with wide stalls.
Below the pool of light, the hold was shadowy and stank of unwashed bodies and urine and death.
There was restless movement everywhere, as the demons in the stalls shifted impatiently.
There were no intentions keeping them in, no sigils gleaming in the dark.
No diamond chains. What Kai could see of their clothing was worn and tattered, and he didn’t want to look more closely, for fear of recognizing one of them.
They brimmed with energy, Kai could feel it from here, tingling uneasily along his nerves.
There were still desiccated mortal bodies sprawled in the pathways between stalls, a few legionaries dragging them into piles to remove once the storm eased.
Two officers stood on the platform, close enough to see Kai’s eyes in the lamplight. Staring at him incredulously, one said, “Do you belong to Vartasias? What are you doing here?”
“Is he with the Hierarch?” Kai asked.
“Yes,” the officer said, puzzled. “What did he send you here for?”
“Bashasa, the Prince-heir of Benais-arik, sent me,” Kai said, “to kill you all.” And he put his hand on the side of the wooden hatch and released the fire intention.
He stepped out as the fire washed over the side of the ship in a wave, and the screams started. This was not the heatless fire he had meant to use as the signal to the army’s vanguarders watching for it from the dunes, but the one that burned wood and people and cloth like straw.
He leapt down the ramp before it went up too. The sandstorm was dying away a little, but not fast enough to help anyone caught out on the platform. Kai started up the broad carved steps to the Hierarch’s house.