Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
My world had always been one thing, and now it was another.
Pieces of the southern wall filled the glowing sky.
They sailed like tossed coins through the air, arcing over the city.
At this distance they looked small enough to hold in my hand.
They rose higher, and Isa and I stared with our fingers still entwined.
There was no time to think, to wonder, to consider.
There was only this: the horizon burning like a candle’s enormous flame, and the southern wall blown to shards.
Only two seconds had passed since the blast. In those seconds, the pieces of wall reached the apex of their arcs and began to descend.
They were headed for the city.
One piece in particular grew larger than the others. Moment by moment, it grew—larger than my hand, larger than my head, larger than me and Isa put together, larger than my house. And in a dawning moment, Isa and I realized the same thing.
This piece was headed for the barracks.
It was headed for us.
“Vaelen’s bleeding sky,” Isa whispered.
Her fingers tightened over mine, and with a suddenness and strength I couldn’t have predicted, she swung me past her and off the porch of the infirmary. Both her hands went to my shoulders, and she shoved me as hard as she could into the dusty yard.
Her shove propelled me into a stumbling run.
The momentum carried me forward until the toe of my boot caught a rock, and I fell forward.
I braced myself on my shoulder, rolling over it once and then twice more until I shored hard up against the stone well in the center of the yard.
My back came to rest against the curved stones, which gave me a view of the infirmary behind me.
For a second, I saw her. Isa the nurse, bowed legs braced, staring back at me.
I couldn’t tell if it was terror or some odd mixture of concern and relief on her face.
Then the world rocked, and I was thrown hard against the well once more.
Dust flew into my face, forcing my eyes shut and filling my mouth.
Pain lanced up my back and into my legs, twice as potent as when my nose had been broken and repaired. The reverberation was so powerful I thought my eardrums had burst. Through it I heard wood explode, buildings crumble.
But I wasn’t dead.
I dragged in a breath and sucked in air through what felt like a straw. Mostly it was dust and grit, and I wheezed and coughed and coughed.
I couldn’t open my eyes, but who cared about eyes when you couldn’t breathe? Somewhere distantly I sensed dust and detritus raining down around me, pebbling over the ground and my body.
I forced myself onto my hands and knees and scrabbled for the side of the well. My hands found their way up the stones and to the lip and wooden cover, until I finally took hold of the still-intact rope at the center and began pulling at it.
The bucket wasn’t far down; they raised it from the deep river to keep it dry at night. And with any luck, there would be some water left inside…
The bucket sloshed when it hit the rail. Yes, there was water. I lifted the cover, grabbed for the bucket with one hand, jerked it over to me, and upturned the whole thing over my face and head.
The chill hit like a shock. The water raced down my throat and nearly choked me. I dropped the bucket and coughed again, this time spitting up dust as I did. I swallowed and breathed in hard, and this time my throat let in enough air to regain some sense of the world beyond the well and the bucket.
Around me, more booming sounded. The ground thudded at uneven intervals, sending vibrations up through my boots.
I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand, only spreading the dust around. I pulled at the collar of my shirt and scrubbed at my face, my eyes.
Finally, I could see.
Around me, dust drifted down like light snow. And before me, in the barracks yard, a behemoth rock loomed. It was unmoving, jagged, some twenty feet tall and at least twice that long.
I stared, uncomprehending. Until my eyes fell on the stones that comprised the rock.
All at once, sense came back to me. My eyes flicked toward the southern wall; all I could see through the dust was the terrifying sight of its absence.
This rock before me was a chunk of it.
Then, the shock: Isa had been there.
“Isa!” I lurched forward. My back and legs objected, but I ignored them, rushing to the fallen stone. Where my fingers touched felt familiar in a way I couldn’t place, but also unfamiliarly hot. The stone was almost scalding.
“Isa,” I called again, my voice small under the cacophony of booms and shouts and calls. Some vague part of my mind wondered why the guards’ horn hadn’t sounded, before or even now. But that was only a thread beneath the terror.
Isa had been standing here.
I skirted the wall-fragment, toward the infirmary. Maybe she was still inside. Maybe she was trapped in there—
When I came around the side, I stopped hard. My breath sawed in and out, lancing me every time. And I let out a wail I didn’t know I had in me.
The infirmary was gone. It was just… gone.
All that remained were shards of wood, scattered in a blast radius around the edge of the barracks.
Footsteps sounded behind me. A torch flared at my side, lighting the face of an older day guard, and he stared over the wreckage with me.
“Stars and shadows,” he breathed.
I stood there, my legs threatening to fold, my hands turned out toward what had been the infirmary. The world swayed. “She’s… Isa… we need to help her.”
“No.” His hand landed on my shoulder. “We need to run.”
I stared at the guard while the world screamed and boomed around us. The night hardly felt real. “Run? Run where?”
“The inner wall.” In the torchlight, his face flickered with shadows of panic and under-eye hollows that made him look almost ghoulish. Terror bled into his voice. “It’s a fucking disaster. The whole southern district is breached.”
Breached?
That meant…
No. I’d been told the creatures weren’t real. They were fairy tales. My mind clung to this notion as I turned toward him. He’d already started jogging toward the barracks’ gate, and I started after him. “What about the other guard? The night guard on the wa—”
“Dead.” He didn’t slow. “They’re all dead.”
I stopped, struck as if by a blow. My eyes followed his torch’s light as it bobbed ahead, faster, farther. He ran without slowing, without stopping to look back. Soon the light disappeared around the corner of the gate. Darkness closed in.
Maybe he’d forgotten about me. Maybe he didn’t care.
Maybe I’d been knocked unconscious when those guard had attacked me and I was having a terrible, concussed nightmare.
Dead. They were all dead. Isa, the regiment commander, the boys who had attacked me. Theo.
Theo was dead. My best friend. I’d just seen him—
A boom shook the district, and I jerked.
My eyes shot up to a sight I had never seen in my life.
High above, a glowing green spear pierced the sky.
It looked like someone had shot off a firework, but this was far more eerie and beautiful.
Spangles of green rained off the spear as it cut through the air a league above me.
My face lifted, eyes following the spear’s path, and I turned as it arced past the barracks and raced toward the inner wall.
What the hell was that thing?
With a hiss and a green flash, the spear exploded. I was thrown from my feet, and I hit the ground flat on my back. All the air was pressed out of my lungs in one go.
Green filled the sky before me, momentarily blinding me as I gasped without drawing air. The green light took on a mushroom’s shape, rising, rising toward the sky. The mushroom cloud splintered at the edges, winking at me with forest-green splendor.
Finally, after a few seconds, my lungs filled. The green faded to seared halos in my vision as I blinked and blinked again. I was in pain all over, disoriented, my heart a bird in my chest.
And for some reason, something the regiment commander had told us on our first day as trainees floated back to mind.
A sword is a sword is a sword.
I’d thought it was cryptic, wet-brain bullshit from a man who didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered with what to say to his thirtieth batch of trainees. But here on the ground, I understood.
A spear is a spear is a spear.
An explosion is an explosion is an explosion.
A thing as obvious as a sword is nothing but a sword. Don’t deny what you can see, hear, and smell.
Of course—I understood now.
We’d been attacked. This was an assault on the outer wall.
I rubbed a hand down my face. We’d covered this in training: my first prerogative as a guard was to protect the citizens as they evacuated. And the only other guard I’d seen had run for the inner wall.
Fuck that. My mother was among the citizens out here. And she lived in the Dip, close to the wall.
I climbed to my feet. I still had my short sword on and the knife in my belt. Hell, I’d never had a chance to strip out of my leathers. One word rang in my head as I started jogging: Breached. Breached.
I didn’t know what I was running toward, except that I had no choice but to run toward it.
As I came out of the barracks’ yard, three more green spears tore through the air high above me. Each angled toward a different section of the district in a concerted assault. I still didn’t know what those were, except that I didn’t want to be anywhere close to their destination.
I emerged into a street full of darkness and yelling and stampeding bodies. People surged past me, around me, aimless but united in one thing: flight.
Where were the rest of the guard?
Someone ran into me, nearly knocking me over.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, righting me before running on.
This wasn’t right—the people of the southern district weren’t like this.
We were hard-bitten, clear-eyed, thoughtful; we lived close to the outermost wall.
Of anyone, we were the true sons and daughters of the storm.