Cnaiür matched Sanumnis’s dark gaze. “Seal the gates,” he said. “Man the walls … If anything happens, the city is yours—as is the Warrior-Prophet’s charge.”
The Baron flinched from the intensity of his look, then nodded in resignation. Cnaiür turned back to the sunlight as he and Skaiwarra withdrew. The first of the boats was returning, rowing between the towers of the harbour’s mouth, over the chain where it dipped in the water. The sun had climbed high enough for him to discern the crimson of the transport’s sails, bundled against black-painted masts.
Tirnemus and his entourage arrived moments before Troyatti’s men escorted the Nansur officers onto the berm. The man smelled of wine and fried pork. Cnaiür told him to muster his men along the docks. “If all is well,” he said, “you will need to organize the embarkation.”
“Is all well?” the Baron asked with open apprehension. They could all smell it now.
Cnaiür turned his back on the man, waved for his Hemscilvara to bring the captives to the end of the quay. Their arms were bound behind their backs, which meant they had resisted.
He glared at the Nansur Generals as they were prodded forward. “You had better pray these transports are empty …”
“Dog!” old Baxatas spat. “What do you know of prayer?”
“More than your Exalt-General.”
A moment of silence.
“We know what you did,” Areamanteras said, not without some caution.
Scowling, Cnaiür approached the General, pausing only when he towered over him. “What did I do?” he asked, his voice strange. “There was blood when I awoke … blood and shit.”
Areamanteras fairly quailed in his shadow. He opened his mouth to answer, then tried to purse away trembling lips.
“Fucking swine!” Baxatas cried to Cnaiür’s immediate right. “Scylvendi pig!” Despite his fury, there was fear in his eyes as well.
The gopas dipped and screamed in the air above.
“Where is he?” Cnaiür asked. “Where is the Ikurei?”
None of the three said a word, and only Baxatas dared meet his gaze. At one point he seemed about to spit at him, but apparently thought better of it.
Cnaiür turned back to the nearest boat’s approach. He looked down to the black water beyond the dock’s edge, watched it slap about the pilings. He saw a branch reaching up from the murk, its forking tip waving just above the surface, like fingers ringed by foam.
The boatmen were shouting across the water. The transports were empty.
By mid-afternoon all the carracks and their escort of war galleys had been piloted into the harbour. Cnaiür kept the gates sealed, not willing to expose himself in any way until he had Conphas in his clutches. He had set Tirnemus and his men to join Troyatti in ransacking the city.
The Admiral of the Nansur fleet, a man called Tarempas, explained that the seasonal winds that so determined travel across the Three Seas had been unexpectedly favourable. He was far more worried about his return trip—or so he claimed. He was one of those restless, small-statured men who, given the way their eyes darted, seemed far more interested in their surroundings than their interlocutors. It was as though he continually sized everything up.
Some time afterward, the Columnaries in the main camp began rioting. They had caught word of the fleet’s early arrival. When noon came without any official word, they organized a protest. Several times in the course of his travels across the city, Cnaiür had actually heard their commotion: raucous shouts followed by booming cheers. As much was to be expected from homesick men, he supposed, especially after nearly three weeks of internment.
Then word of their Exalt-General’s disappearance leaked out.
With Sanumnis and Skaiwarra in tow, Cnaiür climbed the curtain walls overlooking the camp. Gaining the heights was like stepping from a calm grotto into the heart of battle, such was the clamour. A slum of hovels and tents extended from the wall’s footings, filling a great swath of earth denuded by the milling of countless feet. The bare earth funnelled southward, drawn into a track running across abandoned fields to the Oras River, which wound blue and black behind hazy screens of trees. A vast mob had gathered along the westward regions of the camp, thousands of men in soiled red tunics, shaking fists at a thin line of Conriyan knights arrayed some hundred paces distant on the far side of a razed orchard. With the exception of their helms and masks, they looked for all the world like Kianene horsemen.
Sanumnis whistled in grim appreciation. “Should we cut them down?” he ventured.
“Your men would be swallowed whole. You would simply be arming them.”
“Leave them, then?”
Cnaiür shrugged. “I see no siege towers … Just keep them hemmed in, away from their officers. Give a mob a head and it becomes an army. If they start forming ranks—if they remember their discipline—summon me immediately.”
The Baron nodded in what seemed grudging admiration.
Word arrived from Troyatti not long afterward. The Captain was in the city’s crammed necropolis in the largely abandoned Kianene Quarter, where his men had apparently found some kind of tunnel. The certainty of it had coalesced long before Cnaiür found the man standing, shirtless, hands on hips, at the mouth of the half-ruined sepulchre.
Conphas was gone.
“It runs several hundred yards beyond the walls,” the Conriyan said in grim explanation. “They had to excavate some to breach the surface … Some.” He grimaced as though to say, At least he got his hands dirty.
Cnaiür studied the man for a moment, pondered the absurdity of Inrithi scarring themselves in the manner of Scylvendi. It made him seem more a man somehow. He glanced across the necropolis, at the leaning obelisks, sagging ash-houses, and leering images—all Nansur or Ceneian. He felt none of the dread that had prevented the Fanim from reclaiming this ground. Shouts echoed from the nearby streets: the Hemscilvara calling to one another.
“Call off the search,” Cnaiür said. He nodded to the entrance of the sepulchre. “Collapse it. Close the tunnel.”
He turned to search the harbour, but the burnt-brick façade of a tenement obscured it. Conphas had orchestrated all this … After so long with the Dûnyain, he knew the smell of premeditation.
This would not be another Kiyuth.
Something … something …
Without a further word to Troyatti, he galloped the short distance to the Donjon Palace. He strode through the ornate halls, shouting for the Scarlet Schoolman, Saurnemmi. He found the Initiate just as he stumbled from his chambers, eyes swollen from slumber.
“What Cants do you know?” he barked.
The insipid fool blinked in astonishment. “I-I—”
“Can you burn wood from a distance? Ships?”
“Yes—”
A lone Conriyan horn pealed from some hidden distance—the signal Sanumnis was to use to summon him. There was some kind of emergency along the walls.
“Get to the harbour!” Cnaiür snarled, already running. As he rounded the marble banister, he caught a final glimpse of Saurnemmi, standing awkward and dumbstruck, clutching the front of his silk nightshirt.
He rode hard to the Tooth, where the horn seemed to issue. It rang out three more times, metallic and mournful. He shouldered his way through the knights milling in the open mall about the Tooth’s inner gates. Shouting men waved to him from the barbican’s summit.
“Quickly,” Baron Sanumnis exclaimed as he crested the final stairs. “Come.”
Leaning between the floriated battlements, Cnaiür saw that the Columnaries had abandoned their camp and were making their way north. He saw clots of them scattered across the distance, jumping irrigation ditches, filing through groves …
“There,” Sanumnis said, clutching his beard with one hand and pointing to the first broad bend in the River Oras with the other.
Peering between black-boughed sand willows, Cnaiür saw a band of armoured horsemen riding in loose formation. They bore a crimson banner with a Black Sun h
alved by a horse head … Kidruhil.
“And there,” Sanumnis said, this time pointing to the hills, past a series of green-mottled slopes. Though they marched in valley gloom, Cnaiür could see them clearly: ranks of infantrymen.
“You’ve doomed us,” Sanumnis said in his periphery. His tone was strange. There was no accusation in his voice. Something worse.
Cnaiür turned to the man, saw immediately that Sanumnis understood their straits all too well. He knew that the Imperial transports had set ashore in one of the natural harbours to the north of the city, and there disembarked who knew how many thousands—an entire army, no doubt. And he knew, moreover, that Conphas could not afford to let even one of them escape alive.
“You were supposed to kill him,” Sanumnis said. “You were supposed to kill Conphas.”
Weeper! Faggot weeper!
Cnaiür frowned. “I am not an assassin,” he said.
Unaccountably, the Baron’s eyes softened. Something almost … kindred passed between them.
“No,” the man said, “I suppose you’re not.”
Weeper!
As though prompted by some kind of premonition, Cnaiür turned and stared down the Pull, the broad thoroughfare that opened onto the Tooth, all the way to the harbour. Over the welter of rooftops he could see the farthest of the black clapboard transports. The nearer ones were only masts.
A flash of light, glimpsed through a slot between walls. Cnaiür blinked. The thunderclap followed moments after. All those lining the parapet turned in astonishment.
More lights, glimpsed over obscuring buildings. Sanumnis cursed in Conriyan.
Schoolmen. Conphas had hidden Schoolmen on his transports. Imperial Saik. Cnaiür’s thoughts raced. He turned back to the formations advancing through the valley. Glanced at the setting sun. More cracks rumbled across the sky. “Chorae bowmen,” he said to the Baron. “You have, what, four Chorae bowmen?”
“The Diremti brothers and two besides. But they would be dead men … The Imperial Saik! Sweet Sejenus!”
Cnaiür grasped both his shoulders. “This treachery,” he said. “The Ikurei must kill all who might testify against him. You know this.”
Sanumnis nodded, expressionless.
Cnaiür released his grip. “Tell your Trinketmen to situate themselves in the buildings surrounding the harbour—to hide. Tell them they need kill only one—one of them—to pen the Saik in the harbour. With no infantry to prise their way, they’ll be loath to advance. Sorcerers are fond of their skins.”
The man’s eyes brightened in understanding. Cnaiür knew that Conphas had likely commanded the Schoolmen in the harbour to remain on their ships, that their primary purpose was to render escape impossible. The Exalt-General was not so foolish as to risk his most powerful and delicate tools. No, Conphas meant to come through the Tooth. But there was no harm in letting Sanumnis and his men think they had forced this on him.
A brilliant flash deflected their attention to the harbour. No doubt Tirnemus and his men—those who yet survived—were fleeing into the city.
“It will be dark,” Cnaiür shouted over the resulting thunder. “It will be dark before the Nansur can organize an assault on the Tooth. Aside from spotters, we must abandon the walls. We must withdraw into the city.”
Sanumnis frowned.
“The Saik can do nothing so long as we stand in the midst of their countrymen,” Cnaiür explained. “That is cause to hope …”
“Hope?”
“We must bleed him! We are not the only Men of the Tusk.”
The Baron suddenly bared clenched teeth—and Cnaiür saw it, the spark he had needed to strike. He glanced down the length of the parapet at the dozens of anxious faces that stared back at him. Others, mostly Thunyeri, watched from the Tooth’s cobbled mall below. He looked to the harbour, saw curtains of smoke rolling orange and black in the setting sun.
He strode to the wall’s inner brink, held out his arms in grand address. “Listen to me. I will not lie to you. The Nansur can afford no quarter, because they can afford no Truth! We all die this night!”
He let these words ring into silence.
“I know nothing of your Afterlife. I know nothing of your Gods or their greed for glory. But I do know this: In days to come, widows shall curse me as they weep! Fields shall go to seed! Sons and daughters shall be sold into slavery! Fathers shall die desolate, knowing their line is extinct! This night, I shall carve my mark into the Nansurium, and thousands shall cry out for want of my mercy!”
And the spark became flame.
“Scylvendi!” they roared. “Scylvendi!”
The mall behind the Tooth had been a market of some kind before the coming of the Holy War. An expanse of some twenty lengths extended from the base of the barbican to the mouth of the Pull. An ancient tenement of Ceneian construction fronted the Pull’s north side, its base riddled with derelict shops and stalls. Cnaiür had concealed himself opposite, in one of the smaller buildings that ran along the south. If he peered, he could make out the glint of arms belonging to the shadowy myriad crowded within the tenement. A small window in the western wall afforded him a view across the gravel and dust of the mall, but since the moon rose to the west, the inner wall and barbican were little more than monoliths of impenetrable black.
Behind him, Troyatti whispered to the Hemscilvara, detailing the weaknesses in Nansur armour and tactics that Cnaiür had described to him, Sanumnis, Tirnemus, and Skaiwarra earlier. Outside, the shouts of Nansur officers echoed through the clear night air: Conphas making final preparations.
As Cnaiür had expected, the Saik had refused to leave their transports, which meant they owned the harbour and nothing else. While keeping a close eye on the arriving Columns—so far the Faratas, the Horial, and the famed Mossas had assembled—Cnaiür had dispersed teams of men throughout the buildings surrounding the Tooth, armed with what sledges and pickaxes they could muster. In a few short hours they had managed to knock out hundreds of walls, transforming, in effect, a broad tract of the western city into a labyrinth. Then, fumbling their way through the dark, they had taken up positions—and waited.
This was not, Cnaiür realized, what the Dûnyain would do.
Either Kellhus would find a way—some elaborate or insidious track—that led to the domination of these circumstances, or he would flee. Was that not what had happened at Caraskand? Had he not walked a path of miracles to prevail? Not only had he united the warring factions within the Holy War, he had given them the means to war without.
No such path existed here—at least none that Cnaiür could fathom.
So why not flee? Why cast his lot with doomed men? For honour? There was no such thing. For friendship? He was the enemy of all. Certainly there were truces, the coming together of coincidental interests, but nothing else, nothing meaningful.
Kellhus had taught him that.
He cackled aloud when the revelation struck, and for a moment the world itself wobbled. A sense of power suffused him, so intense it seemed something other might snap from his frame, that throwing out his arms he could shear Joktha’s walls from their foundations, cast them to the horizon. No reason bound him. Nothing. No scruple, no instinct, no habit, no calculation, no hate … He stood beyond origin or outcome. He stood nowhere.
“The men wonder,” Troyatti said cautiously, “what amuses you, Lord.”
Cnaiür grinned. “That I once cared for my life.”
Even as he said this, he heard something, a surreal muttering like the susurrus of insects through the riddled world around them. Words coiled through the sounds, the way flames glowered through smoke, and it bent the soul somehow simply hearing them, as though meaning had become contortion …
Brilliance. A concatenation of fires boiled over the parapets. Suddenly the barbican seemed a shield held against a blinding light. One of the spotters toppled, thrashing flames all the way to the ground.
They were coming.
Within the barbican, lines of brilliance
sketched the seams about the iron-banded doors. A thread of gold flared down their centre, and in a blink both were blown outward against the portcullis. Iron screeched. Stone cracked. Another burst. Like sound from a horn, light blasted from the underpass. The portcullis sailed into the old Ceneian tenement. A wave of smoke rolled outward and upward, across buildings and down the Pull.
Cnaiür blinked spots from his eyes. Everything had gone dark. His warriors coughed, beat the air with their hands. They fell still when they heard the growing roar … Shouting men. Thousands of them.
Cnaiür motioned for everyone to shrink back into the blackness.
It seemed to drone on for an extraordinary length of time, but the roar lost none of its ardour, and ever so gradually it became louder—and louder … Columnaries, spears out, square-shields tight, materialized from the black maw of the barbican. They ran screaming, rank after rank of them, setting up shield-walls to either flank, hacking at the doors to the barbican and rushing forward down the Pull. Cnaiür knew how they had been trained: strike hard and deep, cut upon your enemy’s flank, sever him from his kinsmen. “The wise spear,” their officers bawled, “finds the back!”
The heartbeats that followed were absurd. Like gleaming shadows, Nansur after Nansur flashed past the opening of their abandoned stall. Hundreds rushed down the Pull, their helms glossed in moonlight, their pale calves dancing in the gloom. Then a horn—the first—sounded in the blackness. Across the way, Cnaiür saw wild-haired Thunyeri dropping from the tenement’s second-storey windows, hooting their unnerving war cry.
The ring of steel. The clap of shields. Then all became roaring clamour.
Almost as one, the Nansur stopped and turned. Some even jumped to better glimpse the axes pitching to their left. A few canny souls turned apprehensively to black windows and entrances about them.