Crown of Stars

Page 13

The enemy didn’t have their range quite right. Half the next volley snapped on stone and a dozen arrows skittered along the canvas awning, but one buried its point into the dirt an arm’s length from the sergeant and another skipped across Lady Bertha, but surely her mail had protected her.
“Ai, God!” cried the sergeant. “Are you hit, my lady?”
Bertha’s face was pale, but Hanna could not tell if the arrow had drawn blood. She did not answer.
Above, another soldier shrieked. “Ai! Ai! I’m hit!”
Two dropped out of the wall. “Peter’s touched! We’re like trapped ducks there, strung up for market day!”
“It burns!” screamed Jerome, and Ruoda began sobbing and wailing, “No, no, Jerome! God! I pray you! Spare him!”
“Down!” cried Hanna, and Bertha answered her.
“Down! All of you! Take cover! Cover your faces! Do as the Eagle says!”
Hanna ran to the cart, not waiting to see if they obeyed her, although she heard them scrambling. The shaking rain began again.
They are advancing.
She pulled open the door and shoved past Brother Breschius, who was poised a hand’s breadth from the threshold. Out of the darkness, cries rose from inhuman throats, but their battle cry was a name she recognized:
“Sanglant! Sanglant!”
“Sorgatani! We’re lost if you do not come now! We have no defense against their weapons. I pray you! I do not know what enemies these are—”
“I know who they are.”
The Kerayit shaman was bright in her golden robes, beautiful and terrible. Her expression was cold. In one hand she clutched an anklet of bells. She said nothing as Hanna stepped aside to let her pass.
“Hanna,” said Breschius. “Don’t ask this of her.”
“She must go, or we’ll all die.”
Sorgatani crossed the threshold and descended the stairs, shaking the slave’s bells like an amulet in front of herself. There was power in her. Her robes captured the fading light of the coals and shone with a dull gleam whose trail left a ghastly miasma along the ground, almost a living, breathing, crawling mist of shimmering copper intertwined with mottled patches of blood-red vapor.
“This is a terrible thing,” murmured Breschius. “I cannot watch.” He hid his eyes against a forearm.
Hanna went to the door. One of the horses had fallen, and in its screaming and thrashing had driven the other horses out beyond the aisle, where they milled about in the open chapel. Jerome’s body lay trampled under their hooves. Of the groom and Sister Ruoda, Hanna saw no sign, nor of anyone, not one except a half dozen pairs of feet and two rumps peeping out from beneath the canvas awning, pulled down on top of them, and shapes huddled under the wagons and the shields. Sorgatani whistled softly, and every horse quieted. The dogs fell silent. Even the goats ceased their complaining.
Movement flashed by the narrow gap where the cargo wagon met wall. At first, Hanna thought it was their enemy, come to fight at close quarters. Then, horribly, she saw otherwise.
Lady Bertha staggered into view, leaning against the wall, struggling although there was no sign of a wound on her. Her grin was lopsided, as though half of her face had already lost mobility and feeling.
“Ah! Ah!” she said, in gasps of pain as she tried to speak words to the golden presence approaching her. “Too late for me. Too late. Blooded. But I had to see. I always wondered what you looked like. So beautiful!”
She sagged, slipped down onto her knees, and slumped against the wall, eyes still open but staring sightlessly.
Sorgatani walked past without faltering, through the gap. Hanna ran to the sheltering line of wagons. Sorgatani walked into the darkness. She was her own lantern. The mist boiled out from under her robes, streaming down the slopes in a flood that insinuated itself into every fold of ground, every crevice and gap of the ruins.
Their cries changed at first into those of unknown animals heard at a distance in a trackless forest: faint, clipped, despairing. A few arrows flew. None touched the Kerayit woman. Figures darted among the low walls, but they dropped in their tracks as Hanna watched in astonishment. They could not outrun the sorcery that stalked them. Where it touched them, they died, until that light washed the ruined palace and the slopes of its hill, everything Hanna could see, like the moonlight she had not seen for months but turned here into a curse not a blessing. The color was wrong, a haze of corruption.
Hanna stood at the breach. The wind had died. In all that world she heard each footstep as Sorgatani circled back and circumnavigated the chapel to flush out anyone hiding behind.