Balasar could see in their faces that discipline would hold.
A few local fighters made assaults on the square and were cut down in their turn. Brave men, and stupid. The trumpets of the enemy had sounded out, giving away their positions with their movements, their signals a cacophony of amateur coordination. The white sky was slowly growing gray-the sun setting or else the clouds growing thicker. Balasar didn't know. He'd lost track of time's passage. It hardly mattered. His men stood ready. His men. The army that he'd led half across the world to this last battle. He could not have been more proud of them all if they'd been his sons.
The pain came without warning. He saw it pass through the men like wind stirring grass, and then it found Balasar himself. It was agonizing, embarrassing, humiliating. And even as he struggled to keep his feet, he knew what it meant.
The andat had been hound. The enemy had turned some captive spirit against them. They'd been assaulted, but they were not dead. Hurt, leaning on walls with teeth clenched in pain, formations forgotten and tears steaming on their checks. Their cries and groans were louder than a landslide, and Balasar knew his own voice was part of it. But they were not dead. Not yet.
'Rally!' Balasar had cried. 'To me! Form up!'
And god bless them, they had tried. Discipline had held even as they shambled, knowing as he did that this was the power they had conic to destroy, loosed against them at last. Shrieking in pain, and still they made their formations. They were crippled but undefeated.
What would have happened, he thought, if he had not tried? What would the world have become if he had listened to his tutor, all those years ago, heard the tales of the andat and the war that ripped their Empire apart, and had merely shuddered? There were monster stories enough for generations of boys, and each of them as frightening as the next. If the voting Balasar Gice hadn't taken that particular story to heart, if he had not thought This will he my work; I ZL,'il/ make the a:'or/d safe from these things, how would it have gone? Who would Little Ott have been if he hadn't followed Balasar out to die in the desert? Who might Coal have married? What would Mavarsin have named his daughters and sons? tie heard the attack before he saw it. 'There was no form to it-men waving knives and axes pouring toward them like a handful of dried peas thrown against a wall; first one, then a few, and then all the rest in a clump. Balasar called to his men, and a rough shout rose from them. It was ridiculous. He should have won. This band of desperate fools didn't know how to fight, didn't know how to coordinate. Half of them didn't know how to hold their weapons without putting their own fingers at risk. Balasar should have won.
The armies came together with a crash. The smell of blood filled the air, the sound of brawling. And more of them came, boiling up out of the ground and charging down the streets. The humiliating pain made Balasar's every step uncertain. Every time he tried to stand at his full height, his knees threatened to give way beneath him.
All the ghosts that had followed him, all the men he had sacrificed. All the lives he had spent because the world was his to save. They had led to this comic-opera melee. The streets were white with snow, black where the dark cobbles showed through, red with fresh-spilled blood. The men of Machi and Cetani ran through the square barking like dogs. The army of Galt, the finest fighting force the world had ever seen, tried to hold them off while half-bent in pain.
It should have been a comedy. Nothing so ridiculous should have the right to inspire only horror.
They will kill tis all, Balasar thought. Every man among us will be dead by morning if this doesn't stop.
He called the retreat, and his men stumbled and shuffled to comply. Street by street, the archers held hack the advancing forces with IIIaimed arrows and bolts. Footmen stumbled, weeping, and were dragged by men who would themselves stumble shortly and he dragged along in turn. 'l he sky grew dark, the snow fell thicker. By the time Balasar reached the buildings in the south of the city that he'd ordered taken that morning, it was almost impossible to see across the width of a street. The snow had drawn a curtain across the city to hide his shame.
The army of lachi also fell back, retreating, Balasar supposed, into their warm holes and warrens and leaving him and his men to the mercy of the night. There was little food, few fires, and a chorus throughout the black night of men weeping in pain and despair. When Balasar dragged himself away from the little fire in the cooking grate of the house in which he'd taken shelter and relieved himself out the hack door, his piss was black with blood and stank of bad meat.
He wondered what would have happened if he had stayed in Galt, if he had contented himself with raiding the Wcstlands and Eymond, Eddensea and Bakta. Ile wondered what would have happened if he hadn't tried.
Ile forced himself through the captured buildings until it became too painful to walk. 'i'he men looked away from him. Not in anger, but in shame. Balasar could not keep from weeping though the tears frozen on his checks. At last, lie collapsed in the corner of a teahouse, his eyes closing even as he wondered whether he would die of the cold if he stopped moving. But distantly, lie felt someone pulling a blanket over him. Some sorry, misled soldier who still thought his general worth saving.
Balasar dreamed like a man in fever and woke near dawn unrested and ill. The pain had lessened, and from the stances of the men around him he guessed he was not the only one for whom this was true. Still, too hasty a step lit his nerves with a cold fire. He was in no condition to fight. And the rough count his surviving captains brought him showed he'd lost three thousand men in a day. They had been cut down in the battle or fallen by the way during the retreat and frozen. Almost a third of his men. One in three, a ghost to follow him; sacrifices to what he had thought he alone could do. No word had conic from 1 ustin in the North. Balasar wished he hadn't let the man go.
The clouds had scattered in the night. 'l'he great vault above them was the hazy blue of a robin's egg, the black towers rising halfway to the heavens had ceased dropping their stones and arrows. Perhaps they'd run out, or there might only tie no point in it. Balasar and his men were in trouble enough.
The air that followed the snows was painfully frigid. 'The men scavenged what they could to build up fires in the grates-broken chairs and tables, coal brought up from the steam wagons. 'l'he fires danced and crackled, but the heat seemed to vanish a hand's span from the flame. No little fire could overcome the cold. Balasar hunched down before the teahouse fire grate all the same, and tried to think what to do now that everything had fallen apart.
They had a little food. 'I'he snow could be melted for water. 'I'hey could live in these captured houses as long as they could before the natives snuck in at night to slit their throats or a true storm came and turned all their faces black with frostbite.
The only hope was to try again. They would wait for a day, perhaps two. They would hope that the andat had done its damage to them. They might all die in the attempt, but they were dead men out here anyway. Better that they die trying.
'General (; ice, sir!'
Balasar looked up from the fire, suddenly aware he'd been staring into it for what might have been half the morning. The boy framed in the doorway flapped a hand out toward the streets. When he spoke, his words were solid and white.
'I'hey've come, sir. 'They're calling for you.'
'Who's come?'
'The enemy, sir.'
Balasar took a moment to gather himself, then rose and walked carefully to the doorway, and then out into the city. To the North, smoke rose gray and black. A thousand men, perhaps, had lined the northern side of one of the great squares. Or women. Or unclean spirits. They were all so swathed in leather and fur Balasar could hardly think of them as human. Great stone kilns burned among them, flames rising twice as tall as a man and licking at the sky. In the center of the great square, they'd brought a meeting table of black lacquer, with two chairs. Standing there in the snow and ice, it looked like a thing from a dream, as out of place as a fish swimming in air.
When he stepped into the southern edge of the square, a murmur of voices he had not noticed before stopped. He could hear the hungry crackle and roar of the kilns. He lifted his chin, scanning the enemy forces. If they had come to fight, they would not have announced themselves. And they'd have had no need of a table. The intent was clear enough.
'Go,' Balasar said to the boy at his side. 'Get the men. And find me a banner, if we still have one.'
It took a hand and a half for the banner to be found, for someone to bring him a fresh sword and a gray cloak.
