With the loss of their leader any semblance of order collapsed completely. We were at life and death, and everyone realized it. Accordingly the knee-high barrier separating us from the thickest part of the throng stopped doing that, proving no impediment to the movement of fifty thousand angry, frightened men. The march had become a rout – I was a drop in a sea of flesh, and could do nothing but paddle with the current.
Adolphus had it easier – even the most scattered fellow will avoid running into a brick wall if he can help it. But I’m not much bigger than average, and the surge carried me along. Like any great body of people it moved without purpose or direction, mankind in the aggregate no brighter than in detail. The explosion had sent the men in the back sprinting forward, and the barbarity of the guards had sent the men in the front sprinting back. Adolphus and I made for the flanks accordingly, but it was like wading a swollen river. A river that’s screaming at you and shoving fingers into your eyes.
An errant blow from a passer-by sent me to my knees, my head spinning, the sheer press of men near to crushing me. An ugly way to go, and I managed to regain my footing with a few sharp hooks. By the time I got my head up Adolphus was gone, swept onward by the tide. Or perhaps he just hadn’t cared to wait – I got the sense that my well-being was not his foremost concern.
Chaos like that, there isn’t anything that distinguishes one man from another – survival comes down to drunken chance. I was in the front when it started, and I knew it was coming, so I had a better shot than most, but not much of one.
A packed squad of guardsmen hammered their way toward us, and the crowd surged backward like a wounded animal. I broke forward, figuring to take my chances against one fool with a weapon than ten thousand unarmed. A uniformed scab took a swing at me, and I ducked beneath it and took his legs out from under him. I wanted to stay there and beat on him a little, but there wasn’t time. I was off and sprinting as quick as I could muster.
Off the main boulevard I took my first full breath, lungs expanding into bruised bone and injured flesh. I wasn’t sure how long it had lasted, the mad press of bodies. Not as long as it had felt like, that was damn sure. The wind was scattering sparks of fire further into the city, and things were getting bad fast. Worse, I guess I should say. Still I turned to watch, climbed a few feet up the wall of the alley, finding footholds in parched ivy. I’d set the fuse – it seemed only right to stay till the end.
For once the Old Man had overreached. Most of the people in the crowd hadn’t seen violence in fifteen years, but that’s not never. Enough of it was coming back to them to make the comparatively tiny number of guards distinctly insufficient. The Ashers, ever prepared for combat, had formed into a tight square and were edging their way to safety, distinct by their outfits and discipline. Mostly the guards were smart enough to stay away from them, but occasionally one got too close and found himself pulled under, executed efficiently though not painlessly by men who’d made violence a religion.
They were the only knot of organization to be seen, but in chaotic remnants here and there once dangerous men recalled their powers. The guards were armed, and made savage by youth, but their opponents had earned degrees in brutality at the definitive institute in history. A Vaalan the size of an ox snapped a guard over his knee, back breaking like a rotten tree branch. Further down the line a pair of Islanders had isolated one unfortunate, had him against the ground and were beating him to death with something akin to glee. Joachim had stipulated that no one was to carry a weapon, the better to head off this exact scenario – but amidst the tens of thousands some remnant had come with blade or bronzed knuckle. What had begun as blind flight was rapidly hardening into a battle, and I felt an incongruous moment of enthusiasm for my brothers-in-arms.
But the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Another explosion ricocheted through the crowd, then another and another, pops like fireworks, each signaling death, and whatever had braced the spirit of the mob was carried away by fear.
The drizzle had turned into a downpour, but it wasn’t doing anything to stem the spread of the flames. The second wave of explosions had dirtied the air, rendering further observation of the proceedings futile. The city was ripe as a tinderbox, the ground so dry a dropped cigarette would burn cobblestone. There was a burst of heat as the windows of a house a block over erupted, and I dropped from my perch and started off.
The smoke was in my eyes and in my throat and in my lungs, and I coughed my way through the alleys trying to get away from it. I wasn’t the only one hoping to make an escape – I passed a steady stream of veterans breaking out in any and every direction, so long as it was away, away, away. I was of the same desperate strain of mind, so it was a hell of a surprise to make a U-turn in a cul-de-sac and find myself face to face with a pair of old friends.
‘If it isn’t the lieutenant,’ Hroudland said, and for once Rabbit didn’t smile.
‘Thank the Firstborn you two survived! Where’s the commander?’
‘Commander’s dead,’ Hroudland said.
‘Heavens!’ I exclaimed. By that point I was pretty sure talking wasn’t going to square us.
‘What happened to Roussel, Lieutenant?’ Hroudland asked.
‘I might have killed him,’ I admitted, giving up the charade. ‘And I might have enjoyed it.’
Rabbit nodded, unsurprised. ‘As I will this.’
My interview with the Old Man had left me unarmed, and there hadn’t been time to make good the lack. Rabbit held a thin stiletto in his off hand, but he let it drop blade-first to the ground and gestured at me to come forward. I’d never had any great desire to engage the man in fisticuffs, but it didn’t do to show him that. I went in strong as I could, feinting a body shot and trying for an eye-level straight – but he just grinned that grin that I’d come to loathe and dipped his head, and I broke two knuckles off his cranium.
It was a short fight, and the rest of it went the same way. What little I landed might as well not have, and every one of Rabbit’s short, sharp punches found purchase on my own flesh. Soon I was on the ground and he was kicking me in the ribs, the beating somewhat superfluous given what I’d already suffered. Another moment of fun and he dropped down on top of me, pinned his knees against my shoulders and wrapped his fingers around my throat.
The smoke was thick as marmalade, and it seeped into my brain. The margins of my vision folded inward, narrowing on an impossibly wide grin, teeth as big as chess pieces, running together into eternity.
A palm reached out of the fog and wrapped itself around Rabbit’s skull, pulling it towards the wall and dragging the rest of his body along with it. The passageway was ruined brick, but all the same Rabbit’s bald head created a sizable indentation. He slumped slowly to the ground, leaving a streak of blood in his wake.
The hand attaches to an arm attaches to a body, and it’s Adolphus’s, and I am saved.
There are men who wouldn’t have hesitated then, but there aren’t many, and Hroudland wasn’t one of them. His jaw quivered and he held his knife loose in his hand. Adolphus slapped it away casually, the blade skittering off into the dirt. A second backhand rebounded Hroudland off the well, stunned him insensible, left him open for the finale. While I’m aware that it is not literally possible for a punch to knock a man’s head off, somehow that’s the only description that fits.
I lay motionless as my best friend approached me, wondering if perhaps he’d set his boot against my chest and make a clean go of everyone who’d fucked him. Instead he bent down and lifted me to my feet like I was a child.
‘Let’s go home,’ he said, and that’s what we did.
46
It only took Roland a moment to see he was going to die.
We were in a small safe house I had set up in Low Town. That much I had held to. But the men who sat at the table with me were, even at a glance, not the sort of people who would be sponsoring an internal
You can learn everything you need to know about a person by how they react to their death, though of course you can’t do anything with the information afterward. Not that I had any doubts about Roland’s courage. He stopped short, just past the doorway. For a brief moment you could see him thinking about making a run for it, see it in the sudden tensing of his hands. But I’d put two men on the entrance he’d come through, and he must have
