might see Pterocles’ sorcerously glowing hands, but they couldn’t see rocks and holes in the ground under their own feet. Low-voiced curses and occasional thumps from all around said they weren’t the only ones with that trouble.
Grus craned his neck to one side, trying to listen for shouts of alarm from Vasilko’s men. He still heard none. His hopes began to rise. Maybe this would work after all. Maybe…
Then he did hear the unmistakable thud of a scaling ladder going up against a wall. Soldiers rushed toward the top of the ladder. Someone up on the wall called out in the Chernagor language—a challenge, Grus supposed. Pterocles hadn’t managed to hide that noise. The answer came back in the Chernagor tongue, for Hirundo had thought to put some of the men who’d stayed loyal to Prince Vsevolod at the head of the storming party.
Whatever the response meant, it quieted the defender who’d challenged. That meant the Avornans got onto the wall without any trouble. Then more shouts rang out, and the clash of blade on blade. But Grus knew Vasilko’s men were in trouble. If the attackers managed to seize a portion of the wall, they had an enormous advantage on the men trying to hold them off.
“Up!” shouted officers at the base of the wall. “Up, up, up! Quick! Quick!” They sounded like parents trying to keep unruly three-year-olds in line. No child took seriously something said only once. Repeat it and it might possibly sink in. Soldiers were often the same way.
Men cursed and grunted as they swarmed up toward the battlements of Nishevatz. More curses and screams rang out up above on those battlements.
A body thudded to earth at the kings feet. It was a Chernagor; the black-bearded officer had gear too fine for a common soldier. He writhed feebly and moaned in pain. One of Grus’ guardsmen raised a spear to finish the man off. “Wait,” Grus said. “Maybe the healers can save him. He’s no danger to us, and we may learn something from him.”
The guard said, “Whatever you want, Your Majesty, but I don’t think you’re doing him any favor by keeping him alive.”
Blood ran from the Chernagor’s mouth. One of his arms and both legs splayed out at unnatural angles. Grus decided the guardsman was right. “Go ahead,” he said. The Avornan drove the spear into the injured man’s throat. It was over quickly after that.
Up on the wall, the Chernagors began to sound desperate, while the Avornans’ shouts grew ever more excited. “We’re going into the city!” someone yelled in Avornan. That was even better than a foothold on the wall. If the Avornans could cut Vasilko’s men off from their last citadels inside Nishevatz…
Grus felt his way to a scaling ladder. “I’m going up,” he told his guards. “Some of you can go up before me if you like, but I’m going up now.” He’d known the guards would protest, and they did. But the king managed to have his way. Half a dozen guardsmen did precede him up the wall, but he went.
Two Chernagors and an Avornan lay dead in a great pool of blood in front of the top of the ladder. More bodies came into view through the fog as Grus walked along the wall. All the Chernagors he saw were dead. Some Avornans were only wounded. One or two of them gave him feeble cheers.
His guards were as nervous as a mother watching a child take its first steps. “Be careful, Your Majesty!” they said, and, “Look out, Your Majesty!” and any number of things intended to keep the king away from the fighting.
“I do want to see what’s going on, as best I can with the fog,” he said.
They didn’t want to listen to him. He hadn’t really thought they would. Somewhere not far away, iron beat on iron—the Chernagors were still trying to hold off the Avornans and even to drive them back. Grus’ bodyguards got between him and the sound of fighting, as though the ring of sword against sword were as deadly as point or edge.
In spite of the guardsmen, Grus saw a good deal. By now, long stretches of the walls were in Avornan hands. The only Chernagors left in these parts were dead, wounded, or disarmed and taken prisoner. The captives had the stunned look of men for whom disaster had come from out of the blue—or, here, out of the gray. One moment, they’d felt secure enough on the works that had held out for so long. The next, they saw their comrades bleeding while they themselves faced an uncertain fate. No wonder they looked as though they’d just, and just barely, survived an earthquake.
And, as the day advanced toward midmorning, the sun finally began to thin the fog—not to burn it off, but at least to thin it to the point where Grus could see farther than his own knees. He got his first real look inside Nishevatz. Most of the buildings had plastered fronts painted in various bright colors and steeply pitched slate roofs to shed the winter snow.
Parties of Avornans and Chernagors ran through the narrow, muddy streets, pausing every so often to exchange sword strokes or shoot arrows. Grus watched a shrieking Chernagor go down, beset by two Avornans who thrust their blades into him again and again until at last he stopped moving. It took a sickeningly long time.
One of the guardsmen pointed deeper into the city than Grus had been looking. “See, Your Majesty?” the guard said in pleased tones. “There’s the first fire. Now they’ll have to worry about putting that out along with fighting us.”
“So they will,” Grus agreed. This was what he’d been trying to accomplish for years. Now that he’d finally done it, he was reminded of the cost. His soldiers and Vasilko’s weren’t the only actors in the drama. Old men hobbled on sticks, trying to escape both foes and flames. Women and children ran screaming through the streets, fearing what fate had in store for them—and well they might.
A Chernagor archer saw Grus peering down from the wall. The man
“Not safe anywhere,” Grus answered. He shook off the guards and peered into Nishevatz again. “I wonder where Vasilko is and what he’s doing.”
“Quaking in his boots, most likely,” a guardsman said. “This place is going to fall now, and he’s got to know it.” As though to prove his point, what had to be a regiment’s worth of Avornans surged out from the wall, driving the Chernagor who’d shot at Grus and his comrades back toward the center of Nishevatz.
Another guard said, “They’re shouting your name, Your Majesty,”
“I hear them,” Grus said. When he first wore the crown, hearing soldiers use his name as a battle cry had been thrilling. Now it was just something that happened.
He also heard shouts of “Vasilko!” He wondered whether Vsevolod’s son still enjoyed hearing soldiers shouting his name. With a little luck, that wouldn’t matter much longer.
“Where can we get into the city from the wall?” Grus asked his guardsmen. That made them look unhappy all over again, but they couldn’t very well pretend they hadn’t heard him, however much they might have wanted to. Instead, they fussed all the way to a staircase and all the way down. Even after Grus came down inside Nishevatz, his bodyguards still grumbled and fumed.
Avornan soldiers with spears led out long columns of Chernagor prisoners—grim-faced men who tramped along with empty hands raised high over their heads or tied behind their backs. Somewhere not far away, women wailed. Grus winced, knowing they were all too likely to have reason to wail. His own men were only… men, a lot of them no better than they had to be.
“Where is the prince’s palace?” he asked. “Chances are, that’s where Vasilko will make his stand.” He stopped and snapped his fingers. “Wait—I have a map of the town as it was, anyhow.” Maybe Lanius’ gift would do him some good after all.
A captain said, “I don’t know if we can get anywhere in Nishevatz very easily. Do you see? The fire is starting to take hold.”
So it was. Grus wondered if anyone in Nishevatz would ever see clearly again. Even as the fog thinned and the sun struggled to break through, thick clouds of black smoke began filling the streets of the city. A building fell down with a rending crash. New flames leaped up from the ruins. How long before most of Nishevatz was gutted?
