Chương 67: 2.14. Doom to Our Descendants

The Verdugo"No," Anna said.

"Anna—""No. I will not allow it." Her whiskers twitched. She tried to keep them as still as she could—Seth had called them cute once.

"We're wasting time." Seth tightened the noseband on his nameless horse's bridle. By the roadside, his would-be traveling companion, the lizard wizard, waited quite still atop his unsettled horse.

"If I go now, I can make it there and back before sunset. I'm at a gallop until Tondarre. We trade horses there and ride hard to Shipfarrok, we're there by three, and then we go at full clip till we're back at Shaheill's gate. It can work."

"How do you fucking know?" Anna demanded.

"You don't know horses and you don't know stormships. Who told you this?"

"Tiago knows horses." Seth pointed to her son where he sat and gnawed his Larrot Provisions jerky stick, his legs dangling from the slats of the south gate watch platform.

"And the Blue Ekadao knows stormships."

"Somewhat," the lizard said.

"Tiago doesn't know what he's talking about." Anna shot her traitorous boy a withering look.

"And we need Ekadao's siege spells. If he isn't—""The Blue Ekadao," the sarkanian said.

"What?" The sarkanian gave a brief wave with the tip of his tail.

"Kindly refer to me as the Blue Ekadao." Anna dialed the frigidity of her frown to gale force. The Blue Ekadao tilted his head.

"Is something wrong?"

"She's scowling at you," Seth said drily.

"As a threat."

"Pardon me, Madam Verdugo." The Blue Ekadao dipped his head in an apologetic bow.

"As a son of Sarkani, I am unskilled at reading the expressions of kindred with facial muscles. But your subordinate asked and I answered." Seth's composure was tilted a few degrees askew by subordinate. Anna liked the Blue Ekadao a little better.

"Do you know how to fly a stormship?" she asked.

"Somewhat, Madam Verdugo, but not well."

"I'm not doing a trade circuit on it," Seth said.

"I'm not using its guns. I'm not even trying to land the fucking thing. I'm crashing it into the big bastard."

"There will be other sorcerers, mother," Tiago said.

"And if it works, it'll kill the thing deader than a dozen siege spells."

"You don't want me on the front." Seth hung his gaudy new saber from his horse's harness.

"Okay. Good. I'm glad, if you want to hear that. I was putting on a brave face and maybe doing a bit of a tantrum, but I was terrified. I'm not built for a stand-up fight with a blackfeather. You're right about that. And I'm right about this." Anna wouldn't flail out here for his amusement like a fish on a hook. If he wanted to abandon her and find some novel way to die, then fine.

"Fine," she snapped. She was stalking away when Seth said "Wait," and it was as if he'd tugged a tether round her neck the way it stilled her. Her ears flattened again. Why the fuck was she waiting for him? For a moment he seemed as surprised as she did. He recovered quickly.

"If something happens, I'm not about to let one of us go out without telling you I love you." Tiago rolled his eyes and continued chewing his meat-leather.

"You don't have to say it back," Seth said.

"Fine. Whatever. But I don't care if you're wearing the head that makes you an asshole. I love you."

"I won't say it back," she said.

"Because then you'll feel all good and ready to die and you're not fucking allowed, you pigheaded prick. If you want to hear it, you stay here, or you come home."

"Fair enough," he said.

"I'll come home, then. Be right back, T."

"Enough with the T thing." Tiago pointed his jerky in accusation.

"I sided with you, il Gutierre." Seth climbed his pony.

"Ofelia's saying it now. It's terminal." Anna couldn't be around this laughy talky jokey shit. She didn't wait to see Seth and his new pet sarkanian take the road. She skulked back into Shaheill, remembering when Tiago had mistrusted the thief as much as she had. A stupid jealousy. Not her place to feel it. You are not a person, you are a munition. Stop tainting yourself with thought. Do your job and go away again. She could smell him. Why could she still smell him?

From her belt pouch, she dug the red flag that he'd had tied around his arm, and scowled at it, mad at his stupid juvenile stunt all over again. It smelled like him. She tossed it to the ground, then picked it up again and stuffed it back into her pouch. No need to let cloth go to waste. She'd return this one to the stash. In an alley between the stone wall of the fled Corregidor's manor and its wood-framed wattle-and-daub neighbor, a man was weeping, hand over his mouth.

A common enough sound in the hours before a blackfeather, and Anna strode past it without regard until it was joined by a familiar voice, kept low.

"It's all right," Riccana il Teremi said.

"Here. Take this. It's all right."

"No. No, thank you." Simon il Teremi, the sad-smiling vicer fellow. That's who was crying.

"I'll be all right. I'll be back up. You go on. Don't waste your time on me."

"It's all drilling. They don't need me."

"You shouldn't be seeing me like this. You shouldn't have to be the brave one."

"Sure, I should. I'm the Chief Hermandat. What passes for one." Anna crept to the alley corner, again unsure why she was tarrying.

"You're so young," Simon said.

"And you're so ready to give up the rest of your time. Why can't I—I don't know why—I've had so much life, and you've had none at all, and I should be ready, and I'm not. I should be ready. If Condal saw me like this…"

"Condal cried too, before he went to the shield wall." Riccana knelt next to him, helmet beneath her arm, her strawberry hair haloing in the midday light.

"And then he got up and he went, and he was a hero. That's how it works. That'll be us. Alesandri ran, and you could have, and you didn't."

"I would have." He clasped her hand.

"If it wasn't for you and Rainer and Isobel and the others, or if I thought you'd run, too, I'd have run with you in a heartbeat." Anna's knuckles whitened in her fists. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"I'd have run with you, too, Uncle. Anywhere. But it's right to be like this. It's better. They need us."

"Do they? The Verdugo's taken over and she seems built for blood. Would they really have missed us? Do we matter that much?"

"Only way to find out is to stand on the line and see where our spears stick. Besides. If we didn't hang around, who'd water the rhubarb?" Simon sputtered a laugh.

"Oh, Saints. The rhubarb."

"We can't—" Riccana was cracking up.

"Can't let the seraph into the rhubarb."

"Fucking hell." Simon retrieved his spear.

"I guess we'd better go kill it."

"Hey." Riccana dusted the clay powder from his back.

"Can you imagine what all those feathery fucks are gonna say when their big bad blackfeather Enna-Belum tumbles back through the wheel and has to admit he got ventilated by a bunch of rhubarb farmers? They're gonna rename him Enna-Bullshit."

"Enna-Bullshit," Simon sputtered, like it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. The two il Teremis cry-laughed in each other's embrace. Anna stalked past the mouth of the alley while they were distracted, before they chanced to see her. Without entirely understanding why, she followed her feet back to the carriage. She cracked the door and a strip of light fell across Ofelia's pale skin and dark cloak. Asleep, without the aloofness she usually wore, she looked so young. Anna's body had made this little warrior.

Had sheltered her. The chemical cocktail of filial love swept through the strange, thorny pathways of her chimeric brain. She wanted to be like Riccana and Simon. To have words of comfort and to be comforted in turn. She was like them, she reminded herself. She would be again. Just as soon as she could be Annalise. Annalise would know what to say. Annalise could welcome Seth home and kiss him the way he deserved. When was the last time she'd stayed behind this ugly, scarred face for this long?

Anna was to be used like a bodkin or a bullet. Meant to fire and fly and then be done, so that Annalise could live a life, could be happy. Had she been so stupid as to let herself hope, the way her foolish thief had, that the happiness would carry over into this saintforsaken skull? Maybe she could plug a happier head back in and let the Darkness exhaustion drag her under for a few hours.

Maybe she could crawl into the carriage and sleep, keep herself between her girl and the big bad world for a while, like a mother bear in its den. The drumroll crackle of a rifle line creased Ofelia's brow and slapped Anna out of that ridiculous notion. Ofelia wasn't a kid, even if she wore the gangly form of one. And cowardly Annalise wouldn't be able to get any sleep, anyway. Not with Enna-Belum on the horizon. A weapon bearing down on the al Ydrises deserved a weapon to meet it.

Anna shut the door again and saw her reflection in the frosted pane of its window. Here was that jolt she felt every time with Anna, the existential strangeness. Like the glass was cracked and reflecting back all wrong. Another fusillade from the muster yard. She turned away. If she was broken glass, good. Broken glass drew blood. The sun began its descent toward the gory evening. As much of a company had assembled in Shaheill as could be hoped for, with the short supply of hope they had.

Anna gave her organizing speech a second time to the crowd of veterans and volunteers, feeling like a wind-up tin soldier as she paced the scaffwood boards. The group's numbers had swollen twofold. Anna and her children had sent most of the new bodies to the skirmishers and the flanking line, hoping the red-pennant center would be a formality. After a shivering, drawn-in night, the Shaheill irregulars were more confident to be standing within a larger crowd, bolder and heartier when they drilled and looser at rest.

They thought their swelled numbers would save them. Some of them—men and women with scars and weatherworn gear from their homes, not the muster stocks—hadn't shed the graveyard gauntness. These, Anna guessed, were the ones who had been North already, and knew what was coming.

"Sorcerers," she called, now that there was a corps enough for the calling.

"Hands up." Four palms went skyward. A universal sound of clanking and rustling as the company pivoted to behold them. There was a tall man, whose shorn pate and pierced brow spoke to Sektoric extraction. His fire test had yielded a sad nimbus on its first attempt which had only flowered to full fireball on his second; he had given no explanation for this, only a dour shrug and a do I go home? He was still here, to his displeasure.

There was the jittery stripling sorceress from Lam's Hob, whose fireball had never so much as singed a seraph. She'd burn herself out quickly, if she managed to actually execute the siege spell—perhaps her inexperience would be a natural pacer. Next to her was an unlit woman—that was a surprise. The thick shag of her hair, graying at the temples with middle age, held beads and bone charms; her desaturated lips were streaked with bluepoppy dye.

Perhaps those rustic touches explained why she'd chosen the life of a countryside pariah rather than dwell in the humming streets of the capital beneath the shadows of the Basilica and the Psychelith. Why she'd come, Anna wasn't sure. Living unlit outside the Necropolis, surrounded by hate and suspicion, wasn't a recipe for a patriot. The best of them was a bronze-skinned muran with a campaign scar across his forearm where a seraph's claw had tried and failed to take a finger.

He had brightened to see Anna—when he realized what she was, a kinswoman's head stuck atop a human trunk, that cheer had petrified to frigid stone. Fine by Anna. These people were here to discharge their duty and be gone, the same as she was. Her daughter had gone from sorcerer to sorcerer, learning their names. Anna had no wish to.

"These are your artillerists," she said.

"Remember their faces and keep them safe. We'll need all of their firepower to break the beast before the final assault." And it still won't be enough, she thought but did not say. Losing the lizard man had hurt, and the only thing the drunkard would toast was whatever excuse would get him further into his cups. But even with those two sorcerers' lost siege spells piled onto the total, it wouldn't have been enough. They'd bedevil the seraph, and blunt it, but the killing of it would be bloody, heinous work.

Before the night was over, a score or more of the warriors arrayed before her would be undone by Enna-Belum's gnarled hand. Or all of us. Or il Gutierre will fly a stormship into it. She suppressed a scoff at the notion. At least he would be out of the way. At least it wouldn't be his face staring sightlessly up at her from the rusty muck. It might be Tiago's. Or Ofelia's. They were all waiting for her to continue. She blinked into the stretching silence. What had she been saying?

"Bugle call!" Atop the palisade a stoop-shouldered woman in Hermandati green pointed her pike with agitation toward the northern alpine, and saved Anna from the clumsy need to fill the quiet.

"Buglebird just broke the tree line! I heard it!" A hush draped over Shaheill— had she imagined it? —and then the buglebird piped again, its looping clarion tone unmistakable. Another picked up the sound, and another, this one nested jarringly close in the saintspeaker's steeple. It took to the sky, now, its mustard-yellow wings wide.

A mate bond of croaking crows followed it, and then from further out in the timberlands there came a great murmuration of fleet flapping retreat, as the starlings and sparrowhawks and all feathered creatures took their leave, following the buglebirds south. Hardy little things, buglebirds, and despite their garish yellow coloration and their ponderous flight, no raptor was eager to eat them. Something in their avian minds was attuned to the presence of a seraph.

When their clarions sounded and they fled, you could be sure a monster was coming. The Legion had bred and spread them across the Territories, hoping to rely on them as a living alarm system. It had worked fantastically; they stood along with the deathspell itself (and the deathspell's nightclad agents) as proof of the Pale Army's stewardship." Halt," Anna cried, before the square before her could turn to bedlam.

"Everyone to your commanders. Yellow with Ofelia. Green with Tiago. Red with Riccana. Let's send this dumb beast back to the wheel." A cheer originated from the Shaheilli volunteers, the ones who'd dug the pits and worked through the night and now went to defend their homes, and Anna felt a steely pride gird her heart. For a moment, she could almost believe it'd be enough. The square cleared of its soldiers as the kludged together fighting force moved—if not with discipline or drill then at least with purpose.

Shaheill's fresh-faced saintspeaker stood on the steps of his chapel, holding aloft a golden grilled reliquary box that surely contained the mummified toe of Saint So-and-So of the Whatever-it-was.

"Any who require shrift!" She strained above the din to be heard.

"See me first with the name of your guardian divinity on your lips. May the Hundred Saints keep you, protectors of Shaheill!" Stuff that, Anna thought, but did not say. Let the Saints watch and wish they had the stones to stand with us. We'll keep ourselves. Ofelia's skirmishers trooped across the pit-laden field, their boots drumming on the concealed boards of their traps. Tiago's outflankers hefted their billhooks and guisarmes, and summoned what steel they could in imitation of their unsmiling sergeant.

Riccana's red-badged main line hammered their anchorpikes into the earth and cast looks between one another, wondering without words which of their fellows would be front-and-center of the great grotesquerie's charge. Anna's hand slid from her spear into her belt pouch. It found the strip of cloth that smelled like Seth il Gutierre and squeezed the fabric tight. And then there was silence. The utter preseraphic silence when the birds have all gone and the extradimensional horrors approach.

A bellow like the world had broken open, and the primeval leviathans buried in deep time had risen to cry out with petrified throats: doom to our descendants; doom to the Union. A face rose into view above the firs, a face unzipped and reconfigured into morbid saw-toothed mockery of the horrified kindred who beheld it and tried to hold fast to the slipping leash of their courage. Enna-Belum, the Horned Vexation, breaker of battalions and sorrow of the Northmarch, had come for Shaheill.