Chương 146: Chapter 145 – Wind Through a Tunnel

Two hundred people did not move quietly, and nobody was trying to make them. Ant had stopped expecting otherwise somewhere around the second mile: a steady pace through the trees, the odd low word when someone's footing slipped on a root. Thomas walked point regardless, leading them by a route he'd clearly gone over in his head long before tonight, every turn already decided before the column reached it. Marigolds would hear something coming long before they saw it. That was the point.

"You're not worried about the noise," Ant said, falling into step beside Natalia.

"We want the noise, just not yet." She didn't break stride to say it, attention already moving down the line, checking positions without needing to be told twice by anyone.

"Not until Kalsar's already got their attention pointed somewhere else." They stopped at the treeline a quarter mile out, close enough that Ant could make out torches along the wall's upper walk, far enough that nobody up there had reacted to two hundred people settling into the dark behind them. Cindermaw paced at Natalia's heel, smoke curling faint off his spine. Hazel had Vulcan crouched low beside her, faint scorch marks already pressed into the grass where he'd settled his weight.

Mahkir sat at Ant's side, tail wrapped tight around his own feet, eyes fixed on the wall, ears tracking every sound that came off it. They waited. The first sound came from somewhere off to the east, faint enough that Ant almost convinced himself he'd imagined it.

Then it came again, louder, unmistakably a horn, and after that the noise didn't stop: shouting, something that might have been a Kithren's roar and might have been three of them at once, the whole thing distant enough that Ant couldn't tell friend from enemy in any of it.

"That's Kalsar," Thomas said.

"You sound very sure for someone who can't see anything."

"Not sure of it. Just hopeful, and hoping counts for something right now." Thomas's hand had found the rolled map again, though there was nothing left in it he hadn't already memorized.

"Give it a minute. If it's them, the wall guards start looking that way instead of this way." It took less than a minute. Ant watched three separate points of torchlight along the near wall shift and cluster toward the eastern corner, guards calling to each other in voices pitched to carry, and Ant's grip on Soul Render eased slightly even though the fighting he could hear wasn't his to feel relief about yet.

"Now," Thomas said. They went in loud on purpose, Natalia's whistle cutting through the trees before the front line had even cleared them, and the wall guards who'd been watching the wrong direction turned back around into two hundred people already closing the last stretch of open ground. Arrows went up first, more warning than threat at this range, and Ant kept his stride even as the first of them thudded into the dirt a dozen feet short.

"Wall," Natalia called out, somewhere off to his left.

"Everyone hits the wall. Nothing else." It was an easy order to follow because it was almost true. Kithren skills of every variety fired into the stonework from well back of the wall, one strike after another, while archers behind them laid down covering fire on anything that showed itself along the top: a guard leaning out too far, a Marigolds Kithren perched up there to return fire. Nobody closed the distance to do it by hand. There was no reason to.

Standing under a wall while men above had a clean shot straight down would have bought nothing but a wasted life, not caution, and this was never meant to actually breach anything. Guards up top answered anyway, and once a Marigolds Kithren dropped down trying to close on the nearest archers, but the line there gave ground rather than meet it, peeling back instead of trading blows.

That had been the whole shape of the plan since Thomas laid it out back at HQ, and watching it hold now, Ant let himself believe that the plan might actually survive beyond the first encounter. Mahkir hit the wall with a burst of flame aimed dead center of the stonework, exactly where every other strike was landing, and it was almost impossible to see the moment his aim drifted, six inches, no more, enough that the edge of it caught the roofline of the house built flush against the wall instead of the wall itself.

Oops, Mahkir said, and the delivery of it was the funniest thing Ant had heard all week. Vulcan's next blast landed the same way. Then Cindermaw's, further along, catching the far corner of the same roof from the opposite angle. To anyone watching from the wall it would read as exactly what it looked like: three fire-capable Kithren overshooting under pressure, more concerned with volume than precision. Nobody on the wall so much as glanced at the house. Why would they. It wasn't the target. It caught fast.

Whatever Thomas's mineral had done to the timber underneath, or maybe it was just old, dry wood catching easily on its own, but within a few minutes there was a real fire climbing the near side of the roof, smoke rolling up thick and black against the torchlight.

"How long," Ant asked, finding Thomas where he'd planted himself a safe distance back, all his attention on the house instead of the wall, the fight in front of him barely registering at all.

"I don't know." Thomas said it plainly, nothing dressed up to sound like more of an answer than it was.

"I've read about this happening in mine shafts, small pockets, nothing this size. The reaction doesn't care how big the fire is once it starts. It just starts, and then it builds until the space it's in can't hold any more of it, and that could take an hour or it could take three."

"That's not really an answer."

"I wish I could be more precise, but I can't." Thomas didn't look away from the smoke.

"What I do know is we'll smell it before it goes. Sulphur, or near enough to it. Once that's in the air, it's close." There was no comfort in that answer, but Ant took it and turned back to the fight, such as it was. Nobody was dying out here, not from what he could see: a few fighters nursing burns from spent arrows, one man carried back with an ankle rolled wrong on the uneven ground, nothing worse. Range did that.

He watched the fire climb another few feet up the roofline and let himself believe, for the first time since Coldwoof's gate, that the plan was actually working. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Give it another few minutes," Natalia said, arriving at his shoulder, "long enough that nobody up there thinks twice about it later, then we pull back." They gave it the few minutes. The fire didn't slow.

If anything it spread faster once it found the older timber further along the roofline, and by the time Natalia raised her hand for the retreat signal, half the structure was properly burning, flame visible even from where Ant stood, smoke thick enough now that a couple of the wall guards had started shouting about it, pointing at something that wasn't the fight at all anymore.

"Pull back," Natalia called, and the whistle went up a second time, three short blasts instead of one. It went cleaner than the advance had. Fighters disengaged in the same loose clusters they'd attacked in, nobody chasing a last hit, and within a few minutes the whole line was moving back into the trees at a jog.

Ant looked back once before the treeline swallowed the view, the wall guards still shouting, still pointing, none of them anywhere near sorting out what had actually just happened to them, and let Mahkir pull him the rest of the way into the dark. The long way round took the better part of an hour, Thomas insisting on it twice when someone suggested a shorter route that cut closer to the wall's northern face.

"We don't need speed," he said, both times.

"We need them not seeing four hundred people rejoin into one group." Nobody argued the second time either. Kalsar's group was already at the village when they got there, and it took one look at the state of them for Ant to understand this hadn't been the same night his own people had.

"Twenty," Kalsar said, before Ant had even finished crossing the distance between them. No preamble, no softening it.

"Dead or hurt bad enough they're not walking back into anything tonight. Maybe tomorrow either."

"Twenty." Ant repeated the number back, hoping it would sound better the more he said it. Not a disaster, but more than they'd hoped for a distraction.

"Could've been worse. A lot of quick thinking managed to save a few." A scrape ran along one of Kalsar's cheekbones, dried blood he hadn't bothered cleaning off yet.

"They guessed we'd try to attack the sewer gate, so that's a plus, they've clearly identified that as their own weakness as well. They had extra bodies stacked there, ready and waiting for us."

"You still did the damage."

"We did the damage." Kalsar allowed himself that much, nothing more.

"Gate's cracked bad enough they'll be pulling people off everything else to fix it. That's the whole reason we went in loud instead of trying to be clever about it." Ant didn't try to make the number sound better than it was. He asked after names instead, who, how bad, whether anyone needed him specifically, and Kalsar gave him what he had, plain and undressed, no softer than the number itself deserved. It didn't shrink the loss down any.

But asking kept him doing something, better than standing there doing nothing at all. Two scouts had stayed behind at the treeline, close enough to watch the house, far enough to run if anything came looking. The first one made it back inside forty minutes, breathing hard, Rikku's toad-shaped Kithren trotting at her heel with none of the girl's own nerves showing on him at all.

"They put it out," she said, then stopped short, unsure whether that actually covered what he needed to know.

"Forty minutes, maybe. I didn't have anything to time it with. Bucket line, a lot of shouting, and then the smoke just stopped. I think it worked. I didn't get close enough after to be sure of anything more than that."

"And the mineral?"

"I don't know. I couldn't tell." She got the words out in a rush, faster than she seemed to trust them.

"I only saw the fire go out. That's genuinely everything I saw, and I know it's not much of an answer." She glanced toward Thomas, braced for him to say so. He didn't look angry, and her voice found a little more steadiness for it.

"They're pulling people off the wall watch too, sir. Sending them toward the sewer gate instead. I don't know if that means anything, but it's got them worried enough to move people over it." Thomas took that in without much visible reaction, and said nothing for a long moment.

"That's good." He worked through it out loud as he said it, the pieces settling into place one after another.

"They think the fire's dealt with, and the real threat's the gate, which means nobody's watching the house at all right now."

"Or it's already failed," Natalia said, not unkindly, just laying the other option down beside his.

"Fire went out. Maybe that's the reaction stopping right along with it."

"It doesn't stop." Thomas said it with more certainty than he'd managed about anything else all night.

"Whatever it's doing in there now, it's doing it whether the fire's burning or not. That part I actually do know." They waited another hour. Ant spent most of it sitting against a cart wheel with Mahkir's head heavy across his lap, neither of them saying much. Nobody around them was talking either. Too tired for it, most of them, and nothing left to say that hadn't already been said once tonight.

Somewhere off past the fires Duncan was moving between the wounded from Kalsar's group, Rowan beside him doing whatever a healer could still do for the ones who'd made it this far. Ant didn't go over. There wasn't anything he could add that wouldn't just be one more person for Duncan to manage. The second scout came back at a dead run.

"Gas," she said, before she'd even fully cleared the treeline.

"Smelled it maybe ten minutes out, strong, and getting stronger the closer I got before I turned back." Thomas was already on his feet.

"How close did you get."

"Close as I dared."

"Good enough." He looked to Natalia, then to Ant, and for the first time all night his voice had actual energy behind it, exhaustion or not.

"It's close, could be minutes, could still run to an hour, I won't lie to you about that, but it's close."

"Then we move," Ant said. Three hundred and eighty of them went back through the forest together this time, no split, no diversion, what was left after the night's losses, moving as one body toward the treeline. Thomas held them back further than they'd stood the first time, waving people down another thirty yards when a few fighters instinctively drifted forward out of habit.

"Just in case it's bigger than I think," he said, when Ant asked.

"I'd rather explain over-caution to you than the alternative." They settled in to wait again, and this time nobody talked. The smell reached Ant a few minutes later, faint at first, sulphur under something sharper he didn't have a word for, and once he'd noticed it he couldn't stop noticing it, every breath after that carrying a trace of it deeper into the back of his throat. The sound came before the fire did.

A long, rising note, air being pulled somewhere fast and hard, close enough in pitch to wind forcing itself through a narrow gap that half the line flinched at the same moment Ant did, Mahkir's ears flattening back against his skull. Then the wall went. The blast threw light across the whole treeline first, a white-orange flash that turned every face near Ant stark and colourless for half a second, and the sound that followed it landed in his chest before it reached his ears properly, a pressure more than a noise.

Debris came next: stone, timber, things Ant couldn't identify at that distance, arcing out further than he'd have believed possible, some of it landing close enough to their position that people scattered without waiting to be told, a jagged chunk of something burying itself in the dirt no more than twenty feet from where Thomas stood. Nobody moved for a second after that. The ringing in Ant's ears swallowed every voice around him; mouths moved, and nothing reached him but the ringing itself.

"Glad we didn't use the third bag," Thomas said, into the silence, one hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck. Every head on the treeline turned toward him at once.

"Now," Ant shouted, before anyone could say anything about that, "is the time," and the whole line broke forward as one, three hundred and eighty people surging out of the trees toward the smoking hole where a wall used to stand.