Alexandria (58 page)

“Anyone missing?” asks Hargrove, quick counting their heads. The last few men who laid the charges in the ruins only just shambled back over the slope to join them.

“This is everyone,” says Denit, stepping forward.

“Tyler up there on the hill spotted smoke from our camp. I need someone to ride back with me—this might be our friends from the south.”

Denit circles around and addresses them. “Landon, you’re with Hargrove. The rest of you, come with me.”

Hargrove passes his scope over to Denit, then joins up with the saddlemaker, Landon, and they gallop off toward the camp.

“The others are already inside,” says Denit. “When we get down there, if the shooting’s too heavy and we can’t get through, pull back to the grove behind the theatre. Otherwise, we’re riding straight to that door and we’re going to blow it open. Understand?”

Reserved nods from the men and they sally forward.

Holding fast on the lower landing, Raji doles out the contents of his satchel. He snatches up the tight bundles and passes them around, anxious to hear them crack. Sajiress takes a clutch of pitched arrows in his hand and the rest follow suit. A torch is passed around and they light their armaments ablaze. Raji holds the powdered stems of his bundles to the flames and passes two off to Jack.

They spark and sizzle in his hand. Time seems to slow, if only in his mind, and suddenly they are climbing. A blitz of warriors accelerates toward them from down the corridor and the King’s sentries draw out their blades. Raji throws his bundles against the redwood doors and scatters the detachment, suffocating smoke filling the air.

Jack steps into the corridor. Pitched arrows whiz past his head, dreamlike, and he winds back his arm and lobs his charges into the midst of the advancing warriors. They flinch at the fireballs spiraling toward them, falling to the ground with molten tar seeping into raw wounds, and Jack watches mesmerized as the charges explode in a burst of yellow light and black smoke. The warriors fall to the ground, pawing at their faces and screaming.

He runs.

More charges blast against the doors. Arrows fly through the thick cloak of roiling smoke and click off the sandstone walls. They flatten themselves against the walls of the corridor and fire off blindly in both directions. Arrowfire is coming in a constant barrage and the tribesmen are falling to the ground, stuck through with quilled shafts. Sajiress grabs Jack and jerks him roughly behind, shielding him, and pushes into the onslaught headlong. They reach the corner of the L-shaped corridor, just a few paces from the doors leading to the parlor.

Raji is shot through the leg. He crawls across the floor and fetches his satchel. He lights another charge and throws it into the warriors approaching through the swirl of fog to their rear, choking the corridor with more opaque smoke.

Jack and Sajiress hold up along the corner, straining to breathe. The King’s sentries are down the hall, fighting their way back to their posts. The remaining tribesmen flatten themselves in a line along the wall, awaiting their orders.

Sajiress grits his teeth and grimaces.
“Sikelern King…”

Jack nods.

Sajiress launches himself around the corner with his men charging after. He rips one of the blown doors from its hinges and holds it before him like an enormous shield, and they press down the corridor toward the sentries, still firing heavily from down the way. The tribesmen shoot swiftly around the wooden barricade and advance with much difficulty.

Jack levels on the door, his heart pounding. He sprints across the hall and slips through the ruined doorway and bursts into the parlor, sweeping his machete around before him.

The parlor is hazy and sullen from the dwindling hearth—and it is empty. He courses along the wall, throwing chairs and tables out of his way. At the far end, he reaches the closed door to Arana’s bedchamber and kicks it roughly open. A frightened woman cowers on the opulent bedspread, clutching the sheets. Jack runs through, pulling back closet doors and peering into the darkened corners. Nothing.

Back in the parlor, he wheels around in frantic terror, searching for the man he came to kill.

He eyes the stairs.

He pumps his legs across the length of the chamber, and as he reaches the bottom step a fierce scream rings out from the corridor. Sajiress.

Jack bolts up the tight spiral, hitching to a stop before he reaches the top. He creeps up the last few steps and peeks over the top of the rise. Two archers are firing off toward the amphitheatre, with their backs to him. Standing at the far corner of the terrace is Arana, his arms folded tightly around him, his face stunned free of all emotion.

He takes quick stock of himself—he has no arrows, only his blade. He traces it before him slowly, rounding the last steps and cowering behind the divan. The archers are only three paces away—they’ll cut him down before he ever reaches the King. He peers at them through the smothering cloud and recognizes them. They’ve sparred together. Jack performs a quick calculation in his head, trying to remember which is the fleeter of the two. He will kill that one first.

He springs forward silently and drives the blade deep into the man’s back. He gurgles and threshes and Jack drives his boot into his spine and slips his blade out. The other archer startles back with his bow raised and lights off a frenzied shot. It misses by an inch and Jack swats the bow out of his hands with the machete. The voice that seemed fit to doom him earlier now guides him, and he listens to it, and it drives him forward, his blade blurred in the moonlit smoke, opening a stream of blood along his assailant’s throat.

“No!”
Jack wheezes, lurching back toward the stairs where Arana just fled. He bounds down after, three steps at a time, and sees the finely-attired figure of his former King rush through to the parlor toward the door. The fighting has moved further down the corridor as the tribesmen advance, and Arana would have clear passage to the side stairs.

Jack streaks across the length of the parlor and throws himself in front of the door. Arana staggers backwards and flashes out blindly with his short knife, slicing a mean cut along Jack’s forearm as he tumbles to the floor. His arm webs over with blood and it makes his grip slippery on the hilt. Arana risks a move past him and Jack sweeps the blade through the air and drives him back, then pulls himself to his feet.

They stop in place and behold one another. Horror spreads across Arana’s face as he looks at Jack, smeared with fine soot and outfitted from the Temple’s armory, looking an exact replica of the men he has sent to massacre so many unnamed villages. Arana throws his knife to the ground and steps numbly backwards and falls against the sideboard, clutching at it with white knuckles.

“Jack…”

He slumps back, looking pathetic and defeated. “It’s not me, Jack… It was never me.”

Jack says nothing.

“They used me…
They lied to me about everything.”

Blood leaks from Jack’s arm and makes him lightheaded. The glorious King is crying, staring into his eyes with such child-like innocence, so adept at begging sympathy. The innocence looks so real, so fresh and genuine. He remembers what Thomas had told him—
a gentle way about him, signs of being a bright young boy.
They stare across the parlor, transfixed, each seeing in the other some parcel of himself. With sickening dread, Jack realizes that he does not hate this man. He sees the loneliness in his eyes, the eyes of a child with a hopelessly broken and recast mind. The eyes of a victim. The machete in his hand feels heavy and his mind fills with thoughts of the guilt and troubled sleep he suffered at having killed Braylon and Feiyan, and the blood he only just spilled on the terrace. Blood loss clouds his mind, and the machete begins to lower.

Arana traces his hand along the sideboard, wrapping his fingers around something, then lunges forward and swings the new blade at Jack’s face.

The machete is so swift it appears invisible as it slices through the air and splits Arana’s knife hand to the base of his palm. He falls to the floor, clutching his mangled appendage back together, and Jack lands on top of his hinging body and presses him down flat and slides the blade against his throat.

“Jack…”
gasps Arana,
“what have I done?”

He bears down on the blade and whispers two words he never thought he would hear himself speak to this man.

“I’m sorry
,” Jack says, and slashes his throat. His eyes are calm and placid as they gaze through their sooted camouflage, and they are the last thing Arana Nezra the Second ever sees.

Denit retreats back behind the amphitheatre with those that remain alive, and he stares bleakly at the Temple apex, fearing all to be lost. The arrowfire from the Temple’s narrow windows is too thick to press through, and he drops down off his horse and paces frenetically, trying to suss out their options.

“Trevor…”

“Here.

“Think we could run along top of the theatre and crawl down the far side?”

“Let’s try it.”

“Denit!”

“What?”

“Denit—
they’re here.”

The thunder of hooves beats down the quarry road, and Denit turns to see Hargrove and Marikez leading the cavalry at breakneck speed toward the Temple.

The tribesmen have reached the extent of their advance. Footsteps thunder up the stairs from all directions as reinforcements arrive to defend their King. Sajiress lay sprawled across the floor, pierced through in several places. More bodies slumped against the walls. The burnt redwood door is spiked so thoroughly with arrowshafts it is ready to fall to pieces. They turn to run back toward the stairs, but more forces are blitzing toward the top.

Jack steps into the corridor, carrying the dead King in his arms, and the hail of arrowfire ceases abruptly. He steps over the fallen bodies and wends between the slack warriors like a phantom. They falter back and let him pass, the whole crush of them, regarding him like some supernatural thing, as if me might vaporize before their eyes and light back to the Beyond from whence he came.

He descends the stairs, blood leaking down his arm, his and Arana’s entwined. He is dead weight. Cold comfort. It means nothing to Jack, but he must do it, because they must see him dead.

Harried voices ricochet off the tapering interior of the sandstone foyer. Jack crosses the balcony. The Temple’s entire citizenry is huddled below, sobbing and clutching at one another. He steps to the rail and a hush falls over them as they behold the limp body of the man sworn to protect them from the Rain of Fire.

He lets the body roll from his arms. It spirals through the air with droplets of blood streaming along behind it like a comet’s tail, and it lands with a dull crack and a splash of red.

As if exerting a repulsive force it drives them back, a widening circle of clear sandstone, at the center of which lay the broken King.

Madness shatters the astounding calm.

Nisaq throws his hands high and shouts to pacify them, but he is overtaken by the wrenching and tearing crowd. Desperate to escape, they press forward against the door and throw its bar and burst through. The crush of people spills onto the stairs, with Nisaq there in the midst of it all, jittering on the ground as their feet pass over him, and the crowd screams from the Temple, bleating to the impassive skies their sorrowful pleas.