Devices and Desires (84 page)

Boustrophedon lived long enough to see the first gleam of light through the breach. He hardly noticed it, although it meant
he’d succeeded; there was surprisingly little pain, but his sight was being squeezed into a narrow ring by encroaching darkness.
The air was full of dust. He died, and a Mezentine soldier stumbling through the breach trod on his head before an Eremian
shot him. That hardly mattered, in the grand scheme of things. There were plenty more where he’d just come from. What was
left of the defenders was shoved out of the way as the assault party burst through. The Eremian night patrol, who might have
made a difference if they’d arrived twenty seconds earlier, hardly slowed the attack up at all. The first objective, the square
behind the main gate, was secured within a minute of the opening of the breach; five minutes, and the Mezentines were on the
wall, racing along the ramparts to secure access to the whole city.

Miel Ducas had, remarkably enough, fallen asleep. He hadn’t thought he’d be able to sleep, with Vaatzes’ words rattling round
inside his head like stones in a bucket. Nevertheless, when the guard captain burst in, he was flopped in his chair, eyes
closed.

The captain was yelling at him. At first he thought,
he’s come to kill me,
but it soon occurred to him that that wouldn’t call for panic-stricken shouting, so he listened to what the man was saying.

“They’re on the wall,” he said, which didn’t make sense. “We can’t hold them. Come on, get out.”

Get out
he understood. “Hold on,” he mumbled, “I’ll get my things.” But the captain grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him toward
the door. He was too sleepy to resist.

“Head for the palace,” the captain was saying, and that didn’t make sense either.

“What’s going on?” Miel asked.

“The Mezentines,” the captain snapped back at him. “They’re inside the city, and up on the wall. They’ll be here any moment
now. Head for the palace.”

Still didn’t make sense. We’ve won the war, how come there’s Mezentines in the city? Miel knew better than to argue, however.
The captain let go of his elbow and ran off, leaving him standing in the little courtyard. Well, Miel thought, I suppose I’m
free.

If there really were Mezentines… He found it impossible to believe. How could they have got in? Surely there’d have been an
alert, trumpets blasting and men shouting, war noises. Ridiculous. Even so; head for the palace. He could do that.

Someone jumped out in front of him. At first he thought it must be Vaatzes, because of his dark skin. Then he realized: Mezentine.
Immediately he felt bloated with panic. The Mezentine soldier was coming at him, holding some kind of polearm, and he himself
was empty-handed and defenseless.
Oh well,
he thought, but he sidestepped anyway, at the very last moment, and was pleasantly surprised as the soldier blundered past
him, lunging ferociously at the patch of empty air he’d just left behind.

The drill he’d learned when he was twelve said that the sidestep is combined with a counterattack in time, either both hands
round the throat or a stamping kick to the back of the knee. Miel, however, turned and ran.

Head for the palace. The courtyard archway opened into Coopers’ Street; uphill, second left was Fourways, leading to Drapers’
Lane, leading to Middle Walk. There he met the guards, running flat out; he flattened himself against a wall to let them pass.
Up Middle Walk (he’d been cooped up in small rooms far too long, his legs were stiff and painful) to the Review Grounds, across
the Horsefair and down the little alley that led to Fivesprings. Halfway down the alley was a narrow stair up the side of
a house, which led to a passageway inside the palace wall, which let you into the Ducas’ private entrance; assuming you had
the key, which he didn’t.

But the door was open; and the reason for that unexpected stroke of luck was Jarnac Ducas, struggling to do up the buckles
on his brigandine coat left-handed as he pulled the key out of the lock with his right.

“Miel?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Stupid question, as both of them realized as soon as he’d said it. “What’s going on, Jarnac?” Miel asked. “They said the Mezentines
are in the city, and I met —”

But Jarnac nodded. “Don’t ask me how,” he said. “Seems like they came in through the gate, and now they’ve secured the walls,
by the sound of it. We’re falling back on the palace and the inner yards; if we can regroup, maybe we can push them back,
I don’t know. You coming?”

Another stupid question. Up onto the palace wall — they arrived at the same time as the guards, who told them that Duke Orsea
was down below trying to drive the invaders out of the Horsefair. “Not going well when we left,” one of the guards said. “He
made a good start, but they came in from Long Lane and Halfacre, took him in flank. That’s all I know.”

Jarnac swore, and scrambled down the stairs into the palace. Miel followed; but by the time he made it to the long gallery
that ran the length of the top floor, Jarnac had disappeared down one of the side passages. Miel stopped, leaned against the
wall and caught his breath. This was ridiculous, he decided; I won’t be any good to anybody, lost and out of breath.

He closed his eyes for a moment and thought. Something to fight with would be a good start, and then he supposed he ought
to go and look for Orsea. There weren’t any armories or guard stations on this floor, but there was a trophy of arms on the
wall of the small reception chamber, fancy decorative stuff tastefully arranged in a sort of seashell pattern. He couldn’t
reach any of the swords or shields, but by standing on a chair he was able to pull down a finely engraved gilded halberd,
which was going to have to do. Armor was out of the question, of course, and besides, he didn’t have time to put it on.

Down five flights of stairs; people coming in both directions. Most of them gave him a startled look as he passed them, but
nobody stopped or said anything. The front gate of the palace was open, though there was a platoon of guards standing by to
close it as soon as the Duke managed to disengage and pull back. Assuming he was still alive.

As Miel ran through the gateway, the significance of what Jarnac had told him began to sink in. If Orsea had initially pushed
through into the Horsefair, and then enemy units had come out from the alleys on either side, it was more than likely he’d
been cut off, quite possibly encircled, depending on the numbers. It was exactly the sort of mess Orsea would get himself
into (impulsive, brave, very stupid Orsea), and of course it was the hereditary duty of the Ducas to get him out of it.

That’s right,
he thought bitterly — the cobbles hurt his feet through his thin-soled slippers as he ran —
me in my shirtsleeves, with this stupid toy halberd.
This would be a good time to be excused duty, on grounds of having been imprisoned for high treason (can’t get more excused
than that). But he remembered, he was innocent. So that was no use.

North Parade was crowded with soldiers, some running forward toward the arch that led into the Horsefair, others scrambling
through them, headed for the palace. The men coming back in had a dazed, bewildered look about them. Many were bloody, some
were dragging wounded men along with them. One of them tried to grab his arm; he was shouting,
go back, get away, they’re coming through.
Miel dodged him and kept going, but it didn’t sound encouraging. All in all, it was a bad situation, he felt. Death in the
defense of Duke and city was, naturally, a fitting and entirely acceptable end for the Ducas, but it was understood that somebody
would be watching, taking notes, appreciating what he was doing with a view to making an appropriate entry in the family history.
Death by massacre, blunder and shambles wasn’t quite the same thing, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

North Parade Arch was blocked by a crush of soldiers, filling the opening with their compressed bodies and limbs for want
of anything better. No chance of getting through that; so he ran back along the wall, kicked open a doorway (side door of
the Nicephorus house; he was sure they wouldn’t mind) into a garden. The Nicephorus had their own private door opening into
Horsefair — handy for the kitchenmaids going to market for spices and walnut oil. Assuming the enemy didn’t know about it
(they didn’t, because the Nicephorus garden wasn’t full of soldiers) he could use it to nip out into the battle, privileged
to the last.

They’d bolted it, as they always did at night, but they hadn’t locked it with the key. He shot the bolt, opened the door a
crack and looked out. He could see people running, a bit of open space, and a big crowd on the north side, which presumably
was the battle. Taking care to close the gate behind him, he slipped through.

Nobody took any notice of him, unless they were running and he got in their way, in which case they dodged round him or shoved
him aside. It was still too dark to make out anything more than silhouettes and moving shadows in the distance, over on the
north side of the Horsefair, where the fighting appeared to be. He walked rather than ran — why run to your death? he asked
himself, it’ll probably still be there in a minute or two. For the first time in a long while he was fully alert and focused.
He knew what his job was — to save Orsea — and that it was most likely impossible, and that he’d die trying. Under other circumstances
he’d be out of his mind with panic, but there didn’t seem any call for that. As far as he could judge, the city was lost.
Even if they managed to save it, his life as the Ducas was ruined, gone forever. Orsea, his best friend and his Duke, hated
him as a traitor. There didn’t seem to be much point in a life where everything he was had been taken away from him. If he
couldn’t be Miel Ducas anymore, he didn’t want to play.

As he got closer to the fighting, he could hear the usual noises: shouts, yells, screams, thumps, scrapes, clangs, the shearing
noise of cut meat. Take fear away and it was just noise; he approached it slowly and calmly, like a farmer walking up to a
bull.

Something was going on directly in front of him; there was a commotion, and the movement seemed particularly intense. Remembering
the silly gilded halberd he had in his hands, he quickened his pace a little. He had no idea where Orsea might be, assuming
he was still alive, but here was as good a place to start as any.

The commotion turned out to be his cousin Jarnac. By the look of it, he was trying to cut his way into a dense wedge of the
enemy. There was a handful of Eremians with him, but they were hanging back — probably, Miel guessed, because they didn’t
want to get too close to Jarnac while he was swinging his pole-axe.

It was an extraordinary sight. Every inch of Jarnac was on the move; as he dodged a spear-thrust, he pivoted, sidestepped,
simultaneously jabbing, fending, hooking, hammering. There was a Mezentine right in front of him; he reversed the pole-axe
and thrust the butt-spike into the man’s stomach — there was eighteen-gauge steel plate in the way, but Jarnac’s spike punched
through it like tree-bark — then skipped side-and-back like a dancer to avoid another one; he jerked the spike out of the
fallen man and tucked the hook inside the knee of his replacement; down that one went, Jarnac drove the spike through his
helmet into his brain without bothering to look down, because his attention was fixed on another one, who got the axe-blade
in his neck, in the gap between aventail and collarbone; Jarnac had moved again, diagonally forward so as to step in for a
thrust in time into the face of the next Mezentine; he converted the pull that freed the blade into a backward thrust, piercing
the skull of the man who was trying to get behind him; then he pushed forward and swung the poleaxe in a circle round his
head to strike with every scrap of his strength; Miel couldn’t see the man who was on the wrong end of that, but he heard
the ring, clear and sharp as a hammer on an anvil. Every movement of hand and arm was mirrored in a step, forward, sideways
or back; each step was combined with a twist or a turn that tensioned the muscles for the next thrust or cut. The only reason
the Mezentines stood in his way was because they were too closely jammed together to get away; it was like watching a man
dance his way through a tangle of briars.
What happened?
Miel asked himself.
What happened to turn my genial buffoon of a cousin into the angel of Death?

As he watched, a Mezentine slipped past Jarnac on the left, got behind him and stabbed him in the back with a spear. Miel
could feel his own heart suddenly stop, as though someone had reached down inside his chest and grabbed hold of it. Jarnac
was dead; apparently not, because the spear didn’t seem to want to go in. The attacker couldn’t believe it. He froze, completely
bewildered, and Jarnac spun on his heel and crushed his head with a monstrous overhand blow. Miel heard bone failing, and
he remembered that when he’d met Jarnac in the passageway, he’d been climbing into a brigandine coat.

The dance stopped abruptly. Jarnac had run out of Mezentines for the time being, and exhaustion had caught up with him. He
staggered, steadied himself against the axe-shaft, and stood still.

“Jarnac,” Miel shouted. Jarnac lifted his head and frowned. A red wash from the rising sun bathed the side of his face, glittering
off the splashed blood that coated his cheeks.

“Hello, Miel,” Jarnac said quietly, and he grinned. “This is a fucking mess, isn’t it?”

“Where’s Orsea?” Miel asked.

Jarnac shook his head. “Search me,” he said. “I caught sight of him a minute or so back, but then this lot here” — he jabbed
the butt-spike in the vague direction of a dead man —“bust through our line and I got distracted.” He frowned slightly. “I
wouldn’t bother going and looking for him, if I were you.”

Miel shrugged. “I think I’d better have a go at it,” he said.

“Bugger.” Jarnac sighed. “Want me to come with you?”

“Thanks,” Miel said, “but you’d better stay here. Someone’s got to…” He couldn’t say what he wanted to say. “You’re needed,”
he went on, “I’m not. See you later.”