The Seven-Petaled Shield (18 page)

They passed through the merchant district without challenge. The streets here were broader and yet less populated, and many of the buildings—shops, Zevaron supposed, or apartments—had been shut up.

As they neared the plaza, the foot traffic thickened. Zevaron noticed the tense expressions of the people. Ahead, he heard raised voices, bursts of shouting against a rolling mutter.

A crowd had gathered in the plaza. From the periphery, it was difficult to see what was going on. Zevaron glanced up at the governor’s palace. Several men stood on the open balcony, most likely the commanding Gelonian general and his aides. And there was someone else, cloaked in shadow. Zevaron shivered, as if ice had brushed his skin, and quickly turned away.

A man in Isarran dress stood on the topmost step, addressing the people. When the speaker finished, there was a flurry of activity. Muttering swept the assembly.

Zevaron touched Sivran’s arm. “What is happening?”

“It’s an execution,” Sivran muttered. “Someone dared to stand against them.”

“We must find Aharros—look, there he is!” Sivran’s friend, Harela, shoved her way through the crowd with Sivran hard on her heels.

Zevaron followed them for a short way, then a path opened up and for an instant, he could see the space right before the palace steps. The scene looked like a theatrical presentation, with the players frozen in dramatic postures. The blue and purple plumes of the Gelonian helmets glowed in the sun. Their armor and bared swords caught the light. Zevaron halted, horrified and fascinated, as he recognized the man who had thrown the stone at the soldiers. He was one of a handful, ten at least, all of them bound, some bloodied, one or two struggling weakly.

That could be me.

Around them, people shifted uneasily, cutting off his view. Cries of protest arose here and there, as quickly choked off. The crowd wavered between action and horrified paralysis. A spark would set them off. All they needed, Zevaron thought, was a leader to bring them together.

“Stop them!” a woman whimpered. “Oh, someone must stop them!”

“Not now,” said a familiar voice. It was Aharros, working his way through the assembly. “Hold fast, do nothing.”

“He knew the risks,” someone else said.

“We can’t stand by—”

“Hold fast!” Aharros repeated. “Let them think they’ve won.”

“We will not forget this day!” Sivran muttered, her voice harsh and very close. Zevaron turned to see her bent in conference with a cluster of onlookers. He made out a few phrases: “Harbor tonight,” and “Pass the word.”

“Aye,” said the man who had spoken of risk. “They’ll take no slaves from Gatacinne.”

Slaves. Harbor.

A silence fell on the crowd. The sky pressed down on them and in an instant, broke open. An invisible storm cracked the air and a great cry arose from the people, mingled terror and grief.

Zevaron shuddered as if he himself had been struck, as if something bright and hot chilled his very soul.

Source of Blessings, look upon this thy child,
he began the prayer of departure. The words came sluggishly to mind.

Zevaron could not remember the last time he had prayed, not since leaving Meklavar, not since the Gelon had come pounding up to the gates. His mother prayed, he knew. He had heard her murmured words while the fever had her. She had kept faith with the ways of their ancestors, for all the good it had done her. Yet, he admitted reluctantly,
something
had sustained them and brought them free from Meklavar and across the barrens. They might have died ten times over, and yet they had reached Gatacinne.

She had kept faith, and so would he. Tonight, he would go with the others to the harbor, would free Tsorreh and the other captives. Tonight, they would continue their journey together.

“I
T’S time.”

A hand on Zevaron’s shoulder shook him awake. Around him, the house lay dark but not silent. He heard voices, muted and urgent, then footsteps. Renneh bent over him, a slipper-shaped oil lamp in one hand. Her eyes glittered in the light.

He sat up. His body felt as brittle as if he had slept for a week. She offered him a beaker of watered wine and bread with olive paste. He ate what he could, took his sword, and went to join the others. They gathered outside, ten or twelve of them, mostly men. Sivran was among them, talking in hushed tones with a man wearing an Isarran breastplate, but her friend Harela was absent. Although Zevaron’s was not the only sword among them, many were armed only with staves or axes.

A second Isarran officer, the one from the marketplace battle, outlined the plan, the routes they were to take, and the signal to begin the attack.

“Tonight, we will take our city back!” Although he spoke softly, his voice rumbled like muted thunder.

A shiver of excitement passed through the company. Zevaron felt it, too, the sense of standing on the brink of something
momentous. Then he remembered feeling the same way before riding out to battle Thessar’s army.

Tonight, Zevaron thought grimly, he and Tsorreh would turn their backs on Gatacinne and leave these people to their own destiny.

The party set off, moving quietly and swiftly along the back streets. Here and there, a light shone from a window or a torch over an arched entrance. After a short distance, the company broke into smaller groups to avoid notice. Sivran led Zevaron’s party. His heart raced as his body prepared for the fight ahead. Around him, the others muttered prayers, urging each other on. The sword felt light in his grasp, eager.

Streets sped by. They passed the marketplace without incident, then swerved wide around the palace district. Once or twice, Sivran signaled for them to wait at an intersection, then sent them across singly or in pairs. Once, a barricade set up by Gelonian soldiers blocked their path; the mass of splintered wood was mostly likely the remains of a food stall. They had to go round it for several blocks and even then they went carefully to make no sound.

The detour cost them time. Zevaron could not stop thinking of all the things that could go wrong. The attack could start without them. It could go badly, even end in disaster with the Gelon slaughtering the prisoners or he did not know what else. Now that the plan was in action, now that he was on his way, things were both better and worse than while he’d waited. All he could do was to plunge ahead.

Still some distance from the harbor, they came out from an alley, barely more than a trench running along the back of two buildings, and onto a road that was broad enough for two carts to pass. It was lined with storage sheds and an inn or two. Lights clustered ahead.

Sivran called out, “There they are!”

In an instant, Zevaron saw torchlight flashing on metal and men struggling, surging ahead.

Screaming, “Gatacinne! Gatacinne!” Sivran brandished her staff and burst into a run. The others pounded after her,
Zevaron amongst them. As part of a rushing, hurling mass, he came up against a wall of Gelonian shields.

In an instant, Zevaron saw the pattern of the battle. The Gelonian line wasn’t deep, but it didn’t need to be. Nothing could get through. They fought in formation, even as they had at Meklavar, with a precise linking of shield and sword. Each man covered the weaker side of his comrade, giving no opening. The Isarrans broke on the shield wall like water against granite.

Zevaron slowed his pace and the others rushed past him. Sivran disappeared into the crush of bodies. With an effort, he held back, thinking only that if he could not get past that line of shields, what else might he do? Where could he use his strengths—his coordination and agility, his smaller size—to any purpose?

Get away!
The thought came upon him suddenly, ambushed him.

The Gelon were advancing, pressing them back, and now Zevaron saw that the line had curved. The Gelon were using the blocked-off streets as a funnel.

More Isarrans went down. The air stank of fresh blood and battle fever. Zevaron drew it into his lungs, the reek of sweat and adrenaline. For a horrible instant, he was back in Meklavar, fighting at his father’s side, watching the gates burn, watching as the Gelon kept coming and
coming
, and he could not stop them.

I will stop them now!

Fury came howling up from Zevaron’s belly and burst from his throat, with screams that seared his lungs. Charging, he passed through the ranks of Isarrans. To his heightened sight, the Gelonian shields no longer formed an unbroken wall. In an instant, he saw the cracks, the way one sagged here, the gap as another soldier pivoted, the pulse and rhythm of their swords.

“Yahh!” Beside him, an Isarran thrust a spear at the nearest Gelon.

Zevaron sensed how the shield would raise and tilt even before it moved. He sidled, low to the ground, and swept
outward with his sword. Though it was not balanced for circular strokes, he was able to compensate. The edge of his blade slipped below the shield and dug into flesh. It raked bone below one kneecap, then sliced through tendon.

The Gelon staggered, folding forward. Screaming, the Isarran thrust his spear even deeper. He pushed the Gelon backward and to the ground.

The Gelon’s shield-side partner turned, momentarily unguarded. Zevaron, still low and balanced, reversed the arc of his sword, angling it upward. The Gelon turned away from the thrust, and the blade edge ripped across the back of one knee. With a shriek, he crumpled, shield flailing. To either side of the two fallen soldiers, Gelon struggled to reform their line.

With an inarticulate roar, the Isarran fighters surged into the gap, striking the newly opened flank. They pushed through the Gelonian line. Attacking from the side and rear, they forced the Gelon to fight singly. More Gelon fell or stumbled back in disarray. The breach opened still further.

Zevaron drove hard against the next Gelon. He no longer planned, he thrust and hacked his way through the enemy line. Above the clamor of the fighting, he heard shouted commands in Gelone. He could not make out their meaning above the yammering of his blood.

The Gelon fell back, but no longer in disorder. They were reforming, their officers gathering them together, using their strength and training. Renewed, they advanced on the Isarrans. Zevaron retreated a step before their shields, then another. Around him, the city’s defenders fought on, but less effectively now. Zevaron twisted aside and barely escaped being caught between the advancing Gelon and the Isarrans who still pressed from behind, unaware that, in a few moments, they would all be trapped.

“Retreat!” Zevaron shouted, realizing a moment later that he’d used Meklavaran. What was the word in Isarran? He couldn’t think. Things were happening too fast, and he was still half-crazed with fighting fever and the stench of blood.

“Back! We’ll do no good here!” Sivran’s voice rose high and shrill above the tumult.

An Isarran charged the Gelonian line with his axe. The soldiers met his attack smoothly, precisely, two men blocking and countering as if they were one. The Isarran collapsed, and Zevaron saw it was Aharros.

“Out of here!” Sivran shouted. “Back! Back! Save yourselves!”

Zevaron hesitated, for a stunned moment looking down at Aharros’s face. In the uncertain torchlight, blood shone dark across the front of the Isarran’s tunic. His eyes were open, the whites like silvered crescents.

Another debt to lay at Ar-Cinath’s feet.

Zevaron turned and raced back the way they had come. Already, the Gelon were closing in. In a few minutes, there would be no escape. He stumbled—over what, he could not see, a fallen body by the feel of it. He got up and kept going.

Sivran was somewhere behind him, lingering to guard the rear, screaming out encouragement to her people. Zevaron swerved down the first side street he came to. The way felt familiar, shade upon shadow, the pavement falling away to dirt beneath his feet. He had run down a hundred alleys like this, or so it seemed.

He turned down one narrow lane and then another, and only when the sounds of the battle died down and he was left with the pounding of his heart in the cooling night, did he realize he was alone. He bent over, gulped air, braced himself with one arm, and cradled the sword with the other.

He was unhurt, except for yesterday’s cut on his thigh, which burned from the salt of his sweat. That was of little consequence. He could still run and fight.

Fight? What utter folly!

Zevaron had no way of knowing if the Gelon had been warned of an attack on the harbor or if their readiness was part of the general occupation of the city. He did not care. Only one thing was clear: the only way Tsorreh would be rescued was if he did it himself. He would have to go alone, using stealth instead of a frontal assault. The Gelon were
too strong to be overcome by force. If he ever went up against them directly, he would need all the hordes of Azkhantia at his back. For a moment, he envisioned himself riding down the streets of Aidon as the city burned, even as the King’s Gates had burned, as the port of Gatacinne had burned—and in that vision he looked down, his heart filled with dark exhilaration, at the battered, lifeless body of Ar-Cinath-Gelon. Yearning shook him, fracturing the vision. He was momentarily stunned by the ferocity of his hatred and how readily it engulfed him. And why not? He had lost a father, a brother—and now a mother—to that monster!

He could make no specific plans until he knew where Tsorreh was kept, how guarded, whether against escape or rescue or both, and by what force. That knowledge must wait for daylight.

Zevaron found an alley, narrow and smelling of rotting cabbage and soured wash water, but well off the traveled streets. He searched out a relatively uncluttered spot and slumped down.

He debated what to do with the sword. He couldn’t think of it as
his
sword, only a thing with which to hack and stab. Much as he disliked the idea of going unarmed where he would almost certainly encounter Gelon, he would attract their immediate attention if he entered the harbor area with such an obvious weapon. He buried it in a pile of refuse, marking the area in his memory. It might not be there when he returned, and if that was so, he hoped its new owner would be Isarran and put it to good use.