The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(61)
Emerging from the keep, I think I must be dreaming. Then I recall that I am indeed dreaming but that these purport to be the memories of my line, bound into my blood and revealed by Kara’s magics. The inner wall has been shattered, standing in places, reduced to heaps of rubble in others. Bodies lie crushed beneath tumbled debris—waiting to scream. Where the wall has fallen the flames have reached to the keep, patterning its walls with geometric scorch-marks, and reducing all the people in their path to burning pillars.
The sky is crowded with smoke and fire and falling rock. A chunk of masonry bigger than a horse descends along an arc that will end where I stand. It tumbles as it falls, slower than an autumn leaf. I step aside and move to follow Alica. Behind me the missile strikes the wall of the keep and breaks apart with a sound that is both indescribably deep and overwritten by the high scream of stone fracturing.
Through the breaches in the walls I see only boiling fire. No sign of the town, no hint of the great outer walls and the seven vast towers. The air is full of pieces. Rocks, tiles, masonry . . . There are bodies too: I see them dropping from on high as if sinking through water.
Alica runs beneath the gatehouse, under the four portcullises, still raised. Contaph and I can’t keep up with her and she opens a lead. We emerge beneath the fourth gate and step into hell. Fire still billows here. Not the flames above logs in a hearth, or the blaze of a burning house, but clouds of inferno—a living, liquid thing. It seems to be thinning as we watch, spiralling skyward to reveal a scorched wasteland where no building survives. Alica has not waited. Her passage is recorded as a hole punched through the fire. We follow, praying that our swiftness will preserve us.
Alica weaves a path past craters, fire-pits, trenches gouged by unimaginable force. She dodges around stubborn foundations jutting up in our path. She skirts the most intense knots of flame, sidesteps falling debris and jumps the blazing rubble of the outer walls in three huge leaps. I follow, finding like Contaph in his platemail that I can jump distances that would put the athletes of ancient Greece to shame. I see that we are close to the place where one of the seven towers stood—now a column of white-hot flame spiralling above a vast crater. The pieces of stonework that still hang in the air about us, called to the ground along gravity’s rainbow, all radiate from this spot.
Beyond the wall, back past bowshot, the many thousands arrayed against the Castle of Ameroth burn. We race after my grandmother across the dead ground between besiegers and besieged. The engines of war lie in flaming pieces. Chunks of flying masonry from the great walls have carved broad avenues through the ranks of the foe, torn bloody thoroughfares through their camps. Those men closest to the walls lie burning, turned by the heat into blazing fat, pooled amid charred bone. Further back, the soldiers are caught in their agony, their screams deep-throated and low to our ears. Further still and they remain standing, shields raised and smouldering, tents afire. If it is like this all around the seven towers then thousands upon thousands have died—many times more outside the walls than within them.
Alica seems to know exactly where she is going. We follow, with others from the chamber beneath Ameroth Keep strung out behind us, slower than we are but still far faster than any man should be.
We penetrate deep into the warlord’s army, past the major harm done by the exploding towers, into the heart of his host where the pavilions fly the standards of noble houses. Even here great stones have landed, crushing men, horses, tents—but nine in every ten survive. We swerve around soldiers who stand almost frozen, their eyes too slow to track us, hands starting a slow crawl toward their sword hilts.
At last we sight the tight-packed standards of Slov, the pavilions growing larger and more resplendent. Anar Kerwcjz, the Czar’s western fist, is emerging from his great canvas pavilion as we arrive, a magnificent spear in his hand. Cloth-of-gold decorates the entrance and the banners of his vassals hang on standard poles to make an avenue for his exit. The Last Blades stand thick about his residence, resplendent in their black chain mail, faces masked in jet and ivory, a feared elite whose reputation has echoed down the years so loudly that even I have heard of them.
We are slower now, as if our speed is like something gleaned from Maeres Allus’s poppies, a drug that bleeds from our veins, returning us in time to the mortal world. Even so the Last Blades have barely flinched before Alica has slid her blade along Kerwcjz’s throat. She wastes no time in decapitation—perhaps her blade would break if forced through a man’s neck at such speed. She spares the storied warlord no second glance but simply moves to the nearest soldier and repeats the act before the spray of blood from Kerwcjz’s wound is quarter way to the ground.
His spear hangs in the air, seeming somehow more real than everything around it, brighter than blood, more alive than the guards on every side. It’s a dark wood, sheathed in a tracery of silversteel, blades flaring out six inches behind the point. It calls to me, and without thinking I reach for it. My hand closes on the shaft and I feel it, there, solid beneath my fingers.
“Kill everyone!” she shouts.
And Ullamere Contaph obeys. More of her chosen arrive as the butchery begins, and set to their own bloody work. I tug the warlord’s spear into motion and follow Alica, wincing as the crimson deluge sprays over and through me.
She cuts twenty throats before the warlord hits the ground. She cuts a hundred before she has to duck beneath a sword. In places she moves through a clump of ten or twenty Slovian infantry and is on to the next concentration before the men start to fall.