Uprooted(120)
I stared at them all, too startled to be afraid at first, not really understanding that I’d nearly been struck by a dozen arrows. Outside, the cannon roared. I’d already begun to be used to the noise; I flinched automatically, without looking, still half-fascinated by how close the arrows were. But Sarkan was suddenly heaving the entire table over, papers flying as it smashed to the floor, heavy enough to shake the chairs. He pulled me down behind it. The high-whistling song of a cannon-ball was coming closer and closer.
We had plenty of time to know what was going to happen, and not enough to do anything about it. I crouched under Sarkan’s arm, staring at the underside of the table, chinks of light showing through the heavy wooden beams. Then the cannon-ball smashed through the window-sill, the opened glass panes shattering into fragments with a crash. The ball itself rolled on until the stone wall stopped it with a heavy thud, then it burst into pieces, and a creeping grey smoke came boiling out.
Sarkan clapped his hand over my mouth and nose. I held my breath; I recognized the stone spell. As the grey fog rolled gently towards us, Sarkan made a hooking gesture to the ceiling, and one of the sentinel-spheres floated down to his hand. He pinched open its skin, made a hole, and with another wordless, peremptory gesture waved the grey smoke into the sphere, until all of it was enclosed, churning like a cloud.
My lungs were bursting before he finished. Wind was whistling noisily in through the gaping wall, books scattered, torn pages riffling noisily. We pushed the table up against the open gap, to help keep us from falling out of the window. Sarkan picked up a piece of the hot cannon-ball with a cloth and held the sentinel next to it, like giving a scent to a hound. “Menya kaizha, stonnan olit,” he told the sentinel, and gave it a push out into the night sky. It drifted away, the grey of it fading into just a scrap of fog.
All that couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes—no longer than I could hold my breath. But more of Marek’s army had already crammed into the trench, and pushed the baron’s men back towards the first tunnel. Solya had flung another arrow-flight and opened more room for them, but more than that, Marek and his knights were riding just outside the wall behind them, spurring the men onward: I saw them using their horse-whips and spears against their own soldiers, driving them through the breach.
The ones in the front ranks were almost being pushed onto the defenders’ blades, horribly. Other soldiers were pressing up behind them, and little by little the baron’s soldiers were having to give way, a cork being forced out of a bottle. The trench was already littered with corpses—so many of them, piled on one another. Marek’s soldiers were even climbing up on top of the heaps to shoot arrows down at the baron’s men, as if they didn’t care that they were standing on the bodies of their own dead comrades.
From the second trench, the baron’s men began flinging Sarkan’s potion-spheres over the wall. They landed in blue bursts, clouds that spread through the soldiers; the men caught inside the mist sank to their knees or toppled over in heaps, faces dazed and sinking into slumber. But more soldiers came on after them, climbing over them, trampling them like ants.
I felt a wild horror, looking at it, unreal.
“We’ve misjudged the situation,” Sarkan said.
“How can he do this?” I said, my voice shaking. It seemed as if Marek was so determined to win he didn’t care how expensive we made the walls; he’d pay anything, anything at all, and the soldiers would follow him to their deaths, endlessly. “He must be corrupted—” I couldn’t imagine anything else that would let him spend his own men’s lives like this, like water.
“No,” Sarkan said. “Marek’s not fighting to win the tower. He’s fighting to win the throne. If he loses to us here, now, we’ll have made him look weak before the Magnati. He’s backed into a corner.”
I understood without wanting to. Marek really would spend everything he had. No price would be too high. All the men and magic he’d used already would only make it worse, like a man throwing good money after bad because he couldn’t stand to lose what he’d already spent. We couldn’t just hold him off. We’d have to fight him to the last man, and he had thousands of them left to pour into the battle.
The cannon roared once more, as if to punctuate the terrible realization, and then they fell suddenly and blessedly silent. Sarkan’s floating sentinel had dropped down upon them and burst against the hot iron. The dozen men working on the cannon had frozen into statues. One man stood before the left cannon with a rod thrust down the barrel; others were bent over gripping ropes, dragging the right cannon back to its place; still others held cannon-balls or sacks in their hands: a monument to a battle that wasn’t over.
Marek at once ordered other men to come and get the statues clear of the cannon. They began dragging and shoving the statues away, toppling them into the dirt. I flinched when I saw one smashing the fingers off the statues to pry out the ropes: I wanted to shout down that the stone-turned men were still alive. But I didn’t think Marek would care.
The statues were heavy and the work was slow, so we had a brief respite from the cannon-fire. I steadied myself and turned to Sarkan. “If we offered to surrender,” I said, “would he listen?”
“Certainly,” Sarkan said. “He’d put us both to death at once, and you might as well cut the children’s throats yourself as hand them over, but he’d be delighted to listen.” He took a turn thwarting the arrow spell: he pointed and spoke an incantation of misdirection, and another flight of silver-led arrows struck against the outer wall. He shook out his hand and wrist, looking down. “In the morning,” he said finally. “Even if Marek is willing to destroy his entire army, men can’t fight endlessly without a rest, and food and drink. If we can hold them until morning, he’ll have to call them off for a little while. Then he might be willing to parley. If we can hold them until morning.”