TWENTY-SIX

The assault on Zila came in the dead of night.

The clouds that had been stroking Saramyr’s western coast had consolidated into a dour blanket by sunset, and when the darkness came it was almost total. No stars shone, Aurus was entirely invisible, and Iridima was reduced to a hazy smear of white in the sky, her radiance choked before it could reach the earth. Then the rain began: a few warning patters, insidious wet taps on the stone of the town before the deluge came. Suddenly the night was swarming, droplets battering down from the sky, hissing on torches and smacking off sword blades.

It was a painful, aggressive downpour, forcing its way through the clothes of the men who stood armed and on watch, their eyes narrowed as they watched the distant campfires of the besieging armies. They flickered in a ring around the hill upon which Zila sat, beacons of light in otherwise total darkness, illuminating nothing. Eventually, they went out, doused by the rain.

The onslaught kept up for hours. Zila waited, a crown of glowing windows and lanterns hanging suspended in rain-swept blackness.

The man who first noticed that something was amiss was a calligrapher, an educated man who, like many others, had found himself swept up in the events that had overtaken his town and did not really have any clear idea how to swim against the tide. He had been assigned to the watch by some structure of authority he did not understand, and had un-questioningly obeyed. Now he was soaked and miserable, holding a rifle he did not know how to use and expecting at any moment to be struck in the forehead by an arrow from the abyss beyond the walls of the town.

It was, perhaps, this fearful expectation that made him more attentive than the others on the watch that night. They had settled themselves in, after several nights of inactivity, for a long period of negotiation and preparation before any actual combat would occur. The heat of the revolt had cooled in them now, and most had resigned themselves to a long autumn and a long winter trapped inside Zila. What choice did they have? They did not like the idea of throwing themselves on the mercy of the armies, even if they could leave. Some were wondering whether it might not have been better just to let the Governor keep hoarding his food, and take their chances with the famine; but their companions reminded them that they were thinking from the luxury of a full belly, and if they had been starving now, they would not be so complacent. There was food in Zila, more than they would have outside.

Like the calligrapher, many wondered now how they had got into this mess, and what they could possibly do to get out of it with their skins.

It was while chewing over these very thoughts that the calligrapher began to hear noises over the constant tumult of the rain. The wind was switching back and forth in fitful gusts, spraying him with warm droplets, and when it came his way he thought he heard an occasional creaking sound, or the squeak of a wheel. Being a timid man, he was reluctant to embarrass himself by pointing these out to any of the others on the watch, so he chose to do nothing for a long while. And yet time and again he heard the sounds – very faint, blown on the breeze – and gradually a certainty grew in his breast that something was wrong. The sounds were fleeting enough to be imagination, except that he had none. He was level-headed, practical, and had never been prone to phantoms of the mind.

Eventually, he shared his concerns with the next man on the wall. That man listened, and after a time he reported to his officer, and so it came to the commander of the watch. The commander demanded the calligrapher’s account of what he had heard. Other men joined in: they had heard it too. They stared hard into the darkness, but the shrouded night was impenetrable.

‘Send up a rocket,’ the commander said eventually. He did not like to do it: he thought he might unduly alarm the troops and the enemy both. But he liked less the crawling trepidation that was ascending his spine.

A few minutes later, the night was torn by a piercing shriek, and the firework arced into the sky, trailing a thin stream of smoke. Its whistle faded to silence, and then blossomed into a furious ball of light, a burning phosphorescence that lit the whole hillside.

What they saw terrified them.

The base of the hill was aswarm with troops, frozen in the false sun like a bas-relief. They were draped in tarpaulins of black over their leather armour, disguising their colours, and under that camouflage they had advanced from the camp-fires, crossing in secret a potential killing field where the folk of Zila might have been able to shred them with bowshot and fire-cannon. Beneath the tarpaulins, they looked like a slick-backed horde of grotesque and outsize beetles, creeping insidiously up to the walls of the town, dragging with them mortars and ladders and fire-cannons of their own. The very suddenness of the image was horrifying, like pulling back a bandage to find a wound swarming with maggots.

Perhaps three thousand men were climbing the muddy hill towards Zila.

There was a great clamour as the firework died, both from the town and from the troops below. They cast off their tarpaulins in the last light of the rocket, and tugged them away from the sculpted barrels of the fire-cannons, which were shaped like snarling dogs or screaming demons. Then blackness returned, and they were hidden once again; but Zila was speckled in light, and could not hide.

Alarm bells clanged. Voices cried out orders and warnings. Men scattered dice or bowls of stew as they scrambled to the weapons that they had left carelessly leaning against walls.

Then the fire-cannons opened up.

The darkness at the base of the hill was lit anew with flashes of flame gouting from iron mouths, briefly illuminating the troops as they broke into a charge. Shellshot looped lazily up and over the walls, black orbs leaking chemical fire from cracks in their surfaces as they spun. They crashed through the roofs of houses, shattered in the streets, tore chunks out of buildings. Where they impacted hard enough, they burst and sprayed a jelly which ignited on contact with air. Blazing slicks raced along the cobbled roads of Zila, and the rain was powerless to extinguish them; dark dwellings suddenly brightened from within as their interiors turned to bonfires; howling figures, men and women and children, staggered and flailed as their skin crisped.

The first salvo was devastating. The second was not long in following.

Bakkara was out of his bed before the first screech of the rocket had died, and was strapping on his leather armour when the shellshot hit. Mishani had woken at the same time, but she had not understood what the firework might mean. At the sound of the explosions, however, she was in motion herself. While Bakkara was at the window, throwing open the shutters, she was slipping into her robe and winding her hair in a single massive plait which she knotted at the bottom.

Bakkara cursed foully as he looked down onto the rooftops of Zila, saw the flames already rising.

‘I knew they’d do it like this,’ he grated. ‘Gods damn them! I knew it!’

He turned away from the window to find Mishani putting her sandals on. Ordinarily it took her a long while to make herself ready, but when elegance was not an issue she could do it inside of a minute.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he demanded.

‘With you,’ she said.

‘Woman, this is not a time to be a burden, I warn you.’

The room shook suddenly to a deafening impact, a tremor that made Bakkara stumble and catch hold of a dresser to steady himself. The keep had been struck. A fire-cannon’s artillery would not penetrate walls this thick, but there was a flaming rill left on the keep’s flank that dripped down into the courtyard below.

‘I am not staying here; it is the most prominent target in Zila,’ she said. ‘Go. Do not concern yourself with me. I will keep up.’

She could not have said why she felt the need to accompany him, only that to be wakened in this way had frightened her, and she did not want to be left alone to wonder at what fate might befall the town.

‘No, you’re right,’ Bakkara said, sobering for a moment. ‘I have a safer place to put you.’

Mishani was about to ask what he meant by that, but she did not have the chance. Xejen burst into the room, jabbering frantically. He had evidently been awake, for he was not sleep-mussed and his hair was neat; in her time observing the leader of the Ais Maraxa, Mishani had established that he was a chronic insomniac.

‘What are they doing, what are they doing?’ he cried. He registered Mishani’s presence in the room, then looked at Bakkara with obvious surprise on his face. He had evidently not known that they were sleeping together. ‘Bakkara, what are they—’

‘They’re attacking us, you fool, as I told you they would!’ he shouted. He pushed past Xejen and out of the door. Xejen and Mishani followed him as he hurried through the keep, adjusting his scabbard as he went. Outside, the staccato crack of rifles had begun as the men on the walls organised themselves enough to mount a defence.

‘We were negotiating!’ Xejen blustered, running to keep up with Bakkara’s strides. ‘Don’t they care about the hostages? Are they intending to burn an Imperial town to the ground?’

‘If that’s what it takes,’ Bakkara replied grimly.

As a soldier, he was used to the frustration of suffering for a leader’s incompetence, and accepted it. In a chain of command, even if one man thought he knew better than the one above him, he still had to accept his superior’s orders. Bakkara had not, in his heart, thought that the Baraks Zahn tu Ikati and Moshito tu Vinaxis would dare a ploy like this, but he had warned Xejen of the possibility.

Xejen had not heeded him. He believed, as he had always believed, that troops of the Empire would try and wait them out. They would waste time with diplomacy, letting the people become bored and complacent and dispirited, hanging on until the rebels’ morale slipped. Then they would make offers to the people themselves, to try and incite a coup from within. At the very worst, they would assault the walls, and Xejen believed that they could be held back easily from the advantage of high ground. The Empire’s hands were tied to some extent: they would not want to cause any more damage to the town itself than they had to, and the Emperor would not want to kill thousands of Saramyr peasant townsfolk, especially when things were so volatile.

If Xejen knew anything, he knew how to play people, how to inspire them or make them doubt. And he had intended to use the time spent in negotiation to spread the doctrine of the Ais Maraxa, to give the people of Zila something to believe in, a purpose that would keep them unshakable. He had banked on the generals being unenthusiastic about the fight, seeking to preserve their strength for the civil war that was brewing.

Xejen thought only in his own terms, and he assumed – fatally – that everyone else of education thought that way too. After all, sense was sense; surely anyone with a mind could tell that? He had thought it would come to a battle of wills. He was wrong.

They burst out of the keep into a tumult of rain and screams and flame, then ducked reflexively as shellshot came rushing over their heads to explode across the far side of Zila, spewing burning jelly onto the rooftops. Bakkara cursed roundly and raced down the stone steps towards street level, his hair sodden in an instant. The streets were alive with people running and calling to each other, seeking any kind of shelter in their panic, frightened faces sidelit by fire.

The steps of the keep folded back on themselves twice before they reached the surrounding plaza. Several guards stood at the bottom, professional soldiers who knew better than to desert their posts even under an assault like this. Bakkara clapped one of them on the shoulder.

‘Get more men!’ he said urgently. ‘Sooner or later these people are going to end up thinking the only safe place in Zila is the keep, and they’ll want in. You need to hold them back. We don’t want them taking sanctuary; we want them out there fighting!’

The guard snapped a salute across his chest and began giving orders. Bakkara did not wait. He was heading for the southern wall, where the sounds of battle were beginning already.

Those with military training in the Ais Maraxa had known it would be a tall order to co-ordinate peasantry and artisans into an effective defence force, but even they had not expected quite such spectacular disorganisation. The Baraks’ battle plan had been perfectly pitched to sow confusion, sending Zila into a panic by its sheer callous brutality. Fire-cannons rained shellshot indiscriminately upon the town, taking no care to aim. Mortars pitched bombs through the air, destroying chunks of masonry and doing real damage to the walls of the keep. The men of Zila had been ready for a fight, but this was no fight; this was a massacre.

Or so it seemed. Actually, as men like Bakkara knew, there were far fewer casualties than the level of destruction would suggest. The intent was to make the damage look worse than it was. The rain was stopping many of the fires spreading too far, and the outer wall of the town was as strong as it always had been. But the townsfolk saw only that their houses were being burned and their families were fleeing in terror, and many of them ran from their posts to try and save their loved ones from whatever danger they imagined them to be in.

It took a long time, too long, for Zila’s own fire-cannons to open up, blasting flaming rents in the lines of the attackers, sending them scattering. Fireworks whistled into the sky and turned into blazing white torches, lighting a scene of labouring ghosts at the foot of Zila’s wall as the soldiers clambered through mud and bowshot and rifle fire, shields locked above their heads. Shields were rarely used in Saramyr combat except for such purposes as this, and so they were fashioned from thick metal to make them heavy enough to deflect rifle balls. Men fell at the flanks of the formations, but the core remained strong as ladders were passed under the canopy of shields. Distantly, the sinister creaking of the siege engines could be heard approaching through the night, and reinforcements who had not been part of the first assault were arriving.

But the worst consequence of the disorganisation was this: all eyes were on the south, and nobody was looking north, to the river.

The darkness and rain and cloud that had concealed the Baraks’ armies so effectively had done the same for the soldiers that had crossed the Zan and ascended the steep side of the hill, filing up the stairs from the docks to the small gate at the top and then fanning out along the wall.

The men on the north side had not lessened in their vigilance, but under the conditions it was impossible to see anything, and the chaos of the bombardment had put the more nervous men into a panic. The watch commander’s request to have fireworks sent up on the north side of the town got lost somewhere in the muddle, and while he was waiting for a reply that never came, disaster struck.

Four soldiers guarded the small northern gate on the inside. It was massively thick, studded with rivets and banded with metal, practically unbreachable due to its width and compact size. The angle of the slope beyond, which plunged down to the south bank of the Zan, made foolish any attempt to assault it. Men would have to use the stairs – for the grassy sides were just too sharp an incline, especially in this rain – and they would be easy targets for anything the defenders cared to drop on them from above. Any attackers would be forced to huddle close to the tiny margin of level ground by the walls, where burning pitch could be poured on them, while a few soldiers fruitlessly battered at the gate. There was not even enough clearance between the gate and the edge of the slope to manoeuvre a ram effectively.

Giri stood in the lantern-lit antechamber with his three companions on duty, listening to the destruction of Zila going on outside. He was a soldier by trade, but he did not have the temperament for it. He did not enjoy fighting, nor did he revel in the camaraderie that other soldiers thrived on. Most of his time was spent trying to get himself posted in the place where there was least likely to be any danger of him losing his life. He believed himself lucky this time. This was probably the safest place in the town.

He only began to suspect that something was wrong when his head began to throb. At first it was nothing alarming, just a slight, dull pain which he expected to pass momentarily. But it increased rather than diminishing. He squinted, blinking his right eye rapidly as it started to get worse.

‘Are you unwell?’ one of the other guards asked him.

But Giri was very far from well. The agony was becoming unbearable. He pawed at his right eye with his fingertips, wanting by some perverse instinct to touch the area that hurt; but it was inside his head, like a small animal scrabbling within his skull. He could see another guard frowning now, not at Giri but at something else, as if a sudden thought had occurred to him that was too important to dismiss.

They had all taken on that expression now, a curious attentiveness as if listening to something. Then the guard who had spoken turned back to him, his sword sliding free from its sheath.

‘You’re not co-operating, Giri,’ he said.

Giri’s eyes widened in realisation. ‘No, stop! Gods! It’s a Weaver! They’ve got a Weaver out there!’

The blade plunged into his chest before he could get any further.

One of the three remaining guards, those who had not had such an adverse reaction to the Weaver’s influence, doused the lanterns and unbarred the gate. They drew it open to the rain and darkness outside. Barely visible was a Mask of precious metal cut into angles, a splintered, jagged visage of gold and silver and bronze. Behind the hunched figure, soldiers in black tarpaulins waited with swords drawn. They rushed past and slew the unfortunate puppets, then crowded into the antechamber.

Stealthily, they crept onward into Zila.

‘Report!’ Bakkara roared over the crashing of burning timbers and the shattering din of the explosives.

‘They’re all over us!’ the watch commander cried. He was a man of middle age with a drooping moustache, now lank with moisture. ‘They’ve got to the walls and they’re putting up ladders. A third of the men have left their posts already; they’re running around like idiots inside the town.’

‘You didn’t stop them?’ Bakkara was incredulous.

‘How? By killing them? Who would kill them? The towns-folk won’t, and if the Ais Maraxa get sword-happy, what pitiful defence we have left will collapse.’ The commander looked resigned. ‘Men won’t fight if they aren’t willing. We started a revolt; we didn’t create an army.’

‘But they’ll be killed if they don’t fight!’ Xejen blurted.

He, like the others, was sheltering beneath the wooden awning of an empty bar near the southern wall. People ran by on the street, intermittently lit by flashes. Mishani listened to the exchange with half her attention elsewhere. She was scared rigid beneath her dispassionate exterior. The pummelling tumult all around her, the knowledge that they could be incinerated at any moment, was shredding her nerves. She wanted desperately to turn back to the keep; she wished she had never left it. Looking up through the rain, she saw it rising in the centre of the town. Though its sides were scored and scorched, and chunks had fallen free, it still seemed many times safer than where she was now. Fear had driven her towards where the action was, for she had no wish then to remain in a tower that was being bombarded. But she knew nothing of war, and was shocked by its ferocity. Twice they had almost been hit by shellshot; several times they had passed by burnt and blasted corpses. Mishani had seen atrocities like this before, when she had been a victim of subversive bombing in the Market District of Axekami; but that had been one terrible moment of danger, and then the horrifying aftermath. Here, the bombs kept coming, and sooner or later one of them had to hit her.

The commander was looking at Xejen gravely. ‘They’re saying the men will be spared if they surrender. We can hear Barak Moshito down there somewhere.’

‘Impossible!’ Xejen cried.

‘Weavers,’ Bakkara said. ‘They can make a man’s voice carry. They used to do it when generals were addressing troops, back when I fought in the Newlands. There would be two thousand men there, but every one could hear as if the general was right in front of them.’

‘Weavers?’ Xejen repeated nervously.

‘What did you expect?’ he grunted.

‘We need you on the wall, Bakkara,’ the commander said. ‘It’s a shambles up there. They don’t know how to deal with an all-out attack.’

‘Nobody is surrendering!’ Xejen snapped suddenly. ‘Tell the men that! Whatever Moshito says!’ He snorted. ‘I’ll go to the wall and tell them myself.’

The commander looked uncertainly at Bakkara. ‘You mean to lead the men?’ he asked Xejen.

‘Since I must, yes,’ he replied.

‘Xejen . . .’ Bakkara began, then subsided. But Mishani would not let him defer to Xejen, not here. Even amid her fear, she saw that they were at the fulcrum of the balance of power; and the time had come to throw her own weight into the fray.

‘Gods, Xejen, let him do his job!’ she snapped, imbuing her voice with a crisp and disparaging tone. ‘He is the man to lead the battle, not you!’

Bakkara’s brows raised in surprise. His eyes flicked from Mishani to Xejen. ‘Go to the safehouse. There’s nothing you can do here.’

‘I have to be here!’ Xejen protested immediately.

But now it was a matter of pride; as much as he would not have admitted it to himself, Bakkara would not be overridden in front of his woman, however inaccurate that term might be. Mishani had judged him aright.

‘You will do Lucia no good if you get killed!’ Bakkara barked. ‘And you, Mistress Mishani, this is not your fight. If you’re caught up in the fray, they’ll kill you, noble or not.’

‘Ladders!’ someone cried in the distance. ‘More ladders coming!’

The commander glared at Bakkara urgently. ‘We need you!’ he repeated. ‘They’re trying to scale the wall!’

‘Go!’ Bakkara shouted at Xejen, and then he turned and ran, following the other soldier.

Xejen and Mishani stood together under the awning, the rain splattering off it and onto the cobbles. Bakkara did not look back. Xejen seemed momentarily bereft of direction. Mishani, noting his expression, guessed that things would be different if they managed to weather this battle. Bakkara, without even intending to, had taken a great step towards becoming the head of the Ais Maraxa, and Xejen had been diminished. It would serve Mishani well.

‘We should do as he says,’ Mishani suggested. She surprised herself by how calm she sounded, when all she wanted to do was flee towards what little sanctuary she could find. Bakkara had mentioned the safehouse once before: a small, underground complex of chambers that the Ais Maraxa had discovered while rooting through the usurped Governor’s notes. A retreat where they would be protected from the bombs and shellshot.

Xejen spat on the ground in frustration and stalked away in the direction they had come. ‘Follow me!’ he said, his long jaw set.

They hurried through the grim, steep streets of Zila. The tall buildings crowded in on them threateningly as they slipped off the main thoroughfares and through the narrow lanes that ran between the spoke-roads. Flaming rubble had blocked many routes, and some buildings had fire licking from their windows, burning from the inside out. People pushed past them in the other direction. Some of them recognised Xejen. A few pleaded with him, as if he had the power to stop this. He told them to get up on the wall and fight, if they had any pride in their town. They looked at him in confusion and ran on. As far as they were concerned, things were hopeless.

The analytical part of Mishani’s mind was studying Xejen even through the fear. He was enraged by the turn of events, betrayed by the weakness of the townsfolk and by Bakkara; and yet she saw by his manner that he still had supreme faith in his plan, that no matter how bad it looked the walls of Zila would hold. He cursed as he went, muttering in fury at the sight of men shepherding their families away from the blazing buildings, genuinely unable to believe that they did not see the best way to keep them safe was to fight for their town.

That was when she realised unequivocably that his belief in his cause had blinded him, and that was why they would be defeated. The Ais Maraxa were dangerous, not only to the Empire but to the Libera Dramach as well. Zaelis had known that from the start. They were a liability, driven by their fervour to act without caution and to stretch themselves beyond their abilities. Fortune had put them in this town at a time when it was ripe to overthrow its inept ruler, but it had not given them the resources or experience to govern it, and certainly not to face two very competent Baraks and a multitude of war-tested generals.

She had been working towards a way to resolve this mess in her favour, a route to safety; but events had turned on her too quickly. Where was Zahn? Had he chosen to ignore her message? Gods, did he not realise how important she was to him? If she survived the night, she told herself, she might still have a chance of getting out of Zila alive. If she survived the night.

She was thinking just that when the mortar bomb struck the building next to her with a deafening roar, and the whole frontage came slumping down into the street.

It was only Xejen’s perpetually keyed-up reactions that saved her. He had seen the projectile an instant before it hit, and he darted into the open doorway of the building opposite, grabbing the cuff of Mishani’s robe as he went. At the instant she was stunned by the noise and light and the blast of concussion that physically pushed her backwards, she was also pulled hard through the doorway, and she fell over the step as the street where she had just been turned into an avalanche of stone and timber.

A billow of dust blew into the room, forcing itself into Mishani’s lungs and making her choke. Through tearing eyes she could vaguely make out the shape of Xejen. Then she heard the sound of splitting wood and the terrible, ominous groan of the house all around them. She had barely realised that she had evaded death by a hair’s breadth before she heard something crack overhead, and knew that she had not evaded it at all. Her stomach knotted sickeningly as she heard the last of the beams give, and then the ceiling came in on top of her.

Bakkara’s blade swept in a high arc, shattering the soldier’s collarbone and almost removing his head. His victim’s grip went loose on the ladder and he fell, crashing onto the men beneath him and dislodging several, who went screaming towards the upturned shields of their companions below. Bakkara and another man got the end of the ladder and pushed away; it swung back, teetered, and then pivoted in a quarter-circle and tipped over, shedding the last of the men on its back as it crashed onto the heads of the troops that assaulted Zila’s southern wall.

‘Where is everyone?’ he cried in exasperation, racing to where another ladder was already clattering ominously against the parapet. They could have held this position with a tenth of the men attacking it, but there was barely even that. It was all the defenders could do to keep the troops from getting over the wall. In the back of his mind, he noted that Zila’s fire-cannons had gone silent, and the Baraks’ troops attacked fearlessly now.

It was an Ais Maraxa man who answered him, a soldier as weathered and weary as he. ‘They fled the wall, the cowards,’ he grated. ‘Some to their families, some because they want to surrender. They’ll hide ’till this is through, gods rot them.’

Bakkara swore. This was a disaster. The townsfolk had all but given up, demoralised utterly by the sight of their homes burning and the apparently overwhelming odds. They could have held out, if they had stayed together. But that required unity and discipline, and Xejen’s ragtag army of peasants had neither.

He had no time to think further, for he was already at the new ladder, where two Blood Vinaxis men had spilled onto the stone walkway and were running at him. His sword swung up to meet the ill-advised overhead strike of the first, then he stamped on the side of the man’s foot, feeling the joint give under his heel. His enemy shrieked and clutched his ankle reflexively, and Bakkara beheaded him while his guard was down. He slumped to the ground, blood gushing from his severed neck to be washed away by the pouring rain.

The Ais Maraxa soldier, whose name was Hruji, had despatched his opponent with similar efficiency, and the two of them tipped the ladder back before any others could get to the top.

Bakkara glanced grimly up and down the wall. There were too few men here, too few. Almost all of them were Ais Maraxa. The peasants had left them to it. In the lantern-light, he saw small clots of soldiers rushing back and forth, desperately engaging the encroaching troops. But the troops were endless, and his men were flagging.

There were not enough to keep the enemy at bay over such a perimeter.

‘Bakkara!’ someone cried, and he turned to see a dishevelled man come racing along the walkway towards him. He knew the face, but memory failed at the name.

‘Give me some good news,’ Bakkara warned, but at the man’s expression he knew what news he had to give would certainly not be good.

‘They’ve got in through the north gate! They’ve taken the north wall. The peasants are surrendering . . . some are even helping them in the streets up there. Our men are fleeing south, towards the centre.’

That was it. There was no more time for procrastination.

‘We fall back to the keep,’ Bakkara said, the words like ashes in his mouth. ‘The town is lost. Meet at the rally point. We go from there.’

Hruji and the messenger both saluted and ran to spread the order. Bakkara turned flat eyes to the scorched and damaged building that rose above the burning streets of Zila, and wondered if his decision would do them any good at all, or if he was merely delaying the inevitable. He suspected the latter.

A moment later, a horn sounded a shrill, clear note that echoed into the battle-tainted night: the signal to give up the wall.

The retreat was as disorganised as the rest of the defence had been. The Ais Maraxa had been the last to give up their posts, but not all of them were soldiers, and the withdrawal turned into a rout as enemy troops began pouring over the vacated wall and into the town. Booted feet splashed through streets that had turned into shallow rivers of murky water, fearful glances were cast over shoulders at the tide of swords and rifles and armour cresting Zila’s parapets. The Ais Maraxa ran headlong through the glow cast by the street lanterns, flicking from shadow to light and back again, fleeing to gather in a dour square that stood at the crossing of a spoke-road and a side street.

Bakkara stood at the square’s north end as the ragged fighters poured in from all sides, surveying them bleakly. Their expressions were disbelieving, their faith in their cause tattered. For so long they had worked in secret, and they had thought themselves invincible, righteous crusaders for a cause blessed by the gods. But the moment they had stepped into the light they had been smashed by the power of the Empire. It was a cruel lesson, and Bakkara considered what would become of the Ais Maraxa if they managed to get themselves out of this.

Now sufficient numbers had crammed into the square for him to call the order to head for the keep. Through the fires of the shellshot that were still bursting all around them, he led the crowd at a run up the steep, cobbled spoke-road that headed towards the looming structure at Zila’s hub. Maybe there they could at least give the enemy pause. New strategies could be mooted, new plans made.

But who would make them?

He dashed the rain from his eyes, casting his doubts away as he did so. Regroup and defend. That was the next thing he had to do, and he did not think beyond that. He had never thought beyond his next objective. That was his nature.

They came to the end of the spoke-road, and it opened out into the great circular plaza that surrounded the keep. Bakkara slowed to a halt, and so did the men who ran with him. The stillness spread backwards, until even those at the rear of the crowd who could not see had ceased jostling, subdued by a dreadful trepidation.

Ranked before them, at the foot of the keep, were more than a thousand men; double the amount that Bakkara had mustered.

Bakkara took a breath and assessed the amount of trouble they were in. The space between the Ais Maraxa and the enemy troops was all but empty, a dark, slick expanse of crescent-shaped flagstones. A pair of large fires to their left – where shellshot jelly still burned against the downpour – cast multiple yellow glints across the divide. The troops were a mixture of all the Bloods who had arrayed themselves against the revolt; but he also saw peasants there, townsfolk of Zila, eager to buy their own lives by abetting the invaders. He tried to feel disgust, but he could not. It seemed petty now.

There above them, on the steps leading to the keep, he picked out the dimly shining Mask of a Weaver. The face of precious metals was an obscenity against the ragged robes that he wore. Bakkara did not need to look up any further to know that the keep had already been breached.

Men were murmuring in fear behind him. The very thought of facing a Weaver was enough to make them balk. Yet the enemy forces that had scaled the southern wall were catching up to them with every wasted moment. Bakkara sensed that he had to act now, or he would lose them.

Their lives were forfeit if they were captured. He knew that, with the certainty of a man who had seen war over and over. He also knew that there were worse things than dying.

‘Ais Maraxa!’ he roared, his voice carrying over the crowd. It sounded like someone else’s voice, someone else’s words. ‘For Lucia! For Lucia!’

With that he raised his sword high and cried wordlessly, and as one the men that followed him did the same, their instant of weakness passing at the sound of Lucia’s name, reminded of the faith that had brought them here in the first place. Bakkara’s chest swelled with an emotion so glorious that he could not put a name to it, and he swung his sword forward to point at the enemy who waited to receive them with better weapons, better guns, and greater numbers.

‘Attack!’ he bellowed.

Rifles cracked and swords rang free of their scabbards as the last of the Ais Maraxa surged forward to the death that awaited them, and in his final moments Bakkara knew what it was like to be a leader at last.