The Forlorn Hope

Fire.

Visserine by night had become a place of flame and shadow. An endless maze of broken walls, fallen roofs, jutting rafters. A nightmare of disembodied cries, ghostly shapes flitting through the darkness. Buildings loomed, gutted shells, the eyeless gaps of window and doorway screaming open, fire spurting out, licking through, tickling at the darkness. Charred beams stabbed at the flames and they stabbed back. Showers of white sparks climbed into the black skies, and a black snow of ash fell softly the other way. The city had new towers now, crooked towers of smoke, glowing with the light of the fires that gave them birth, smudging out the stars.

“How many did we get the last time?” Cosca's eyes gleamed yellow from the flames across the square. “Three was it?”

“Three,” croaked Friendly. They were safe in the chest in his room: the armour of two Talinese soldiers, one with the square hole left by a flatbow bolt, and the uniform of a slight young lieutenant he had found crushed under a fallen chimney. Bad luck for him, but then Friendly supposed it was his side throwing the fire everywhere.

They had catapults beyond the walls, five on the west side of the river, and three on the east. They had catapults on the twenty-two white-sailed ships in the harbour. The first night, Friendly had stayed up until dawn watching them. They had thrown one hundred and eighteen burning missiles over the walls, scattering fires about the city. Fires shifted, and burned out, and split, and merged one with another, and so they could not be counted. The numbers had deserted Friendly, and left him alone and afraid. It had taken but six short days, three nights times two, for peaceful Visserine to turn to this.

The only part of the city untouched was the island on which Duke Salier's palace stood. There were paintings there, Murcatto said, and other pretty things that Ganmark, the leader of Orso's army, the man they were here to kill, wished to save. He would burn countless houses, and countless people in them, and order murder night and day, but these dead things of paint had to be protected. Friendly thought this was a man who should be put in Safety, so that the world outside could be a safer place. But instead he was obeyed, and admired, and the world burned. It seemed all turned around, all wrong. But then Friendly could not tell right from wrong, the judges had told him so.

“You ready?”

“Yes,” lied Friendly.

Cosca flashed a crazy grin. “Then to the breach, dear friend, once more!” And he trotted off down the street, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other clasping his hat to his head. Friendly swallowed, then followed, lips moving silently as he counted the steps he took. He had to count something other than the ways he could die.

It only grew worse the closer they got to the city's western edge. The fires rose up in terrible magnificence, creaking and roaring, towering devils, gnawing at the night. They burned Friendly's eyes and made them weep. Or perhaps he wept anyway, to see the waste of it. If you wanted a thing, why burn it? And if you did not want it, why fight to take it from someone else? Men died in Safety. They died there all the time. But there was no waste like this. There was not enough there to risk destroying what there was. Each thing was valued.

“Bloody Gurkish fire!” Cosca cursed as they gave another roaring blaze a wide berth. “Ten years ago no one had dreamed of using that stuff as a weapon. Then they made Dagoska an ash-heap with it, knocked holes in the walls of the Agriont with it. Now no sooner does a siege begin than everyone's clamouring to blow things up. We liked to torch a building or two in my day, just to get things moving, but nothing like this. War used to be about making money. Some degree of modest misery was a regrettable side effect. Now it's just about destroying things, and the more thoroughly the better. Science, my friend, science. Supposed to make life easier, I thought.”

Lines of sooty soldiers tramped by, armour gleaming orange with reflected flames. Lines of sooty civilians passed buckets of water from hand to hand, desperate faces half-lit by the glow of unquenchable fires. Angry ghosts, black shapes in the sweltering night. Behind them, a great mural on a shattered wall. Duke Salier in full armour, sternly pointing the way to victory. He had been holding a flag, Friendly thought, but the top part of the building had collapsed, and his raised arm along with it. Dancing flames made it look as if his painted face was twitching, as if his painted mouth was moving, as if the painted soldiers around him were charging onwards to the breach.

When Friendly was young, there had been an old man in the twelfth cell on his corridor who had told tales of long ago. Tales of the time before the Old Time, when this world and the world below were one, and devils roamed the earth. The inmates had laughed at that old man, and Friendly had laughed at him too, since it was wise in Safety to do just as others did and never to stand out. But he had gone back when no one else was near, to ask how many years, exactly, it had been since the gates were sealed and Euz shut the devils out of the world. The old man had not known the number. Now it seemed the world below had broken through the gates between again, flooding out into Visserine, chaos spreading with it.

They hurried past a tower in flames, fire flickering in its windows, pluming up from its broken roof like a giant's torch. Friendly sweated, coughed, sweated more. His mouth was endlessly dry, his throat endlessly rough, his fingertips chalky with soot. He saw the toothed outline of the city's walls at the end of a street strangled with rubble.

“We're getting close! Stay with me!”

“I … I …” Friendly's voice croaked to nothing on the smoky air. He could hear a noise, now, as they sidled down a narrow alley, red light flickering at its end. A clattering and clashing, a surging tide of furious voices. A noise like the great riot had made in Safety, before the six most feared convicts, Friendly among them, had agreed to put a stop to the madness. Who would stop the madness here? There was a boom that made the earth shudder, and a ruddy glare lit the night sky.

Cosca slipped up to the trunk of a scorched tree, keeping low, and crouched against it. The noise grew louder as Friendly crept after, terribly loud, but his heart pounding in his ears almost drowned it out.

The breach was no more than a hundred strides off, a ragged black patch of night torn from the city wall and clogged with heaving Talinese troops. They crawled like ants over the nightmare of fallen masonry and broken timbers that formed a ragged ramp down into a burned-out square at the city's edge. There might have been an orderly battle when the first assault came, but now it had dissolved into a shapeless, furious mêlée, defenders crowding in from barricades thrown up before the gutted buildings, attackers fumbling their way on, on through the breach, adding their mindless weight to the fight, their breathless corpses to the carnage.

Axe and sword blades flashed and glinted, pikes and spears waved and tangled, a torn flag or two hung limp over the press. Arrows and bolts flitted up and down, from the Talinese crowding outside the walls, from defenders at their barricades, from a crumbling tower beside the breach. While Friendly watched, a great chunk of masonry was sent spinning down from the top of the wall and into the boiling mass below, tearing a yawning hole through them. Hundreds of men, struggling and dying by the hellish glare of burning torches, of burning missiles, of burning houses. Friendly could hardly believe it was real. It all looked false, fake, a model staged for a lurid painting.

“The breach at Visserine,” he whispered to himself, framing the scene with his hands and imagining it hanging on some rich man's wall.

When two men set out to kill each other, there is a pattern to it. A few men, for that matter. A dozen, even. With a situation like that, Friendly had always been entirely comfortable. There is a form to be followed, and by being faster, stronger, sharper, you can come out alive. But this was otherwise. The mindless press. Who could know when you would be pushed, by the simple pressure of those behind, onto a pike? The awful randomness. How could you predict an arrow, or a bolt, or a falling rock from above? How could you see death coming, and how could you avoid it? It was one colossal game of chance with your life as the stake. And like the games of chance at Cardotti's House of Leisure, in the long run, the players could only lose.

“Looks like a hot one!” Cosca screamed in his ear.

“Hot?”

“I've been in hotter! The breach at Muris looked like a slaughter yard when we were done!”

Friendly could hardly bring himself to speak, his head was spinning so much. “You've been … in that?”

Cosca waved a dismissive hand. “A few times. But unless you're mad you soon tire of it. Looks like fun, maybe, but it's no place for a gentleman.”

“How do they know who's on whose side?” hissed Friendly.

Cosca's grin gleamed in his soot-smeared face. “Guesswork, mostly. You just try to stay pointed in the right direction and hope for the … ah.”

A fragment had broken from the general mêlée and was flowing forwards, bristling with weapons. Friendly could not even tell whether they were the besiegers or the besieged, they hardly seemed like men at all. He turned to see a wall of spears advancing down the street from the opposite direction, shifting light gleaming on dull metal, across stony faces. Not individual men, but a machine for killing.

“This way!” Friendly felt a hand grab his arm, shove him through a broken doorway in a tottering piece of wall. He stumbled and slipped, pitched over on his side. He half-ran, half-slid down a great heap of rubble, through a cloud of choking ash, and lay on his belly beside Cosca, staring up towards the combat in the street above. Men crashed together, killed and died, a formless soup of rage. Over their screams, their bellows of anger, the clash and squeal of metal, Friendly could hear something else. He stared sideways. Cosca was bent over on his knees, shaking with ill-suppressed mirth.

“Are you laughing?”

The old mercenary wiped his eyes with a sooty finger. “What's the alternative?”

They were in a kind of darkened valley, choked with rubble. A street? A drained canal? A sewer? Ragged people picked through the rubbish. Not far away a dead man lay face down. A woman crouched over the corpse with a knife out, in the midst of cutting the fingers from one limp hand for his rings.

“Away from that body!” Cosca lurched up, drawing his sword.

“This is ours!” A scrawny man with tangled hair and a club in his hand.

“No.” Cosca brandished the blade. “This is ours.” He took a step forwards and the scavenger stumbled back, falling through a scorched bush. The woman finally got through the bone with her knife, pulled the ring off and stuffed it in her pocket, flung the finger at Cosca along with a volley of abuse, then scuttled off into the darkness.

The old mercenary peered after them, weighing his sword in his hand. “He's Talinese. His gear, then!”

Friendly crept numbly over and began to unbuckle the dead man's armour. He pulled the backplate away and slid it into his sack.

“Swiftly, my friend, before those sewer rats return.”

Friendly had no mind to delay, but his hands were shaking. He was not sure why. They did not normally shake. He pulled the soldier's greaves off, and his breastplate, rattling into the sack with the rest. Four sets, this would be. Three plus one. Three more and they would have one each. Then perhaps they could kill Ganmark, and be done, and he could go back to Talins, and sit in Sajaam's place, counting the coins in the card game. What happy times those seemed now. He reached out and snapped off the flatbow bolt in the man's neck.

“Help me.” Hardly more than a whisper. Friendly wondered if he had imagined it. Then he saw the soldier's eyes were wide open. His lips moved again. “Help me.”

“How?” whispered Friendly. He undid the hooks and eyes on the man's padded jacket and, as gently as he could, stripped it from him, dragging the sleeve carefully over the oozing stumps of his severed fingers. He stuffed his clothes into the sack, then gently rolled him back over onto his face, just as he had found him.

“Good!” Cosca pointed towards a burned-out tower leaning precariously over a collapsed roof. “That way, maybe?”

“Why that way?”

“Why not that way?”

Friendly could not move. His knees were trembling. “I don't want to go.”

“Understandable, but we should stay together.” The old mercenary turned and Friendly caught his arm, words starting to burble out of his mouth.

“I'm losing count! I can't … I can't think. What number are we up to, now? What … what … have I gone mad?”

“You? No, my friend.” Cosca was smiling as he clapped his hand down on Friendly's shoulder. “You are entirely sane. This. All this!” He swept his hat off and waved it wildly around. “This is insanity!”