'Oh no.'
Hands reached to the sky. Heads rose from the slime. Bodies, dripping with filth hauled themselves upright to stand on unsteady legs. Refugees, soldiers. And larger shapes too a little more distant. Horses. Up they came. Thousands. Tens of thousands. And as one, they turned and began to walk west. Their shambling march, the uncoordinated movement of arm and leg. The hanging of a head to one side or other. All of it told Jhered everything he had to know and feared to see.
He turned and began to walk quickly over the slippery terrain. 'Ardu, Mirron. Let's walk. And don't look back.' 'Why not?' said Ardu, looking.
Jhered had to slow immediately. Arducius could barely put one foot in front of the other.
'Because the dead are coming. All of them.'
Cheers died in throats. Men whose spears and swords had punched upwards into the air in celebration let them drop to hang limp at their sides. The dead outside the walls had not moved but the songs of victory from the camps and beyond had ceased. A rumbling had filled the air. The foundations of the barrier had shaken very slightly and the screaming had begun.
Roberto ran to the back of the gate fort and looked through one of the mounted magnifiers positioned there. He moved it up to the horizon and then slowly back down, scanning left and right in a gentle sweep. What he saw chilled him to his bones despite the warm genastro sun. People running. A stampede of humanity with all sense of control and discipline gone. Legionaries pushed aside slower citizens. Refugees clambered over any who fell. All had forgotten anything but the primal urge for self-preservation. Faces were contorted. People screaming as they ran, dragging in fresh breath and screaming again. He saw a man tumble and be submerged beneath a tide of others too terrified to stoop and help him.
Man descended to animal. And Roberto could not find it in his heart to blame a single one of them. For behind them the earth had risen and was charging at them. From horizon to horizon it spread. It would crash against the roots of the Gaws. It would thunder through the foothills and into Lake lyre. And it would drive straight through every single living thing between it and the Jewelled Barrier.
'Not again, God-surround-me, not again.' Roberto dropped to his knees, placed one hand on the stone and the other fingers spread pointed to the sky. 'Dear God the Omniscient, saviour and loved of all your faithful. Deliver us from this fate. Show us a path to victory that may keep your earth safe for your children.'
A shockwave ran through the fort. Soldiers stumbled. Everything shook. Onagers juddered across the roof. Loose stones rolled. Roberto stood again. The earth wave, higher than two men, eclipsed the western horizon. Clouds and dirt clogged the sky above it. It crashed through man and beast, unstoppable. Roberto turned and ran back to where Davarov and Harban were clinging to battlements while the shudder subsided.
'Hang on to anything you can,' he shouted. 'Whatever happens, do not let go. Don't fall to the ground when this things hits us. Down there is death. Up here we might just live.'
'It is as the prophecy foretold,' said Harban. 'He will shiver the mountains and topple the world. Him and his spawn.'
'That may be but right now, we have to survive what's coming at us,' said Roberto. 'Pass the word to any who have time and the will to hear it. If you want to live, cling on to the rock.'
They didn't have to shout people to the walls. A flood tide of soldiers and civilians was already racing up the concrete slopes. Flagmen were waving the command to get to the walls anyway. Davarov, his bellow managing to carry over the din of panic, was roaring people up. He barked at anyone within earshot to attach themselves any way they could to the barrier. Torch brackets, rope around crenellations, human chains. Anything.
Roberto cast around for a place to secure himself. Bound in a net and held fast against the forward battlements were two crates. He raised his eyebrows and ran for them. Another tremor shook the fort. He pitched forwards. On the roof behind him, onager stones rolled. Engineers dived and leapt the ambling projectiles. Pitch barrels fell, spilling flame and heat across the concrete and stone. He heard screaming, cut off abruptly. The net and its contents had not shifted. It would have to do.
Roberto clawed his way towards them, grabbed the net and fumbled at his sword belt with the other hand. The tremor subsided. Roberto passed the belt through the net, its half inch rope strong and fresh, and refastened it such that his back was to the crates. He looked left. Davarov, his huge arms wrapped around a bolted torch bracket, a rope from his waist to the metal as well, could still smile.
'Hey Roberto!' he called. 'What a way to go. A wall of earth is coming and you attach yourself to the most explosive compound in the Conquord.'
Something broke in Roberto then. The well of his grief ran dry for a moment and every trial, everything that was to come, diminished. Just for a few heartbeats. He howled with laughter and patted the crates. He had to shout over the roaring rumble of the wave and the juddering of the fort and wall that grated stone against stone.
'Hey Davarov! See you on the other side. And you know what? If we survive, these little beauties might just come in handy.'
From his position, Roberto could see over the open left-hand side of the fort and down into the compound. His laughter cramped in his throat and he prayed for the cycles of all those about to die. Down on the ground, the seething mass of humanity had stalled. Below him the great gates were closed and he could hear futile pounding on the timbers. Too many people crammed into the space to allow them to open inwards as they must. It would have been pointless anyway. The wave would surely catch them and the fort needed the strength of the closed portals if it was to have a better chance of standing after the wave had passed.
People were still moving up the slopes. Heaving masses, slowed almost to a standstill. Hands grasped as feet stumbled. Men and women fell from the sides on to the heads of those pinned to the walls themselves with no hope of climbing to questionable safety.
The roof of the fort began to fill. Legionaries taking the lead of their engineers and clinging on to whatever they could find. Camaraderie blossomed. The raw recruit and the triarii veteran beckoned each other into embrace. Armour and belt straps were held in death grips. More and more spilled onto the roof. And through the mess of limbs and bodies, people crowding into Roberto's left and right, hanging like him on to the net, he saw one familiar face.
'Julius!' Miraculously, the Speaker heard him and turned. His jaw dropped and he shouldered his way to Roberto. 'Get yourself in here, you bastard. Hang on tight.'
'Surprised you want me to live through this.'
'Like I said before, we all need to live. Even fucking idiots like you.'
Barias grinned briefly and wrapped his arms through the net. Plenty of people were on it. Roberto hoped it would be strong enough to hold them all.
Screams intensified from below. The juddering of the fort made seeing anything difficult but it couldn't obscure the sight of the wave washing through the administration buildings and overwhelming every man and woman who had crowded in, on or around it. The surge of noise sent a shooting pain into his head. The rumble of the wave became a roar. The steam and dust buffeted up and over the back wall of the fort. It swallowed them up in its choking stench.
The earth wave struck the Jewelled Barrier.
Roberto was aware that he and everyone around him was calling, screaming and shouting. Oaths and prayers or just emptying the lungs. The world shook and shuddered, turned on its side and back again. Leapt high and fell. Roberto tried to look but all he got were jumbled images. They were enough.
People falling, hurled like dolls against wall, man and onager. The onagers themselves, slithering sideways and crushing screaming engineers against battlements that crumbled and threatened to fall. Other engines tipped sideways, sliding and crashing to the ground. Onager stones rumbled across the roof. Pitch spewed everywhere. The wheel of an artillery frame attached to shattered timbers flew across the fort, smashing into people scant inches from Roberto, dashing skulls to fragments, smearing bodies.
A great rending crack ricocheted through the stone beneath him. A dozen others followed it. The fort lurched. Roberto's body was shaking so hard he had to close his eyes for a moment. He heard stone tumbling in torrents. The flat crack of snapping timbers reached him. He opened his eyes.
A rent pulled wide open right along the centre of the fort, passing directly under him. Soldiers, pulled free of their moorings, slid across the fort and followed pitch fire, artillery fragments and projectiles, tumbling to the ground below. The whole right side of the fort sagged outwards over the barrier wall running north to the Lake lyre. Roberto half slid over the rent but the rope of the net held him, legs dangling over the carnage below.
Bodies covered in stone. Filth spreading from the wave. It passed directly beneath him, a shivering, rumbling unnatural ripple of death and destruction. It burst through the great gates. Battlements crumbled, sheared and fell. Sections of the wall surged up to the sky, thumped back down and toppled outwards into Atreska. People by the hundred were tossed aside, falling back onto concrete or into the fetid rot below.
Of the people who had gripped the net, only four remained. Julius was one of them. He was hanging by his hands over the shattered fort, the whole right side of which was rubble and spears of timber. The rest of it, gone to crush those on the wall beneath it. Blood smeared every surface.
'Hang on, Julius,' said Roberto.
‘I
will this time, Ambassador.'
'You do that.'
Cracks and rumbles echoed north and south. Sections of the Jewelled Barrier collapsed on themselves, fell in and out. Dust clouds carried on a stinking breeze clogged Roberto's eyes and mouth. He coughed, hawked phlegm from his throat and spat. Stones and shards of rock tumbled and pattered. The noise began to subside. The wave rumbled out into Atreska. And above it, the screams of the wounded and dying, the cries of the terrified and the prayers of Julius Barias.
Roberto glanced to his left. This side of the fort had remained intact though skewed at an angle down and back into the compound where nothing remained but sludge covering the bodies of the thousand upon thousand slaughtered there. Legionaries and engineers still covered the battlements, laughing and crying in relief if they had the wit to make any sound at all.
And Davarov. Davarov was still there. The torch bracket hung by one bolt but he was still there and through the dust covering his deeply tanned face, Roberto could see a grim smile. He couldn't see Harban for the moment. The Karku was too smart a mountaineer to have fallen, though.
Roberto fumbled for the belt buckle, loosened it and pulled himself to his feet. He knelt and grasped one of Barias's arms. Julius turned towards him and with a nod, Roberto hauled him up. Julius clawed and pulled with his free hand until he was once again on the stone, dragging in huge breaths.
'Thank you, Ambassador.'
'The pleasure is all mine,' said Roberto.
He stood and looked out into Atreska. The wave carried on. It swept through the dead standing there, felling them all and engulfing the wagon of the Gor-Karkulas. Roberto frowned. Beyond them, the Tsardon, as if they had been waiting, roared and charged. Roberto wiped at his face, too weary to be scared.
'Bastards,' muttered Davarov now beside him. 'I told you we couldn't trust them.'
'I don't think it matters all that much, Davarov,' said Roberto and he pointed out into the plains, ruined more and more with every passing heartbeat. 'The wave isn't stopping.'
Davarov grunted and pointed down at the ground close to the ruined walls where hundreds of Conquord citizens had been hurled.
'No. And the dead aren't staying dead, either.'
Chapter Sixty-Three
859th cycle of God, 12th day of
Genasfall
The dead were flooding into the harbour. The dual fort artillery thudded and sounded. Flaming onager stones, ballista stones and scorpion shafts poured onto the fleet, sixty and more strong crowding the harbour mouth. The fire was withering. Ships were driven into their neighbours by the force of onager strikes. Timbers holed and shattered. Masts were splintered. Sails fell into the water, acting as drag anchors, pulling ships off course. Tsardon and dead were dragged to the bosom of Ocetarus in their hundreds.
Yet still enough got through the bombardment. Inside, the harbour was a wall of flame and smoke. Heat radiated out beyond the walls and into the ocean. Iliev was at the tiller of Ocenii squad seven's corsair. Kashilli rode the spike low. His oarsmen made almost forty stroke. They'd been doing it much of the day.
Out to sea, the Conquord triremes battered at the laggards of the Tsardon fleet. Half a dozen enemy ships were burning, sinking fast. Three squads were in the water wreaking havoc among the stragglers. Others had chased north and south to combat the dead landing on the beaches and heading for the city walls.