Moya braced for the fall. She grabbed the ancient parapet, despite knowing that it, too, would fall. The stairs and the primary supports for the massive wall were gone. The whole thing was going down. It had to, but it didn’t. The wall continued to shake and jerk back and forth. Tesh and Moya wrapped their arms around the merlons, clinging to the bucking wall. Still, it didn’t fall.
Across the chasm, Moya spotted the Fhrey troops lined up at the foot of the bridge. They were waiting for the front of the fortress to come down. But the front wall of Alon Rhist refused to fall. Bewilderment filled every face as the great stones danced like a stack of juggled plates. Looking inside the courtyard, Moya saw why.
Standing amidst the rubble of the toppled tower, just outside the smithy, Moya saw the small figure of Suri flanked by Roan, her dwarfs, Malcolm, and Padera. She stood with arms outstretched, hands moving, head thrown back as if singing to the sky.
Not knowing if Suri was winning or losing, or just buying time, Moya didn’t want to wait to find out. The stairs to the south were gone. The only way off was the steps on the far side.
“Up for a crazy run?” Moya asked Tesh and nodded toward the long expanse of crenelated parapet that wiggled like a snake.
“Always.” Tesh turned his body and knelt like a sprinter. “Ready.”
“You first. Go!” she shouted.
The kid took off and got several strides across before being buffeted between the battlements. He staggered and fell, got up, and ran again. Once he was three merlons down, she started her run. She could have been sprinting across a bobbing log in a rushing river for all the stability the wall was providing. A jerk nearly sent her out a crenel.
Not a log at all—I’m running along a rope used in a tug-of-war!
While remaining vertical, the wall was faring poorly from the struggle. Stone blocks were jiggled free and fell. Whole merlons were missing, and the parapet was no longer anywhere close to straight. While it changed from moment to moment, the wall had warped into an S shape. About the time Moya was in the very center, she heard a terrible clang. Fearing she was about to fall, she sucked in a breath, but the wall stayed up.
The doors! The great bronze gates are right beneath me. They must have been shaken off their hinges.
Ahead of her, Tesh reached the stairs, and once more he stopped. Turning back, he waved frantically for her and waited.
Kid has more balls than brains.
The wall jerked again, and she was slapped from one merlon to the other. She slammed one shoulder hard enough to make her cry out, then the other side of the walkway hit her in the chest, knocking the air out of her.
Tetlin’s tit!
She forced her legs to keep moving. Moya wasn’t sure where the strength came from—maybe Suri had buoyed her up, or Mari was lending support, or just plain old-fashioned fear fed her efforts—but she finished the crossing, and she and Tesh raced down the steps to the courtyard.
They were fifty feet away when at last the wall came down.
* * *
—
Suri used to try to catch fish with her bare hands. She’d seen the bears do it, so she thought it was worth a try. Tura had explained that her lack of claws was an insurmountable obstacle. Suri tried anyway. She had stood knee-deep in the stream where the fish swam in the shallows—the same place where the bears hunted—and she scooped up a nice river salmon. The scales were slick as oil, and the creature wiggled, fighting hard. She could feel the muscles thrashing back and forth as the fish struggled. She pulled it to her chest, but the thing was just too slippery, too heavy, too strong. After a titanic battle, it flew from her hands and back into the river, leaving her disappointed and realizing that she couldn’t do everything. Suri felt the same way when the wall was finally torn from her grasp and shattered into a heap of broken stone.
You just don’t have the claws.
The land continued to shake. There were no runes on the ground to stop it. The Orinfar protected the primary walls, which was part of the problem in holding them up. She couldn’t grab them with the Art. Instead, she was forced to use the air around them and anything else that wasn’t rune-marked. No sooner did she stop one tower from falling, then another began to wobble. She tried to calm the ground but couldn’t.
Where is all that power coming from?
All Suri was doing was holding things together, and she felt exhausted. The struggle over the front wall had drained her, the runes on it acting against her efforts, and the continued fight to withstand the impacts that shuddered the rest of the fortress was a marathon she couldn’t finish.
Maybe it’s because there are more of them. But Suri could only sense the one, a young Fhrey. She could almost see him, and there was something familiar in that connection. She knew this person. He’d been in Dahl Rhen. He was the one—
“The bridge,” a voice said in her ear. “Forget the walls. Destroy the Grandford Bridge.”
If the words had been screamed, she might not have listened, but the calm confidence was something one looked for in emergencies.
The bridge.