“Only along the wall,” he says. “We ran out before we could spread it in the city.”
“It won’t be enough.” A pale, smoky cloud passes near the Karkauns, veering away from the salt border they have marked around their army, like a trail of ants avoiding a line of water.
The shrieks from the cloud block out every other sound, including the drums, the shouts of the men, the ragged rhythm of my own breath. There are faces in that cloud, thousands of them.
Ghosts.
My men exclaim in fear, and I do not know what to do. I do not know how to kill this enemy. How to fight it. I do not know what it will do to us. Help, I scream in my mind. Father. Mother. Elias. Someone. Help us. I might as well be calling out to the moon.
The cloud is at the wall now, streaming over. Cold blasts through me as the ghosts shriek past, hissing at the salt along the wall before plummeting down to the unprotected men holding the gates, and into the streets beyond.
The soldiers do not know what hit them. One moment, they gaze at the cloud in wary fear. The next, they twitch and shake, possessed. Then, to my horror, they begin attacking each other like rabid animals.
The Karkauns roar and storm the city gates. We rain down arrows, pitch, rocks, but it is not enough.
I grab Dex by his collar. “We need more salt!”
“It’s gone—we used everything we could find.”
“If our own men are attacking each other, we cannot hold the gates,” I tell him. “We will lose the city. Get to Harper. Tell him to collapse the entrances to the tunnels. We cannot risk the Karkauns getting to our people.”
“But what about the people who are still left?”
“Go!”
“Shrike!” Another voice calls to me, and Faris bulls through the soldiers fighting to keep back the Karkauns. Down below, the men tear each other apart, attacking with anything they can find. One of the soldiers on the wall flings handfuls of salt down, perhaps hoping to scare the ghosts out of the bodies they have possessed. But it does nothing.
Any other army would have fled the wall at this sight—Karkauns crawling over the walls, our own men possessed. But the legions hold.
“Shrike.” Faris is out of breath, but he still has the sense to speak quietly. “The midwife we found to replace the last one is dead. I just found her swinging from a beam in her own house.”
“Well, bloody find another.”
“There are no others.”
“I don’t have time for this!”
“You don’t understand.” Faris crouches down and hisses, and I can see panic that he’d never feel in battle in his shaking hands. “I sought out the midwife because it’s time. Your sister is in labor, Shrike. The baby is coming.”
XLIX: Laia
Cook does not speak to me for a long time after I wake. Her face tells me what happened to the children I was trying to help. Still, I ask.
“The blast killed them,” she says. “It was quick.” Her golden skin is pale, but her hunched shoulders and shaking hands tell me of her rage. “Nearly killed you too.”
I sit up. “Where are we?”
“The old Scholar’s District,” she says. “In the slaves’ quarters. It’s farther from the chaos than the Mariner Embassy, though not by much.” She dabs a wound on my face with a warm cloth, careful not to let her skin touch mine. “The skies must love you, girl. That blast threw you thirty feet into a pile of feed.”
My head aches, and I struggle to remember. The skies must love you.
No. Not the skies. I knew that voice. I knew well the feel of that arm, strange and warped and too hot.
Why would the Nightbringer throw me out of the way of the blast? Why, when he knows what I am trying to do? I had no plan in my head in the moment of the blast—nothing but trying to get the children out. Am I playing into his hands somehow?
Or was it something else?
“Your heroics cost us.” Cook stirs a pot of some sort of acrid tea over a cook fire. “Do you know what day it is?”
I open my mouth to respond, but Cook cuts me off.
“It’s the day of the Grain Moon,” she says. “We lost our chance to get to the Blood Shrike. By tomorrow, the city will be breached. The Martials are stretched too thin, and there’s no relief in sight.”
She takes a sniff of the tea and adds something else to it. “Girl,” she says, “you trained with your”—she takes a deep breath—“grandfather,” she spits out, “in healing?”
“For a year and a half or so.”
She nods thoughtfully. “As did I,” she said. “Before I ran away like a damned fool. When did he take you to meet Nelle, the apothecary?”
“Uh . . .” I am bewildered that she knows about Nelle, until I remember, yet again, that of course she would know Nelle. Pop trained my mother from when she turned twelve until she was sixteen, when she left home to join the Resistance.
“It was at the beginning of my training,” I say. “Maybe three months in.” Nelle showed me how to make dozens of poultices and teas from basic ingredients. Most of the remedies were things that only a woman needs—for moon cycles and to prevent the getting of child.
She nods. “That’s what I thought.” She pours the foul tea into a waiting gourd and corks it. I think she is going to give it to me, but instead she stands. “Change the dressing on your wounds,” she says. “You’ll find everything you need there. Stay inside. I’ll be back.”
While she’s gone, I change the dressings, but I can’t stop thinking about the blast, the Nightbringer throwing me out of the way, the brother and sister who died. Skies, they were so young. That little girl couldn’t have been older than ten and her little brother—Najaam—no more than seven. I promised my parents I’d keep him safe.
“I am sorry,” I whisper.
I could have saved them if I had moved faster, if I had not taken the route I did. How many other Scholar children have been ordered to stay in the city? How many others have no way out? How many are expected to die along with their Martial overlords if the Karkauns take Antium? Musa’s voice rings in my head. We need you as a voice for the Scholars. We need you as our scim and shield.
Though Cook told me not to, I leave the crumbling little shack in which we’ve taken shelter and walk outside, wincing from the way the movement pulls at the gash on my face.
The house I am in faces a large square. There are heaps of rubble on either side and more dilapidated cottages beyond them. Across the square, dozens of Scholars remove the bricks of a still-smoking shack, trying to get to those trapped inside.
Boots thud beyond the square, their rhythmic tattoo growing louder. Quick as lightning, word spreads. The Scholars disappear into their houses as the patrol marches into the square. The house I am in is set back, but still, I make my way up the stairs, dagger in hand. I crouch beside a window to watch the patrol’s progress, waiting for the screams of the Scholars.
I hear only a few, from those the Martials have found and dragged out, whipping them into a line to no doubt save Martial lives from the Karkauns’ destruction.
When the Martials are gone, the remaining Scholars emerge again, back at the rubble of the ruined house. I am wondering how they communicated so quickly when the stairwell creaks.
“Girl,” Cook rasps, “are you here?”
When I get down the stairs, she jerks her head to the north. “Come with me,” she says. “And don’t ask questions.” She no longer holds the gourd of tea, and I want to know what she has done with it. But I hold my tongue. As we head through the square, Cook does not spare a glance for the Scholars.
“Cook.” I run to catch up with her. It’s as if she knows what I am planning to ask. “These people. We could help them. Get them out of here.”
“We could.” She sounds utterly unsurprised at my suggestion. “And then you could watch as the Nightbringer takes the ring from the Shrike, sets his accursed subjects free, and destroys our world.”