56
~ AKELLA ~
The stone walls shivered once more, and this time, a cascade of dust and debris rained down on their heads from the rafters above.
This is madness,Akella thought. Madness! Of all the people created in Preyla’s image, I’ve been fated to die in a landlocked city with the Empress of the House of Dorsa.
Not for the first time, she pinched herself, willing herself to wake from what could only possibly be a fever dream.
It had taken the mountain men hours, under heavy fire from archers and tower-mounted ballistae, to bring their trebuchets down into the dry moat. Who could even guess how many tribesmen had died in the process. But then there were four trebuchets at the dry moat’s bottom, in range to fling their missiles at the inner keep at last.
That had been an hour ago, an hour of near constant bombardment during which time flying boulders killed scores of defenders at a time and knocked holes in the top of the inner keep’s walls.
“They will run out of stones. Sooner or later, they will run out of stones,” the Empress said, repeating it like a mantra while she paced back and forth in the sitting room. They had gathered here, in the sitting room instead of the bedchamber, because of the large window that took up part of the bedchamber’s eastern-facing wall. The Commander had foreseen a boulder going straight through the window and killing them all.
At least one of them had some sense.
Akella had been ordered here with the Empress once it became clear the mountain men were determined to move trebuchets into place. From one point of view, that was fine, because Akella had no intention of dying amongst the defenders. It was different when she had elixir coursing through her veins while she searched for Megs, but Megs was almost certainly dead, killed during the first assault, so there was no longer any reason for Akella to fight alongside the Imperial soldiers.
These were not her people, and this was not her war.
From another point of view, being trapped inside the Empress’s chambers, surrounded by zealous guards in their black armor, was infuriating. She could have escaped through the tunnels hours ago. Preyla’s tit, she would’ve even been happy to take the Empress and the concubine with her.
But no. The Empress had determined that they were all to martyr themselves here.
This is madness,Akella thought again, and then she said it out loud. “Why are we still here, Empress? This is madness – we’re all going to die.”
The Empress looked up from her pacing as though surprised someone had addressed her, eyes wild. “They will run out of stones eventually. We have enough defenders left to –”
The guards opened the door, and a harried officer burst into the room. “Empress, we’ve pulled everyone back to the inner keep, as you commanded. But we are down to thousands – I would guess we are outnumbered two to one, at least.”
The Empress faced the officer – a colonel, if Akella was reading the Imperial Army insignia correctly. “They’ll run out of stones,” she told the man. “And then they will have to breach our walls with naught but ladders, and we will cut them down. Tell your men that.”
The colonel hesitated, then snapped into a salute. “Aye, Empress.”
He left as briskly as he’d entered, and the Empress resumed her pacing.
“I wanted to die on a ship,” Akella said to no one in particular. “Or in Perrintot at the very least. Somewhere that my body could be easily returned to the sea.” She spread her arms. “And now? How will Preyla find me here, inside this stone tomb?”
As if to underscore her question, the walls shivered again. On the other side of the bedchamber door, Akella heard glass shattering.
“You,” the Empress said sternly, pointing a finger at Akella, “shall not die. You are commanded not to die. You are going to take my army to the Kingdom of Persopos, so we can put an end to this once and for all.”
The guards exchanged worried glances. The Empress wasn’t making sense anymore, and everyone knew it but her.
The Commander stepped up to the one with the Western accent and spoke into his ear. A few seconds later, all the guards left the Empress’s chambers, leaving only the Commander, the Empress, and Akella.
“Tasia,” the Commander said slowly. “I think it’s time we consider the pirate’s offer to show us the tunnel that leads out of the city.”
“I’m not abandoning my army.”
The Commander was very clearly trying to remain calm. “There isn’t going to be an army in another hour.”
The Empress was still pacing. “They’ll run out of stones. They’ll run out of stones, and then they’ll – ”
“Gods be damned, Tasia! They are not going to run out of stones!”
The Empress stopped in her tracks and stared at the concubine. Even Akella lifted a surprised eyebrow.
The Commander clenched, then unclenched the muscles of her jaw. “If you stay, you die.”
“Then at least I die fighting alongside my men. Maybe if I die, Mace will convince the council to take the threat seriously. Maybe my death will serve to –”
“Your death serves no one,” the Commander said firmly. “And I am not letting you die if there is still a chance we can make it out of here alive.”
But the Empress, as though demonstrating her reputation for being famously stubborn, shook her head. “If we lose Pellon, we lose the war. The undatai – or the deathless king it inhabits, or whatever monster it is that rules in Persopos – will finally have its way. We have to stop that creature – here, now – while we still can.”
“You’re wrong. If we lose you, we lose the war. Did you not hear Rennus? The creature wants you dead, not me, not Alric, not the men out there. It wants you dead, because it fears you.” The Commander paused, and for a moment, Akella thought she saw a heartfelt sorrow come over the stoic woman’s face. But she must have been mistaken, because it disappeared nearly as soon as she’d noticed it. “Although it pains me to say so,” the Commander said carefully, “the Empire can always produce more soldiers. It cannot, however, produce another Empress like you any time soon. If you have ever listened to me, even once, listen to me now: It is time to get you out of here.”
“Listen to your concubine,” Akella said. “Before it’s too late to get out.”
They both looked at Akella as though they’d forgotten she was in the room.
“Even if I wanted to abandon my soldiers,” the Empress said, “there’s no way we can get out at this point.”
Akella snorted. “You’re talking to what might be Terinto’s last mizana and the youngest woman to earn the rank of rizalt in history, and you think a little siege is going to stand in our way?”
“They’ve taken the outer keep,” the Empress said. “Isn’t that where the tunnel is that you and Linna took?”
“Like I said, Empress.” Akella tapped her chest. “Youngest woman to earn the rank of rizalt in history. You know that sudden influx in white cactus flowers in Port Lorsin two years ago? That was me.” Akella flashed a grin. “The disappearance of an entire ship filled with meravin mushrooms and silver ore last year? Also me.”
The Empress cocked her head. “That was you? We were depending on that ore to restock the treasury.”
“Sold it to a Western smuggler in Korent.” Akella let her grin fade. “Point is, Empress, I don’t give the hind end of a bilge rat about you or your war. But if you die in here, I’m probably dying with you, and I really don’t want to die this way.” She glanced at the Commander, who nodded.
“Akella might be the lowest form of sea scum –”
“Hey!”
“– but she’s right about one thing. It’s time to leave, and we are going to get you out of here alive,” the Commander finished, and Akella didn’t even grimace when she realized that the arrogant concubine had used the word “we” to refer to herself and Akella.
#
Akella and the Commander spent close to an hour drawing and redrawing maps on the back of one of the Empress’s parchment sheets, heads bent together while they devised a plan to get the Empress out of the inner keep, through the ruined outer keep, and down the shaft into the sewers below. Less than half an hour into their planning, the bombardment of the castle finally stopped, but not because, as the Empress had hoped, the mountain men had run out of boulders to fling at their enemies. They stopped, the Commander told the Empress patiently, because the sun had fallen. The tribesmen and their Brotherhood allies had no need to risk nighttime attacks. The Imperial Army, or what was left of it, wouldn’t be leaving the inner keep, so they might as well take the night to rest and resume their assault on the castle come dawn.
The Empress stopped pacing when the trebuchets stopped firing, which Akella counted as a blessing, because the woman’s incessant motion had been driving her crazy. Now she sat in one of the sitting room’s armchairs, one of the few that had been spared from being part of the makeshift barricade, and stared vacantly at a tapestry on the wall across from her. At some point, a servant brought them a small evening meal – little more than a snack, really, and Akella wondered what the common soldiers were eating if this was all the Empress was receiving.
Akella had half-expected the little seagull to come in with the tray of food, but the concubine explained that she’d sent the girl back to Port Lorsin before the parley. It was probably for the best, but Akella was surprised to find that she missed Linna.
Akella looked from the Empress to the bedchamber door, imagining the scene on the other side. She was sure that if she could look outside the broken bedchamber window, she would see an outer keep wall that was a tattered remnant of its former self, and atop its battlements, she would see frightened archers hunkered down for the night, waiting for fate to find them at dawn.
She thought about the impressive female archer she’d met during the initial assault on the outer keep. Zandra, she remembered. Did the woman still live? Had she been one of the archers on the wall when the foolhardy Empress had gone out to parley with the sorcerer? Was she one of the archers still on the wall now, waiting for the battle to begin again?
She hoped Zandra was alive. On the other hand, if she were already dead, killed by one of the trebuchet’s boulders or some flying shard of broken tower, maybe it was for the best, because tomorrow would surely be the end of most of the Imperial soldiers still defending the castle. Better to be killed quickly by a boulder than bleed out slowly from a mountain man’s axe.
The door between the sitting room and the hallway opened, and the Commander came back inside, her face drawn. Her stride slowed when she neared the Empress, but the Empress didn’t so much as look up, so the Commander settled back into the chair across from Akella.
“Well?”
The Commander sighed. “They are brave, loyal men and women. They understand what they are to do.”
“Did you tell them why – did you tell them we’re getting the Empress out of here?”
“No. The less they know, the better.”
“I’d want to know why I was sacrificing my life, if it were me,” Akella said.
“And if by some chance they are captured?” the Commander shot back. “Given truth serum – or worse, tortured?” She spread her hands. “Then their sacrifice would be for nothing. Our success depends upon convincing Rennus that the Empress is dead. The longer he believes that, the better.”
Akella wanted to argue – because it was the bloody concubine across from her, after all – but there was nothing to argue. She knew the Commander was right.
“Be ready to leave by eleven of the clock. Do you need to retrieve anything from your quarters?”
Akella shook her head.
“Alright. Eleven,” the Commander repeated.
The Commander rose, and this time she went to the Empress, kneeling down in front of her and reaching for one hand as she spoke in soft, gentle tones. In watching them, Akella didn’t want to feel a surge of emotion, she didn’t mean to, but she did. Yet the painful swell inside her chest wasn’t so much for the tenderness displayed between the Empress and her concubine, but for all that she had lost with Megs. In the first sergeant, she had at last found someone she could imagine a future with, someone she might take home to Perrintot one day and introduce to her family.
But Preyla was punishing Akella for her wickedness. She had abandoned her crew in the white city that teemed with sorcerers and hollow-eyed men, and so the goddess had cursed her. Preyla gave Akella a glimpse of what she could have had, then snatched it away.
Akella could practically hear the old man who sometimes visited her dreams laughing at her.
Eleven of the clock might as well have been three months away, filled with interminably long hours in the Empress’s sitting room with nothing for Akella to do but mourn Megs and worry that she’d never see the ocean again. She tried napping with some limited success, but mostly, she remained motionless on the armchair, thinking of what was to come.
The sorcerer Anthon and his Wise Man friend paid a visit around ten of the clock. The sorcerer finished the job of knitting the Empress’s abdomen back together, then wished her good luck. Neither of them wore robes, just the plain tunics and breeches of common Imperial folk. They would look like refugees when they were captured, Akella supposed. At least until someone recognized them.
Then eleven of the clock finally came, and the Commander handed Akella and the Empress the plain grey robes of Wise Men. Akella wondered whose hers had been – Anthon’s, Jesker’s, or someone else altogether. Maybe the dead Wise Man who used to live in the little cubby hole above the Empress’s chambers. Not that it mattered. She pulled the robes on over her regular clothes, tucking her long black braids inside and then pulling the hood up so that her features would be obscured. Beside her, the Commander and the Empress did the same with their own robes.
Gileon watched them from his position at the door, expression somber. In six or seven more hours, the sun would rise, and he and the other men and women chosen by the Commander would take the Empress’s personal standard to the inner keep’s wall as the final battle for Castle Pellon began. One of the female guards with them would dress in the Empress’s riding clothes and wear a simple crown of steel and onyx upon her head. The unit’s presence would inspire the other soldiers, and there they would fight the mountain men and their Brotherhood allies in one last stand. If they could escape before the battle’s end and go west, they would.
But if not…
The Commander might not have told Gileon the full plan, but it was obvious enough, wasn’t it? Akella, the Commander, and the Empress dressed up like Wise Men or Brothers and leaving in the middle of the night?
Akella didn’t know if she should think Gileon brave or a fool.
How can you judge his sacrifice,a voice whispered in the back of her mind, when you left your own crew to die rather than risk sacrificing yourself?
“Are you ready?” the Commander asked.
Akella pulled her gaze away from the watching guard. “Aye. The sooner we get out of this place, the better.”
Even as Akella said the words, she knew she didn’t believe them. Megs was inside this castle somewhere, piled amongst the dead, ready for the pyre. Akella would not be there to kiss her brow before Preyla’s final embrace; she was abandoning Megs to this cold and stinking castle, this grim graveyard of the Imperial Army, just like she’d abandoned her crew.
The Empress caught Akella’s eye, and Akella saw a hollowness in her dull green eyes that had never been there before. It was a look of defeat, of surrender.
Akella suspected her own eyes looked the same.