Then the two cannon roared together. But this time, the flying iron balls glowed with blue and green fire, trailing them both like comets. Sarkan was flung back hard against the table, the edge slamming into his side. He staggered, coughing, the spell broken. The two balls tore through his shield and sank into the wall almost slowly, like pushing a knife into an unripe fruit. Around them the rock seemed almost to melt away, glowing red around the edges. They vanished inside the wall, and then, with two muffled roars, they burst. A great cloud of earth went flying up, chips of stone flung so hard I heard them pattering against the walls of the tower itself, and a gap crumbled in right in the middle of the wall.
Marek thrust his spear up into the air and roared, “Forward!”
I couldn’t understand why anyone would obey: through that ragged opening, the fire still leaped and hissed, despite all my work, and men were screaming as they burned. But men did obey him: a torrent of soldiers came charging with spears held at waist-level, into the burning chaos of the trench.
Sarkan pushed himself up from the table and came back to the window, wiping a trickle of blood from his nose and lip. “He’s decided to be profligate,” he said grimly. “Each of those cannon-balls was a decade in the forging. Polnya has fewer than ten of them.”
“I need more water!” I said, and catching Sarkan’s hand I pulled him with me into the spell. I could feel him wanting to protest: he didn’t have a spell prepared to match mine. But he muttered irritation under his breath and then gave me a simple cantrip, one of the early ones he’d tried to teach me, which was meant to fill up a glass of water from the well down below us. He’d been so annoyed when I either slopped water all over his table, or barely brought up a trickle of drops. When he spoke the spell, water came rippling smoothly up to the very brim of my jug, and I sang my rain spell to the whole jug and to the well below, all that deep cold sleeping water, and then I flung the whole jug out the window.
For a moment I couldn’t see: a howl of wind blew rain spattering into my face and eyes, the slap of a biting winter rain. I wiped my face with my hands. Down in the trench, a downpour had smothered the flames entirely, only small flickering pockets left, and armored men on both sides were sliding off their feet, falling in the sudden ankle-deep torrent. The gap in the wall was gushing mud, and with the fire gone, the baron’s men were crowding into the breach with their pikes, filling it up with bristling points and shoving back the men who’d been trying to come in. I sagged against the sill with relief: we’d stopped Solya’s fire, we’d stopped Marek’s advance. He’d already spent so much magic, more than he could afford surely, and we’d still halted him; surely now he’d think better of—
“Get ready,” Sarkan said.
Solya was casting another spell. He held his hands up into the air at an angle, all the fingers pointed with his eyes looking straight along them, and silver lines lanced out from each finger and split into three. The arcing lines came down over the wall, each one landing on a different target—a man’s eye, a chink in his armor at the throat, the elbow of his sword-hand, the place directly over his heart.
The lines didn’t seem to do anything, as far as I could see. They just hung in the air, only barely visible in the dark. Then dozens of bows twanged at once: Marek had three lines of archers ranged up behind his foot-soldiers. The arrows caught onto the silver lines and followed them straight home.
I put out a hand, a useless gesture of protest. The arrows flew on. Thirty men fell at once, cut down at a stroke, all of them defenders at the breach. Marek’s soldiers shoved into the gap, spilling into the trench, and the rest of his army crowded in behind them. They began to try and push the baron’s soldiers back towards the first passageway.
Every inch was hard-fought. The baron’s men had put up a bristling thicket of spears and swords pointing out ahead of them, and in the narrow space, Marek’s men couldn’t come at them without driving themselves onto the blades. But Solya sent another flight of arrows going over the walls towards the defenders. Sarkan had turned away: he was shoving through his papers, looking for a spell to answer this new one, but he wasn’t going to find it in time.
I put my hand out again, but this time I tried the spell the Dragon had used, to bring Kasia in from the mountainside. “Tual, tual, tual,” I called to the strings, reaching, and they caught on my fingers, thrumming. I leaned out and threw them away, down towards the top of the wall. The arrows followed them and struck against stone, clattering away in a heap.
For a moment, I thought the silver light was just lingering on my hands, reflecting into my face. Then Sarkan shouted a warning. A dozen new silver threads were pointing through the window—right at me, leading to my throat, my breast, my eyes. I only had one moment to grab up the ends in a bunch and blindly heave them away from me. Then the flight of arrows rushed buzzing in through the window and struck wherever I had thrown the lines: into the bookcase and the floor and the chair, sunk deep with the fletched ends quivering.
I stared at them all, too startled to be afraid at first, not really understanding that I’d nearly been struck by a dozen arrows. Outside, the cannon roared. I’d already begun to be used to the noise; I flinched automatically, without looking, still half-fascinated by how close the arrows were. But Sarkan was suddenly heaving the entire table over, papers flying as it smashed to the floor, heavy enough to shake the chairs. He pulled me down behind it. The high-whistling song of a cannon-ball was coming closer and closer.
We had plenty of time to know what was going to happen, and not enough to do anything about it. I crouched under Sarkan’s arm, staring at the underside of the table, chinks of light showing through the heavy wooden beams. Then the cannon-ball smashed through the window-sill, the opened glass panes shattering into fragments with a crash. The ball itself rolled on until the stone wall stopped it with a heavy thud, then it burst into pieces, and a creeping grey smoke came boiling out.
Sarkan clapped his hand over my mouth and nose. I held my breath; I recognized the stone spell. As the grey fog rolled gently towards us, Sarkan made a hooking gesture to the ceiling, and one of the sentinel-spheres floated down to his hand. He pinched open its skin, made a hole, and with another wordless, peremptory gesture waved the grey smoke into the sphere, until all of it was enclosed, churning like a cloud.
My lungs were bursting before he finished. Wind was whistling noisily in through the gaping wall, books scattered, torn pages riffling noisily. We pushed the table up against the open gap, to help keep us from falling out of the window. Sarkan picked up a piece of the hot cannon-ball with a cloth and held the sentinel next to it, like giving a scent to a hound. “Menya kaizha, stonnan olit,” he told the sentinel, and gave it a push out into the night sky. It drifted away, the grey of it fading into just a scrap of fog.
All that couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes—no longer than I could hold my breath. But more of Marek’s army had already crammed into the trench, and pushed the baron’s men back towards the first tunnel. Solya had flung another arrow-flight and opened more room for them, but more than that, Marek and his knights were riding just outside the wall behind them, spurring the men onward: I saw them using their horse-whips and spears against their own soldiers, driving them through the breach.
The ones in the front ranks were almost being pushed onto the defenders’ blades, horribly. Other soldiers were pressing up behind them, and little by little the baron’s soldiers were having to give way, a cork being forced out of a bottle. The trench was already littered with corpses—so many of them, piled on one another. Marek’s soldiers were even climbing up on top of the heaps to shoot arrows down at the baron’s men, as if they didn’t care that they were standing on the bodies of their own dead comrades.
From the second trench, the baron’s men began flinging Sarkan’s potion-spheres over the wall. They landed in blue bursts, clouds that spread through the soldiers; the men caught inside the mist sank to their knees or toppled over in heaps, faces dazed and sinking into slumber. But more soldiers came on after them, climbing over them, trampling them like ants.
I felt a wild horror, looking at it, unreal.
“We’ve misjudged the situation,” Sarkan said.
“How can he do this?” I said, my voice shaking. It seemed as if Marek was so determined to win he didn’t care how expensive we made the walls; he’d pay anything, anything at all, and the soldiers would follow him to their deaths, endlessly. “He must be corrupted—” I couldn’t imagine anything else that would let him spend his own men’s lives like this, like water.
“No,” Sarkan said. “Marek’s not fighting to win the tower. He’s fighting to win the throne. If he loses to us here, now, we’ll have made him look weak before the Magnati. He’s backed into a corner.”
I understood without wanting to. Marek really would spend everything he had. No price would be too high. All the men and magic he’d used already would only make it worse, like a man throwing good money after bad because he couldn’t stand to lose what he’d already spent. We couldn’t just hold him off. We’d have to fight him to the last man, and he had thousands of them left to pour into the battle.
The cannon roared once more, as if to punctuate the terrible realization, and then they fell suddenly and blessedly silent. Sarkan’s floating sentinel had dropped down upon them and burst against the hot iron. The dozen men working on the cannon had frozen into statues. One man stood before the left cannon with a rod thrust down the barrel; others were bent over gripping ropes, dragging the right cannon back to its place; still others held cannon-balls or sacks in their hands: a monument to a battle that wasn’t over.
Marek at once ordered other men to come and get the statues clear of the cannon. They began dragging and shoving the statues away, toppling them into the dirt. I flinched when I saw one smashing the fingers off the statues to pry out the ropes: I wanted to shout down that the stone-turned men were still alive. But I didn’t think Marek would care.