Clement shouted at the signal man, “Stand down!” It was an order that should stop even a battle‑mad soldier mid‑stride, mid‑blow. Gasping for breath, the bugler brought the bugle to his lips, but the noise that came out was an unrecognizable spurt of sound that to any listener would seem a meaningless accident.
The sky seemed full of ravens.
“Hell!” Clement cried helplessly. “Do not kill her! Do not kill her!” Her voice echoed back at her.
The ax rose. The ax fell.
The garrison wall burst open.
Chapter Thirty‑Eight
Squatting on her heels, Zanja read Medric’s book until the water in her pot boiled. She had read the book many times, but it seemed different every time she read it. When the water boiled, she shut the book and steeped her tea. As she looked up from the porcelain pot with a poured cup of tea in her hand, she noticed the owl perched atop a stone, gazing at her. The owl had the passionless, infinite eyes of a god. Surely, Zanja thought, the land in which she endlessly traveled was a place in the owl’s mind.
“Salos’a, is it finally time for me to die?” she asked. The owl said, “You die painfully at every crossing. Yet you have never refused to cross. Why is that?” Zanja said, “Because it is my duty to my people.” “Speak again,” said the owl. “The truth this time.” “Because you named me a crosser of boundaries when I became a katrim.”
“Speak again,” said the owl. “More accurately.” Zanja thought, and said at last, “Because crossing boundaries gives me joy.”
“That is a good reason,” said the owl. “Remember it.”
When Karis struck the wall, the hammer‑head fractured like glass. The hammer handle shattered to splinters. Pieces of the hammer exploded out from Karis’s hand, burning as they flew from shadow into sunlight. The sound of that blow reverberated in Garland’s head. The feeling of it shook his joints loose, so he felt that he would collapse; that nothing could possibly remain standing.
The stones of the wall simply let loose of each other. The wall fell down before Karis, nearly obscuring her in a shimmering cloud of shattered mortar and dislodged snow. Through the dust, Garland caught occasional glimpses of her: legs straddled, hands open, feet buried in restless rubble.
Leeba shrieked wildly, “Look! Look at that! Oh!” She held the wooden lizard over her head, so that he could see. Stones crashed, cracked, and clattered. Beyond this racket, a bugle was sounding. Garland shouldered his way through the awestruck Paladins to Emil, on whose dust‑caked face glowed the sunlight that broke through the widening breach in the wall.
“Emil,” said Garland humbly, “that bugler is signaling the soldiers to stand down.”
Emil rubbed dust and tears from his eyes. “To stand down? Well!” He grinned ferociously at the crumbling wall. “I guess even the Sainnites don’t want to know what it’s like for Karis to lose her temper.”
The storyteller genuflected, folded neatly over her bent knees with her hands tied behind her. Her face was crushed into the shattered ice that covered the block. Across her back sprawled the spread wings of a fallen raven.
“Lieutenant‑General Clement?” said the executioner. The wall was disintegrating beyond him, and he started nervously at every new crash.
“General Clement,” she said. “Cadmar’s dead. What happened?”
“The bird tangled with the ax.”
“And what?”
“The ax hit the block, not the prisoner.”
“But she looks dead!”
“I guess she’s fainted. Shall I–?” He hefted the ax.
“Gods, no! Put that down.”
Still gasping for breath, with the bugler still sounding his signal–half of the soldiers of the garrison seemed to have already arrived, but now stood back in a disorganized rabble–Clement unbuttoned her coat to be used as a stretcher, and suddenly a dozen soldiers were there doing what she wanted, though she had not seen them arrive and did not remember giving any orders. As the soldiers tucked the storyteller and the folded up raven into the coat, Clement called, “Signal‑man: honored guests in the garrison!”
The puzzled bugler began playing the new signal. Ellid, who approached from a distance, flanked by several of her lieutenants, shouted, “General Clement! Your orders?”
“Just follow me,” Clement said.
They went plowing through the snow: Clement, starting to feel the cold; the senior officers pretending they knew what they were doing; the four soldiers, carrying the storyteller between them; and the bugler blaring away at the rear. All along the edge of the field, the captains were frantically getting their companies in order. For no apparent reason, the soldiers began to cheer.
And then Clement realized they were cheering for her. It made no sense.
And then it did make sense: those shouts made her feel like she could do anything. And by the gods, she needed to feel that way, or she was going to collapse just like the wall, right there in front of five hundred soldiers.
She and her entourage reached the wall as another arm‑span of it came crashing down. The breach was already as wide as three wagons, and where the wall had collapsed lay an ever‑shifting and spreading field of restless rubble, of stones that rolled and rolled and did not rest until they were no longer touching any other stone.
A rolling stone bumped into Clement’s foot. On the other side of the restless rubble stood a woman in a flapping red coat. At her right stood a lanky gray man with the fire of sunrise in his face. At her left stood a wiry, cool woman whose glance was like a sharp blade drawn across skin. Flanking her were a half dozen black‑dressed, gold‑earringed Paladins–not farmers with weapons, but the kind Gilly had once called deadly philosophers. Clement noticed Councilor Mabin, the ubiquitous runaway cook, a jumpy little man in sun‑drenched spectacles, a sturdily built man with a joyous, shrieking little girl in his arms. And beyond them were gathering astonished townsfolk, with their coats thrown on over night‑clothes and their bare feet jammed into boots they hadn’t taken the time to strap up.
Clement started forward across the unsteady stones. Karis met her in the middle. Her unbuttoned coat revealed plain work clothes, and a belt from which small tools dangled and danced: a folding rule, a fat pencil, a utilitarian little knife. Her boots looked as if they had walked down every last one of Shaftal’s godawful roads.
She offered her bare hand. Clement clasped it, and felt like she had grabbed hold of a piece of hot iron.
“The war is over,” Karis said.
The stones heaved underfoot. The soldiers were shouting Clement’s name. “The war is over,” Clement affirmed, as definitely as she could manage to say such a preposterous thing.
The cold woman at Karis’s left turned to face Shaftal. She cried, in a voice that seemed trained to carry long distances, “The war is over!”
Clement glanced backwards at Ellid, who had climbed up the rock pile behind her. “Signal peace. Make bloody sure the soldiers act happy about it.”
“Yes, General.”
Clement turned back to face the steady, implacable gaze of Shaftal. “Do you want to discuss some details?”
A deep humor came into the face of the man at Karis’s other side. Three earrings–a Paladin general. Emil, Clement realized.
Karis said, “The Sainnites will not be harmed or attacked, and you will not harm or attack the people of Shaftal. The people of Shaftal will offer you the hospitality of strangers and eventually the hospitality of friends.”
The rocks slipped away from under Clement’s feet, but the powerful grip on her hand balanced her. The cold woman at Karis’s left said, “General, say that you will do whatever is necessary to make these things happen.”
Clement opened her mouth to speak, and then there was a great, terrible pause.
“I am a Truthken,” the cold woman said, answering a question Clement had not asked.