Page 89 of Into the West

Bleak despair delivered a punch to his gut, and he clung to the wall for a moment as his knees grew weak. For a moment, blackness closed in around him, and he could not see a way out of it.

A steadying hand on his shoulder recalled him to himself, and he looked up into Isla’s eyes.

Like her sister, she was pale and trembling, but her voice was steady. “Tell me what you need, my love.”

Maybe I can’t save us all . . . but maybe I can save the future. “Gather up everyone who doesn’t actually want to be fighting, all of the children, and as much of the livestock as you can. Get them down the ramps, and get them all underground,” he said hoarsely. “Then seal all the entrances. With luck, if the wall fails, you’ll be safe there, and all our spare food will be down there with you. I need you down there with them. One, you’re a mage, and two, if I’m lost, those that survive will need a leader.”

She didn’t protest, she didn’t argue, and she didn’t complain. Instead, she took his head in both her hands, kissed him fiercely, and flew down the stairs, trailed by Ivy and Daisy, shouting at the people huddled in confusion away from the wall. Whatever she said, they started following her.

He turned his attention back to the enemy. He had put his people in the best hands he knew.

It was his job now to give them as much time as he could. The rest was up to chance and fate.

That damned pig.

Next to Kordas, Jonaton apported canister after canister into the thrashing trees, his mouth set in a grim line, his hair plastered to his head with sweat. Dragonfly wings no longer attached to an insect fluttered wildly in clouds. A little farther down on the wall, someone had gotten hold of a small catapult—the gods only knew where and how he had—and was sending cracked casks of brandy into the trees, while Hakkon put fire arrows into them as soon as they hit. On his other side, a Healer tended a lucky bastard who’d only gotten lashed by a tree and not pulled down into the monster to be torn to pieces. “Only” meant that his arm had been flayed in a wide line down to the bone from his shoulder to his wrist, and the Healer sewed him up with careful stitches. He wasn’t screaming, because he had passed out.

Kordas was in a state of deliberate not thinking, because if he thought about any of this, he knew he would fall to pieces. Strategy was useless, plans impossible. No help was coming. All that he—all that any of them—could do was hold the line and buy more time. Not for themselves, but for their future, hiding underground. He hadn’t said this, of course. What was the point? He didn’t want to shame anyone who couldn’t bear this any longer and deserted the walls for that hoped-for safety in the hertasi warrens. He didn’t want to put anyone in the unbearable position of disobeying orders or dying—probably horribly.

Don’t think about it. Just aim, and fire. Aim, and fire.

“Kordas,” Rose said calmly into his ear, as he aimed for one of the canisters and exploded it.

“Rose, if you Dolls can get out, or get down into the underground with Isla, you should,” he replied, sending another Spitter bolt into a canister, and shouting to be heard over the din—although to his abused ears, his own voice sounded muffled. “You didn’t come with us to get slaughtered by a monster.”

“Irrelevant,” said Rose, over the explosions, the thunder, the screams. “Pebble wants you. It’s just below us.”

He wanted to curse. He wanted to weep. He did not want to be pulled away from this completely doomed fight on the wall, because every moment they held back the Red Forest was another moment when more people could escape into the underground and maybe live another day.

“Please, Kordas. This is important.”

He repressed the urge to do—or say—something unforgivable. Instead he looked down, behind him. Sure enough, there was the Earth Elemental, pressed up against the wall like an anxious puppy. Kordas looked back at the Red Forest; he’d blown a big enough hole in it that it was struggling to grow back. He thrust the Spitter into Rose’s hands. “You know what to do,” he told her, not wondering whether she could even use the damned thing. “Aim for the dot. Try not to miss.” So what if she wasted bolts? It wasn’t as if they had a reason to hoard ammunition right now.

“Kordas—we Dolls can’t participate in warfare. We’re restricted.”

Kordas stepped back, and touched his forehead to Rose’s. “Rose . . . this isn’t warfare now. It’s a rescue.” He pressed his pistol pouches to Rose’s hands and left.

He sprinted down the stairs, and he hadn’t even gotten halfway down before he saw that Pebble was vibrating. With fear? Anger? It’s just a child, he reminded himself, bit his tongue before he snapped at it, and put his hand on the warm rock of its side. It’s probably terrified. It probably wants to run, but it’s afraid that I’ll be angry if it does.

“Pebble, if you can escape, you need to escape, now,” he said, as calmly as he could, although his voice broke a little. “Don’t worry about us. I know you can go underground. Go somewhere safe. Go back to your Mama—”

“Nooooooooo!” the Elemental wailed. “Not go! Help! I help! Say how! Mama come!”

Kordas did not comment on the absurdity of that last statement. Even if Pebble’s mother was inclined to help humans, who had done very little for her but kidnap and torture her child, she must be hundreds of leagues away. How was a notoriously slow, gargantuan Deep Earth Elemental going to get here before they were all dead? Impossible, of course.

But Pebble could do one thing . . .

“Can you give us power?” he asked. Not that he expected that Pebble would be able to produce enough magical energy to save them—but maybe Pebble could buy them a little more time. More time for all the noncombatants to get underground.

“Feed stone, feed you?” Pebble asked anxiously. “Like bad bads took?”

“Yes,” he replied, assuming that Pebble meant the Heartstone. “Can you do that?”

Pebble said nothing . . .

But in the next heartbeat, he felt power surging into him through the ley-lines and from the Heartstone. He jolted against the wall. This was power of a sort he had never experienced in his entire life. It was the sweetest of tastes, the most refreshing of waters, the contentment of a still lake. It was the high and low pitches of the same instrument, factoring their frequencies, and simply passing through him, cleansing along the way.

This was like the power he’d felt in the Chamber of the Beast, where a wounded Pebble had been lying, healing itself, and emitting vast amounts of magical energy doing so. But it wasn’t the same, any more than water from a cesspool was like water from a pure, clear spring. And it wasn’t the same, because Pebble was giving this to him and all the other mages, rather than being drained of it by Imperial spells, through what was left of the Heartstone. Freely given, tuned to their abilities as Masters, literally rock-steady power. He practically felt his hair stand on end, and up on the wall, he heard Jonaton’s wordless exclamation of shock and surprise.