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“Darrow.” Thraxa reaches out her hand for her blade. “I’ll die my way. You die yours.”
For loyalty to the end, it is the least I can do. I give the razor back.
Tired beyond words, I arrange the able bodies with what remains of our guns to constitute a defense for the Mound. As if it will matter when Atalantia comes. A hand settles on my shoulder as I send snipers to the gallery. I wheel around to kill the man, but find Harnassus standing there, shrunken and tired, arms caked to the elbow in blood from the wounded. “Darrow. Enough. There’s nothing more to do.”
I say nothing because I know he is right.
One of the Red snipers I sent after Lune joins us, a nasty wound on the side of his head. “Might be able to get you out underground, sir.” Alone amongst my men, he seems to think there’s still hope. I disabuse him of it.
“The tunnel entrances are collapsed. The ships are dead. There?
??s nowhere to go.” Hearing a noise, I look back to Harnassus. “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“A ship engine.”
“Where are you going? Darrow!”
It takes me a full two minutes to climb the stairs to the Mound’s tower. I throw up halfway to the top. The sick is dark with blood. My limbs are cold and trembling. The razor in my chest hurts so bad it’s all I can do to focus on breathing as I look out over the city. There is nothing to see in the darkness. No lights break the spell Lysander has summoned. Only the soft, ocean-like sounds of screams. No lights illuminate the sea. No ships over the water. It was my imagination. A phantom hope. Harnassus mutters a curse for his aching joints as he joins me, breathing heavily.
“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment.
I say nothing.
“Glirastes did something to the EMP. Built in a back door. We should have seen it. We should have stopped it. I told you we could. I thought we could keep up with him…” I look over at him at the very moment where the stalwart commander breaks. It is a single shudder, one that comes from the hidden, substantial depths of the man, and reveals for just a moment the insecure child within as he realizes what he always suspected is true: he treads in waters far too deep.
All this time, I shied from his disapproval. In the absence of Dancer, he became my father figure, in a way. I didn’t even know it until now, because there is nothing like seeing a father shudder. And then he buries the child and is Harnassus again, Hero of the Vox, scowling leader of men.
“You know the curse of this world?” I ask, looking at the body the Carver made for me. “The greatest gifts were given to the worst of us.”
“Not realizing they are gifts is what makes them the worst,” he replies as the first of Lysander’s legions begin to fill the mall below. My men die as they scramble up the steps, as if there were any safety inside with us. “You know I envied you.” I look over at him. “Why him? I asked. Why did Ares choose an arrogant pisspot miner and not me? It was pettiness. Pettiness that made the Vox. Pettiness that brought us to this. But your wife believed in the Republic, didn’t she?”
I nod.
“You didn’t. I saw you lose faith one step at a time. Looking to solve it all yourself. That’s why I stood in your way. I thought this was what you wanted. A glorious end. Now that it’s here…” He searches my eyes. “If not for the Republic, if not for a hero’s end, why…why keep going?”
Sometimes a simple question wakes a sleeping answer.
“I had this picture in my head where I would wake beside Virginia. I’d let her sleep and rise to make coffee, breakfast. And when they woke, my wife and son would find me reading at the kitchen table, or maybe making something out back.”
“That’s it?” he says.
“That’s it.”
He bellows a laugh.
As insult, the sky begins to glow. Individual friction flames from descending starShells coalesce into a throbbing furnace of light. “Well…I imagine one of those friction trails is Atalantia or Ajax. They’ll want us alive.” He nods. “I won’t risk being taken in a last charge. It will smell like cloves and melting rubber as the celtex comes in. We’ll pass out. Then we’ll wake up in hell.”
The reflected light from the friction trails carves across Harnassus’s eyes. “I’ll be damned if I let this be the last thing I see. You shouldn’t either.” He pauses. “I don’t think any of my men will be taken prisoner. It would mean something to them if you were with them in the end.” When I do not reply, he goes back down the stairs.
“Harnassus.” He pauses and turns. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Being my conscience.” I smile at him. “My wife says I sometimes need that. I know it isn’t an easy role.”
“But what a role.” He laughs before he departs. “What a role.”
