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“It collapsed,” the young man said. “As we were walking through. It was after dark. The other groups had already reached the bridge, and many had crossed over it. There was a rumble, then it was nothing but rocks raining down on us.”
“It was an avalanche,” a slightly older soldier sitting nearby said. “But it wasn’t a natural one.”
“What do you mean?” I asked as I peeled back the unconscious man’s shirt as he lay in his friend’s arms. The injured man’s torso was covered with bruises, but there were no lacerations or bones protruding. All of his injuries were on the inside.
“Avalanches don’t happen like that,” the man sitting beside us said. “They don’t usually happen in the autumn either. And these avalanches weren’t snow, they were rocks, boulders. Like someone had dislodged the mountain from itself.”
I frowned as my hands continued to hover over the injured man’s torso. I couldn’t think what to do. There was nothing to bandage up, nothing to splint or set. And yet, I could tell the man was broken and dying. I was helpless to know what to do.
I looked up at the man telling the tale, focusing on that, since it was marginally less painful. “I still don’t understand. The mountain just…fell apart?”
“And the bridge exploded,” another, wizened soldier commented from the other side of the man I was treating. If the injured man and the friend that were holding him were too young to be in the army—and they were—the other soldier was much too old.
“The bridge exploded?” I gaped at him.
“You heard me right,” the old man said. “With gunpowder.”
My eyes snapped wide. “I didn’t think there was any gunpowder left on the frontier.”
“That’s what it was, I tell you,” the old man said. “General Rufus found some somewhere. He blew up that bridge, and he brought the mountain down on our heads.”
It took me a moment to process what he was saying. Once it hit me, I stood with a gasp and turned to stare at the horizon and the mountain pass.
The smoke was slightly less discernable, now that I was on the ground and surrounded by soldiers. Clouds had moved over the mountain as well, and the sun was setting behind the peaks. But now I noticed the steady line of soldiers limping and trickling back down to the meadow from the mountain pass. The pass was over a mile away, but there was a clear enough view for me to make out the snaking line of defeated men.
“Which bridge exploded?” I asked, my voice too tight and thready to be my own.
“All of them,” the old soldier said. “At least, that’s what I was told as we clawed our way back here.”
“Not all of them,” the other young man said, scowling at the old man. “We’d only crossed the first bridge.”
“Others were farther west in the mountains,” the old man said. “Didn’t you hear the reports that all of the bridges had been smashed or broken?”
My throat closed up so fast I thought I might gag. I remembered those bridges, remembered how beautiful some of them were and how solidly built. I also remembered the vast chasms that they crossed and the jagged mountainsides that would be the only thing left.
Vast, jagged chasms carving their way through the mountain pass, breaking it into pieces.
How was I supposed to get home now?
“Conrad!”
I twisted sharply to find Magister Flaccus striding toward me. My heart pounded in my ears, and I could barely feel my hands and feet.
“What is the status of this patient? Report,” Magister Flaccus barked at me. He was drawn and pale, as if he already knew what lay all around us.
It took me a long time to work my jaw and force my throat to open enough to speak. “Internal injuries,” I managed to croak. “What do I do?”
“Nothing,” Magister Flaccus said, striding right up to me, grabbing my arm, and shoving me on past the cluster of men. “We aren’t equipped to treat internal injuries. Ruptured organs are a death sentence. We don’t even have enough opium to ease their passing. You can only treat the ones with injuries you can see.”
I would have hated the man for being so cold and remorseless about dragging me away from injured and dying men, like they meant nothing and their loss was for naught, but I could see anguish behind the hardness of his expression. Magister Flaccus was affected, and he felt as helpless as I did.
I could only do what he’d suggested and seek out men with visible injuries. It reminded me too much of the night of the Battle of the Coronation. Everywhere around me, soldiers lay dying, and they were not being given clean or peaceful deaths. I set broken bones and bandaged lacerations as best I could, asking each man who I treated, or the friends who held them as they died, what had happened.
The story was the same from everyone. The bridges had been blown up with gunpowder, and the mountain had crumbled down on top of them. Apparently, hundreds, if not thousands, more men were still trapped under the rocks that had rained down, crushing everyone in their way.
No one knew how many men had been crushed or trapped. No one knew how far the destruction of bridges stretched. The only thing anyone seemed to know and agree on was that the mountain pass leading to the frontier was completely and utterly destroyed.
My only way home was destroyed, and everyone I loved was on the other side of the destruction. I was trapped without them.
