Chapter Twenty-Nine
The procession followed him.
As he ran, Indrajit bounced the standard pole within the crook of his elbow, managing to keep it upright despite knocking it against brick walls right and left. That freed his right hand, and he managed to work it up under the skirts of his own linen robe, grab the hilt of Vacho, and rip the sword free.
Halfway down the alley, a small triangular plaza let in a little light, and Indrajit stopped to look back. Munahim had ripped off his skirts almost entirely, but held his sword free and upright before him; the Kyone turned to position himself between the Lord Chamberlain and the alley mouth. The rest crowded into the plaza. All the banners were upright, everyone still dressed in linen, but Indrajit had the sensation that some of the standards were being held by different hands.
Looking past the procession, he saw corpses in linen lying at the edge of the street. One was burned, one was crushed, as if trampled by droggers or run over by a wagon. The third . . . just lay still. Indrajit couldn’t see what had killed the man.
Linen masks confronted him. “Who knows a way through the alleys?” he asked.
No one said anything. He looked for Grit Wopal and couldn’t find him; had the Yifft been killed also, or separated from the procession when the droggers had run amok?
“No problem,” Indrajit said, “because I do.” He pointed. “I’m pretty sure if we go that way, we’ll get onto the long corner, and that will take us right to the gate.”
“Who put this idiot in charge?” a Dawn Priest snarled.
The Lord Archer’s standard-bearer guffawed. “This is your creature, Orem. Are you going to restrain him, or shall I?”
But then Indrajit realized that there was only one large, violet-skinned man in the group. Which presumably meant that the Lord Archer’s standard-bearer was dead, and this man was Arda Ne’eku himself.
“I’m in charge,” Orem Thrush growled.
Indrajit heard a metallic ring as something struck Thrush in the chest. The Lord Chamberlain took a sudden step back, then patted around under his robe, and brought his hand out holding a dart.
So Thrush was wearing armor, at least. If all the Lords were, that might give them an important edge.
“It may be poisoned,” Munahim said.
“This way!” Indrajit turned and charged down the alley. “Assassins! Run!”
Turning his head to the side, he could look with his widely spaced eyes at the edges of the rooftops. He saw the silhouette of a man in a short cape, running to keep pace with the procession. He held a long stick in his hand, which might be a rod . . . or a blowgun.
He heard a distant hum. Was it the sound of the fire, or of keening droggers in pain, distorted by the intervening city?
He wished for Munahim’s bow. He wished that Philastes were present, with his sling and his ability to pick up a projectile off the ground anywhere he went. He wished that his own eyes were closer together so that he could use any kind of missile weapon with accuracy. But all his wishes were in vain and he knew it.
“Follow me closely!” he called.
He stuck close to the wall beneath the caped man. The eaves weren’t wide, but they should be enough to protect him. He skinned his shoulder against the wall running, then held his breath as he darted across the street.
He heard the steely clink as a dart struck the cobbles near him.
The street widened. Ahead, Indrajit saw flames at the mouth of the alley. To his left, another alley opened.
Without giving a warning, Indrajit turned left and veered across the street. Laundry hanging on lines overhead gave him a little notional cover, but mostly, he wanted to force the assassin to backtrack or come down to ground level, to follow.
As the procession raced across the street to follow him, he picked up a stone and threw it. Embarrassingly, it struck the wall two ells beneath the caped man’s feet. Still, he threw himself flat on the roof tiles, and the procession crossed unmolested.
They raced down the alley. A shadow crossed Indrajit as he ran; had the assassin caught up so quickly? Or did the man have confederates?
And who was it? He didn’t think any of the Gray Lords would want to kill him anymore, but maybe he underestimated their anger or resentment toward him. The Handlers? The Lord Archer had been very dismissive of him. Who would be sending an assassin after Indrajit?
Although, previously, the killer had seemed to attack Fix in particular. Was this a murderer intent on killing Fix, and attacking Indrajit as a second-best? Or attacking Indrajit because he thought he could get to Fix that way?
The alley ended in a square plaza. A crumbling stone well squatted in the center of the muddy pen. Two doors opened onto the plaza, both shut, and three balconies with iron railings looked down from the second story, darkened doorways opening on each. Two more balconies peered down from the third story.
That was a lot of balconies to be staring down at a patch of mud.
Indrajit turned to look back up the alleyway by which they’d come, and saw the short-caped man raising his blowgun. Indrajit threw himself sideways, into the shelter of the corner of a building, and heard a dart whiz past him, disappearing into the mud.
Munahim hurled his bag of candy at the man with the blowgun, causing him to duck for cover.
Indrajit tried each door, and they were barred. He spun about to face the procession.
“We climb!” he called. “Munahim, help me—we hoist the Lords up onto that balcony there. Quickly now, before the sharpshooter can double back!”
“Which balcony?” Munahim held his sword up in a defensive position. “Indrajit?”
Indrajit turned his back to the alley to see what Munahim was looking at. A Kattak crept forward, emerging from the darkness of one doorway and then leaping to perch on the iron balustrade. Indrajit saw more Kattak behind the first, and wished again for missile weapons. Or for a friendly Gund.
In the corner of his vision, he could see both of the other lower-level balconies. At the same moment, Kattak leaped from the shadows to perch on the rail.
“Arm yourselves!” Indrajit snapped to the procession. Most of the men drew swords or daggers. A few stood with empty hands, crouched uncertainly, or gripped standard poles. Orem Thrush drew a long knife, and also took the standard from Indrajit. To the Kattak, he called out, “Whatever you thought you would accomplish, it’s over! Go home!”
“We are home,” a Kattak hissed.
“What is over is your friend Fix,” one of the Kattak called back. Indrajit thought he recognized the voice of Chach-shazzat. Though really, the voice was so inhuman, could it have any personal character at all? “He has given birth now, and he is one of us.”
“He is many of us,” another Kattak said.
The Kattak laughed. It was a hideous rattling sound, dusty and sharp at the same time.
“You don’t know that,” Indrajit said. To the Lords and their men, he barked, “Get into a circle. Use the banners like spears, to push them away. Don’t let them attack us from above. Make them approach on the ground!”
“You don’t know what we know,” Chach-shazzat taunted Indrajit. “But you could. Wouldn’t you like to?”
“This may have been your home once, but you can’t take it back!” Was it possible that Fix was dead? It certainly was. Indrajit tried not to think too much about that idea. “There are too many men here! Too many thousands!”
“Every man a walking womb,” Chach-shazzat called back. “We delight in Kish’s abundance of men!”
Should he direct the Dawn Priests Procession to climb down the well? If they were lucky, there might be enough light down there to be able to navigate. Or, if they weren’t pressured by the Kattak, Munahim was able to maneuver in the darkness of Underkish. If he wasn’t following his own scent, maybe he wouldn’t be able to navigate great distances, but there would be other scents he could follow. But if they went down into the darkness, and the Kattak followed, they might be pressed into a corner and unable to see the monsters that massacred them.
Indrajit found the latter possibility depressingly likely.
“We go into the well,” he murmured to the Lord Chamberlain, “but only as a last resort.”
“You are amusing,” Chach-shazzat called. “We’ll let you go, Blaatshi. You and the Kyone. You walk away, and we’ll deal with these upstarts. We’ll give Kish a lesson it will never forget, a lesson that will mark the beginning of a new era in Kish.”
“You’re stalling,” Indrajit shot back. “Because you know you can’t take us.”
Chach-shazzat made a rapid clicking noise and hummed at the same time. His wings flapped rapidly, but he stayed gripped to the railing. “I was stalling, so that our reinforcements could arrive.”
Indrajit looked up, and saw Kattak heads peep out on the edges of the rooftops, in ragged but quick succession, until the open sky above was entirely ringed with insectoid skulls.
The Kattak attacked.
They dropped without clear strategy from the sky, leaping over the muddy plaza and not even flapping their wings. Not without strategy, Indrajit realized. With a strategy that gave not one orichalk, not one sesterce, not one Imperial bit of value to the life of the individual. The swarm would throw away any number of individual Kattak lives to get what the Kattak collectively wanted.
If they all died, they could kill the Lords of Kish by crushing them with the weight of their corpses.
Indrajit fought with slashing strokes; now was no time to risk getting his sword stuck in a foeman’s corpse. He sliced deep into the face of one Kattak, sending it swerving against the stone wall, where it hissed like a boiling kettle and ground itself in a tight, muddy circle. He stepped sideways and sliced through the thorax of a second wasp-man, amputating its stinger. When the Kattak landed beside him on the ground, shrieking in pain, Indrajit put a second swipe of his sword through its insectoid neck, severing its head.
Around him, the Lords and their men stabbed and slashed and poked. Kattak hit the mud, bounced, and lay still. Others winged away wildly, blinded or mad with pain.
Indrajit sliced into the abdomen of a Kattak, three times in quick succession, until it lay still. He stood surrounded by heaps of the dead, not because the corpses were so numerous, but because they were so large.
“The bodies!” he cried. “Shove them aside!”
“Into the pit!” the Lord Chamberlain barked.
The Lord Archer, who was the biggest man present, together with a burly northman of some sort, picked up a Kattak and heaved it into the well. Then each man separately grabbed a wasp-man and threw him in.
“They’re big,” Ne’eku yelled, “but they weigh little!”
Defenders fell. One man lost his thigh to Kattak mandibles and collapsed in gouts of blood, dark red against his muddy white linens. Another took a stinger through the chest—was that the Lord Farrier, or his double? A third was seized by two Kattak and lifted off the ground. He fought back fiercely, stabbing the belly of each Kattak as they rose, and forcing them to drop him. He landed across the stone lip of the well, a marionette without strings.
Two more men joined the crew removing bodies, but they couldn’t move them fast enough. Horse-sized wasp corpses piled up.
Indrajit slashed Vacho through a Kattak’s face, but found a second Kattak immediately behind. He couldn’t get his arm out wide enough to slash again, so he did the only thing he could, and stabbed.
He pierced the Kattak through the abdomen. It died in a spasm and a burst of ichor, but it also landed on top of him. Ne’eku was right, the Kattak didn’t weigh as much as a horse did—but it was still heavy, and it knocked Indrajit to the ground. He fell splayed on the mud, arms wide, sword pinned under the dead wasp-man.
With a high-pitched hiss, another Kattak fell toward him.
The severed stinger was within his grasp. Indrajit seized it with both hands, braced it against his chest, and pointed the sharp tip at the enemy.
The Kattak died impaled through the face and wailing.
Indrajit dragged himself from beneath the first Kattak with Orem Thrush’s help. Munahim made it possible by shoving aside one of the bodies and then cracking another attacker’s head with his sword. Indrajit picked up Vacho and shook off the worst of the mud.
Half the party lay dead, crushed, severed, impaled, mangled.
“The alley,” Indrajit gasped. “We take the risk of the assassin.”
“The alley is full of wasps.” Thrush’s voice was calm. “We die here, poet. We make a bold stand, such as will be remembered. Such as will inspire Kish to resist these monsters. Such as will be sung of in your Epic for ages to come.”
“No one will sing the Epic for ages to come.” Indrajit said it, and tears ran down his cheeks. “The Blaatshi Epic has been sung for the last time.”
“Let’s get against the wall.” Munahim pointed to the wall facing the center of the Dregs. “By that door. We will have less sky to defend against. Better, given our smaller numbers.”
Munahim’s white linens were entirely gone. He bled from multiple wounds, but he gave no sign that he noticed them.
“To the wall!” Thrush bellowed. “Rally around the door!” He raised his banner and waved it back and forth.
The Lord Archer and the Lord Stargazer each shoved another Kattak into the well; so at least three Lords of Kish still lived. Indrajit smashed aside a dropping Kattak and turned to the door, but then saw movement at the well.
“Kattak!” he howled. It was a pointless thing to yell, since there were Kattak all around, living and dead. Ne’eku didn’t respond at all, but slowly moved toward the door, rallying to the Lord Chamberlain’s banner.
Behind him, three Kattak climbed out of the well.
Had they been thrown in as casualties, but not really been dead? Or were the Kattak swarming up through Underkish?
Did it matter?
Indrajit took advantage of a gap in the attack and strode toward the wall and the door. The door sat beneath a balcony, which would also give them a little shelter from attack. Not that it mattered. Thrush was right: they were doomed.
“Assassin!” Munahim barked.
Indrajit spun and found the man in the short cape. He stood on a balcony above the one swarming with Kattak, and he aimed his blowgun at Indrajit. Indrajit had no cover. He swung Vacho, hoping for a miracle, hoping that he could intercept the tiny dart midair.
“Protagonists!” someone yelled.
Someone who wasn’t Munahim.
Across the plaza, across the two stories of separation, despite the air full of dropping wasps, Indrajit saw the assassin’s cheeks puff. He swung Vacho again.
A Kattak, dropping to Indrajit’s right, lurched sideways. It swerved across the space between Indrajit and the assassin, and behind it, Indrajit saw the Lord Chamberlain’s banner. No dart touched Indrajit.
Orem Thrush had batted the Kattak with his standard, and knocked it into the path of the assassin’s dart.
“Protagonists!” Thrush yelled.
“Protagonists!” Fix yelled in his high-pitched voice.
Fix?
Fix appeared on the balcony with the assassin. He attacked with ax and falchion both. The blowgun fell to the balcony floor, bounced, and then dropped into the plaza. The assassin dodged the first two attacks and then drew a slender scimitar.
Philastes was at Fix’s side, sling spinning. He struck two Kattak quickly, and then the wasp-men regrouped, a portion of them swarming to attack the balcony where Fix and Philastes fought.
“Against the wall!” Thrush bellowed.
The surviving Lords of Kish and their servants complied, backing into a defensive semicircle against the brick. It was a pitifully shrunken remnant of the original Dawn Priests Procession. Ten men, maybe?
Indrajit wanted to rush up and help Fix and Philastes, but he could barely spare them a glance. Between the bodies of leaping Kattak and over the heads and wings of Kattak boiling out of the well, he saw flashes of color. A savage battle raged on the balcony—Fix and his foe slammed each other against walls and against the railing. Both men slashed, both bled. Philastes was busy with his sling, keeping attacking wasp-men from overwhelming all three of them.
Indrajit cut down a Kattak but a second leaped on him, grappling his two arms with its four. The insectoid face leaned in close, mandibles the size of short swords clacking repeatedly, a handsbreadth from Indrajit’s own nose.
The Lord Archer came to his rescue. The big, lavender-skinned man grabbed the Kattak by its two mandibles and then tore them apart, ripping them entirely from the waspish face. Ichor poured onto Indrajit’s chest. The Kattak spasmed, but Ne’eku grabbed its thorax and jammed it downward, sinking the stinger into the mud and trapping the wasp-man. Then with a single pivoting motion, he ripped off the Kattak’s head and hurled it at the incoming enemies.
He bled from multiple wounds, too.
“It is a loss that no one will tell this story,” Thrush said.
“Someone will make up a better one,” Bolo Bit Sodani said. “Even a corrupt old pile of rot like this one needs heroes.”
“Welcome to Kish,” Munahim said.
Were there eight of them still standing? Seven?
Kattak from the rooftops sprang into the air en masse, darkening the sky in their descent.
Indrajit braced himself to receive the charge.
He heard the door behind him open.