Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

Very tired, Baj urged the pole-arm's heavy blade a little aside, thrust for the man's face, drove the point through his cheek deep into the angle of his jaw, and backed him bleeding away as the second sentry rushed past, face convulsed with rage. This man raised his weapon high, then hacked it down.

Baj turned, intending to manage something, as Errol – eyes shut and still suckling, dreamy with pleasure on a shrieking mount – was struck at his back, and split. For an instant, the boy's snowy rib-ends showed, and the intricate chain of his spine… then flooded red.

Baj heard Nancy scream, turned to help – and was struck and knocked aside as the first of the Shrikes, in swift slipping thuds and scraping, came skidding, tumbling from the ice ramp, recovered, and charged with thrusting javelins.

Two sentries, still living, were lifted on those slender points, transfixed, kicking, making noises…

Baj looked for Nancy – and saw her alive and weeping, kneeling by ruined Errol, touching and plucking at the spoiled parts, as if she might heal him.

"Jumping Jesus." Dolphus-Shrike came away from the others, shaking his head. "Poor climbing boy…"

"Where were you?" Baj saw the place at the base of Dolphus's throat where the rapier's point would go.

The Shrike sighed. "Some Boston people came and forced the iron gate. There were… a number." One of the fallen sentries had still been alive. Baj heard the slice and gargle behind him as a Shrike cut the man's throat.

Richard, just off the slide, said, "Fucking thing." Then, finding his feet, saw what was around him, "… Baj… we had no choice but deal with people up there – which cost us men – and no time to send the bodies down. So… they're left for anyone to see."

"Next time," Baj said, though he had no idea what "next time" that might be, "- next time, do as was done back on the streets. Leave a few men to hold, while the others go on to finish what must be finished."

"Right," Dolphus said, and Richard nodded. It was an acceptance that Baj found somehow expected, as if his fathers had spoken through him, their voices one in harmony. The plainsong "Obedience."

Nancy knelt in puddled blood, crooning as if the dead boy could still hear her.

Baj knelt beside, took her in his arms. "Sweetheart… sweetheart, he never knew he was struck, it came so fast." His left shoulder hurt where the glaive's hook had caught it… the same shoulder George Brock had hit with his hurled shield.

"I don't care," Nancy leaned against him, weeping. "I don't care."

Baj saw she was cut down her left forearm, sliced through leather and cloth. Slow bleeding… not serious. "He saved your life."

She shook her head, took the opportunity to wipe her nose on his sleeve. "He didn't mean to. He was only doing what he wanted to do." Then, lisping, "He was a child. Not like the rest of us, always scheming and wondering and… thinking."

"True," Baj said. His lip was sore, split and bleeding where the older man had hit him. His shoulder hurt. "True…"

He heard Richard saying, "Rest a minute," looked across the corridor, and saw him helping Patience to stand. She stood, but swaying. "… The boy was killed?"

"Yes," Richard said. "I should never have brought him."

Baj felt, and felt in the rest, exhaustion from the long run through Boston, the fighting – and more than either, from the task still before them. There was a great temptation simply to stay and rest awhile, consider further what must be done…

The great bell's tolling of alarm – somehow unheard through the fighting – rang softly shivering down the corridor of ice. It rang its slow, ponderous periods, and Baj woke to them.

"Dolphus," he said, "have your people gather the sentries' glaives, chop notches in the ice ramp, and prop the pole-arms up so anyone coming down after us will run onto the points."

"Nasty." Dolphus smiled, and gestured his men to the work. There were only seven tribesmen now, Dolphus making eight… All the others cut down, beaten down, holding the ice streets of Boston. Holding the pit-gate above. Marcus gone. Christopher gone, also.

"Patience," Baj raised his voice, since she seemed still dreamy from the fighting. "- where do we go? And who still defends?"

"… We're in the tunnel to the bridge, entrance to the Pens."

"Defenders?"

She seemed to wake, shrugged Richard's supporting arm away. "Never many, only enough to keep order here and in the Pens. The guard roster was – used to be – a file of eighteen. There are locked gates for every tier, so more were never thought necessary, with Constable Formations in the town." She glanced at the scimitar in her hand as if surprised to see she still held it, then slowly wiped its blade clean on her coat's cloth. A bruise was beginning to stain the side of her forehead. "There may be… Talents working there, if the bell hasn't sent them all home."

"Sweetheart," Baj said to Nancy, "do you have cloth to bandage that arm?"

"Yes. It's nothing much -"

"Dolphus," Baj interrupted her, "leave two men to finish setting the glaives. You and the rest follow me. – Patience?"

"I'm well enough," Patience said, though, to Baj, she didn't look well enough.

"Then we go." He led down the tunnel at a trot – led as if a wind were blowing at his back, whispering "Decide and move…, decide and move, and they'll follow after."

They followed climbing, soon enough, up an ice slope crosscut for better footing. There, Baj felt what the epics, Warm-time and after, never troubled with – the aches and stabbing pains in muscles, tendons strained in any desperate fight. As he climbed the slope, he felt even the injuries George Brock had inflicted, battering for advantage in the tundra circle. His cracked cheekbone… the left shoulder; that hurt again, of course…

And if so for him, and young – how much more for Patience and those older others? But he didn't slow. Time… time. There was a quote from some Warm-time Great Captain. "Ask me for anything, but time."

Still, Baj came to a stop when he climbed into the open. Stopped and stood still in a steady, biting wind.

Before him, the slope – dazzling under distant lamps – became the steep bone-white rise of a great unrailed bridge of ice that arched up and up over a crevasse wide as a tributory river, fractured, and darkening blue to black with deepness. But both – grand, gleaming bridge, and the depthless coursing vacancy it spanned – shrunk to insignificance in the enormous chamber that contained them, miles from side to side, its riven ceiling certainly almost another mile high… all, with the city behind them, forming the glacier's immense and hollow heart.

The others caught up, and stood staring as he did.

"Wonderful," Patience said, "isn't it?" The whining wind caught her words and spun them away.

"The bridge," Nancy said.

"Yes." Patience smiled. The side of her forehead was bruised dark blue. "Great blocks of ice cut, then each drenched with heated water and frozen into place – and every course set a little farther out into the air. This was made by our many-times great-grandfathers… who were men beyond what is meant by 'men.'"

"It's a great work," Richard said, apparently relieved to stand a moment to catch his breath.

"And we," Baj said, "still have work to do." He set off climbing the bridge's gently rising arc, thankful for the grooves crosscut into its footing. Even so, it became uneasy as climbing through the air, since no railings interrupted view of the chamber's vast expanse at either side, so the bridge, seeming so grand and wide at first, appeared to narrow – and perhaps did narrow – as they climbed near the height of its arch.

And while they climbed, the cavern wind came stronger, thrumming over the span, cold and sharp as weapons, so there seemed nothing easier than to suddenly slip and slide away – off that arching height, and down through the great space of air into depth immeasurable.