Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

"Listen!" Patience forced his steel aside. "Listen…!" The great bell, that had rung its note so deep into them they hardly heard it, had been joined by a second sounding even through the screams. Another plangent shivering note, but higher, so the bells rang now in alternation, their sounds beating at the ear.

"The second!" Patience stood, mouth open as if for even better hearing. Her white hair was streaked red where blood had flung from her scimitar. She nodded, as if that tolling were some confirmation. "The second bell…! It has never ever rung. That call is Enemy-in-the-Town! It means defeat!"

Richard and the Shrikes, blood spattered, were still – held still, listening. There were the great bells, and the women's cries, their screams and weeping as they fled into their barred corridors.

"What…?" Baj said, speaking from his place of pretending, quieter than a dream. "What?" he said, but meant all questions he wished to ask. He and Patience, Richard and the Shrikes, stood bloody and quiet while the Pen's women, shrieking or silent, crowded back from dagger and scimitar, from ax and javelins, thrusting the youngest girls behind them as if sufficient softness, courage, or beauty might become armor adamant, and proof against the world.

"The Guard!" Patience spun in a circle as if dancing, her scimitar's blade flinging drops of blood. "The Guard is in Boston Town!" She turned, shouting at Richard and the Shrikes, "Put up blades! Kill no more…!"

If so, it seemed to Baj, as he roused, a miracle too late. Too late – and had been too late once his dagger thrust through Mary-Shearwater's breast.

"Not possible," Richard said, over a soft chorus of weeping, a shriek of agony from a woman wounded. "Not enough guardsmen to do it – not even with Sylvia commanding."

"The bells say so," Patience said. "- And have never rung together before." Distracted, she wiped her scimitar blade on her coat, wiping blood onto blood, and sheathed the blade dirty.

"What's happening…?" Nancy came down the steps. She looked to Baj so like the women, the girls he'd been killing…

"I hear drums." A Shrike named Porter cocked his head to hear better.

"I doubt it," Dolphus said. His furs were soaked, here and there. "Those bells are lying."

"Listen," Porter-Shrike said.

Then there was listening. Listening… And softly through the sobs, the cries of women, softly between the distant sonority of the bells, came the faintest heartbeat thudding. And a trumpet's thready cry.

"Dear every Jesus," Richard said. "How is it possible! She hadn't the companies for it!"

Baj, awake, saw as if for the first time that girls and women were lying in little drifts of the dead and dying. There was an injured lady screaming, with Nancy kneeling beside her… More than twenty-five. They'd slaughtered at least that many. More than thirty…

Baj recognized his second murder. Then his third, in running blood. And no longer shelter-dreaming – seeing now so clearly that his eyes ached with seeing – found that one was missing. He drew a rapier stained only by the blood of fighting men, and turned to Patience.

"Prince," she said, started to touch her scimitar's hilt, then saw there would not be time. And not time enough for rising in the air.

Baj had not seen her frightened before. "You were half-expecting the second bell. Listening for it. This was your planning, your doing. And now we have murdered for nothing."

Patience put her hands together as several of the dead women had put their hands together, waiting. "Prince," she said, "how could I have known?"

"… I think you knew because your child dreamed the future for you. You knew at least the chance the Guard would win."

She shook her head, watching the rapier's blade. "No, no. Only perhaps – but he's just a baby, and might have been wrong. There are bloodlines he has no knowledge of." She took a deep breath, looked away from the blade as if not seen, it wasn't there. "- I knew only what was likely, and saw no way for the Wolf-General to win the city! No way… our duty could be avoided."

Baj said nothing.

"- If I had believed my Maxwell, you know I would have harmed no girl, no woman, here." Patience tried to smile, as Mary-Shearwater had tried to smile. "Prince, don't kill me. My son…"

Nancy crouched silent by the wounded woman. Richard was silent, and the Shrikes. None said a word for her – and so saved Patience. That little rest, the quiet of no argument, and silence but for weeping women, saved her.

"… For past kindness, past courage," Baj said, stroked his sword and dagger clean – criss-cross – on his parky's sleeves, and sheathed them. "How fortunate you are, that I am not my First-father… who, I believe, forgave nothing."

Then noise rose up as if it had been held down before. Injured women cried for help, girls for consolation for butchered friends… Patience went to Nancy, and together they began binding, bandaging, pressing cloth to bleeding injuries, murmuring "There… there, dear," to a silent, dying lady whose intestines were out.

The men stood stupid, but for two Shrikes who went down the barred corridors calling to the huddled women, "Mistake… mistake! Oh, how stupid we were. And now, all safe!" They called like boys who'd been bad.

Richard set his ax down on the ice floor, and made a motion of washing his great hands. "But how could the Guard do it?" he said.

A hint… then the fact of bell-staff music softly jangled in the air.

"Too many fucking bells," Dolphus said.

Patience looked up from binding a wound. "Constables."

Baj led Richard and several Shrikes at a run up the ice steps to the landing, then out onto the gallery. He pressed close against freezing iron bars, looked down – and saw many hundreds of Boston soldiers, ranked in their formations, coming marching along the crevasse road, halberds swaying together on their shoulders. Bell staffs struck and sounded – nearer music than Boston's great bells. Nearer than the trumpets of the Guard.

"My God." Dolphus joined them, pressed his forehead against the bars to see better below. "I thought the cowards who ran from here, were to bring back only a few. If that fucking regiment comes into the building, we might slow them on the stairs, but not for long."

As if to confirm bad news, the cavern winds gusted hard along the ice gallery, so the carved pillars moaned a rising note with it.

"If they come into the building," Baj said, his breath clouding, "- we go back up to the crest of the bridge." Giving orders had become as easy as those orders were unimportant, considering the women who'd just been butchered. "The crest is narrow, and footing treacherous enough for us to hold them there a little while. Perhaps until a Guard company comes."

Richard shook his head. "Too many, Baj. They'll march over us, and hardly know it."

"We'll know it – and deserve no better. If they come into the building, we go to hold them at the bridge."

"Well," Dolphus said, "this is terrible fucking luck. And I was just thinking to live forever."

"Where are they?" Patience trotted along the gallery, went to the bars and stared down."… I know them. The West-Gate Constables, all four formations. But here – not at South Gate. They weren't at the fighting!"

"Where's Nancy?"

"Tending the women, Baj." Collected and herself again, as if there'd been no begging for her life, Patience stared down as the long columns, to called commands, came to a march, march – and halt, almost below the gallery wall. Halberds swung up, then were grounded on the road's ice with a thud and rattle like a hailstorm striking.