John Carr - Siege of Tarr-Hostigos

She held up the stoneware. Phidestros managed a grin. "So that's why they didn't run out of bullets. They saved up their last moon's trash and shot it at us!" Phidestros made a face and groaned.

"That's not all the trash I'm going to get shot at me when Soton learns I got this kiss from Galzar rallying his musketeers not a hundred paces from the breach! My ears will hurt worse than this leg."

Petty-Captain Helios lifted Phidestros' leg so that Sirna could bind it in the boiled remains of a shift. Helios' wrenched knee made him slow, but as long as he could stand he felt that he had to be on duty. Certainly he'd had more experience dealing with battle wounds than any of Menandra's girls, and he didn't mind taking orders from a woman who knew her business and whipped into line any soldier who did.

At last, Phidestros was bandaged. Sirna came as close as she could to offering a prayer for his recovery. She could no longer tell herself that wish was entirely practical, either. Phidestros was too good a man to die, even if he was serving a particularly murderous brand of superstition.

"Sorry to give you such a bad time," she said as four of the hastily recruited orderlies lifted Phidestros off the table. Half the Captain-General's bodyguard had escorted him to the Gull's Nest after he fell. She'd drafted most of them into helping with the wounded who'd been streaming in since dawn. And this was only one of the besiegers' hospitals! Galzar's Great Hall was going to be crammed to the rafters tonight.

"Menandra runs a fine whorehouse, but it's not much of a hospital," Sirna went on. "If I had some proper tools, or the help of a priest of Galzar-"

Phidestros sighed. "My lovely Sirna, if I knew where to find an Uncle Wolf who didn't already need two heads and six hands, I'd have him dragged to you. You're going to be all we have for today. When they carted me off, I heard we already had two thousand men down."

"Two thousand!" Sirna shuddered at the implications. Phidestros had been hit early enough to reach the Gull's Nest before the storming of the keep. Two thousand men down in the time it took the Styphoni to close the walls. How many more in the fighting since-?

Thunder battered at her ears and the floor quivered. The door and all the window shutters banged wildly and dust rose until the room looked as if someone had fired a cannon. Sirna looked frantically out the window, saw nothing but people gaping idiotically, knew she must be doing the same, and dashed out the door.

A vast cloud of gray smoke towered over Tarr-Hostigos, blotting out the whole castle and slowly swallowing the hillside below it. The top of the cloud was already several thousand feet high, spreading into something dreadfully like a fission bomb's mushroom. Sirna lived a moment with the nightmare that Kalvan had done the impossible, taking his time-line from a poor grade of gunpowder to fission bombs in four years.

Then she remembered there had been no pre-explosion lightning flash of gamma ray radiation, and she breathed more easily. Sirna watched as the mushroom shape started to blur; the top of the cloud was simply spreading in a breeze not felt here in the lee of the hills.

Ptosphes had given himself and the last of his men over to a quick death, destroying Tarr-Hostigos and more of his enemies than anyone would ever know.

Sirna wanted to weep, scream, pound her fists against something. For a moment she even wanted to die herself. There had to be something wrong with her, if she was still alive with so much death around her. The battle, the flight, her surgery at Menandra's, Roxthar's Investigation, and now the storming of Tarr-Hostigos-dead men and women and children were everywhere.

Sirna didn't die. She didn't even have hysterics. Instead she gripped the porch railing until she knew she could stand without help. Around her Hostigos Town awoke from a stunned silence into a hideous din of bawled orders, howling dogs, shrieking women and children, horses neighing or galloping wildly about in panic and an occasional pistol shot.

Menandra was standing in the doorway when Sirna turned. "Better come in quick, girl," she said. "The soldiers who lost comrades up there- they'll be wanting someone's blood for it. Can't keep it from being yours if you stand out there."

Sirna followed the older woman inside. She wasn't afraid of death itself. After today she never would be again. Ptosphes had shown her that death could sometimes be your best friend.

He'd also shown her that there were good and bad ways to die. No, not good and bad. That implied a simple moral distinction. If there was anything simple about death, Sirna hadn't seen it.

Wise and foolish ways? Better, but still an oversimplification.

Useful and useless? Yes. That wasn't a universally sound way of distinguishing kinds of death, but there probably wasn't any such thing. It certainly made sense here.

Staying outside to be shot or raped by soldiers mad with rage or wine would be a useless death. She wouldn't risk it. What she would do another time, she would decide when that time came.

A phrase from one of Scholar Danthor Dras' seminar lectures came back to her:

The only universal rule of outtime work is that there are no universal rules.

Soton cursed Roxthar and his stubbornness that was costing the Grand Host so many lives. A quarter to a third of the storming party was inside Tarr-Hostigos, swarming over it like bees. Both courtyards were littered with bodies, most of them Styphoni. Clouds of smoke wreathed the keep, but before they rose Soton had seen, even from his distant post, the savage struggle to enter it.

Why in the name of all the gods hadn't Phidestros held back, instead of closing the breach? True, it was such reckless abandon that had built Phidestros' reputation at the Battle of Phyrax, when he and his Iron Band had made a suicidal ride to join the battle after the calamity of Chothros Heights. Soton had even ordered him not to fight; if only had the rash commander listened, then there would have been someone to go down and put matters in order.

Instead Phidestros was wounded-badly, the tales ran. Small loss, with the last defenders of Hostigos dying even now and Kalvan fleeing toward the Saltless Seas. If Phidestros were going to make a habit of such follies, perhaps it would be best if he stormed Regwarn's Caverns the next time. If he didn't, Soton would make him wish he had!

The smoke around the keep eddied. Soton turned to summon a messenger.

He never completed the turn. Instead, something as invisible as the air but as hard as stone flung him to his knees. Thunder swelled until it seemed that someone was beating on his helmet with his own warhammer. Three Knights flew off the hill, along with a shower of rocks. Soton knew he cried out at that sight, but couldn't hear his own voice.

He lay, gripping the rocky ground as closely as he ever gripped a woman, until it stopped shaking. Then he rose to his knees, and when they did not betray him, to his feet.

The air was filled with acrid smoke and fine ash. Looking toward Tarr-Hostigos, he saw only a vast swirling cloud of smoke. Somewhere in that smoke was the entire storming party-one man in six of the Grand Host's strength.

One of the Knights was shrieking. "It's the Daemon Kalvan! He's come to save his people! Great Styphon, save us!"

Soton smashed his gauntleted fist into the Knight's face. The man fell as if poleaxed. Soton didn't know what he was really smiting, the Knight or his own fear.

Slowly, the air around what had been Tarr-Hostigos cleared. The slopes around it were alive with men, thousands of them, all streaming away from the castle. Soton let out a deep breath he hadn't even known he was holding.

Another quarter-candle showed him what was left, of Tarr-Hostigos. The keep was only a pile of smoking rubble, the towers had mostly lost their tops, and the walls looked to have been chewed by monsters. How many of the Grand Host lay there under the fallen stone or in fragments strewn across the hillside? The Grand Host would be far less grand by the time they were all counted-of that Soton was sure.