Ian Esslemont - Assail

He scanned the curved rock before the fortress where it descended to the north; the bedrock carried only low brush and dwarf trees, but it combed downward into a forest of cedar, fir, and birch. Just at the fringe of these woods was where Giana and her team were supposed to be digging. He could see no sign of them, however.

The vibration punishing everyone’s feet was becoming almost unbearable. One of the pounded dirt ramps collapsed into a heap of soil, it seemed soundlessly, as the cacophony of the leagues-wide avalanche grinding down upon them drowned everything out.

Squinting into the blowing snow he could make out entire swaths of forest disappearing as if swept down by an invisible hand. The enormous blocks of the wall juddered and bounced as if toys. The last screen of trees between them and the avalanche fell towards them, their crowns swinging down as if bowing in farewell. Come on! he urged Giana. Run!

Something appeared through the curtain of snow but it was not what Jute expected. To all appearances it looked like a flood of extremely muddy water creeping up the slope of the bedrock. Sticks and detritus roiled amid the froth of the approaching tide. It took him a moment to grasp that the sticks were in fact the stripped trunks of mature trees, and that the coming tide was a churned froth of mud, silts, soil, and sand, all being scooped downslope towards them in front of a solid wall of one of the ice-tongues. And before this flood emerged six figures, running pell-mell for the high land and the wall.

Jute tottered and stumbled his way down the ramp to the gates, where a team of locals waited to swing closed the twin leaves. The figures, completely mud-covered, ran on while the very earth jumped and shuddered beneath them. Now Jute counted only four.

The quartet came barrelling in, dripping, sheathed in mud and streaks of blood, and fall to the ground, panting and gasping. King Voti’s people pulled shut the leaves. Jute and a number of Malazans stooped to the four, rubbing away muck, pulling a shattered length of wood the size of a dagger from the arm of one of them. To Jute’s immense relief Lieutenant Jalaz emerged, bruised and bloodied, from the layers of clinging muck encasing another of them.

‘You fool!’ he growled, though of course she could not hear. She understood, however, and shrugged weakly. He waved for her to stay where she was and tottered up the ramp.

What he found above reminded him of what Lady Orosenn had said about there being no escape. Entire forests of tangled trees were building up amid the coursing wash of suspended soil and earth that was passing to either side of the rise. Orothos, under directions from Cartheron, had his crews blasting these logjams to pieces. Meanwhile, the roiling mass of coming earth just kept mounting higher and higher. Of the township of Mantle there remained no trace. The effect of all this was as of the worst naval engagement Jute had ever endured. He ran to Lady Orosenn, motioned that he wished to speak. She lowered her head. ‘What are they doing?’ he yelled.

She made a pushing gesture. ‘Moving it along.’

‘Why?’

‘We don’t want it to catch and heap up.’

‘Why are they firing into the mud?’

‘We don’t know when the ice will arrive,’ she called back. ‘I suspect the leading edge to be thin — under the muck at first.’

After that, Jute was too hoarse to continue yelling so he merely nodded and allowed Lady Orosenn to return to studying the flow. He tried to imagine what it must be like on the shores of the Sea of Gold as all this earth and gravel and loose rock came thrusting out on to the mudflats, perhaps taking them with it. It suddenly occurred to him, horrifyingly: could the entire sea be erased? All that water heaved further south? How far away were the ships? Had they made it through the channel yet? He prayed to the gods that they had. If not, they were in for a memorable ride.

One of the crews on the springals thrust their arms skyward, shouting soundlessly, and Jute scanned the base of the rise. Pulverized white flakes came floating down from an eruption. They momentarily painted white the foaming, shifting flow, only to be sucked beneath. Cartheron was gesturing, signing to the crews, who shifted their aim. He raised an open hand and the crews waited, hands at the releases.

Why was he waiting, Jute wondered. Shouldn’t he be punishing the ice now that it had arrived? Perhaps he was waiting for the flow to thicken — no point in blasting the thinnest leading finger. Perhaps. Then he noticed that the commander’s gaze was fixed upon Lady Orosenn, who had a hand outstretched as if reaching for him.

The walls rocked then, as in a true earthquake. Or perhaps a collision. Jute turned his head to the north, terrified of what he might see. There, what he’d taken earlier for a thick wall of falling snow revealed itself to be a steep upward-sweeping wing-like slope that went on and on, perhaps for leagues, up the entire lowest shoulder of the mountains: an ungraspable immensity of ice and weight and might all bearing down upon them like a war dromond striking a water beetle. He knew it to be a plain physical manifestation of ice and rock, but he couldn’t help also feeling a palpable sense of deliberate menace and ruthless will pointed directly at him — and he the size of a flea beneath it.

Lady Orosenn snapped her hand down and Cartheron made a fist.

All four siege weapons fired.

The four cussors arced upwards, disappearing into the driving snow. Almost immediately spouts of smashed ice shot upwards, without any accompanying sound. Jute was appalled. The best we had. Like a child throwing a rock at a landslide. Cartheron signed to fire again. The four now simply kept firing and reloading, pounding that one same spot. Jute imagined that that must be where the cussors had been jammed down into cracks and crevices in the bedrock — if they hadn’t yet been plucked out.

The eruptions came almost continuously now, in a constant shooting spray of pulverized ice that arced high into the blowing snow. Jute thought the pushing lip of the ice-tongue was climbing the hump of bedrock. Soon, he imagined, it would sweep them off like dust from a tabletop.

All four crews kept pounding, and it did seem to Jute that larger chunks of broken ice now flew with each eruption. He gripped the topmost stone of the wall before him, itself many hundreds of pounds of rock, and felt the immense power of the grinding advance transmitted to his bones through the juddering of the stone. Break, damn you! he exhorted the ice. Break!

He’d seen towers brought down by one or two well-placed cussors. Entire harbour defences reduced to rubble with just a few casts. And now this man, Cartheron Crust, was pouring half the imperial arsenal of Moranth munitions into this unstoppable mountain of ice in a colossal contest of wills that would grind all else into dust.

The stones of the wall jerked towards him then, knocking his hand aside as if it were alive and flinching. Ahead, through the curls and scarves of snow, a great fountain of white was burgeoning upwards like a dome swelling over a surfacing swimmer. Enormous shards of blue-white ice now arced skywards. They blossomed outwards in all directions. A roar washed over Mantle that overcame even the valley-wide growling of the ice.

Smaller chunks fell all about him. They burst to shards against the wall. Some punched through the timbers of the catwalk. Nearby, a man fell as if mattocked, his head a shattered ruin. Jute ducked, arms over his head, and staggered down the ramp to take cover under the catwalk. Here, beneath his hand and his rump, the bedrock shook as if drummed. A deep wounded-animal sort of groan mounted into a high-pitched cracking. In his mind’s eye, he imagined the stupendous weight of the ice pulling it downslope to the east and to the west, naturally tugging in opposite directions. And so it would split — not of intent, but because the great ice-river merely wished to find the lowest level. He rose and clambered out to look. The ramp had been shaken to nothing more than a heap of dirt, and this he climbed to pull himself one-handed up on to the catwalk. The huge blocks of the wall were now misaligned and uneven in their course, and it seemed wondrous to Jute that the snow still fell as if nothing had happened. To the right and left coursed the dirty snow-blown river of ice, down to where the two arms came together again before sweeping out over the obliterated shore of the Sea of Gold.