Chapter 16.3
Author: theredsheep

Chapter 16.3 – Pyrebound

One resh—if there ever was such a thing as one alone—might be a danger to travelers. Two would be a nuisance, but as likely to fight each other as any human. If there were three, a pair of them would gang up on the third, if food got short. Reshki were stupid, impulsive creatures, driven mad by the agony of their own decay, and in small groups incapable of self-control. It was only large numbers, which they rarely acquired, that gave them the will to focus their terrible speed and ferocity on a long-term goal.

How large a number was needed? Nobody really knew. Fifteen, twenty, thirty? Whatever the number was, it was known as a sul. It had been a small sul of reshki which attacked Urapu. Ram was all but certain that it was a sul he heard outside the walls of Barenmul hearth that evening.

A trumpet sounded in the air over Ram’s head as he ran for the stairs up the hearth’s outer wall, confirming Bal’s alarm for the Lord Etana. His own militia would be with them, and he’d promised to fight beside them. There was no helping that now. He’d be needed more here, if he could do anything at all.

The yellow sun had not set yet, not quite, but it was hidden by the hills behind them; if the night of dark dreams had not technically begun, it was close enough as to make no difference. He couldn’t say whether he saw anything from the wall or not. There might have been a dark cloud in the distance, sparkling with cold blue lights, or there might have been only the ordinary speckling of stars against the deepening blue of dusk. Barenmul’s hills did not end at the hearth, and there were plenty of rolls and folds in the earth thereabouts for foul things to hide in.

As for the reshki, he could not scent them at that moment. It was said—as many things were said—that the bazuu had made the reshki, long ago. It might not have been terribly hard to round some up from the wild, perhaps even a sul’s worth. He’d never heard of reshki being used in the war, but keeping them fed and contained in the deep desert would have been more bother than it was worth. They were no faster than shabti, and far more fragile. Driving them into a hearth, to ravage and disrupt and terrify before the main attack, would be another matter.

He turned his face back to the bondservants, frozen uselessly around their little heaps of bricks, and screamed, “RUN! RUN OR DIE!”

A few bolted. The rest only squealed, or looked at each other. It would make little difference either way; men could not outrun monsters. Ram turned back to the fields. Somehow Beshi was already in his hand; irritably, he sheathed it—we’re not going to hack the whole army to bits alone, ass—and turned his mind to the great light he could feel atop the tower at his back.

He’d never dared to look through a hearth or pyre before. He’d always been afraid of the souls of the men who’d died to make them. Now he found himself simply floating in the air, lonely and austere. The world beneath him was small and indistinct, unworthy of his attention. Except for the area to his immediate east. There, he saw with waxing disgust, was something that should not be. Something unsanitary, perverse. There was no question of what needed to be done, and Ram had barely to suggest it to make it so.

The limits on a hearth’s output were just as unclear as the limits of a sul, and for much the same reason. It could not manifest from a distance, like a handmaiden, but it could throw the flame directly, and its connection to the pyre allowed it to draw on far more power at once. For the sake of Bal and the bonded, Ram restrained it to a relatively narrow stream. It had almost a mile of open space to cross, and by the time it arrived, it would be less a stream than a boiling wave of scalding air several hundred feet across, making a noise like the breath of a hundred murrush.

He had no idea what effect it would have at such a distance, but there was no need to babysit the hearth. He returned to himself, and the transfigured spirit of long-dead Barenmul—if that was what it was—kept up the assault without him. Ram would only need to intervene if the enemy got so close that the spirit risked killing its own community in the process of defending it.

Six skybarques were aloft now, swooping down on the eastern horizon. Every one bore eight or ten handmaidens—not enough to turn a full invasion, but more than sufficient to frustrate and delay. They bobbed and danced on the hot updrafts from the hearth’s fire. From the walltop, their own efforts amounted to nothing more than a series of pretty sparkles, but they made a noise like a thunderstorm. Up close, it would be an inferno.

Still, it wouldn’t stop them all. They might kill a fair number, but even a coordinated barrage, by the handmaidens of four pyres working together, could only blunt a shab charge. The majority of them would make it through this token bombardment intact, and Ram had no way of getting even his handful of militiamen in front of them. Bal—he looked back—was still groaning and crying on the ground, for whatever reason. Which left only Ram, and a ten-foot wall meant for keeping out hearthless and moonchildren.

He had perhaps a minute before contact. Perhaps less. Etana’s strategy was plain enough, and Ram could not deny its cold wisdom: to wear the enemy down, making him offer up a half-ton of his dead black flesh for every foot he traveled forward, so that little would survive to meet the core of Karagi’s forces by the water.

Ram’s own path was less clear. This wall would be no protection. He might hide, but the reshki could sniff him out, and if they did not the shabti would probably crush whatever building he hid in. It would be easy enough, he supposed, to order one of the barques to turn and pick him up, and bear him back to join the Lugal’s forces and his own men.

Unprompted, the spirit within presented him with a vision: hundreds of bondsmen cowering in the shadow of the wall behind him, looking up to see a skybarque gliding down to their wall. It would descend, a glorious vision of silk sails and shining glass such as they had never seen so near, and bear their priest away to safety alone, and they would have a few precious moments to ponder the vision they had been vouchsafed before the reshki came scampering over the wall, or the shabti smashed through it, and destroyed them. And then, whether standing in the streets with their heaps of bricks, or cowering in the corners of their pitiful huts, they would all die alike.

And the spirit said, very firmly and clearly: no.

What do you want me to—

It had already given way on the cowardly surrender to the Atellui. It would not allow Ram to abandon his duty to his inheritance. It was a priest’s duty to die; did it make a difference how?

Ram tried to turn away from the battle, and found he couldn’t. His foot wouldn’t lift from the battlements. He tried to call one of the barques, and again was stymied. This is insane! What good does it do for me to die with them?

A priest did not make his people suffer in his place. That was the greatest perversity of all.

The shabti were closer now, and the fires with them. Closer still, the tender new crop of winter barley was shaking; Ram thought he could descry little black spots scattered throughout the shoots. Certainly the stink of kurtushi was clear enough now. Yet Ram did not feel fear, precisely. Irritation, frustration, and rage, but not fear. Another gift of the spirit’s.

Soon the fire was so near he could see the women atop the skybarques, leaning over the railings and shouting—there would be no songs for this battle—as they cast down gobbets of flame. Below, the shabti convulsed, sent up clouds of their atomized shells to mingle with the smoke of the green plants, but kept coming obstinately on, rolling, crawling, and bounding through the onslaught in a hundred different shapes.

The reshki were only a short distance ahead of them, dozens of simian grey and black shapes moving slower than Ram would have expected. Here and there they halted entirely, rocking back on their haunches to stare at the hearth, or to shriek at the sky. A few shook their heads irritably, or swatted the air about them, as if trying to drive off a passing fly.

It was not the kind of behavior Ram would have expected from a sul at war; were they suspicious at the lack of defenders? He had never heard of reshki showing caution, but then no sul lasted for long enough to properly study. Typically their numbers would surge for just long enough to get nine of every ten killed in a frontal assault, along with any number of innocent humans.

There was so much going on that Ram nearly missed it when it happened: a shab, fleeing the holocaust behind it, ran headlong into one of the halted reshki, knocking it flying. The beast landed on all fours some distance away, facing the shab; with a snarl, it bounded back towards it, landing atop the bright-blue locus, which was still struggling to rebuild a protective armor carapace after passing through the flames. Ram wasn’t close enough to see what had happened—a bite? A swipe of the claws?—but it ended with the shab exploding into black dust, and the resh leaping off to attack the shab behind it.

It might as well have been a prearranged signal. All at once, inexplicably, reshki all up and down the long, long line halted their already diffident advance to turn on their masters. If they were not quite so fast or durable, they made up a good deal of the difference with sheer agility; a resh in the prime of its life was far better at dodging than a man with a crowhammer. Everywhere Ram looked, the little vermin were dancing lightly over or under attacks, then pouncing to tear at a locus.

He might have had no idea, strictly speaking, what the hell was going on, but that was no reason not to make the most of it. Even as the enemy drew closer, the hearth had kept its fire concentrated on the same spot, some distance out; however much it hated bazu craft, actual tactical thinking was too much to expect of a bodyless spirit. After some tinkering, Ram got it sweeping rapidly back and forth with a tight beam like a scythe, a hundred feet beyond the resh line.

Then there was nothing to do but stand on the wall and watch with some chagrin as a relative handful of monsters formed a better defensive line than Ram could have put up with ten times as many veteran militia. They coordinated perfectly, no two picking the same target, never getting in each other’s way, and after every kill they moved instantly and fearlessly to the next attacker stumbling its way through the fires. Could a true sul read each other’s minds?

Ram turned—it seemed he was allowed to move again—at the sound of dragging footsteps. Bal was making his unsteady way up the stairs behind him, with one hand on the wall and the other held out in front, as if to catch himself if he tripped and fell on his face. When he got to the top, he slumped against the battlement, and bestowed a somewhat woozy smile on the carnage unfolding before him.

Tentatively, Ram reached out to touch his shoulder. “Bal? You better now?” Without taking his eyes off the battle, Bal slapped the hand away, then pointed at the slaughter and made a gargling noise in his throat that sounded something like resh-talk.

Whatever was going on, the bazuu commanding the shab force were not as stupid as Barenmul’s fire, to keep up an attack that wasn’t working. Out in the distance, far beyond the burn zone, Ram could see the shadows spreading out along the ground, forming two broad wings to encircle the hearth and move in from the sides, where there were no treacherous reshki to thwart them.

There was a spot, some distance back, where the haranuu were clustered tightly together; Ram picked one at random, and found himself in one of several hundred handmaidens standing on the roof of the common hall. He looked around for Etana, and found him at the very center of the building, peering up at the sky with a hand over his eyes. Probably waiting for a barque to land and report. Ram was faster. “Etana!” he shouted from where the handmaiden stood. “They’re splitting into two groups now! Flanking! Watch your north and south!”

For a long moment, the Lugal only gave him a hard stare. Then he nodded, and Ram released the woman, feeling the same queasy sensation he’d felt for the past few days, that he was doing something utterly necessary yet deeply wrong. He hoped he never lost that feeling. It was his best defense against becoming another Mannagiri, however many lives he was saving with this casual borrowing of human flesh.

Meanwhile, the six barques on skirmish duty had peeled away, three each to harry the north and south wings. Four more were rising from the hills to join the hunt—Ram was fairly sure that was all the reserve Etana had to commit, unless he threw in the two he was keeping aloft as his eyes in the sky. Four or six, it still wouldn’t be enough to stop them, and there was nothing else for Ram to do where he was. The sul had what remained of the frontal offensive well in hand, with Bal and Barenmul’s assistance; Ram had a promise to keep. Quelling yet another twinge of conscience, he summoned one of the Lugal’s two “eye” barques.

A thought came to him as the gorgeous craft descended: was it not fortunate that Ram had not fled, the way he wanted to? The God would not abandon a faithful priest.

He’s abandoned plenty of us before, and I never heard that he could control reshki. Anyway, you didn’t know that would happen any more than I did, so shut up.

From two hundred feet, the situation was not promising. The shab host looked to be every bit as vast as the one he had fought last bloom, with sparkling black clouds stretching back to the horizon, only spreading out when they drew nearer the hearth. At least Natati and Shasipir would have a whole bloom untroubled by war—assuming the bazuu didn’t decide to press whatever advantage they won here, and wage war bloom-round. If it was only a matter of acquiring enough shabti, they would likely win plenty of human captives here.

Etana’s defensive arrangements appeared straightforward: every handmaiden who was not aloft huddled on the roof of the common hall, which Ram assumed was packed with every remaining free Barenmula. He could see an anxious crowd in the courtyard. Master Nusun stood in the hearth’s main street at the hall’s corner, guarding the approach from the east. Ram didn’t know if the other murrush, who worked the Tegnembassaga, had been unwilling to come, or if Etana had been unwilling to risk them for the marginal gain of having them as roadblocks.

Every other approach to the hall was blocked off by a little clump of his new militia. The houses and shops behind them were packed with flamekeepers, ready to either leap out and ambush any shabti who got past the crowhammers or to cower in shelter while the enemy passed them by en route to the common hall. Certainly they would show no such reticence if they spotted a common soldier running for it. It was only a modified version of the standard battle formation, and the same rules would apply.

It was no better than Ram had expected, but he motioned for the barque to bring him down over the largest gathering, a pack of thirty-odd nervous men packed in front of a little square with a fountain in it. He’d have shouted something encouraging down to them, if he could only think what. He settled for something simple and true: “This is Rammash! The shabti are sweeping around to enter the hearth from the north and the south. Brace yourselves!”

Not that they could do much else. Still, he sent the barque on the rounds, spreading the warning, while the shabti all too quickly battered their way through the outer walls and funneled in through the hills, ineffectually harassed by airborne handmaidens. Ideally they would take this opportunity to bull-rush the common hall through the streets until they hit the militia blockades, at which point their dead would pile up enough to obstruct them as usual and the handmaidens could rain hell on them until they fled or were annihilated.

Again, however, the bazuu in command were not fools. Once they had massed around the hearth’s flanks, the hills and outlying buildings gave the shabti a measure of shelter, and made it impossible for five barques to keep them all busy. The flying batteries could only flit about aimlessly, striking where they saw an opportunity, letting two of the enemy past for every one they killed. The sun had set, and it was hard to see a night-black enemy in the twilit streets.

From the lee of the acolytes’ hill a gigantic shape came rolling forward, a ball fifteen or twenty feet across. A barque flitted in to intercept, too slow; the blasts knocked off a barely visible plume of dust from the thick rind before it struck home. It could have flattened the nearest group of militia, of course, but after gathering momentum through the streets it was nearly as quick and far more comfortable to veer away from the mass of trembling spikes and slam into the little house beside them instead. Its north face caved in on impact, and the enormous sphere was deflected, flying into the air. The women on the rooftop lit it up as soon as they saw it, but it looked to Ram as though some portion survived to crash down on the other side.

All around the hearth, other shabti replicated the feat, even as their comrades came pouring in behind them. Flamekeepers came scampering out of their holes, racing the terrified militia to the hall. Above, the barques had lost all semblance of organization, firing wildly at the enemy streaming past them. So much for defensible perimeters. Enough of them were still rushing the east end that he didn’t dare pull the hearth’s attention away.

The hall was ringed with light now, as every handmaiden on the roof concentrated on pouring out as much destruction as she could on whatever patch of street was nearest. Ram doubted if any of the normal humans on the scene could even bear to look at it directly. Nusun had abandoned his post—too hot even for him—to meet the enemy, vomiting heat wherever he went. One of the spheres made to roll over him, only to disintegrate fifty feet out and have its loci battered apart by his claws. He, at least, would be going home alive.

The militia and flamekeepers were caught in the streets together, with no safe place to run. At the odd corner, seeing no other option, they made a stand together, with no regard for rank or station. If they held their ground, the shabti might decide it was more convenient to slightly alter their course—or else go out of their way to crush the knot of defiance. The bazuu would prefer to kill indwelt humans, Ram was sure, but anyone else they captured could be turned into the next crop of warriors.

And still the enemy boiled in through the gaps in the hills. How could an ensi keep his promise, in the face of such a disaster? Anything, surely, would be better than floating above to watch as his men were slaughtered. He turned to his handmaidens—this craft, on its mission of reconnaissance, had only the minimum of three. They’d likely spent most of their lives in workshops or kitchens, and every one of them had been taught, from girlhood, to respect authority and wait for commands. Their spirits would reinforce the lesson every day: they were servants, not leaders.

“The common hall is as secure as anyone can make it,” he told them. “The rest of the hearth is lost. From now on, we rescue the men. All of them. Understood?” He heard no argument, and passed on the word to the other ships.

Any barque he landed would be mobbed before it could take off again, so he set them all hunting across the battlefield, seeking out survivors to shepherd them together into larger groups, where they could be more easily defended from above. It was like trying to swim through a river in flood to pick up the survivors of a wreck, if the river were alive and actively trying to kill everyone in it.

It wasn’t quite hopeless—they only lost about as many as they saved. Eventually, he had a crowd of a few score gathered together in the lee of the forested hill, half of them unarmed, defended by an orbiting screen of four barques. It was the best he could do.

With a long, rumbling roar, a broad stretch of the besieged hall’s south wall fell in. Ram got a half-second’s glimpse of black shabti erupting out of the gap before it was drowned in fire. He looked to his crew, who gave him only grimaces in return. Tunneling. The bastards were tunneling, now. That group had been wiped out, but so what? These creatures didn’t care for their lives. With their numbers, they could do it as many times as they liked, until the whole building collapsed and everyone in or on it was dead. Already many of the citizens would be suffering heatstroke inside.

Nothing else for it, then; if all those handmaidens died, they would lose more than just Barenmul. He tried not to think of the bonded as he gave the hearth’s fire a new command, and it turned its attention to the west. Abandoning the scything blade for focused pulses of power, it shattered half a block with every blow, kicking up man-sized chunks of debris like so much dust, one or two blasts every second. Just the flying shrapnel was enough to tear a shab in half; his little company of survivors scrambled farther up their hill to hide in the trees. The handmaidens ducked down on the rooftop, hoping for some shelter from the body of the building. Even Master Nusun, still brawling away near the breach at the common hall, took cover inside.

Ram didn’t need to order his barques to clear the area. That was a simple matter of self-preservation, now. Some headed north or south, to try and stem the influx, while others made for the east. Only his own craft stayed behind, circling more than two hundred feet up to get out of the hearth’s line of fire. He and his three handmaidens had the only clear view of the battle’s end, as sheer overwhelming firepower ground the shabti down like the poor scuttling black beetles they were.

It might have been one minute, or two, or perhaps three, before the fire halted for lack of targets. Somewhere in the devastation—Ram had not seen it—the bazuu had given up hope of taking the common hall, and called a retreat. They were still scarcely an hour into the night of dark dreams, and the surviving shabti could sweep back to the rookery to guard it until it retreated to Kur in the morning, satisfied with a very successful campaign.

And it was successful. Barenmul was lost, a second Urapu. Most of the populace survived—he hoped—but the center of the hearth was an overgrazed pasture, bare trampled earth. The cropland would be little better, torn up where it wasn’t kurtushi. Only one part of Barenmul remained intact, and Ram directed his women to take him there now.

He suspected the bonded had had the right idea all along. If their piles of bricks lay untouched, so did the people themselves, crouched inside their hovels while they waited for the end of the world. The fields outside were littered with the corpses of reshki, but there was no sign of damage to the walls, and the dead shabti had already evaporated. The streets were silent.

Just one lone man stood, perfectly still, on the walltops. Ram jumped down some distance along the wall, and approached the sentinel with care as his women rushed back to their sisters on the roof. But he needn’t have bothered; Bal didn’t even turn to look as he approached. The Jackal’s eyes were fixed on a bare patch of dirt at the base of the wall.

“Gone again, are you?” No reply. Not even a twitch. “Maybe I should have expected that. You haven’t killed anything, but …” Ram waved at the remains of the sul. “Something happened here. I just wish I knew what.” If Bal in fact had a resh’s soul inside him, it was awake again—or else his human part was fast asleep. Had he known this would happen, that he would die another of his little deaths? Or had he consciously decided to do anything at all? It might have been pure instinct that drove him; possibly he could no more choose not to drive back a sul than Ram could choose not to burn at the kindling. From what little he had seen of Bal-the-man, however, he seemed to be decent enough. He might have taken this path anyway, given the choice.

“Who is he?” said a voice from the foot of the wall. Ram looked down and saw a barefaced young woman, about twenty, in a drab smock. She was a skinny, sickly little thing, with an underdeveloped jaw and dull eyes. “That’n, he just stood there, yellin’ something awful, the whole time. Didn’t hardly never move, never said nothing at all. Is he funny in the head? Sir,” she belatedly added.

“That’s a good question, miss,” he said. “I don’t really know what to tell you; I barely know him myself. His name is Balnibduka, and you might say he’s a kind of priest.”

“A priest?” She squinted. “What god?”

“I don’t know that, either, and he can’t tell me. But we can spot our own. You have to give something up, to serve a god. And he gave up himself.”