knot, fighting with their backs together. Balasar's men overwhelmed them.
And then it was finished. As suddenly as it had begun, the fight ended.
The bodies of the enemy lay at their feet, along with a few of their
own. Not many. Steam rose from the corpses of friend and foe alike. But
they'd reached the tunnels. One last push, down deep into the belly of
the city, and it would be over. The war. The andat. Everything. He felt
himself smiling like a wolf. His shoulder and arm no longer hurt.
"General! Sir! It's blocked!"
"What?"
One of his captains came forward, gore soaking his tunic from elbow to
knee, his expression dismayed.
"It can't he," Balasar said, striding forward. But the captain turned
and led him. And there it was. A great gateway of stone, a sloping ramp
leading down wide enough for four carts abreast to travel into it. And
as he came forward, his hoots slipping where the fight had churned the
snow to slush, he saw it was true. The shadows beneath the gateway were
filled with stones, cut and rough, large as boulders and small as fists.
Something glittered among them. Shattered glass and sharp, awkward
scraps of metal. Clearing this would take days.
I Ie'd been betrayed. Sinja Ajutani had led him astray. The taste of it
was like ashes. And worse than the deception itself was that it would
change nothing. The defending forces were scattered, the towers would
run out of bricks and arrows, given time. All that Sinja had
accomplished was to prolong the agony and cost Balasar a few hundred
more men and the Khai Machi a few thousand.
Ah, Sinja, he thought. You were one of my men. One of mine.
"Get me the maps" was what he said.
Knowing now that it had been a trap, knowing that the forces of Nlachi
would have some way to retreat, some pathway to muster their attack,
Balasar scanned the thin lines that marked out the streets and tunnels.
His fingers left trails of other men's blood.
Not the palaces. Sinja had sent him there. Not the forges. His mind went
cool, calm, detached. The blood rage of the melee was gone, and he was a
general again. The warehouses. There, in the North. The galleries below
would be good for mustering a large force or creating an infirmary.
"There would be water, and the light from it wouldn't shine out. If it
were his city, that would be the other plausible center from which to
make his campaign.
"I need runners. A dozen of them. We need to reach the men at the
palaces and tell them that the plan's changed."
SINJA HAD RIDDEN HART) FUR THE. NORTH. EVEN AS HE HEARD THE DIS"I'ANI'
horns that meant the battle within Machi had begun, he leaned down over
his mount and pushed for the paths and rough mining roads that laced the
foothills behind the city. And there, low in the mountains where
generations ago it had been easy and convenient to haul ore, one of the
first, oldest, tapped-out mines. Otah's bolt-hole for the children and
the poets, and the only thing between it and the city-Eustin and a
hundred armed Galts. Visions of cart tracks crushed in the snow and
disappearing into the mine's mouth pricked at his mind. Let Eustin not