I crawled over and caught his hands, putting pressure on the wound to slow the bleeding. “Don’t pull at the shaft,” I told him. “You’ll make it worse.” Part of me wondered how it could possibly get worse. “Are there any physics here yet?” I yelled.
Tain knelt on the other side. My eyes fixed on the bone shaft jutting out from the poor man’s throat. I measured his struggling breath, the pallor of his skin, the speed of the blood from the wound, seeking the familiar dispassion of analysis while beside me Tain comforted him, holding him still at the shoulders and speaking slowly and calmly. The wall shuddered as the attackers pounded at the gate.
Finally, a man in a physic’s blue sash scrambled up the stairs and over to us, a bag in hand. I moved out of the way as he took charge, checking the man’s pulse and breathing and then padding around the arrow with cloth from his bag. “Good—you didn’t move the shaft. Hard enough to get an arrowhead out without having to scramble around to try to find it. Here, give me a hand with this fellow.”
The physic hadn’t recognized Tain in the confusion. I hid my relief by assisting with the injured man’s legs and the three of us carried him back down into the city grounds. We had barely reached the bottom step when others hurried forward to help with our burden. I scarcely had time to breathe before Marco found us.
“This is the weakest gate, Honored Chancellor,” he said. “It replaced the original gate some decades ago and it is not built to withstand this kind of force. They are attacking the joints between the panels.”
“We can’t sustain this,” Tain said. “We’ve barely any weapons and our people don’t know how to use the bows they’ve got. We’re relying more on luck than anything else. Where’s Eliska?”
Marco collared a nearby Credola. “Find the Stone-Guilder,” he ordered, and though her mouth twisted with affront, she sprang off quickly enough. Yesterday Marco had been the least important Councilor—the temporary substitute leader of the least respected Guild. Now our lives depended on his leadership as much as Tain’s. The fortunes only knew whether either would be up to the task.
Eliska found us soon after. Her well-muscled arms and broad, strong hands bore some scratches and dirt marks, and her round face seemed to have gained ten years in the past hour.
“We need this gate reinforced,” Tain said. “Can you get your best people—pull them off the walls if they’re up there—and do something from the inside that will help it hold?”
The Stone-Guilder frowned, calculating in silence. Eventually, she nodded.
“I can secure it—it’ll make a mess of the gate for the future, but I can stop anyone getting in there.”
“Do what you can.” Tain clasped Marco’s shoulder. “Can we pull all the Order Guards here? We need people who can actually use bows to protect the gate.”
“We need to break that contraption they’re sheltering under,” I said. “What if we dropped something seriously heavy on it—statues from the wharf street gardens, maybe?”
“That should buy Eliska time,” Tain said. The Stone-Guilder already had a small group of Builders’ Guild members around her, scurrying to her quick orders. “I just hope it holds.”
* * *
It held. As Eliska said, it wasn’t pretty, but the reinforcements strengthened the gate where the metal had bowed and chipped from the force of the attacks. Eventually, after having lost their upturned boat to some of our fine marble sculptures, the attackers abandoned the attempt and fell back to a position away from the wall. Though it had felt like hours, the whole attack and retreat had been swift.
We had left the Order Guards and senior Guild officials in charge while we held the emergency Council meeting. I wasn’t sure they would be able to contain the panic; some terror-driven scuffles had already broken out as people streamed in every direction through the lower city and across the lake. The gate reinforcement had given us some time, but likely not much. How fast could we fit untrained citizens with our light stores of armor, and show pampered scholars and merchants how to use weapons they’d never even held?
The Council chamber had been tense and unruly a few days ago at my first meeting. Now that seemed tame by comparison. The comfortable setting contrasted sharply with its disheveled, quarreling inhabitants.
Marco, his earlier authority swallowed by politics, sat like a nervous child in school while Councilors loomed over him on either side, peppering him with question after question. A few Guilders were engaged in heated words with the Credolen about whether the landowners ought to have known there was trouble on their estates. Tain’s gaze and attention flew back and forth, trying to listen to multiple conversations at once and contributing to none of them. I watched, anxious, willing him to take control.
“Why haven’t our spies reported an uprising on the farms? We do have spies, don’t we?”
“Why would we need spies when the landowners are right here around the table? I know none of you like to actually go there, but you all have stewards. Don’t you get reports? Rebellions don’t come from nothing.”
The Credolen around the table looked uncomfortable; lots of shifting eyes and wringing hands. Some of it I shared; after all, what attention had I ever paid to our estates? Etan and I had always been focused on our duty to the Chancellor’s family, and left the management of our family’s business largely to our steward, Alozia, and my mother. Tain, too, knew next to nothing about how his estates worked; it was the usual practice for the Chancellor and Heir, who had to look to the health of the entire country and not just to their own businesses and affairs. “Farmers, miners, workers, they always grumble,” Credo Lazar blustered at last. “No one could expect things to come to violence.”
“No point wondering where it came from for now,” the Craft-Guilder, Credo Pedrag, said. “We just need to stop it, quick smart. We need more archers up there to shoot them down.”
Marco rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair, sighing with the frustration of a man relaying information for the fiftieth time. “We lack the people and the weapons.”
“What I cannot understand is why,” Budua, the Scribe-Guilder, the calmest at the table, balanced her wrinkled chin on her hand with the air of an academic studying an interesting problem. “Yes, I know the Council voted to send the army south. But no one asked me to vote on the understanding that there would be no protection left for the city. We skirmish over those mines every few years. Why did this necessitate leaving the city unprotected?”
“I was not party to all your deliberations,” Marco reminded her. “But it is my understanding that Chancellor Caslav sent the full army as a deliberate show of force to prevent these skirmishes in the future. As for our own garrison, well, Silasta sits in the center of the most protected country in the continent, Scribe-Guilder. Between the mountain ranges and the marshes, no external force could realistically enter Sjona other than through the three border cities, which are garrisoned. An attack on the city has not been a realistic possibility in decades.”
“And yet here we are.”
“Here we are,” Marco repeated. His gaze sank to the table. A few days before, the worst part of this role must have been the prospect of being forced to listen to spoiled, wealthy old men and women insulting him; now here he was suddenly in charge of a defense plan no one had even contemplated us ever needing, and having to defend decisions made well above his level of seniority.