So he blocked out his rage, and his indignation that some killer was watching this private moment, and everything but his wife and his love for her.
They made love, and they shared breath and body. It was tenderness and desperation and clinging and resignation and acceptance. It was joy at what they’d had and sorrow at its brevity. It was golden heartbeats of pure unthinking pleasure pierced by iron arrows of grief.
After a long time, after all too brief a time, they held each other. She sat in his lap, arms and legs embracing him. She didn’t lie down, though she was winded and sweat glistened on her skin. These were to be her last minutes. She wouldn’t waste them in seeking sleep.
She touched her forehead to his, and kissed him. Then she reached one finger up to the yellow eye tattooed in luxin on her forehead. It went dark, and then frayed and disappeared.
“I have run the course set before me,” she said. “I have finished the race.” Then she whispered in Corvan’s ear, “Polyhymnia.”
A lone tear coursed down her cheek, contrasting with the brave smile on her lips.
It was what she had laid down when she had taken up the title and duties and sacrifices of being the Third Eye: it was her name.
“Go with my love, Corvan Danavis, my Titan of the Great Fountain.”
It was an epithet he’d never heard. A glimpse into his own future, perhaps, a benediction and a farewell.
He rose, tears blinding him, and dressed in silence, strapping Harbinger on his hip, not trusting his voice, not trusting his rage. His breath came in little gasps as he struggled for control. When he looked back to her from the door, she didn’t meet his eyes. She had thrown on a thin robe and sat, legs folded, hands resting in her lap, her back straight and proud.
Her face as cool and peaceful and beautiful as a statue of the saints, she faced the eastern window, praying, waiting for a sunrise she would never see.
Chapter 64
It can’t be that big, was Kip’s first thought as he first saw Dúnbheo in the low light. From his maps and many descriptions of it, Kip knew exactly what Dúnbheo looked like. But as with so many things in life, there’s a difference between knowing and knowing.
Unlike most cities, there had been only a few buildings outside the walls. The population of Dúnbheo had shrunk so much over the years—and been so huge before the Chromeria’s rise—that land inside the walls was cheap. The inns and food stalls that had set themselves up outside the walls for the convenience of travelers had been burnt or cannibalized for lumber and stone by the Blood Robe besiegers months ago.
It made for an odd scene: the attackers set up in a wide crescent around the walls amid the great stumps of all the trees they’d cleared, their boats anchored in a neat crescent outside the river gate, and then the vast, incomprehensible greenery of the wall itself.
Kip had seen the creation of one of the wonders of the world in Brightwater Wall, but the Greenwall surrounding Dúnbheo was something on a completely different scale. Kip had assumed Greenwall was a screen of impressive trees in front of a wall itself. When told the trees were the wall, he’d thought there must be fortifications stretched between each tree.
That was wrong, too.
Massive sabino cypresses made towers to heaven every thirty paces, and the gaps between them were filled with millennial cypress and other trees, trunk to straining trunk, growing more thickly than should have been possible and also more closely to their neighbors. But no branches hung out into the space over the invaders. Every limb had instead grown back into the mass of the wall itself, as if guided by some chelonian intelligence to make it impregnable.
Over and through all the massive trees grew ivies and vines, further binding the trees together and clogging the spaces between them, but their leaves also gave the defenders perfect cover. An archer would part the leaves, take a shot through the makeshift murder hole, and then disappear, leaving not so much as a target.
The impression of the whole was of a green cataract as far as the eye could see, cascading in every direction as if it were the old gods’ own verdant fountain. Flowers even sprouted everywhere, not deigning to accept the mortals’ war going on beneath them.
In some places, the ivies had been burnt or pulled down in previous sallies, but it had done little. In fact, against the mammoth height of the tree wall, the tiny scars only made the efforts of man seem paltry and impotent.
“Time,” Ferkudi said.
In their months fighting together, Ben-hadad had fashioned clocks with deliberately weird intervals for each Nightbringer captain’s superviolet drafter. Kip didn’t need a clock to count out the six-minute-and-thirty-seven-second interval they were using today. Ferkudi counted it in his head. All the time. Without apparent distraction or even effort.
Sometimes Kip wanted to kiss the big dope.
He threw up a superviolet flare in the predawn gloom.
For a long time, nothing seemed to happen. Then Kip saw the answering superviolet flare. The night mares were in place in the woods.
“Time,” Ferkudi said.
Around him, Kip saw men and women silently making the sign of the seven, preparing their immortal souls and hoping they wouldn’t find out if they had immortal souls today. Here we go.
Kip gestured, and they released the fire birds. It had taken the will-casters and pyroturges a long time to figure out how to set birds on fire without actually burning them. But the Ghosts absolutely refused to intentionally harm the animals they partnered with. It was war, harm happened, but they did absolutely everything they could to avoid it. The fire birds went up in a broad fan in front of Kip and his lines, perfectly spaced. Their charges burnt for ten seconds, and then winked out.
Before they were all gone, four thousand throats roared, and fires went up all along Kip’s lines. Narrow trenches filled with pyrejelly had been cut between each of the widely spaced lines and they lit with a satisfying whoosh in long deep streaks as if a dragon had clawed the forest itself with talons of fire.
Then each man and woman dipped their torches—two for each—into the flames. Eight thousand torches to make it look as if they had eight thousand soldiers, for Kip had ordered that even the camp followers should march behind the army to appear to be part of it. Everyone could carry a couple of torches.
The Blood Robes’ officers would know the numbers were wrong, were impossible—but the men would see those supposedly impossible numbers with their own eyes.