An Autumn War(135)

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 find them.

He reached the first ridge behind Machi just as a distant crashing sound came from the city, the violence muffled by distance and snowfall. The horse steamed beneath him. Riding this hard in this weather was begging for colic; the horse was nearly certain to die if he kept pressing it. And he was going to keep pressing it. If a horse was the only thing he killed before sunset, it would be a better day than he'd hoped.

Sinja reached the tunnel sometime after midday. Time was hard to judge. Silently, he walked down into the half-lit mouth of the tunnel and squatted, considering the dust-covered ground until his eyes had adapted to the darkness. It was dry. No one had passed through here since the snow had begun to fall. He stalked hack out, mounted, and turned his poor, suffering animal to the south again, trotting down the snow-obscured tracks, cutting hack and forth-west and east and west again-his eyes peering through the gray for Eustin and his men. It wasn't long before he found them-a dozen men set on patrol. There were eight patrols, they told him, and Eustin in the one that ranged nearest to the city. Sinja gave his sometime compatriots his thanks and went on to the south.

His gloves were soaked, the cold creeping into his knuckles, when he found Eustin. I3alasar's captain and ten of his men had stopped a beaten old cart pulled by a mule and driven by a young man with a long Northern face and a nervous expression. Eustin and four of the men had dismounted and were talking to the panicked-looking man. Sinja called out and Eustin hailed him and motioned him down with what appeared to be good enough will.

We're allies, Sinja told himself. We're Balasar Gice's men on the day of the general's greatest triumph.

He forced his numbed lips into a smile and let his horse pick its way gently downslope to where the soldiers and the unfortunate refugee waited.