I urge the Scholars on and stop to warn any others I see, asking them to pass on the message. By the time I reach the Foreign District, I see hundreds of Scholars streaming toward the embassy.
A fight spills into the streets in front of me. A group of Martial auxes battles a much larger force of Karkauns. Though the Barbarian steel breaks on the auxes’ scims, the Martials are hard-pressed, overwhelmed by sheer numbers. If this is happening all over the city, then the Barbarians will be in control of Antium by nightfall.
I skirt around the battle, and when I get to the embassy, Scholars spill out the doors. Cook’s grumpy, raspy voice is instantly recognizable as she orders everyone down the steps and into the tunnels.
“About bleeding time!” Cook says when she sees me. “Get down there. A few of these slaves know the way out. Follow—” Cook sees my face and groans when she realizes that I have no plans to leave—at least not until everyone is through.
Even as she speaks, more Scholars arrive. I see Martials now too, most of whom are Plebeians, judging by their clothing. They are drawn by the crowd, assuming rightly that there is a reason so many Scholars flock here.
“Bleeding hells, girl,” Cook says. “Do you see what you’ve done?”
I gesture the Martials in. “I’m not going to tell a mother with a crying child she can’t escape through here,” I snap. “I don’t care if she’s Martial or not. Are you?”
“Damn you, girl,” Cook snarls. “You’re just like your f-f-f-fath—” She presses her mouth closed and turns away in frustration. “Move, you bleeding sloths!” She unleashes her wrath on the Scholars closest to her. “There are hundreds behind you who want to live as badly as you do!”
Urged on by Cook’s threats, the Scholars slowly make their way through the tunnels, and the embassy begins to empty—but not swiftly enough. The Karkauns are closing in, pouring through the streets. The Martials are overcome.
As I watch, I see an aux squad go down, blood and viscera spraying the air red. And despite the fact that I know the Empire’s evils firsthand, my eyes grow hot. I will never understand the savagery of war, even when it is my foes being destroyed.
“Time to go, girl.” Cook appears at my shoulder and shoves me down the steps to the cellar. I do not protest. No doubt there are Scholars still left in the city. But I have done what I can.
“Help me with this.” She bars the cellar door, her hands steady. Above, glass breaks, followed by the harsh barks of the Karkauns.
Cook fiddles with something in the door, eventually pulling out what looks like a very long candle wick. Moments later, it is sparking.
“Take cover!” We run to the door that leads to the tunnel, pulling it shut just as the ground begins shuddering. The tunnels groan, and for long moments, I worry that stones above us will collapse. But when the dust clears, the passageway has held, and I turn to Cook.
“Explosives? How?”
“The Mariners had a stockpile,” Cook says. “Musa’s little friends showed me. Well, girl, that’s it. Tunnel’s sealed. Now what?”
“Now,” I say, “we get the hells out of this city.”
LV: The Blood Shrike
The Karkauns flood Antium, breaching gate after gate, the screams of their warriors chilling me to my core. Their ghost-possessed fighters are gone, thanks, perhaps, to Elias.
But the damage is done. They have decimated our forces. Marcus was right. The Empire’s capital is lost.
My rage is a pure, glowing flame that drives me to tear through any Karkaun I see. And when, in the distance, I spot a familiar blonde figure making her way through the city with a handful of soldiers at her back, my anger burns white-hot.
“You treacherous bitch!”
She stops when she hears me but takes her sweet time turning around.
“How could you?” My voice breaks. “Your own people? Just for the throne? What is the point of being Empress if you have no love for those you rule? If you have no one to rule over?”
“Empress?” She cocks her head. “To be Empress is the least of my desires, girl. Why stop at Empress? Why, when the Nightbringer would offer me dominion over the Tribes, the Scholars, the Mariners, the Karkauns—over all the world of man?”
No—oh bleeding hells, no.
I lunge for her then, because I have nothing to lose now, no Paters to placate, no orders to follow, just a bolt of wrath that possesses me like a demon spirit.
She steps easily to the side, and in moments her men, all Masks, have me pinned. A knife gleams in her hand, and she runs it lightly down my face, tracing my forehead, my cheeks.
“I wonder if it will hurt,” she murmurs.
Then she turns around, leaps onto her mount, and rides away. Her men hold me until she is long gone, before casting me to the side of a road like offal.
I do not chase them. I do not even look at them. The Commandant could have killed me. Instead she left me alive. Skies only know why, but I will not waste this chance. I listen to the drums, and soon enough I am racing toward the men of the Black Guard who still live, along with a few hundred soldiers, as they hold off a wave of attackers from a square in a Mercator district. I search the faces for Dex, hoping to the skies that he’s still alive, and nearly crush his ribs when he finds me.
“Where the bleeding hells are our men, Dex?” I shout over the cacophony. “This can’t be all that’s left!”
Dex shakes his head, bleeding from a dozen wounds. “This is it.”
“The evacuation?”
“Thousands make their way through the Augurs’ caves. Thousands more are still in the tunnels. The entrances have been collapsed. Those who could get through—”
I hold up a hand. The drum tower closest to us thuds out a message. It is almost lost amid all the noise, but I just make out the end of it: Karkaun force approaching Pilgrim’s Gap.
“Harper has our people coming out just beyond the Gap,” I say. Livia, my mind screams at me. The baby! “The Karkauns must have scouts up there. If those bastards get through the Gap, they’ll slaughter everyone Harper has evacuated.”
“Why follow us?” Dex says. “Why, when they know they have the city?”
“Because Grímarr knows we won’t let him keep Antium,” I say. “And he wants to make damn sure that while his men have the advantage, they kill as many of us as possible so we can’t fight them later.” I know what I must say, and I make myself say it.
“The city is lost. It belongs to Grímarr now.” Skies help the poor souls who remain here under that fiend. I will not forget them. But right now, I cannot save them—not if I want to save those who do have a chance at escape. “Get out this order: Every soldier we have is to report to the Gap immediately. That is our last stand. If we stop them, that is where we will do it.”
* * *
By the time Dex, my men, and I reach the Gap, just beyond the northern border of the city, the Karkaun force is on the march, bent on crushing us.
As I watch them pour out of Antium’s northern gate and up the Pilgrim Road, I know that we will not win this battle. I have with me no more than a thousand men. The enemy has more than ten thousand—and thousands more they can call from the city, if they must. Even with our superior blades, we cannot beat them.
Pilgrim’s Gap is a ten-foot-wide opening between two sheer cliffs that sit atop a wide valley. The Pilgrim Road curves across the valley, through the Gap and toward the Augurs’ caves.
I glance back over my shoulder, away from the Karkauns. I had hoped when I arrived that the Pilgrim Road would be empty, that the evacuees would have gotten through. But there are hundreds of Martials—and Scholars, I notice—on the road and hundreds more emerging from the tunnel entrances to make their way up to the Augurs’ caves.
“Get a message to Harper,” I tell Dex. “Take it yourself. White smoke when the last person is through. Then he’s to collapse the entrance to the caves. He is not to wait, and neither are you.”
“Shrike—”