Arc 13: Torch-light and Gate-shadow

“We've worked them into a frenzy.”

* Merigold Thresh

- - -

The sound the metal makes.

It's the loudest thing I've ever heard, louder than the bellow of the darkest storm, than the roar of the greatest fire, the howl of the fiercest gale. The closed gate bends in the middle, as if some great and unseen hand takes hold of it and pulls. Earth crumbles, stone breaks, and my legs are cut out from under me. I land hard on the cold and rocky ground. I don't feel it. I feel the ringing shriek that starts in my ears and lances inward. It pushes deep and spreads. Makes me shake. Makes vomit climb my throat. I have enough time to swallow it down before Clarke takes hold of my arm and pulls at me. She's saying something, I should think. I don't hear it. I hear bells ring and the pound of my own heart.

Nothing else. Nothing else. I press my dizzied head hard into dirt, harder still when it doesn't realize that I'm not falling or flying. Clarke pulls at me again, trying to lift me to my feet by her grip at my elbow alone. She fails because I am a long, dead-weight girl, on the ground where she belongs. Why would I move? I feel her give up, feel her grip soften and slide down to my hand. Her knees push into my back as she settles behind me. The icy blue of her working power washes against my tightly shut eyes.

For a heart's-beat of a moment, I think she means to heal me; to give back my hearing, when that sound took it away. She doesn't. There's a magi to reckon with, one proven a mortal threat to Juliana and everyone else trapped behind that bended gate. My shaking eases, the nausea recedes, but the pulsing throb in my head remains. It's enough to open my eyes.

Streams of frost curl from the leaking chalice formed by Clarke's upraised hand, her fingers bent into claws. There's fear and fury in her eyes, given glow by the pale star alight in the hollow of her throat. I follow her gaze to the churning, hungry earth that's swallowing the magi up. He claws at the ground, mouth open in screams I don't hear. He doesn't use his magic, not to save himself or strike back, and I don't know why. Juliana drives the heel of her boot into his temple, a snarl twisting her lips. He falls to the side and stays there, not dead but thoroughly dazed, and the earth buries him up to his neck. Clarke lets her hand fall, but her star shines still.

Why, I wonder? Isn't it over? For the first time since I opened them, I look beyond the ruined gate, I look beyond the down-struck magi and the woman who struck him down. The folk of the town were once a single thing, their edges softened and smoothed into each other. The sound broke them apart, rending their unity into splinters. A sluggish trickle of what can only be blood slides from my ear into the cold, hard dirt. Juliana pushes her back into a corner. It's not over.

Half in shadow, half in light, a single horse in panic becomes a thing of nightmare. A dozen of them? More? An accursed vision sent from the heart of the cruel moon. There can be no other reason for the visibility of a lashing hoof striking a man in the back, right where his head and neck meet. Clarke flinches, her whole body jerking with it. The sound must have been horrible to hear. It must be worse still to hear it happen again, and again, and again.

People start running. They start falling. They're shoved, tripped, or simply lose their balance. Merchants wearing their goods land next to parents carrying their children. Someone's thrown from the saddle, tumbling backwards off the horse and into the path of its kicking legs. All of them lay where they fell, crushed beneath the fleeing feet of everyone around them. All of them die where they fell, and it's only seconds before the dusty earth starts turning to bloody, sucking mud.

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One by one, the horses snap their tethers and break free into the growing quagmire. They're berserk, driven to a place beyond madness by the sound, by their terror, by the scent of blood in the air. Foam flies from their mouths as they snap fingers and snatch ears with their flattened teeth. They throw the weight of their bodies into jumps and slams. A fleeing woman is caught between a stallion's heaving bulk and the wall's unforgiving stone. It happens twice. She survives the first.

Juliana gathers who she can. It starts with a boy, his arm so badly broken the bone shows through his skin. Then a child, no older than Tals, handed to her by a desperate father before he's pulled away by the bloody tide. More follow, until there's too many for even her broad, powerful shoulders can protect. That's when the least of the injured start to step up. They stand beside her, make a wall of themselves. The boy is there, pale and sweating, puke on his clothes.

A thing of nightmare strikes them. Beneath the twitching, red-slick hide and white, rolling eyes is a coat of soft, pale tan. White fetlocks. The wall breaks, those behind it shrink and shy away from crushing, filth-crusted hooves. Juliana tries to save who she can. She grabs the people nearest her and presses them into the gate, then shoves her arms through the deformed gaps and locks her hands around her wrists. Plants her feet.

- - -

Clarke pukes, spattering my legs and mixing sour bile into the sodden air. Her star winks out. She lists to the side, catching her fall on an outstretched hand. Her ears are bleeding, trails of rust staining her skin. She wipes her mouth and spits out the rest. Her lips move, shaping the beginning of words that never finish. The fear and fury are gone from her. In their place is nothing; a stunned and shattered emptiness that leaves her staring at the ground. I lift my face from the ground and ignore the blood-dirt that covers it. I need my legs beneath me, working as they ought. I need to reach Juliana, to know that she's still alive.

Flint leans into a dazed, swaying run to the gate as I roll my knees beneath me. Dig the toe of my boots into the ground. Dizziness whirls and my heart throbs lancing pain in my ears, but I'm halfway there. Curl my hands around fistfuls of dirt. This is nothing. I push my knees up under my chin to plant my heels on the ground. Then I stand, slow and steady. I won't fall. I need to know.

Acid burns the back of my throat and my belly writhes, but I'm up. Hard part's done. Walking's easy, I should think. I've done it all my life. Lift this foot, put it down; lift that foot, put it down. Simple.

I'll keep doing it, I'll focus, until I'm there. I won't think about anything else: not about how still she is, or those people she saved wriggled free and left her, or how she buckled as it kept not being over. I won't think about how still she is now, hanging from the lock of her hands, because she's alive.

Lift this foot, put it down. Lift that foot, put it down.

Nothing else to think about, not until Flint reaches her. Then it's watching him reach through the gate, heedless of how the torn metal bites at him. It's him taking her helm in shaking hands and slowly, gently, lifting it from her head. Her crooked nose bleeds from a cut to it's lumpy bridge. She's bitten her tongue or the inside of her cheek, because she bleeds from her mouth, too.

A good sign, I should think. It means she's blood in her body and a beating heart to move it. A dead woman wouldn't have either of those things. She simply wouldn't, so Juliana's alive.

Flint tosses her helm away. I try to remember where it lands. He starts tapping her face and calling to her, begging her to wake up, to open her eyes. She doesn't, and it's impossible. I cannot believe it. I will not. She is alive, because her heart beats, because I need her to be. I stand beside him and touch her hands. Fruitlessly try to work my fingers between hers, give her something in the waking world to hold onto. I feel myself speaking, pleading with her.

She doesn't wake. She won't. I hate her for it. Flint goes on tapping, calling her ma'am and captain as if she's listening. She'd wake if she was. She'd open those narrow, blue-dark eyes and glare at us for being too close, too loud, and too familiar. Her skin is clammy beneath my fingers. I smear dirt across her cheek. Please. I think I'm whispering now. Just...wake up. Please.

Nothing. She doesn't stir. Flint tries to break the lock she made of her clasped wrists. I try to help him. We both fail. Even how she is, she is stronger. He starts to shout, to scream. Someone. Anyone.

Please.

All I can do is stare at her, at her crooked nose and huge forehead; at how she still looks like she's squinting.

Then I feel it: her breath. It's shallow and soft and I might have missed it. I did, before now. I grab Flint's shoulder and he whirls on me. He's tears in his eyes and outrage on his mouth. What excuse could I possibly have, what reason could make me interrupt him?! I take his hand. Put it where mine was.

It's not a lot. It's not even good. It's enough, I should think. It's enough.