Chapter 190: No Other Way

There was a flicker in the flow of light.

Malik stopped with Spine Splitter half raised and looked back over his shoulder.

The great circle at the center of the square, burning silver a moment ago, had dimmed to a sick, thin green.

Beside it, one of the gray-robed Arcanists had folded to the ground with both hands still pressed to the lines; the man next to her had reached out to cover the gap only to go down as well.

Many thousands of civilians stood frozen on the rim of a door that was closing.

Malik looked at the ridge, and at the pale ranks gathering beyond it, making the sum in the time it took to breathe.

An army could wait.

These people could not.

Devil’s Footsteps lit under his boots and the plain slid away behind him in a long scorched streak.

Two drop-pods came down across his path, and he went through the soldiers pouring out of them without breaking stride.

One pass of the blade, one gold sweep of fire, and what had been two companies lay in the furrows behind him.

He did not turn to watch them fall.

Malik reached the rim of the circle, slid to a stop in a spray of dust, and dropped to one knee beside the young Arcanist who lay with her eyes rolled back.

He caught her wrist with one hand and laid the other flat against the nearest silver line.

His Rukh poured in.

It had never been a question of whether he had enough.

The question was how fast the circle could swallow it, and the lines drank greedily, flaring brighter with every heartbeat.

The green faded to blue, then to white, then to a blinding silver that threw the shadows of the waiting crowd across the broken stones.

The hundreds on the rim stepped forward into the light and were gone in a single clean flash, and the next came after them without being told.

That was when the girl stirred.

Her eyelids fluttered, and she looked up at him with unfocused eyes.

"Sultan?"

"You fainted."

Malik did not take his hand from the line.

"It happens to everyone who carries a circle this long, and I am not angry about it. But there are people on the other side of that light who need you awake, and a great many more on this side who are counting on you to stay that way. Get up when you can, and finish what you started. I will keep it lit until you do."

A flush rose into her cheeks.

She scrambled upright, planted both palms beside his, and glared at the lines as though they had insulted her family.

"Yes, Sultan! I’m awake!"

"Good."

He rose, and an older Arcanist with ink-stained fingers caught at his sleeve.

The man’s robes were soaked with sweat, and he looked as though he had not stopped moving in two days.

"Sultan, forgive the interruption. There is news from the West that I thought you would want."

Malik nodded at him to continue.

"The silver and blue banners are leading the people through the passes. The Empress has opened the old roads, and every city in Parsa is emptying along the northern routes in good order."

He swallowed.

"Her messengers reached us an hour ago. She asked that we tell you, and I give you her words as she gave them to me. Tell my husband that I have kept my half of the bargain."

Malik’s brows lifted.

He had not expected that, and he had not expected the warmth that came up in him with it.

She had been pulling a whole country out of the path of the Order while he stood in a field cutting down its soldiers, and she had stopped, in the middle of that, to send him a message about a promise.

"She is a woman who keeps her word."

Malik smiled softly.

"Please tell her, if you are able, that I noticed."

Behind him, someone coughed into a fist.

Hakim had come up from the corridor, with his burned sleeves flapping and a smear of soot across his forehead.

He had the careful, innocent face of a man trying very hard not to have heard something.

"Husband? You really accepted her demands?"

"Are you surprised that I keep my promises?"

"...touche. But aside from my severe shortcomings, I’m only a father who has recently learned that he has a daughter-in-law he was not sure about, and who would like to be told, at some convenient point, whether there are plans for any others."

"There may be a few more conversations ahead of you than you expect."

"I will make myself comfortable, then."

"Not too much, we are at war."

Hakim looked as though he would say more, only to then look at his son’s face and let it go, knowing when to leave a subject alone.

"All corridors are holding. The families are through, and the others are moving. I only wanted you to know."

Malik nodded, and he found, a little to his surprise, that he was grateful for the interruption.

The hours that followed ran together.

He stayed near the circles, because a man who left them unguarded for long would come back to a field of bodies, and he went out from them in sweeps whenever the pressure grew too heavy at the edges.

Each time was the same.

A drift of drop-pods would fall too near the road, or a column of war-beasts would break through the northern flank, and he would go out in a streak of gold and come back with the field behind him empty.

A wall of wind.

A ring of black fire.

A seam in the earth a half mile long that closed over a regiment of spearmen still in their ranks.

All that death, its weight...

It never once had him pause.

His hands knew the work, and his mind was elsewhere, counting the line of living people as it moved north through the dust.

By the second hour, the square had thinned.

The circles still burned, but the lines feeding them had shortened from an ocean to a river to a stream.

A few thousand people remained on the road, and then a few hundred.

Malik climbed onto a broken cart and watched the last of them pass through the corridor of rope.

For exactly one breath, he allowed himself to feel something close to relief.

Then, all of a sudden, Zayna came up beside the cart, and he saw the girl’s face.

She was bleeding from a cut above her left eyebrow, and she had not wiped it away.

Her armor had been split in three places and tied together with strips of cloth.

Few of the Guard of the Fifth stood behind her in a tight block.

Malik counted them and wished he had not.

"My Sultan."

"Tell me."

"The main fleet has finished landing."

Zayna’s voice was somehow still level.

"They are a few thousand miles out and are advancing in order. My cohort has watched them for the last quarter hour, and they are not hurrying. The ranks you broke this morning have been replaced from behind, and the replacements are larger. The circles in this region will hold for another quarter hour at best, and after that the lines will burn through. There are perhaps a few hundred thousand still on the roads. They are slower than the circles can carry, and slower than the enemy can march."

Malik looked towards the horizon.

Past the farmland and the ruined harvest, a dark ridge had formed where the land met the sky.

It was made of figures, thousands upon thousands of them, marching in measured ranks beneath a forest of banners.

The ground shook with each step.

Above them, the black ceiling of ships hung so low that he could see the seams between the plates, and the two Suns had gone from gold and white to the color of dull coins.

He had cut a hole in that army that morning.

He could see where it had been, a long pale gap in the formation.

It had closed already.

"Then you move them."

"Sultan?"

"You take every cart, every mule, and every pair of legs in this region, and you send them north in one convoy towards the next line of circles. The ones who cannot walk go on the carts. The ones who can walk carry the ones who cannot, and nobody is left behind on those roads for any reason that can be avoided."

He turned his golden eyes on her, and let his voice soften a little.

"And the Guard stays behind them. I know what I am asking, Zayna. I would not ask it if there were another way."

Zayna bowed her head.

When she lifted it, the blood had run into her eyebrow, and she blinked it away.

"There is no other way I would choose to serve you, my Sultan."

"Hakim."

His father stepped forward from the edge of the cart.

The fire in his palms had burned low, lacking Rukh.

"I want you at the rear of this moving region, behind the Faraja. If anything gets close, burn it, and if it keeps coming, burn it again. You are the best man I have for that, and I trust you to know when to stop."

"And you?"

Hakim asked that without pause.

"Hm."

Malik looked at the dark ridge, and at the shadow of the ships, and at the long, slow line of people already beginning to move north beneath a sky with no Sun in it.

He could hear their feet on the road, many, many thousands of them.

"I will hold the middle."

That was the plan.

No other way.