The Black Wall

1. The Invasion: Six Months Before the Verdict-1

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THE INVASION: SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE VERDICT

Bodies lay strewn, pale against the rich brown ground. Blood muddied the soil between the trunks of massive trees, churned until its hue matched the broad, fern-like leaves grasping the sky. Long-beaked scavenger birds, red breasted with gleaming black wings, hunched in the lower branches, silent and waiting. I watched Cardinal Vimr lean down to pluck one of the long, black, wooden daggers from the hand of a corpse, the plates of his elaborate, ill-fitting leather armor sliding against each other like a film of cracked wax floating on water.

The karakh shifted beneath me. I wondered if the creature found the corpse-littered glade as terrible as I did, or if it just shared my hatred of the Cardinal. Or its attitude to our situation was as alien as its form, and its thoughts unknowable to anyone but its human companion.

Gre’pa, or as close to that as I could pronounce, was shaggy white with grey streaks, and over twenty hands tall at the shoulder. Dakar had unsheathed its tusks when we arrived in the valley. They were studded with bronze bolts, sharpened edges now dripping with gore. The shepherd sat motionless in front of me on the karakh’s shoulders, and the back of his head revealed nothing about what the chieftain’s husband was thinking.

I pulled my thoughts from the monstrous scavenger and forced them back to the clearing. Corpses of my soldiers. How many of them had been added this time to the ranks that would never return home from this wretched mission? How many of their lives had I spent? I tried to feel something; tried to recall my horror and shame at the first loss of life we’d suffered on this mad journey when the burning wreckage of the Salamander sank into the Sea of N’narad. But my grief since then had been replaced with a void, and now, even when recalling the Salamander, I could feel nothing.

“General Mann.” The low sound of Vimr’s voice made the hair on my arms stand on end, but I kept my expression even when I turned to face the Arch Bishop’s adviser harnessed behind me on Gre’pa’s back.

“What is it, Vimr?” I spat the words more than I’d intended.

Vimr cast a meaningful look at the bloody meadow. “I maintain that this requires a purge.” Vimr’s voice was smooth.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing the answer but needing Vimr to say it. Needed him to say it, so it would not be my responsibility. To tell myself that I was only following orders. I felt sick.

Vimr sighed, reading my thoughts on my face. “g******e is an ugly term, and shouldn’t apply to these constructs. Nevertheless, as I have said on more than one occasion, our passage the rest of the way through this valley will only be achieved with the extermination of the guardians.”

I looked again at the scattering of bodies that weren’t my soldiers. The karakh had mangled most into bloody strips and bone. Still, I could see enough. Shorter on average than those from outside the Black Wall, clad in soft, dark leather. Both men and women. Weapons of strange, black wood, harder than iron or ceramic. “They seem human enough to me.”

Vimr shrugged. “Regardless, the histories are consistent. Whatever guardians the Ancients left in this valley were created by them. Produced, not born. Not, at least, in any normal sense of the term.”

I felt my jaw clench, but I was facing away from Vimr, and I doubt he noticed. “I will not condone the annihilation of a people who are only defending their land. Whatever your ‘histories’ tell you.”

Vimr sighed. “They are not my histories. They are, as you well know, the records of the Church—of Heaven itself. Anyway, General, I’ve broached the subject with the remainder of your men. They all agree that their survival and the completion of our mission surpasses any cultural needs. We—you—lead a quest passed from Heaven itself, and the locals, whether machines or men, are killing themselves in their attempt to stop you. The only difference between staying the course and bringing the fight to them is how many more of your own people you lose.”

The remainder of your men. The words echoed in my head, drowning out the rest of Vimr’s tirade, threatening my numbness with the only thing that would be worse: regret. Memories flooded back.

The descent into the valley strapped to the back of Gre’pa had been only a little less terrifying for me than it had been for the five hundred soldiers I’d chosen to come with, rappelling over six hundred hands to the jagged, black scree that ran to the edge of the forest. Maybe. To be fair, I’ve never been a fan of high places. At least the soldiers had had ropes. The eleven karakh had plunged from the grotto head first, creeping down the obsidian cliff like spiders, their massive claws gripping the cracked, black glass.

And yet the other half, who stayed in the grotto, like the thousand still waiting in the foothills of the Black Wall, had complained at being left behind. Good men. Better than me. Better than I deserved.

The first attack came while we camped at the base of the cliff that first night, whipped by wind blowing up from the south. They flooded out of the darkness like demons, slaughtering a quarter of us before vanishing among the trunks of the enormous, blood-hued trees. The canopy was so thick that even the great lens of the gibbous Eye couldn’t penetrate it enough for any organized pursuit. If not for the eleven karakh, we all would have died then.

I wondered at the time—still wonder now—if those in the tunnel, so disappointed at being left behind, felt the same way as they watched our burning tents far below them and listened to the distant screams. Probably, they’d only grown more bitter as they’d looked on, helpless. In all the months since that first night, I was too much a coward to ask them.

For five days, we pushed south, circumventing the few settlements we’d found, over Vimr’s protests. The villages had, at least from a distance, seemed abandoned in any case. I argued that we’d only come for the contents of a library, not to exterminate the hapless guardians who had been imprisoned in that valley since the Age of Ashes. My soldiers, for their part, followed me into the valley because they were faithful. Destined to a better Heaven should they be lucky enough to give their lives in service to the Church of N’narad.

Now more than half of them lay in a trail of corpses from the grotto to the glade where we now stood.

I studied the faces of the survivors, scattered around the edge of the clearing, standing or crouching. That meadow had become sacred. Even the karakh were reluctant to enter. Hard, tired eyes. Leather armor, some of it hanging in tatters, all now spattered with blood, their own or someone else’s.

Vimr was right about one thing: These soldiers no longer served me. They no longer even served the promise of Heaven. They only wanted to survive long enough to go home.

I ground my teeth and turned, craning my neck until I could look Vimr in the eye. “I will not allow my army to commit g******e,” I whispered. Then I spat. “But it is obvious that this army is no longer mine.”

“Was it ever, General?”

I didn’t have an answer, and Dakar, if he’d heard the exchange, didn’t react.

We continued south. The terrain became rocky and uneven, but there was still no end to the massive, red trees. Twice in two days, we came across large, square patches of thin-leafed brambles covered in barbed, finger-long, thorns and tiny white flowers. The blackvine, you called it. Not even the karakh could find a path through them, and we were forced to make our way around. Both times we stumbled upon villages of small, obsidian buildings, their roofs thatched with the broad, dried leaves of the trees. Well maintained. Abandoned. Vimr ordered the buildings doused in naphtha, and their roofs burned. I watched, silent and ashamed.

The sun set early behind the western Black Wall, plunging the valley into a twilight that would last for hours. I called for a halt, anxious to finish setting up camp before the wind that had raged every night made such a task impossible. I half-expected my order to be overridden by Vimr, but the squat man only nodded like a sage from his perch behind me on the shoulders of Gre’pa.

It took two hours to set up the tents and a few hasty pickets on the uneven, root-knotted ground, but twilight still seeped, speckling the haggard remnants of my soldiers in blood-hued shadows.

I walked among my men, though in truth, it was only to get away from Vimr; there was no need for orders. From somewhere nearby but out of sight, I could hear his voice chattering and laughing with a few officers.

No, no orders were necessary. Not from me.

They set up my tent first, despite my objections, and I wandered back to sit alone at the end of my cot, listening to the sounds of my army through the canvas walls.

I wouldn’t have realized I’d fallen asleep if it weren’t for the scream that woke me.

An orange light flickered through the heavy cloth of my tent. Fire, I remember thinking, groggy through half-remembered dreams. The scream was sustained, inhuman, shrill. It pierced the air from every side. The tent shuddered and flapped. Wind, I realized. The screaming was the sound of the wind.

I bolted upright, and my right hip creaked in protest, reminding me I was too old for this. For all of it.

I staggered to the flap, which had become untied, now snapping in the burning gale. I forced myself to stand straight and gave my right leg one final shake, as if that would help.

Heat roiled from the south, and smoke churned between the tents on violent, stray currents. Above the scream of wind skittered other sounds—soldiers yelling in confusion, uprooted tents snapping where they fluttered, ensnared in trees, the creak and snap branches, the panicked whistles and clicks of the karakh. A black and gold Sun-and-Eye pennant of Tyrsh tumbled past, writhing like some mad spirit.

The smoke burned my eyes. A few soldiers ran this way and that between the tents, or knelt by fallen comrades. I hesitated, feeling lost, before making my way to the west side of the camp. Most of my soldiers had already moved to the perimeter to man the pickets, despite the lack of orders and the flames.

Captain Rohm was there, crouched in a shallow trench. He glanced at me and nodded a greeting as I limped down to hunker at his side, trying and failing to suppress a wince as pain growled from my hip.

“They’re trying to drive off the karakh with fire.” Rohm had to yell over the din. “Or just kill us.”

I grimaced, remembering the Salamander. “Guess they’ve never seen a karakh before.”

Rohm shook his head, but before he could respond, the wind surged. A wall of heat rolled over us. The livid glow to the south became a liquid avalanche of flame stampeding through a tunnel of air clear of smoke, leaping from tree to tree, devouring the whipping red leaves like locusts.

I coughed and grasped at my chest, unable to catch my breath in the boiling fumes. The air shimmered and writhed like water. Through the sheet of darkness collapsing over me, I could see Rohm on his knees, clawing at the ground.

I guess this is how it will end for us. The thought was calm. I could feel the oxygen-starved air singe my lips and tear at my lungs, smell burning hair, but it was far away. I sucked in another desperate, pointless breath.

My last breath, I thought, with a vague sense of disappointment.

A shadow passed across the wall of light. Huge eyes of gold, pupils shrunk to tiny black marbles against the glow of fire. Massive tusks bolted with bronze curved up from a flat, dog-like nose, which in turn jutted from the white face of some immense, demonic goat.