“A trap,” she said raggedly. “Don’t go in. Don’t show them your back.”
She dragged Noé aside. “We need to get to the barracks. The other Sands—”
He nodded, his narrow face solemn in the dark. He turned to go, but before she even let go of his shirt—the hooded shirts the Qazāli wore, not the standard-issue conscript coat—they paused at an all-too-familiar sound.
Balladairan marching drums, keeping a sharp cadence.
“The alarm,” Noé said, maybe in denial. He tried to shrug her off and see to his mission, but Touraine held fast.
She shook her head. “Alarm’s been set off.” It had been for ages, though the attack couldn’t have been on longer than ten, fifteen minutes even. This sounded too far away, from the south. “The Balladairan reinforcements are here.”
Sky-falling fuck.
Noé’s eyes widened.
“Come on,” Touraine said. Noé turned tail and sprinted to the southernmost barracks in the southeastern corner, quiet as a fox in a den of gunfire and death screams, and Touraine bolted for its neighbor. Freeing the Sands was their only hope of getting out of this compound alive.
She sent another rebel after Noé and took a second to assess the rest of their little company. Jaghotai raising a holy devastation through the west of the compound. There was no sign of Djasha and the prisoners.
Touraine took out the only Balladairan in front of her barracks building before he could level his musket and fix his aim. Blood gurgled from his belly and across his eyes as he screamed. Touraine hadn’t quite gotten the hang of using the long knife instead of her baton, and it showed. She got the important parts, though: poke them hard, hit with the sharp side, and be fast.
But when she opened the door to the barracks, there was no one there. Just rows and rows of empty double bunks. At a loss, she stepped in farther, even going so far as to kneel and scan under the beds. The room was dark enough to hide in, but it was quiet as death.
Outside was another case. She listened and watched as Sands and rebels died. She had planned for this. She’d looked as many moves ahead as she could, and she was exploiting every piece, every weapon she had.
The jail was across from her, on the other side of the packed dirt road from the empty barracks. She didn’t know how many of the rescue squad had managed to get into the jail, but as she watched, prisoners burst from the door, Sa?d at the fore with an injured arm, dragging one woman on his good shoulder.
It wasn’t Aranen or Djasha.
A sound like a sudden rainstorm made Touraine duck low. A shadow passed over the sky. A massive flock of seagulls blotted out the stars, flying toward the eastern wall. Toward Shāl’s Road, where the Balladairan reinforcements were coming from. Beneath the flapping of their wings, other sounds got sharper: gunshots farther away, outside the walls, and the yelp and snarl and bark of hyenas. The roar of a lioness.
Touraine let herself smile.
In a kinder world, she could wait for the Many-Legged to break through. Or she could look for Luca, ask her one last time to stop this. There was no time for either.
She skirted the chaos of her rebels meeting musket balls to her left, their knives and batons against Balladairan bayonets. To her right, empty training fields, the practice dummies like leering enemies in the dark. In the noise of the night, she was one lone and silent shadow slipping easily across the street and into the jail.
The jailer was dead, clearly the first casualty inside. He’d been taken with expert knife work: a stab through the ribs followed by a slice across the throat to leave him sprawled across the short entry corridor. His blood was already sticky under Touraine’s boots.
Along with blood, the place smelled like sickness. Not the clean, disciplined Balladairan prison smell she had taken for granted. Her stomach turned, and she thought about running the other way, back under the sky, but even the open air wasn’t safe today. She didn’t let herself think long on how many Sands weren’t immune to the death pox.
“Aranen!” Touraine called. “Aranen, are you here?”
She grabbed the jailer’s lamp and held it high enough to illuminate the sandstone cells as she turned into the jail’s main corridor. Their metal gates were flung open like welcoming arms. The Sands weren’t here, either. She passed cell after cell, afraid each time she looked that she would find the dead bodies of people she knew.
Where are you, you witch? Where are you, Pru?
Touraine spun around at the heavy rush of boots at the entrance. The clink and clatter of belts and muskets. A hoarse voice swearing in Balladairan, saying, “Clear it. Anyone not in a cell dies.”