Chapter 12: The Fourth Spear

Had there been another moment of the gloating of the Ortheri Cowr, someone would surely have hurled himself at the smirking vizier, even at the cost of being skewered on the spear of one of the guards that attended him. Qemik was already being pressed against the wall by two warriors in full armor; Oyana, Kargöz, and even Ulgî were bristling with each contempt-laced word.

So perhaps it was fortunate that, at that moment, one wall of the tower suddenly crashed apart, sand flying every which way. A huge ballista bolt, almost as wide as a tree trunk, tipped with an iron anchor, had burst into the room and now lay across the floor; all around it, what seemed at first like ragged bricks began to unravel, sand dissipating into the air. Shattered pieces of window glass lay jaggedly all around.

One wall of the tower was now a gaping, ragged hole, which Yîgeke turned to stare out, brushing sand, dust, and splinters of glass off herself. There, in the distance, perched atop the fortification wall that ringed the town, was a ballista, pointed this way. "How?" she began. Then, "Why?" Indeed, why would anyone fire a ballista at a tower inside the town, let alone this very room? The coincidence of it was simply beyond belief.

Behind her, Kumzu and Kargöz were checking on their comrades. They'd all added a few more bruises, cuts, and other injuries to those they'd been accumulating since they'd seen the white-furred aurochs – was that only the day before? – but none were seriously hurt. Neither were most of the guards; a few had broken limbs, but Kumzu didn't see any who might perish. And the Ortheri Cowr must have been well enough to flee; even now, the door was swinging ajar, a cowled figure disappearing down the stairs.

The flame that shrouded the tip of the ballista bolt leaped to the desk. Books and parchment scrolls of incalculable age and value began to burn, while most of those present stared in bewilderment at one another.

And at last, the guards that weren't pinned or badly injured regained their wits and began to move into position, blocking the exit and preparing to corner the slaves. Thinking quickly, Qemik snatched up a spear that one of the injured guards had dropped, and brandished it, slowing the advance. Oyana and Kargöz followed suit, while Ulgî chose a large, jagged block of wood broken from the now-burning desk. While this kept the guards at bay for now, there was nowhere for them to go. The only door was behind the guards; behind them was nothing but the wall, with its ragged hole. Which, Yîgeke noted with astonishment, was starting to slowly close, like a healing wound. The ever-moving sand within the walls extended out a little farther into the gap with each moment, held in, presumably, by the winds that shaped the wall. In a few minutes, it would be closed.

She was peering out the gap and down, so far, so very very far, to the ground below, when Kumzu pushed into her hands one of the huge silk sheets. "Here, hold the corners," she was saying. Yîgeke only stared blankly at her. "We have to jump," Kumzu was saying. "Hold the corners out, like this, and the sheet will catch the air, like a bird's wings." She was frantically passing sheets to the others as well.

When Yîgeke finally swallowed and leaped from the mending gap in the tower wall, she found herself, as she fell, marveling at the impossibility of it all. Not just that she was now falling from a tower, hoping a sheet would buoy her up and break the fall. Not that she had somehow agreed to Kumzu's insane plan. Nor even that a moment earlier, a ballista had broken open the tower and thus, somehow, freed them. No, it went all the way back to that day when someone had seen markings on a horse-hide. If there was an age of wonders, a time when fate shaped the lives of men, she was sure she belonged nowhere near it. Somewhere far to the west, where fully half of the Ortheri warriors were meeting with those of dozens of other tribes to assault the Westerlings, that was where fate's hand might be changing the face of Middle-earth, shifting the powers that ruled the world, fulfilling ancient oaths and ending rivalries of past ages in the clash of blood and steel.

But not here, in the life of an unimportant slave of no particular ability, strength, or courage.

A slave of no courage who had just leapt from a broken tower to fall, or fly, with nothing more than a silk sheet to save her.

Above and behind her, also suspended in the air by nothing but a silk sheet, Kumzu was urging her friends to do the same. The ground was coming up quickly, but not so quickly that Yîgeke didn't have a chance to sway, buoyed up by breezes, and glide towards a boulevard some distance from the tower. As she was nearing the ground, she saw, lining the avenues, people staring up at her and her companions. What a sight they must make, she thought. Some of the people had olive skin and green eyes, like her; they had paused in carrying out their master's work to gape at the bizarre sight.

Slowly, an idea was trying to form in her mind, but the roaring of the wind, and the buffeting of the sheet above her, made it impossible for her to grasp it.

Nearer the ground, the updraft from sun-baked sand streets was stronger. At the moment she leaped, she imagined it would take mere moments to reach the ground, and indeed she'd covered half the altitude in only a dozen heartbeats, but now she was coasting on nothing but air over the top of a warehouse and making to land in a plaza nearly far enough from the tower to be out of bowshot.

"The Fourth Spear!" cried Qemik somewhere above her. "We are the birds!"

That was it. That was the idea that had been eluding her. She could see Haehînbór on the ground reaching the same conclusion, pointing, gasping, exclaiming. The Fourth Spear shall fly, cast by a mighty bow, to shatter glass and set loose a flock of white birds across the sky of Caras Lithgweth. It had never been never the aviary.

The sheer absurdity of it sickened her. Or perhaps that was how quickly the ground was coming up now. She hit the cobblestones of a wide plaza, tumbled, and came up short with her back against a well, the silk sheet fluttering loose from her hands and then being carried across the courtyard by an urgent breeze.

No, she thought, this is too much. I am not a white bird. My friends are not a flock. Fate cannot play such jokes on me. I refuse to be part of such things. The stones reached up and pulled her down into the darkness.

Even when she was jostled awake, being carried on Ulgî's shoulders as her friends made a rag-tag run across the town, she felt as if she couldn't breathe and listen to them at the same time. They were talking about the idea that, while the prophecy was deliberately invented, perhaps fate had caused it to be invented, had tricked the first Ortheri Cowr into being an unwilling prophet. Or perhaps fate was now intervening to turn the falsehood into truth. Qemik was enthusiastic about these ideas, and as always, Kargöz had to take the opposite view, insisting that some person or group was deliberately causing the signs to happen, for uncertain reasons. The very idea that such a question had to be asked nearly caused Yîgeke to slip into the darkness once more.

Ortheri warriors were mobilizing to search for them, but it was a vast city, and there were many Haehînbór, and they had a considerable head start. Once while they were hiding amongst a crowd of their fellow slaves for some guards to pass, Qemik began to argue in whispered tones that they had to go, once they escaped the city, to the monument to the Ortheri Rhîs to make sure that the Fifth Spear was not prevented.

Yîgeke heard someone agree with him. "Yes. It is time. Whatever fate intends, we cannot let the Ortheri turn us into our own captors any more. We cannot let them use hope against us any longer."

What surprised her the most, and everyone else, was that the voice was hers.