mizpah (adj.) an emotional bond between people who are separated, physically or by death; a thing worn, as by lovers, to signify remembrance.
"The death of a beloved is an amputation," Suero had told him once. "No one will ever tell you that grief feels so much like fear."
He had never seen Kunegunda Kaasik fearful before. He saw it now. At first he thought that she had fallen, for she had dropped from the rooftops of the city as suddenly as a star shot from its place in the sky, and hit the ground with enough force to tear some of the cobbles from their place in the street. She stumbled – it was not a graceful landing, but a movement of dire, sickening desperation as she dived to cover a body on the ground with her own. She made it just in time, just as the cannon-fire brought an enormous concrete edifice crashing down in huge chunks. The building next to them had once been a quaint bakery; Kane had stepped inside only earlier in the day.
The tagma were retreating, beaten back by wave after successive wave of monsters. Rakel had screamed after Kunegunda, but the younger excubitor didn't seem to hear her; Kane waved with one sword that his lieutenant should continue leading the rest of the unit back to the wall, and then dived after Kaasik himself. The sinuous movement of hook and harness was second nature by now, as much a part of himself as his own fingers; it took no effort or time to land beside her. The whole city was shaking around them – a few blocks away, the street was rippling with the near-invisible motion of a druj beneath the surface. Overhead, the enormous stone druj blotted out the sun, casting an enormous shadow across the whole of the district that doused them in cold and shadow.
He didn't even bother to speak to her, only knelt, and put an arm around her waist, and hauled her back. She fought him, like something feral, so much stronger than he had realised she was, ripping her limbs from his gloved grip and twisting in his grasp to reach for the body of her friend. There was a patch of blood spreading slowly across the coat she had thrown over his torso, where she had tried to apply pressure and to stem the hemmorhage of the weeping wound in his chest, the enormous patch of open flesh which bared rib and lung. Her efforts were valiant, but in vain: only a few inches further up on his body, Ghjuseppu Mannazzu's skull had been split open entirely, red viscera spilling from a broken eye socket and what had once been a cheek.
Druj rarely slaughtered neatly. He had seen this over and again; it still jarred, slightly, to see a human being so quickly reduced to meat and carcass.
Over them, the golem loomed. With every step the enormous stone druj took, the universe leapt around them, like a juddering heartbeat. Dust rose in clouds; windows rattled in their frames like broken teeth. "He's dead." He pulled her back again. "There's nothing we can do." She was all sinew and scar and silent shriek; for a moment, he thought she would fight again, throw herself against his grip and writhe, but then she went still, and for a moment hung hollow in his arms, staring at her friend like she was seeing him for the first time. His face was unrecognisable as a face, all ripped skin and shattered bone; Kane should have told her not to stare so, if she wanted to remember Ghjuseppu as anything but.
There was no time for that now. The golem towered overhead, implaceable and enormous, like a walking extension of Wall Szymanska. It had trunk-like limbs, each one as broad as the gable of a house, and it stooped now, stooped and reached for them, marble fingers uncurling as long and thick as a human being. At another time, Kane might have been fascinated – how human a druj could look on occasion, despite its utter and innate inhumanity. It was in the flexing movement of its hands, the painful sun-bright glow of its tiny eyes, the utter fixation of its attention on the excubitors far below.
Kane ripped Kunegunda back for a final time – and then it was like she had woken from a walking dream, how quickly she found her feet beneath herself, how quickly she scrambled back in the enormous shadow of the druj, how quickly she dove forward to rip a metal chain from around Ghjuseppu's neck and then how quickly she turned and sprinted with him as he loosened his grip on her and put his energy into running instead. The druj behind them lurched forward, threatening to give slow, laborious chase – but it wouldn't matter how slowly it moved, when it could cross the district in a dozen long strides.
They moved fluently and fluidly: where detritus forced their paths to fork, Kane found himself alone in scrambling over fallen concrete walls, hurdling broken doors and rafters, ignoring the bodies and bits of druj underboot as he sprinted until he could plant a shoe firmly against a fallen piece off metal from the clocktower, and launch himself into the air, and send his hooks hissing before him, grappling onto the chimney of a nearby apartment building and then again, higher, until he was on Wall Szymanscy itself, one foot in Aizsaule District and one foot in Kass. A single, frozen moment passed, before he heard Kunegunda Kaasik clatter to a landing a few feet away, more graceless in her grief than even she usually was.
She was silent, until he forced her back to her feet, and took her by the shoulders, scanning her for serious injury, half-expecting to see that she would be missing half of her skull as Ghjuseppu did. And he saw, in her lone brown eye, just how much grief could resemble fear to the outsider. She said, "I'm sorry," and he shook his head.
"There is not a single thing you have to apologise for, Kaasik."
It had been inevitable – a long time in the making. To care so much, in a job so deadly… Kane remembered thinking that if they had known each other a little bit better, he might have told her what a bad idea it was to care so much. Your colleagues could be your friends, they should be your comrades, but developing anything closer or more intimate was just asking for trouble. The heart was so often too fickle to survive the duties of war; a few days beyond the wall taught you how to prioritise. It boded well that she had abandoned the corpse so willingly; a lack of sentiment was essential to survival in a world so cruel.
And the world was cruel. Ghjuseppu had been a good man: steady, and thoughtful, and dutiful. They had shared dinner only the night before; Kane remembered pouring wine, and watching the way Ghjuseppu watched his surroundings, like he felt the need to watch out for his comrades even in the utter safety of Lorencio's dining room. It was a cruel world that would have answered a night of joy with a morning of horror, that would have balanced Ghjuseppu's arm around Kaasik's waist with Kaasik's coat bloody and Ghjuseppu's brains spread across the street.
As Rakel spotted them, and sprinted to them, Kunegunda sank to her knees, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, and was silent again. Rakel was bloodied and dishevelled, but alive; that was as much as they could ask for. "Captain. Oroitz said we were to fall back to Vanth."
They were being ordered to abandon Aizsaule. It was an uncomfortable kind of déja vu – Kane remembered living this moment before, in Mønt, only six months ago. They had fallen back, and promised to reclaim it as they went; six months on, and they had only ceded more land, claiming back none. Now they were to fall back again – hand over thousands of acres and thousands of lives to the claws and maws of the druj. Would they do it all again six months from now? Where would next fall – Nav, maybe, or Arali, or Kelch. The middle circles were falling so quickly now, quicker than they ever had before. The inner circle was under the greatest threat in recent memory – or even ancient memory.
Kane said, "Oroitz is correct. If we don't defend Vanth, then Ganzir will fall before dusk." He fixed his hands But someone needs to stay behind and secure the retreat. Buy time for refugees to make it out."
Rakel said, "not alone."
"Sjöberg –"
"Not alone," Kunegunda said, coldly. She had risen again; her hands had smeared blood and dust across her face, making her look somewhat less than human in the filtered grey light falling over the city. She had knotted in her hand the silver chain taken from Ghjuseppu's body; she was swaying as she stood, as she so often did, swaying and staring at the silhouette of the golem as it moved across the district. She didn't even have her swords; Kane suspected she might have abandoned them by Ghjuseppu's body, too grief-stricken to remain dangerous. She had the expression of one who wanted to kill – to exorcise the phantom pain of grief with violent movement and ichor under her nails.
Fools, the both of them – fools without which he could not have coped. Reaching into the pocket of his green excubitor's coat, Kane withdrew the three winged brooches Suero had given him earlier in the day, at the close of the confirmation meeting. He threw Rakel hers: the wings of a second-class lieutenant, her new rank and position. He turned the other two over in his hand: one, the pin of a third-class excubitor in the expeditionary unit; the other, the badge of a third-class Scholar in the Nav Schools. He leaned over, and gently pinned them both to Kinga's collar while she swayed.
He said, "something in that city killed him."
She said, "you don't have to tell me twice."