I heard a distant scream, and then a woman shouting, “Fire! Fire! Wake up, wake up! Fire!” Somewhere in the town, flames suddenly climbed the side of the building and rose, casting a ruddy light. The stables, full of stored hay, suddenly roared and the roof seemed to literally burst off the building. In a matter of seconds, smoke was rolling like a flood through the streets, while bits of burning straw floated up into the cold night sky. Chances were good that as they settled, they would kindle other fires, adding to the confusion.
Where was Spink? Why hadn’t he warned anyone? Did he and Epiny and Amzil and the children all sleep on? Would they awaken before smoke crept in to choke them? Would the townsfolk who had chosen to drug themselves with Gettys Tonic awaken at all, or burn as they slept?
“You’ve done enough!” I shouted at Soldier’s Boy as he advanced on the barracks.
One back corner of it was alight, and as I watched the door was flung open. A single soldier, hopping and skipping as he tried to pull his trousers on, emerged. He was shouting, “Fire! Fire! Wake up! Get out! Fire!”
“Just take your warriors and leave. You set the fort alight in so many places, they won’t be able to fight all the fires. Gettys will burn. Give some of them a chance to escape. Don’t you want them to flee alive, to carry word of the Speck attack?”
“They must carry word of a Speck war against them, not of a random fire that spread and burned the town down. We are lancing a boil here. Grit your teeth and be silent while I do what must be done!”
Sempayli had already lifted his bow. The arrow was trained on the door. There was a small sound like torn paper, and the hopping soldier went down on the snowy ground, clutching at an arrow shaft in his chest. He saw us then and, to his credit, tried to shout a warning. It came out as a gargled spray of blood, speckling his chin and the snow around him with black dots. Two other half-dressed soldiers burst out of the door. They too went down, feathered with arrows and blocking the door behind them.
There were two doors to the barracks. Soldier’s Boy’s warriors had surrounded both of them. The building was burning well now, kindled in at least three places. I heard a terrible shriek from the other door as a man escaped the fire to die under a sword. The flames were leaping up into the night. From inside, I heard shouts and the thunder of overturned furniture and coughing. There were only two windows in the barracks. One burst outward in a shatter of glass as a chair was flung through it. The man who tried to follow the chair was shot with an arrow through the throat and fell back inside. Shouts of consternation greeted this, but another man immediately launched himself through the window. He fell dying in the snow as one of Sempayli’s arrows took him.
I do not know how many soldiers were sleeping in the barracks that night. Perhaps some died of the smoke. But every one that emerged from the doors or the window was killed before he got two steps. It was slaughter, not battle, for the dazed and smoke-blinded soldiers scarcely seemed to comprehend what was happening. In their struggle to escape the flames and engulfing smoke, they understood too late that a second foe, just as deadly, awaited them outside. Bodies piled up outside as cries for help and shrieks of burning men came from within.
I could not look away. I could not control the eyes. I wanted desperately to cut myself off from Soldier’s Boy, to retreat to where I could not experience this in any way. Under Soldier’s Boy, Clove shifted and fought for his head. He didn’t like the flames, the smoke, the cries, and the blood. But like me he was forced to stand and witness. Soldier’s Boy reined him in hard and held him. The torment for both of us continued.
In that endless time, two things slowly transformed me. As I watched the men die so ignominiously, half-clothed, blinded by smoke and dazed by shock, they suddenly became my fellows, my regiment. Whatever they had done to me, they had done with their own rude sense of judgment. It had not been just, and I knew that, but they had not. My regiment had not been the mob that cornered me and tried to murder me. Looking back, I knew that only a dozen men had willingly partaken of that madness. The others had been reluctant witnesses or shocked bystanders. I would not judge my regiment by the base actions of a few during a time of fear and anger.
I now understood what they had become when the mob spirit had taken them because I now saw how I myself behaved. Bereft of empathy or sympathy, Soldier’s Boy mirrored for me what any man might become when hate and purpose ruled him. What I had become, for all purposes. He was me; folly to deny that. He was doing what I might have done, were I ever in a position that I hated someone so badly that I completely lost sight of his humanity.