The walls of the city glow deep orange from still-raging flames along the Dividing Wall. The remains of Zargon’s exploded statue lie strewn about the city like embers. We dart around corners and through dusty alleys, straining to hear the clatter of the hoplites’ armor behind us.
As we pass buildings, shutters slam shut, torches blow out. With the watchtowers in flames and the Dividing Wall in chaos, natives must be pouring through the breaches right now—and everyone on the Akkadian side of the Wall is bracing for a riot.
Kiddu weaves around another corner. Her third left in a row.
“Where are we going?” I yell.
“I have no idea!”
Clank-clank-clank. Two hoplites skid around a corner. They instantly spot us and raise their spears.
“HALT! NOW!”
We run, around a corner, down an alley, across an empty street. Another block and we emerge onto Canal Street. We’re south of the waterway, but the Temple on Nabuk Street is north of it—and there are only so many bridges.
The nearest one is two blocks ahead.
The mystics have stopped shooting around the city so the sorcerers’ lightning has died down now. I can finally hear most of my surroundings—flowing water from the canal, clanking footsteps from a block behind. Other sounds too, more distant but more ominous—hundreds of natives chanting, the words muddled echoes but still clear:
Death to the Empire!
Death to Akkad!
I’m trying to keep up with Kiddu. My stomach is a knot of pain. I check behind me. Two hoplites from the Circus, still in pursuit, but now they’re joined by several other soldiers. One of the new arrivals is holding something out, glowing with a point of blue-white light—
“Kiddu! Watch out!”
I throw myself down on the cobblestones just as a jagged spear of lighting shoots past. The hoplites’ little bolt-wands aren’t nearly as powerful as the sorcerers’ killing lightning blasts but they’re strong enough to shock you into a collapsed vomiting heap.
“Son of a BITCH!” yells Kiddu. The bolt’s aim was bad, but it nipped her. She turns around, hoists me up from the ground, shakes her shocked arm. Her dreadlocks stick up in frizzy clouds.
We run. The chanting gets louder. So does another sound, a rumbling marching. So do the sounds of our pursuers who, I realize with horror, are now more than close enough behind to simply throw their spears at us.
The bridge is right in front of us now, to our left, just a half-block away—
“Oh shit!” says Kiddu.
We turn onto the bridge and I see what she’s swearing about—a crowd of torch-carrying natives is swelling on the other side of the canal, flooding towards us, and funneling onto the opposite side of the bridge.
I turn around, thinking that the bridge is effectively blocked. But then I skid to a stop. I see the source of the rumbling marching sound on our side of the canal—an entire phalanx of hoplites, ten rows deep and spread out across the whole street ahead of us, a wall of shields behind a forest of oily black spearpoints.
The soldiers march forward in perfect lock-step towards the bridge, a huge weight slowly but inevitably falling against the natives on the other side—and, in the process, on the two of us caught in between.
“Which way?” I say.
“We’re probably safer with the natives!”
“Are you sure about that?”
Kiddu is more decisive than I. She pulls my arm and we run towards the chanting throngs of natives, feeling utterly exposed on the crest of the bridge’s high arch. Some of the natives throw rocks that whistle over our heads and clatter uselessly against the shieldwall of the hoplites behind us.
I can see the faces of the closest natives, dressed in rags, mouths open wide, eyes glowing wild in the torchlight. One holds up a flag emblazoned with the abstract circular emblem of the Sun God, or perhaps the mystics’ legendary city of Harrappa. The native notices me, points and yells something over the din—
A tremendous flash.
Thunder explodes from the Dividing Wall and from the space in front of me—and a nimbus of blue-white lightning rips the yelling native man and everyone around him apart.
I’m thrown back from the blast, blinded and deafened. I can’t feel or see or hear a thing.
With enormous effort, I push myself up to my knees. It takes my vision a few seconds to recover. Through the swimming spots of blurry light, I see bodies lying sprawled on the bridge.
I have never seen a dead body before.
Faces locked in twisted agony. Flesh charred, clothes burning. That’s not what gets to me, though.
What gets to me is the blood coming from their ears. I see this and then I realize my left ear feels wet. Piercing, screaming pain through the formless hollow seashore sounds. I wipe my finger below my ear and look: bright red blood. Then I retch onto the cobblestones.
At this point, I think I may have fainted for a minute. When I come to, the phalanx has streamed onto the bridge. Surviving natives scream out in pain and terror, stumbling over corpses as they flee.
“Kiddu?” I yell, I think. I can’t hear myself yell.
Some of the natives have stayed behind to drag still-spasming lightning-shocked bodies away, creating bottlenecks. Others climb over the bridge’s railing and throw themselves into the canal below.
“GIL!”
They say you can always hear someone calling your name above the noise of a crowd; I guess they weren’t lying. I spot her—she’s following the natives’ lead, trying to climb up over the railing.
“NO!” I scream without hearing myself. “KIDDU, NO!”
I wave at her with all of my remaining strength, trying to get her to come back. It works—she pauses her climb—and then a second bolt of lightning hammers down from the Dividing Wall.
This one hits the canal. Every native that jumped into the water screams and dies.
I try to walk towards Kiddu, towards the railing.
Suddenly, rough hands seize me and throw me to the ground. A heavy foot pushes against my back. An armored forearm presses against my face, pinning my cheek against the rough cobblestone. Someone ties my hands in a tight knot behind my back.
I watch as row after row of sandled feet and greave-covered shins march past my face.
A gruff voice: “Don’t move, boy.”