“Come on,” she said. “We’ll be safe up here.”
“Safe for a little while,” Lola said. Then: “Mother of God,” as they came out onto the flat roof of the tower.
Ciano was burning. The pillars of fire had merged into columns that covered half the area they could see. Heavy and black, smoke drifted down from the hillsides, covering the highways that wound through the valleys running down to the Pada. The warehouse districts along the river were fully involved, the great storage tanks of olive oil and brandy bellowing upward in ruddy flame like so many giant torches.
“Nobody’s fighting the fires at all,” Pia whispered to herself. The waterworks must have been finally destroyed. And the streets by the docks, they were stuffed with timber, coal, cotton, so much tinder. She could feel the heat on her face, worse even in the few moments since they had come out onto the flat rooftop.
Lola looked around. “What can we do?”
“Wait,” Pia said. “Wait and pray.”
Thunder rumbled from the eastward. Pia’s head came around slowly. The sky was summer blue, save for the great pillars of black smoke. Rain would be a mercy, but God had withheld His mercy from the people of the Empire. The sound rumbled again, then again—too regularly spaced for thunder, in any case.
The rain was not coming. The Chosen were, and those were their guns. She slipped to her knees and crossed herself, bringing the rosary to her lips.
Come to me, John, she thought. Come quickly, my love.
Then she began to plan.
CHARTER NINE
“Ciano’s burning,” Jeffrey Farr said, opening his eyes.
Get out of there, he added silently to his brother. Afterimages of buildings sliding into streets in sheets of fiery rubble washed across his vision as the link through Center faded.
“Ya,” Heinrich Hosten said cheerfully. “Maybe we shouldn’t have bombed it quite so heavy.”
He looked eastward, toward the smoke that hazed the horizon. The distant thump . . . thump . . . of artillery sounded, slow and regular.
“Street fighting,” the Chosen officer went on. “We may have trapped them too well—there are a quarter of a million troops in there, less what’s getting out, the net’s not watertight.”
“Why not just let it burn?” Jeffrey asked.
“The High Command may do that for a while. Praise the Powers That Be, we won’t be pitchforked into it right away.”
The survivors of Heinrich’s regiment had been pulled into reserve, not completely out of action, but things would have to take a decided turn for the worse before they were put back into the line any time soon. More than a third of the roster had died blocking the Imperial breakout for those crucial hours, and as many again were wounded. The survivors were billeted now in the grounds of a nobleman’s country estate; they could see the smoke-shadowed buildings of Ciano in the distance to the east. Heinrich had spent the last couple of days rounding up supplies for the celebration that bellowed and sprawled across the gardens: oxen and whole pigs roasted on spits, barrels stood at the ends of tables heaped with food. A roar went up from the troops—the male majority, at least—as a crowd of women were herded through the gates.
Jeffrey averted his eyes and ignored the screams. Nothing he could do, nothing at all . . . for now. Heinrich beamed indulgently down at the scene below the terrace and bit the last meat off the turkey drumstick in his hand.
“They’ve earned a little rest,” he said, idly stroking the hip of the naked girl who poured his glass full again. “Did damned well.”
The rest of the surviving officers were grouped around the tables on the balustraded terrace, paying serious attention to the feast the villa’s staff had prepared for the new overlords. Most Chosen ate rather sparingly at home; in the food-poor Land red meat was a luxury except for the wealthiest among the upper caste. Jeffrey remembered John telling him how the Friday pork roast was the high point of the week, and that was for an up-and-coming general’s family. Now that they had the biggest area of rich farmland on Visager under their control, the Chosen were making up for lost time.