Marias walked the path the others had taken since coming through the gate. She saw the bodies of thousands of crows littering the street, with children picking them up in armfuls and dogs fighting over them. Some of the golden animals wagged their tails as Marias passed by with Lord Ran and the Fool. It was not hard to know where to go. As darkness descended on the city, Marias could hear gunfire down one street and see the light of a burning house. Thick orange embers floated through the air and householders were already throwing buckets of water onto doors and roofs wherever she looked. They were a determined people, she thought.
‘You said it was just to look, Marias, remember?’ Lord Ran wheedled, sniffing.
He had been offered a sword by the woman who had given them tea. He held it awkwardly, an archaic-looking thing with a curved blade, more suited to hanging above a fire in a tavern than actual use. The Lord of Trade in Shiang still clutched his blanket around his shoulders with his other hand and rubbed a dripping nose. Marias did not answer him. She wanted to see Taeshin again, even if it was to watch him die, even if she would die herself in that moment. She was not sure if what she felt was love, or exhaustion, or just the sense that she was so very far from home and would not see it again. Yet she knew she could not just watch Taeshin snuffed out for ever and go back to whatever life she had waiting. She would not be sold again, not in Darien. The woman who had given them tea had confirmed that much. Marias knew she could find work, but she hadn’t crossed mountains simply to wash clothes or scrub floors in a strange city. She’d come to see that Taeshin survived, no matter what the cost.
Despite the darkness, the street was thick with soldiers, talking and laughing together, secure in the knowledge that some other poor sods were in the thick of it at that moment. Armed men in a dozen different colours blocked the road. Marias saw two officers almost come to blows as they argued over the order of march. With Lord Ran and the Fool in tow, she took alleyways around two of the closed positions, working always towards the cracks of gunfire and flickering lights. No one questioned them. The soldiers had no orders to stop those behind coming through. Unnoticed, the three of them slid along walls and twice through a tavern, excusing themselves as they went. The Fool beamed the whole time and something about him calmed what angry glances came their way.
Marias held her hand to her mouth as she saw massed ranks across the road ahead, made black against the glow of forty windows, all hissing flame. In that destructive light, dark figures lunged and struck, too fast for the eye to follow, so that they seemed to flicker. She had reached the heart of it, and the city trembled around her, with good reason.
She jumped as another fusillade of shots rang out, followed by furious orders to hold fire. Smoke rolled over broken stones and dead men, obscuring the open ground. At her side, Lord Ran sniffed miserably once more. When she went to go closer, he put his arm across her chest, thin and weakened by fever as he was.
‘You said you only wanted to look! Whoever he was to you, he’s gone. You can see that now, surely?’
‘Take your hand off me, Ruin,’ she said, using the name she’d heard on the docks of Shiang. ‘You said he can’t kill me.’
‘I meant … don’t!’ he said, but she was moving towards the flame-light before he could grab her.
The Fool looked back at him and smiled, following Marias. Lord Ran rubbed his nose hard, almost angrily, then stepped back, leaning against a wall in shadow. He knew the Returners rather better than most. He would not have gone into that maelstrom for a crown and an estate on the river.
Regis gasped as he found he could breathe again, recovering slowly. The air had been like porcelain in his throat. It was not that he’d been choked, but that he hadn’t been able to move his lungs at all. He knew he had begun to die in the first moments, and to feel that awful constriction shatter to pieces around him was almost an ecstasy. He heaved in breath after ragged breath, but as he did so, he could see the Sallet Green being held in place in the same way. Panels flickered grey amidst the green and the thing clawed the air, trying and failing to reach its tormentor.
Regis didn’t want to face a man who could thicken air into something he could not breathe. He had never known such helplessness in his entire life and the prospect of encountering it again was hard. He thought of his father’s scorn then and grinned weakly. Perhaps it helped to imagine that. The old devil had never found much to praise in his son, except when he battered one of the guards unconscious in training.
Regis stood up and raised the red shield. Smoke drifting thick all around, two threats nearby – Goddess alone knew where the third had gone. The one before him stood on a broken leg and was the weaker of the two he’d engaged. The one the shield had sent flying moved like a damned hummingbird – and he had killed Geese. Regis heard himself growl and shook himself.
He had built a frame of muscle and hard bone on the training field and in sparring, every day of his life. He had done so for just such a moment. He raced forward, driving on with the red shield held before him. Most men thought of a shield only in defence, to hold a line or fend off an enraged enemy. Yet when the thing reflected and magnified impacts on its polished surface, it brought an entirely different effect to the battlefield. Regis was a heavy man, with powerful legs. He drove himself to accelerate, running at an enemy who could steal even breath.
Thomas was engrossed in his torture of the patchwork armoured figure. He’d already crumpled one of them that day – and broken the neck of another. Of all the Returners, he was the most experienced in dealing with the armoured green things. He had the patchwork figure up on its toes as he strained to break its grip on life. This one seemed to resist with greater strength, so that Thomas had to focus and double his effort.
He raised one hand and slowly turned it, as if he held a lever only he could see. With satisfaction, he heard a grunt from the warrior inside as the strain made his neck creak. The stillness in the air spread around the green and grey armour hanging in his grasp.
With no warning, Thomas heard running steps and caught a flash of red coming at him. He let the Sallet Green drop and tried to duck, expecting a sword blow. Yet his broken leg betrayed him and Regis hammered the red shield into him at a sprint, the lord’s shoulder braced against the inner curve. Thomas flew back with a clang, tumbling over the rubble with his broken leg flopping horribly. When he lay still, he was on his back and he took a breath only to scream.
The patchwork armoured warrior settled into a crouch and stretched its neck. It raised one hand to Regis to halt him, rolling its shoulders like an athlete limbering up. Its gaze was fixed on Thomas. When Regis gestured for it to go ahead, the thing jerked into movement, loping the dozen yards between them and the fallen man.
Regis heard a light, pattering step behind him, like a man sprinting over sand. He turned in time to raise the shield to block Gabriel’s blow and roared in triumph as the man was knocked through the air by his own attempt to cut him down from behind.
‘Hurts, does it?’ Regis said with savage glee. He had knocked the man into the ranks of De Guise soldiers. They had seen their own master killed just moments before and they fell on Gabriel with extraordinary savagery, battering at him with everything they had.
Regis turned from one side to the other, unsure where best to use the shield. As powerful as it was, it had its flaws in battle, which was why his family had formed such a close bond with the De Guise. The sword they carried was not his to use. It rested by the body of a young man who had been in the prime of his youth. There would be no new heir from that line, no more partners to stand with a Regis on the field. He picked up the sword for the first time in his life. For the first time in a hundred generations, a Regis held the De Guise sword. His shield seemed to ring with it and the dust of the ground trembled beneath his feet.
Thomas felt tears come into his eyes as he struggled to stand. Every man was confident before the fight began, when they were fit and whole and strong. It was only after injury that the struggle changed, when a torn gut or a broken bone made every movement agony. That was when courage mattered. All men believed themselves immortal as they took the field.
His leg did more than throb or ache: it screamed at him. The pain was so intense he wanted to cut it off his body as a traitor before it killed him. He remembered feeling the same once with a childhood abscess, when he’d pleaded with his mother and a dentist to just yank the foul thing out with pincers. The smashed leg brought insanity and weakness. It had betrayed him and he could not see to fight, when he needed every ounce of control.
The Sallet Green scrambled into an attack with greater grace than the ones before. Whoever the man was within, he seemed tireless, so that as Thomas waited for a breath, a respite, it did not come. Instead, blow after blow slammed down on him from all angles. He held a shield of air against them all, but the armoured monster threw its entire weight against it, so that he lay back and could not rise a second time.
Thomas cried out as the Sallet Green clambered right on top of him, for all the world as if it straddled a glass ball. He could see it there as the shield of air began to fail, thumping crazily at him with sword and armoured fist. As he stared, he saw the thing make a spear of its fingers and try to jam them through the barrier it could not see. The attempt reminded him there was a man inside the armour, an enemy, yes, but just a soldier, not some terrifying creature of legend. Thomas tried to restore the choke hold he’d had on it before, but the pain was too great and it was all he could do to prevent it collapsing onto him.
He saw his own death in that moment and, to his surprise, it gave him strength. He had died once, after all. He had no illusions about what it meant. Other men might have given up under such an onslaught, but Thomas knew where he’d wake if he did. He could not bear the thought of the grey land stretching around him once again. He would rise, he told himself. Somehow, he would stand. Gabriel or Sanjin would come and set him free.
Sanjin startled awake, gasping aloud. Something had struck him in the first volleys of gunfire, before grey smoke rolled across the yard. Thomas had failed to keep his shield ready, or more likely he’d looked after himself and Gabriel, leaving Sanjin to be shot. He felt anger bubble like acid in his gut. His foot was bleeding again, of course, so that he left red prints and the bandages were crusted with brown muck. Gabriel had promised, but Sanjin understood very well why he had not finished the healing. It gave Gabriel power over him, that was all it was. It kept a leash on Sanjin, just like the one they had used on the Fool. He would have done the same. Gabriel was afraid of him, which showed he had some sense.
Sanjin sat up on his elbows, understanding that he’d gone down so fast in the darkness that none of the attacking companies had seen where he lay. His head throbbed and seemed twice its normal size, but he was alive and there was no one coming at him in that moment.
He pressed a hand to his forehead and felt the groove in the bone that had put him down. He blinked at the sight of bright blood on his hand, feeling suddenly ill, so that he turned to vomit into the bricks and twisted iron around him. That made his headache even worse and he found his anger growing. A great ocean rose within him, but he could not heal a graze, nor make a breeze blow.
He had seen Gabriel use fire. The man had been drunk on all he’d drawn from the Bracken Stone and he’d sent a torrent of flame, spending power as if it would never run dry. Sanjin frowned. They had come back together from the grey land, but it had been Gabriel who sat on a throne, Gabriel who took a young woman as his queen. Gabriel who led them to Darien for more stones.
There were dead men lying all around that yard, Sanjin realised. In the darkness, he would be invisible amongst them. Perhaps he could just walk away. He could leave Gabriel and Thomas to whatever fate they had brought down on themselves and just disappear into the city. His foot throbbed, reminding him. Half a foot. The cauterised spots had not held for long. He knew he could have it removed and sealed by a decent surgeon, but Gabriel could bring it back.
With a growl of frustration, Sanjin stood up. He was sick of this city. All he and the others wanted was the stones! Why did the people have to keep fighting them? It was a kind of collective madness, perhaps.
He saw Marias walk from the dark street into the flame-lit yard, the Fool trailing her like a faithful dog. Sanjin showed his teeth at the sight of them. Marias was Gabriel’s weakness. The man made no formal claim of his own on her, but it seemed she was still too good to be given to a man like Sanjin, too fragile to endure his rough touch. He looked around him, taking in the ebb and flow of the battles going on across the yard. He saw Thomas struggling with one of the armoured green warriors and Gabriel lit by a bloom of flame further over.
They were surrounded; Sanjin understood that much. Perhaps there was a way out around the back of the Bracken estate. Or perhaps he would find more soldiers waiting for him there if he tried to creep away. He flexed his hands. The moment he moved, he would be back in. That was clear enough. He’d been granted a chance to just walk into the night and never be seen again. Perhaps the stones would cease their pulsing call to him if he stayed in Darien.
The thought was dizzying. A normal life. Not stolen thrones, or facing armies in battle, but eating lunch and walking in a park. Working for a wage and even finding himself a wife and a little place above a shop. Near a tavern, obviously. Perhaps that was all he had wanted.
Marias had not seen him, Sanjin thought. He crouched amongst the shadows and the dead, but she would pass just a few paces from where he was. He relished the fear and shock he could cause. He could come out of that black stillness and snatch her. Gabriel would never even know she had been there.
Only the presence of the Fool made him hesitate. That poor, ruined man stumbling along with her seemed to understand nothing. They had never even learned his name. Yet it was all too easy to imagine him pointing and hissing and weeping that Sanjin had hurt Marias, making a mush of the words.
Sanjin slowly raised his head. For a few moments, he’d dreamed a different life, something ordinary. That was not truly what he wanted. He had been given the power within him to use. He had not come back just to live like some farmer or tradesman. He had despised such people in his first life. No, that was not for him. He had come back to rule.
Marias was walking closer, beautiful in the gleam of flame. The whore had struggled when he’d taken her by the arm, as if his touch appalled her. So he would allow himself one moment of spite in the midst of battle, and then he would fight alongside Gabriel and Thomas – his brothers in arms – to wherever their fates took them.
He opened his hands like a flower and flame bloomed between them. He saw her turn to the light and then he flung a rope of it, a stream of gold and white that struck Marias and enveloped her.
Sanjin poured it out, then breathed more gently, the ground around him steaming with heat. As his eyes adjusted, his smile died as quickly as it had come. The Fool stood with his hand resting on her shoulder. Marias was untouched, unburned. The Fool beamed and cackled and Sanjin’s temper surged. He advanced out of the darkness, but a crackle of gunfire held him back. His flame had alerted every soldier with a pistol. He shrank down and Marias and the Fool passed by, untouched by the violence whining in the air about them. Sanjin saw one or two orange trails as bullets slowed and he heard the Fool hissing laughter. The little bastard had been learning the whole time, Sanjin realised. He cursed to himself and made a decision. It was time to enter the fray. He would burn the air itself if he had to. He took a single, deep breath and began to walk across the yard. Apart, they were too weak to stand; together, Darien would fall.
Thomas felt his will crumble. The horrible figure of the armoured warrior was still gripping his sphere of air as if trying to lift it, hammering all the time with ceaseless energy. Thomas knew he was seeping blood, and no matter how he told himself to rally and stand, he could feel himself getting weaker. Sanjin had run off somewhere like the coward he was, but Thomas expected to see Gabriel still.
Gabriel would never run. Whatever some men had that made others want to follow them, he had. Part of it was that private oath, that bond. I will not run, when I see you fall. Gabriel had called him brother and Thomas had heard the promise in the word. Yet he was failing, and the spidery monster of green and grey was getting closer as the sphere shrank. Thomas could look into his own reflection on the helmet and see he was filthy with dirt, blood and fear. He bared his teeth at that green version of himself – and pushed back, trying to roll the monster off him.
Thomas almost sobbed when Gabriel appeared, standing to one side. The man took hold of the armoured green warrior by neck and leg and just threw him across the yard. Thomas felt his shield collapse and he lay there, breathing in relief, tears slicing through the dust on his face. He sensed Gabriel kneel. The first touch and the sudden cutting off of pain sent a shiver through him.
‘My leg …’ he murmured. ‘Do what you can, brother …’
Gabriel began to reply, but the patchwork green warrior belted into him, snatching him from sight as it hit him at full speed. Thomas was left looking up at stars and floating embers. He found the strength to stand, though the bones of his leg broke again the moment he put weight on them, making him shout long and loud in his frustration.
To one side, Gabriel rolled with Bosin, punching and striking with appalling speed. Thomas thought he could not take a single step to help them, not and remain on his feet. All his promises were drawn apart, ruined by loss of blood, by too much pain. He wanted to sit down, to sleep. He could not fight any more.
He turned to see a man as marked in soot and filth as he was. Lord Regis hit him with the De Guise sword, knocking him onto his back. Without hesitating, the man leaped on top and brought the shield down. Thomas raised one hand to fend him off, but the impact was like being hit by a falling wall. It drove the air right out of him so that he could not take a breath. He was too weak to save himself and Regis gave him no time to harden the air, no time to breathe. He punched the shield down over and over, each blow doubled in its impact, until Thomas did not twitch and just stared, unmoving. Even then, Regis kept up the assault, grunting with each blow. He had never been afraid in his entire life until air had been made into glass in his mouth. That fear played itself out as he crashed the Regis shield down with all his strength, until the man beneath was bone and blood and cloth and Regis could barely raise his arms. He sat astride the body of the dead mage, panting so hard he thought his heart would burst in his chest.
‘Majesty, please! Listen to me,’ Taeshin said. ‘I was not sent here. A man named Gabriel left your ranks with three others. Thomas and Sanjin – and one more whose name I never learned.’
The king used an old style of attack, Taeshin saw in relief. The man was tireless and strong, but he telegraphed his blows so that Taeshin could bat them aside or duck under them.
‘Gabriel stands in my ranks,’ the king growled at him. ‘With better men than you, boy. Should I listen to a traitor? Who sent you?’
‘I am not part of this battle, this grey place!’ Taeshin yelled at him. ‘Point Gabriel out, if you can, Your Majesty. He went back and dragged me here in his place.’
‘No one goes back,’ the king said with a sneer.
He turned to the ranks making ready to march that day. Taeshin held his breath as the king peered up and down the lines, a frown appearing.
‘You see?’ Taeshin pressed him. ‘Gabriel has gone, with three others. Can you call him back to his place?’
‘No one leaves this field,’ the king said, though with less force. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘If there was a way home, don’t you think I would go through it myself? It would take the power of a stone to open a door.’
‘There was one. I saw it. There was a white stone,’ Taeshin said. He was desperate. He had not spoken to anyone since arriving in that place an age before. He was close to weeping just to have the king hear him. ‘Please. You are a king. Can you at least call them back?’
The man sheathed his sword, while his army looked on and another gathered on the fields beyond. He tapped a horn that rested on a thong around his neck, but there was only sadness in his expression.
‘I can call them, boy. And they must come. That is my part to play – and theirs.’
Taeshin stood with his mouth open and wide eyes.
‘Then … that is all I want! Please. Send me back. I am not meant to be here.’
‘Oh son, I am sorry. I can call them, as I said. But do you see a morning stone, here? I can’t send you home. Take up a sword and join the ranks. There is still time to fight today.’
Taeshin felt hope shrivel and die, so that he looked with new eyes around him.
‘Call them, even so,’ he said.
The king nodded.
‘If you wish.’ he said, his eyes shadowed. ‘Where did you find the door?’
He looked to where Taeshin pointed and the king began to walk with him, climbing the slope away from the battlefield.
‘What about your horse?’ Taeshin said.
‘The horse is what holds me, son. As when the new souls take up a sword or a shield. You pulled me from the saddle and so I was free, for the first time in …’ He shook his head. ‘I do not know.’
‘Will you go back to the battle, after?’ Taeshin asked him. ‘When you call Gabriel and the others?’