Seven things Elayne saw as she flew toward Chakal Square and the next day’s burning:
1. Lights flooded a Downtown park. Brass instruments glinted gold from the bandstand, and people danced. Skirts twirled and unfurled around girls’ legs. Dancers in slacks orbited as dots around swelling and collapsing suns. Too high up to hear the music, she placed it anyway as swing from the dancers’ rhythm.
2. Huge golem-towed trucks snarled in traffic on an elevated highway, bearing goods from Longsands warehouses to train stations and the airport. Spider-golems skittered forward one massive claw limb at a time, and human drovers walked among them, gnats trying to correct the movement of greater forces. The cause of the traffic, farther up the highway: a truck on its side, four golems straining to right it while men ran between them, waving hand torches.
3. A billboard on an old sandstone pyramid, lit by bright blue ghostlights, bore a picture of a geyser and the word ACTUALIZE in block letters. If the billboard offered more context or instructions, they were too small to read from the air. She did not remember the old use of the pyramid upon which the billboard stood. Southern temples often belonged to moon gods. Or perhaps it had been a school, or a prison.
4. A half mile from the Skittersill the blackout began, and the sky opened. No lights shone below save the occasional red bloom of a fire. The stars here were sharper and clearer even than in Sansilva, where, despite the Craftsmen’s best efforts, some light seeped up to dilute the stars above the city center. The Quechal gods had reclaimed their city. Black ribbon streets divided black blocks of black buildings below a black sky. Interesting choice, if it had been a choice, for the gods to clear the clouds away: Quechal religion did not trust stars. The night sky, for them, was an iron web enormous spiders wove to steal the sun’s light. This new blackness was defiance of a kind, and a reminder to their people: you have enemies, and they work against you.
5. Wardens swarmed in camps lit by the brilliant ghostlights road workers used after dark, which mimicked noon sun but lacked its heat. From this height, their chaos resolved to order: each camp divided naturally into sectors, bunks here and armory there, temporary cells, guard rotations, clinic. Couatl circled. One passed near enough to ruffle Elayne’s suit with the wind of its wings. With streetlights lit, Couatl shimmered from below thanks to their jeweled plumage. Without that light, nothing set them off from the sky where the demons lived.
6. Elayne could not read Chakal Square from overhead as she had the Warden camp. It looked like a forest made of people—individual humans visible only around bonfire edges, sleeping or dancing or drinking, making music or love. Beyond the firelight circles they were droplets in an ocean. Tendrils spread down alleys into labyrinthine Skittersill streets. Here and there, half-lit, she saw some structure: the beds of a field hospital, the command tents broken by the Wardens’ assault, the makeshift temple. Grass mats, and the altar makeshift no longer—anointed in the old way, with blood.
7. Gods moved through the Skittersill. With closed eyes she saw them. Back in the wars she’d shipped out to the Shining Empire from a port in Xivai where whales gathered by the thousands to mate. Sometimes they exploded from the waves in majestic fountain breaches, but even hidden, they shaped the surface. The sea boiled with whales.
As Chakal Square boiled with gods, tonight. Elayne did not recognize most of them, nor could she see them all at once. Like whales, they presented hints to form: a gnarled face with a fanged mouth, an arm elegant as an Imperial dancer’s, a hunched back and a single blinking eye.
They had slept long, and deep, and they had fallen far. So, woken by Temoc’s sacrifice, they rooted in their faithful’s minds and took strength from the dreams engendered there. Nightmares would rule Chakal Square this evening. No quiet rest before the day, and the fire.
* * *
She landed hard on the woven grass mats of Temoc’s chapel. The force of impact knelt her, and raised a cloud of dust. Guards and faithful cried out in terror. A bowstring sang and an arrow slipped through the dust cloud to stop inches from her suit. Shaft and feather crumbled. She plucked the arrowhead from the air and held it between thumb and forefinger as the dust settled.
The kneeling faithful recoiled. Red-arms in scrap armor forced through the crowd, brandishing makeshift weapons. Others raised bows with arrows nocked. Torn tents and broken tentpoles rose into the sky. Flames licked the night.
Temoc stood by the altar. His hands seemed clean.
She saw Chel too, and the man with the broken nose, Tay, both running half-clothed from a nearby tent. Hair in disarray. Elayne forced the smile from her face: at least someone was enjoying the night while it lasted.
Temoc walked toward her. The crowd gave way to let him pass. “Elayne.”
“Temoc,” she said. “We have to stop meeting like this.”
“If you have come to fight, know that my gods live. I am your equal now.”
“Before you try to kill me,” Elayne said, with slight emphasis on try, because it always helped to plant seeds of doubt in a potential adversary, “you should know I’ve come to help.”
“You have come to join us against your master.”
“I’m not a fighter, Temoc. Not anymore. I’m here to save people, like I saved you. Like I saved your son.”
That broke the paladin’s facade. “Caleb,” he said. “Is he—”
“Well, no thanks to you. Golems chased him and Mina from the Skittersill after you left. They’re fine.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t think I should give you that information.”
“So you have come to torment me.”
“Hardly.” She looked from him, to the crowd, and back. In a blink, she saw the gods gathering too, through lightning-seaweed lines of Craft: not manifest, though awake enough to listen. “I’ve come to offer you a trade. Tell your people to leave. As many of them as will go.”
“And in exchange?”
“In exchange I save the Skittersill. Or try.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The King in Red will strike tomorrow morning. Your sacrifice made him angry. He thinks the God Wars have come again, and he will destroy you. He’ll use gripfire. It will catch, and spread. The Skittersill’s undefended now—we’re inside the insurance renegotiation window. People will die whose only crime is living near the Square. The Skittersill will burn. I can’t save the Square, but I can save the surrounding district, and the people there, if you help me. Otherwise, tomorrow, the fire starts, and who knows what Tan Batac will build in place of all that’s burned. You’ll have lost in every way.”
“The gods will help us.”
“Can they save the Skittersill and fight the King in Red at once?” And addressing him she addressed the crowd, and the gods.
Temoc did not answer. Neither did they.
“Caleb will recover,” she said, after too much silence passed. “He’s young. Mina’s safe, and angry, and hurt.”
“What do you need?” he said.
“The Skittersill. I have to know it. Perfectly. Intimately. I have to know it like someone who has lived here for sixty years. Backstreets. Shortcuts. Rooftops at sunset. Sound of rain in gutters. The color of the alley cats, and their secret names. I need the dream of this place.”
“Is that all?”
She had no patience for sarcasm. “I need men and women who know this ground, and these people. The process is dangerous, but I think I can protect them.”
“You think.”
“We will be a fire brigade in a firefight. There is a limit to how much safety I can offer. But I need volunteers.”
His chin sank to his chest. It might have been a nod.
“He’ll go.” Chel’s voice. Elayne glanced up, startled by the interruption, to see Chel shove Tay forward. He glared from Elayne to Chel, shaking his head. “He knows the Skittersill as well as anyone. Born and raised here. The other red-arms too, Zip and them. They’ll help you.”
“What about you?” Tay said it first, so Elayne didn’t have to.
“I’ll stay,” she said. “I started this. I’ll see it through.”
Elayne did not interrupt the pause that passed between Chel and Tay, did not speak to draw their eyes from each other. At last, Tay’s shoulders slumped. He nodded. He took Chel in his arms, kissed her, broke away, and walked toward Elayne.
“We will send the others,” Temoc said. “Good luck.”
“Thank you.”
He offered her his hand. It was clean, though firelight dyed it red.
They were close enough for him to whisper and be heard. “I had no choice.”
“I don’t believe you,” she replied, with false conviction.
She left him standing on his grass mats before his altar, beneath the stars.