Elayne almost lost the city.
Her volunteers ran through the fire, senses webbed to hers: sulfur and acid vapor and char, burnt leather and metal and melted rubber from the soles of shoes. Around her, atop that perfect-imperfect map, the bodies piled, packed close: in a few minutes they’d rescued dozens, and Elayne took what she could from them, the heat in their flesh and the pain in their souls, to keep them safe. Her shields trembled and almost failed. If she had not been familiar with this feeling—if she had not learned from a twisted master in her youth how to span the gaps between minds, to split and recombine herself—if she had not learned those black arts, she would have broken in the first minute.
She nearly broke anyway.
The Skittersill blazed. A slick layer of flame covered the wooden shops that lined Bloodletter’s Street and the brick-and-timber fronts at Crow, fire eating stone, crisping and cracking earthworks—fire that laughed at the rules of fire, fire that burned what could not burn.
With all the focus she could spare, she opened the line to Aberforth and Duncan, called on the insurance contract, invoked true names and serial numbers. The dream map she’d drawn seared her thoughts. The city burned, and she, with stolen power, told it to stop.
Beside her, a man curled into a ball and wept.
The insurance contract responded grudgingly to her call. She felt buildings burn, heard them scream in her mind, and demanded Aberforth and Duncan to perform. This would work. Had to work. She hoped.
There had been no time to negotiate Purcell’s agreement; a poorly written contract might let his employers slide out of their obligations to protect and to defend. But though she did not trust Tan Batac in any other particular, she trusted his greed and cunning to have negotiated a good deal.
But still the firm moved slowly, so slowly, to honor her call. Fiery plumes erupted from rooftops. Screams bubbled and choked off. With her eyes closed, she saw the green web of the crowd’s faith pulse with their deaths. Hundreds in a few minutes, tight spiraling souls burst like fireworks.
All for nothing, all for a scorched stretch of earth where some developer would build a shopping mall, and everyone left alive would profit, and none would remember, unless this contract moved. Now.
The power came.
It flowed smooth and slow and gold and heavy as a flood of honey down from Aberforth and Duncan, into her, and from her into the dream map. Eyes still closed, feeling rather than seeing the contours of the map, she directed the power to dormant wards in the Skittersill’s nails and mortar.
The argument was easy enough: the gripfire tugged matter from matter. Windowsill, rafters, casement, insulation, and drywall all burned on their own. But each piece was part of a building, and the building as a whole did not burn merely because one piece burned. And yet how could a part be burning if the whole was not on fire?
Sophistry, but you didn’t need to work hard to outfox flame. Even Craftborn demon-fire was pretty dumb.
The Skittersill burned around her but was not consumed. This trick would not work forever: even the most massive building had a flashpoint. For the moment, wood and insulation glowed, but they did not erupt—excess heat seeped into surrounding stone and metal. The Skittersill’s buildings would not burn until they all burned together.
It hurt, intensely.
Not as much as the men and women around her hurt. Even those she shielded were singed by metal buttons and buckles, parboiled in their own sweat.
The bodies—the people not yet dead—mounted around her as Tay and Cozim dragged the fallen to safety. She saw no one she knew. They must be on fire already.
Chel. Bill and Kapania Kemal. Bel. Temoc.
They should have been safe. No sentimentality here, simple fact: they should not have died so easily. Temoc’s sacrifice woke the gods. Even weakened, they might have saved their worshippers for a few seconds, given Chakal Square an instant’s defiance to trumpet through history. Why not?
She searched the Square for the vast and immanent presences she had seen.
And found them.
The Quechal gods stood overhead, arms open to receive burnt offerings.
Elayne’s stomach turned. She wanted to be sick. She could not afford to be sick. Good thing she was no longer precisely human, or she would not have had a choice.
There was a logic to it, she had to admit.
The gods had slept for decades, eking out a life off Temoc’s little sacrifices. Last night’s exercise woke them and left them hungry. After the Wars, even gods knew their limits. The choice, from their perspective, was simple: waste what little power they possessed in a defensive tactic that posed no threat to their adversary, or gather the dead and use their sacrifice to power an assault.
The gods sent their power forth. A wind moved among the dying of Chakal Square.
Elayne opened her eyes to watch the first of the doomed things rise.
“Temoc,” she said, though he could not hear her. “I am so sorry.”
* * *
Scorched hair and baked flesh, bubbling skin and crisping muscle, ash and bone and the cries of the dying, and everywhere the stench of alchemy. People dove for cover under the remains of tents that were themselves aflame. Temoc stood in the end of the world.
Through the smoke, through the haze, he saw columns of pure white light ascend.
At first he did not understand. Stared blankly into the sky, into the Couatl wheeling overhead—some new weapon, some mercy to kill his people faster? But these lights rose heavenward, and as they neared, Couatl spun in disarray.
Then Chel cried out in fear, in pain—an animal noise pressed from her by contortions deep within. She knelt, clawing at her skin. Her back muscles wriggled like snakes, and where her nails touched, her clothes and flesh parted and through the cracks flowed the purest, brightest light Temoc had ever seen.
Her screams became a roar.
That light seeped from the wounds she’d torn, a viscous shining fluid that scalded as it coated her shoulders, arms, neck, spine and back and legs. Beneath the light she remained herself: charred clothes and skin, heaving, screaming, standing. She stood, wracked with pain. Her face was a radiant mask.
The light flowed and bulged at Chel’s back and folded itself into feathered wings.
Yes, the gods said, and he understood.
He understood, and wanted to fall to his knees and weep hot tears into the consuming fire, that took everything from him, and left him with—
Power.
Once he’d seen a dam break, no small backriver dam but one of the great waterworks of RKC’s youth, a structure of concrete and stone fifty stories high. Hundreds of thousands of gallons battered forth, a white wall tearing through the plain, scouring soil to bedrock, shredding houses and farms, shattering the fleeing horses it overtook. Water became solid in two states: frozen, and in motion.
Each cell in his body was wired to a lightning generator. If not for the scars, if not for sixty years of prayer and twenty of war, he would have broken like those horses on the flood. He stood, instead, as light ripped through him, as the shadows of his skin sunk deeper than black, a hunger more than a color. And he was strong.
He grew strong with the deaths of hundreds. One sacrifice, last night, had woken the gods. They found the people of Chakal Square in their dreams, and sang songs of faith to them as they slept. This morning, they tasted the blood of those who remained. As planned.
We few, he said when he raised the knife, we fortunate few, are called to give our hearts.
Rise, Seven Eagle sang in his blood. Fly, and fight.
He wanted to tear his scars from his skin. Wanted to curse the gods and run from Chakal Square, to crisp himself to ash in the fires the King in Red made fall.
But some choices could not be unmade.
Not when Chel spread her glorious wings. Not when she looked at him sadly, and flew.
The shock wave of her rising bent him to his knees. And he knew, as he had known once but forgotten, that his gods were wise, and also clever. They knew Temoc of old. They knew Eagle Knights. They knew he would not leave his people.
Not when there was vengeance left to take.
The Couatl turned for another pass.
He rose to meet them in the air.
The square’s heat bore him up as he flew, arms at his sides, chin up, no need for wings. Swept past Chel in a blur, and past the others, too. Senses dilated open by this rush of power, he saw them, the risen of Chakal Square: twelve altogether. Not all whole, or wholly alive. One woman had all the flesh melted from the right side of her body, skin replaced with divine light. A man flew still aflame, his burned-off hands replaced by shining talons. A child, gods, they’d chosen a child, he’d thought all those gone—a child was brightest of them all. Twelve, against the Couatl.
The Wardens’ mounts broke in confusion. Scales and serpents, silver chains, star crowns atop their heads, and Wardens rode them, faceless masks reflecting fire.
Temoc aimed for the lead Warden, and, accelerating, recognized him. The tall one, the broad one, who threw the rock that killed the child that started it all. Sent here, by some twisted logic, to see the end.
Temoc held out one hand, tightened his fingers into a ball, and struck Zoh in the face at a large fraction of the speed of sound. The Warden’s neck snapped, the Couatl roared, and the other angels joined the battle.
Temoc fought so he would not weep.
* * *
“Sir,” Captain Chimalli said. “There seems to be a problem.”
They stood atop the King in Red’s steed, a mile from Chakal Square and the battle. Chimalli flicked through various Wardens’ fields of view. The King in Red, behind him, watched.
The first run went smoothly: gripfire deployed, on target within operational parameters. Casualties high. The second wave turned strange.
Lights danced among a cloud of Couatl. Occasional bits of dirt fell from the mass: Wardens tumbled from their mounts. Many were caught; Couatl swept to snag them with their claws. Others died.
Voices chorused in his ears.
“Move like nothing I’ve—”
“—Out of nowhere—”
“—Dive, dive, dive—”
“It’s on my tail, it’s coming, it’s—”
“—Got one with a net, but she’s burning through—”
He could only glimpse the forms that moved among his Wardens, killing. A flash of wing, an image of an impossible face, a melted hand, a claw. He recognized, at least, the shadow whose sweeping fists ended too many transmissions. “Sir,” he repeated.
The King in Red’s star eyes shrunk to crimson dots. He stood motionless, hands on his brass-shod staff, wind billowing his robe.
“All teams,” Chimalli said back over the link to his Wardens. “Burst out. Surround them. Javelin units on my mark.”
“Acknowledged.” Couatl took flight from surrounding rooftops. Chimalli counted twelve lights, and Temoc. His men could handle so few, surely.
Far away, he heard gravel grind against gravel. He realized, with sudden deepening horror, that the King in Red was laughing.
“Sir?”
“Clever. Not Temoc’s idea, unless I’m very much mistaken. And here I thought all we’d have to do today was hammer a shield until it broke. Captain. Bring us in.”
* * *
Rainbow wings and black scales flashed. The world was a cloud of ash and blood, prisms and nets, claws and teeth and glass and death.
Chel danced within her light, a splinter tossed on a torrent of divine will. Jaws snapped where she had been moments past, and she turned and struck back faster than she had ever moved before. She tore open the Couatl’s head, and blood steamed in the air. A claw battered her from behind and she fell, spinning, wings flared to catch herself on emptiness in time to block a talon meant for her throat—and then she broke the talon, grabbed its wrist, and spun the Couatl around into another, sending both wheeling toward the fire, wings beating desperately against the empty sky.
Couatl seethed around her, and divine lights darted through them, killing. Two lights landed on one Couatl’s wings, and pulled up until bones broke. The lights zipped away, and one flew into another serpent’s jaw. That light pulled free, but the beast’s jaw slowed him enough that a thrown net caught him and he tumbled toward the ground, faster, faster, until his wings cut through the strands and he soared up to fight.
The sky was a mess of blood. She felt the other lights, their joy and pain. They were together, wound through one another to carry out a grand task.
And that was all that remained of the others. They were singular as blades: when one broke, pinned through the chest by a Couatl’s lucky strike, she felt his passing: the joy of purpose served, and gone. The others were dead, or hovered on the verge of death, their pain and final rage giving their new forms strength. They were part of this miracle machine, built by gods to do their will. Chel lived. Beneath the rush of power, she smelled the melted human bodies from the square below, and wanted to die. It would be easier.
Temoc leapt from Warden to Warden. He was a gift of violence to the world. A javelin darted toward him, and he shattered it with a backhand. Nets caught him and he ripped them open. He strode on air. Couatl struck him from all sides, and he laughed. Blood stained his hands, and his eyes burned.
The surge and pulse of battle eased, the whirlwind slowed. Through the confusion of serpents and wings, Chel saw the sky, and the city below. For the first time in ten frantic minutes of battle, she had no immediate target, no one to strike, no one to kill.
They were winning. Gods. All the dead, and all the dying, and still they were about to win.
Did that make it worthwhile?
Couatl corpses splashed into the lake of fire that was Chakal Square.
Someone cried victory.
She glanced around, talons raised, new instincts awake to the chance of threat. More Couatl took off from surrounding rooftops, moving into position for a barrage. The Couatl they’d fought winged to shelter. Chase after them, catch them. Easy. The gods sang war song in her blood.
Then the northern sky rippled and turned black, and the gods began to scream.
* * *
Elayne burned in the city’s stead. Fire crowned the Skittersill and would have eaten it but for the Aberforth and Duncan deal; Purcell’s firm, meanwhile, tried to pull free of its obligations, and would have succeeded but for Elayne. She bridged the fire and the firm, and the two met in battle, on her and through her.
She was too far gone to scream. Fire could not consume wood and brick and stone, so it torched instead through her mind. The iron-wrought cages where she locked her memories melted. Images long discarded, moments of weakness and pain chained in dim corners, broke free, and she:
was a twelve-year-old girl hiding facedown in cave mud, breathing moss and muck as a mob poured past the cavern mouth, torches in their hands and whiskey on their breath. She tasted fear and bile and ice-cold anger. Run, she had to run, but could not—and wouldn’t it be better to crawl into the dark and remain, and grow a twisted thing twisted more by shadows?
was fourteen and killing for the first time, with a simple steel knife in those days of sorcery, entering a man’s ribs again and again and again, the shock of his body’s weight through the steel as he bore her down.
was the snow that fell on Dresediel Lex for the first and last time, and left smoking holes in stone. Gods died in the sky, pierced by thorns of light, as Craftsmen clad in war engines marched through the city’s wreckage. Stench of motor oil and blood, saltpeter and ozone, brick dust and sand. Life’s million colors faded black and white from soul-loss as she staggered from her war machine down an alley, fatigues bloodsoaked, her eyes shining and her body wet, toward where Temoc lay impaled.
was a body in a dim-lit room in Alt Coulumb, given away from herself, robbed even of the right of rage. City lights outside the window, sharp as instruments of torture, while in her soul’s depths delicate mad hands gripped the roots of love and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and willed them to come loose.
was a hundred moments of pain and defeat, anger and sorrow, innocence lost, and none mattered, because from each she had emerged stronger than before, welding out of horrors new truth, new determination. To be what? Professional? Successful? She was both, she’d been both, and here she stood, saving a city’s bones even as its people died. She had grown strong. But what world had she built with her strength? A world where she saved what could be saved and left the rest to rot?
Around her the circle closed, her emissaries soot-smeared and broken. The wounded lay crying.
She saw out every window in the Skittersill. Her senses filled the air. She held the city in her hand as the Quechal gods transformed their dying faithful into weapons, and as those weapons killed the Wardens and their steeds. The dogfight twisted above, a roil of scales and wings, of razors and rainbows. Bodies fell broken into the fire.
She saw Chel in their midst, shining like a star, and winged. Elayne heard Tay say the woman’s name, but he could not join her, only watch. She lived, as far as Elayne could see: a human woman winning against all odds, with her patrons’ help. Perhaps Temoc’s people would have their vengeance after all.
For a few minutes, torn between fire and Craft, she almost believed that. The Couatl broke, fleeing north. More took flight from rooftops around the Skittersill, smaller breeds, built for ranged combat, but Temoc and the angels were fast, hard to imagine a marksman hitting one even with a clear shot.
The angels gave their fleeing enemies chase.
Temoc held back at first, and Elayne saw why. The Couatl fled north in a single narrow stream. If this was a true rout they would flee in all directions at once. The gods, flush with sacrificial souls, were being tempted by a target. They took the bait, humanoid weapons darting forth blood-hungry, rejoicing in the strength with which they put their foe to flight.
Then the Wardens folded their wings at once and dived, and the sky before the Quechal angels rippled, twisted, inverted, and went black with spreading scaly wings, a battleship-broad back, tail long as a highway and thick as a magisterium tree, cavernous jaws with teeth three times the height of a man. Even the eyes were enormous. A ruby glared from the creature’s forehead, supernova bright, and in state at the root of its neck stood the King in Red.
In her shock, Elayne almost let the Skittersill ignite.
It was not a dragon.
Well. It was not a dragon anymore.
Dragons, in their age, and wisdom, and might, rarely meddled in human affairs. They took sides in the God Wars, when after long decades the struggle finally threatened to crack the egg of the world—lent aid to Craftsmen, then retired once again to their quiet slow empires and millennial games. Some, young and curious, hired themselves out as carriers for air freight, but the elders kept apart.
But dragons were not sentimental for their dead. The dead were landscape, the dead were for devouring. Humans had some atavistic reluctance to transform their corpses into weapons; dragons had no such qualms, and did not flinch at Craftsmen’s first careful question as to whether they would mind, so much, if humans ran a few experiments with their bodies. And so in death they were reborn—the dead ones lacked the living’s supernatural cleverness, but their immense frame and unique biology, their polymer scales no artificial process could duplicate, their muscles stronger and more durable than any hydraulic system, the bones from which an enterprising engineer could hang a fortune’s worth of weaponry, their colossal lift, and of course the atomic forge within that could power much more than mere fiery breath, Craftsmen could find use for these.
Expensive to operate. A thousand souls or so to fund a minute’s combat. But then, war always had been a chance for great powers to play with their most exquisite toys.
Elayne closed her eyes, and within, between, beneath the scales of the King in Red’s dragon, she saw Craftwork weapons spin to absurd heights of power. And, as the Skittersill angels broke for cover, the guns spoke.
* * *
Chel did not wait to understand the shape that emerged from nothing in the sky. Immense, claws, teeth, fangs, nightmare eyes, swallowing up the sun: that was enough. She dove, twisting, forward and down. The godsong split into cacophony as divine minds realigned. She ignored them, and let herself fall.
A cloud of cold iron fléchettes erupted from the dragon’s wings and filled the air where she’d just been: hundreds of thousands of metal slivers flying at the speed of sound. The others had no time to guard themselves; the gods did that for them by instinct, forging magnetic shields in the air around their servants. But the fléchettes did not ricochet. Glancing off the shields, they darted out, turned, and sped back for a second pass, a third, a fourth. A cloud of tiny knives surrounded her comrades, and some pierced their shields to draw shining blood.
Chel cut her dive, and began to climb.
* * *
Temoc saw the dragon, heard the gods scramble to respond, a dozen different concepts rippling through divine minds that understood the contours of the physical world but barely. Their voices pulsed through his scars, their minds through his:
—attack—turn—parry—preserve—
Time, for gods always a confusing and imprecise parameter, dilated out, and they swatted each fléchette away: easy to do when they all came from one direction, but on the second pass—
—many—hunger—resolve—turn—charge—adjust—iron—
He ran toward the dragon, trailing footsteps of shadow through ozone-charged air. Gods did not deal well with small things moving quickly, and especially not with cold iron. Swatting each sliver aside would strain their powers and attention. Instead, they charged the angels themselves. The iron shards burst away from the winged lights, straight out in all directions. The risen of Chakal Square flew toward the King in Red atop his war beast, laughing.
Laughing, as was the King in Red himself.
The storm of iron lost its animating life, and fell.
Temoc ran faster.
And then the lightning spoke.
* * *
Elayne watched. Elegant. The fléchettes first, too fast for the gods to turn aside one by one, and enchanted to seek their target. The easiest response to which, if you were a god, was to apply a single, powerful charge to the entire field of combat, fléchettes and divine wings and armor alike, so the King in Red’s iron splinters could never come close enough to hurt the angels. Which, of course, left the angels charged.
So now you have a fléchette storm, positively charged, and a number of angels whose wings are as well. Drop the fléchettes, and you’re left with a field of charged targets. Which means, no matter where they run, no matter how fast they move, you can find them, and hit them.
And so as the angels flew toward the King in Red, dragonwing antennae sparked and popped. Lightning lanced across empty air.
The angels burned.
* * *
Chel was behind and beneath the dragon when the lightning hit.
She was aware only of a discontinuity, of flying toward the dragon and then of falling a hundred feet or so beneath, below, every muscle clenched at once, blood in her mouth and ozone in her nose. Ground approaching, fast, faster—she tried to spread wings but the wings did not spread, she spun and fell and flailed as the gods’ voices clashed in disarray, but there, her fingers twitched, and the tips of her wings, and out they flared, arresting her in mid-fall, slowing so fast the world went gray but at least she rose.
Above, the others hung in brilliant webs, arrayed in a ring around the dragon’s vast head. She must have dodged the worst of it.
Her fellows were not so lucky. They writhed, a twitching agony of seconds that stretched for years. Hooks and beams and instruments of torture manifested in the sky, pierced their wings and pulled, and tore.
The gods’ song faltered and grew faint.
She flew faster, a rising spark, a streak to embrace the sun, toward the dragon.
* * *
—adjust—scramble—pain—pain—escape—fly—
Temoc, running, heard the gods recoil as the King in Red tore their emissaries. The dragon threw its defenses against him: shields manifested in his path and he broke them. His distance to the dragon doubled and doubled again with every micrometer of space he crossed, and yet still he crossed the space. Demonic claws glanced off his shining scars.
Divine voices clashed discordant in his mind.
Lose the wings, he prayed, fervently. They’re too much—gives him something to grab and tear. He knows you want them, so he tries to take them from you. It’s only a matter of time before your power runs out.
—perhaps—
With a roar of tearing paper, the risen of Chakal Square burst from their plasma wings and leapt forth, fingers grown claw-long, teeth sharpened to points. The dragon’s wards sparked and flashed; two dropped insensate to the city far below, but eight more landed, three on the dragon’s skull, three on the left wing, two on the right.
Temoc himself touched down above the creature’s ruby forehead. The head twisted; the dragon screamed an iron scream. Around, beneath, to all sides Dresediel Lex wheeled, one with its sky. The shadows that clad Temoc’s feet gripped the dragon’s scales, held him in place. One more of the risen fell, contorted with insensate rage; the rest dropped to all fours and scampered down the long neck toward the King in Red and his Warden captain.
On the wings, more Wardens ran to intercept the risen, weapons shining in their hands. Fast, so fast, but not fast enough; claws tore silver masks and teeth ripped silver throats. The three from the skull leapt down the neck, from scale to massive scale toward the King in Red. Grinning still, grinning always, the Craftsman stretched out his hand. Invisible knives flensed the fire from the risen, but it rekindled and they advanced—slower, though, a bare but perceptible change, and still the knives spun and skinned. The second of the risen fell: her own body sprouted thorns that grew inward, piercing flesh and bone. Still she advanced, spurred by divine fervor. On the wings, Wardens recovered their footing, ringed the risen and stabbed them with spears as if baiting bears.
He’s playing an attrition game, Temoc prayed. Forcing you to spend power you don’t have, power you can’t recover. Spreading you between obligations until you break.
—our city—our power—
Not now. Not after forty years. You can retreat, but that doesn’t mean you can win.
—no retreat—too long asleep—
He thought, at the last, of Caleb, and of Mina, and of the family he’d given up for it to end here, on dragonback.
And then, because he saw no other way, he opened himself to the gods. He pulled their power into him. Light surged through his scars. He sprinted up the dragon’s neck. Demons barred his path; he shattered one with a punch and threw himself into the second’s chest, breaking crystal with his weight. Close now, so close. More shields, easily sidestepped. Disregard the captain. Focus on the King in Red.
Kill him and this ends. You don’t win, nobody wins this kind of war, but at least it ends.
The dragon swooped toward Chakal Square. Another risen tumbled off. The Wardens pressed the attack.
And the King in Red stood before him, undefended, his eyes twin red stars in the black of his skull. Temoc swept his arm around, fast—
And the King in Red raised his staff in a blur and blocked.
* * *
Chel was airborne when her wings failed and the fire of her flesh changed shape. New animal instincts rushed in, mixed a cocktail with the fear in her blood. Even without the wings, momentum carried her up, up, don’t think about the drop, the hundreds of feet give or take a death or two she’d fall to solid rock. Focus on the dragon, reach with your claws, never mind how you got claws exactly, just reach—
She caught the edge of a knife-sharp scale. As the dragon dove and lurched she pulled herself up, one hand at a time, forcing her feet between the beast-machine’s immense scales, and she climbed and climbed until she stood atop the back.
Gods called her to battle, but she splayed flat. The gods had not made good decisions so far. A Warden approached over the swell of the dragon’s body: mistook her for a corpse. She did not disabuse him of the notion, not until he was close enough, gods, until she was close enough for Chel to grab her ankle and throw her off into the void.
Screaming, she fell.
Distractions: who was that Warden? How old? What family? Was she young? Married? Children? Happy? What path brought her here?
Below, the Square was dead. And that woman, too.
She crawled across the dragon’s back.
* * *
Captain Chimalli felt the wind as Temoc sprinted past him. He turned in time to see the King in Red defend himself, war-glyphs shining from his bones. No time for Chimalli to help: the monsters of Chakal Square had almost reached him, climbing up the neck.
The first, still pressing through a squall of knives, its flesh stripped to bare bone, would be the easiest. It pounced and he sidestepped, struck with both hands on the back of its neck, heard the spine snap. Fallen, it spasmed, started to slide off the dragon’s neck. Bones wriggled and realigned. He’d have to kill it again in a minute. Fine.
The second, the one that had been female, with the thorns growing through it, was slower, and more difficult. Pain made it canny. A feint forward with a claw, from which he retreated a step. He drew his truncheon. Another feint, another step back. It knelt and growled, as behind it the third approached.
Two against one were not odds Chimalli liked.
He lurched back. Hungry, the monster struck with a claw. Chimalli did not need to recover his footing, had never lost it, faking only—he grabbed the clawed hand, twisted and pulled and hoped these things’ joints still worked like those of men.
Yes. The wrist popped, and the elbow and shoulder when he twisted his waist. A blow with the truncheon to the side of the skull sent that one sliding down the slope of the dragon’s neck, clawing with one arm to halt its fall. Which left the third—
The third hit him in the back. Claws dug through his uniform jacket, through his armor plates, through slick silver into skin. He grunted, no screams yet. Teeth on his neck, not through the mask. He fell forward, pushed up with his legs and arms. Bad idea, this, but no better ones with claws in your back. He jumped, and for a sickening moment was airborne over the dragon’s neck—then the monster hit scale, and he hit the monster, hard enough to break its grip and roll to one side, his arms weaving around its arm and tightening to dislocate the joint. He stood, hands empty, truncheon fallen. The King in Red and Temoc were a tempest of red and black and silver and brass, but he had no time to help, with the first monster recovered almost already and standing.
Chimalli hit it in the face, and it dropped again. He turned to the second, and hoped.
* * *
The fires of the Skittersill were not dead, but they banked low. The gripfire was two parts, fuel and spark, the plan being that the fuel would last the spark long enough for it to catch. Elayne had broken the cycle, and the fuel was almost gone.
Minutes more, and it would all be over.
Elayne’s senses filled the Skittersill, and she watched the dragon swoop toward Chakal Square, wings beating. She watched the battle on its back. The sparks, the angels, faded. With each death they slowed, reduced. Captain Chimalli fought three at once, while behind him his master and Temoc traded stroke for stroke. And Chel, where was Chel, lost already, fallen? No. Elayne saw the woman crawl along the dragon’s back, light dimmed, keeping low. She remained herself, despite the gods.
And Elayne watched from the sidelines.
“She’s still alive,” Tay said. “Save her.”
“I can’t,” she said. “That was the deal.”
Around her, the King in Red’s victims wept.
“Break the deal.”
“I can’t.”
You’re not a warrior anymore, Temoc had said.
A peacemaker. A restorer of life. That was what she wanted to be. A counselor.
And so far she had failed.
Soon, at least, the fires would go out.
* * *
Temoc and the King in Red danced an old dance. Faster, faster they spun. Temoc lashed out with a kick, blocked by the staff, as was his second. Invited his adversary to attack, sidestepped the staff strike when it came, grabbed at the weapon which was gone already—it swept in a blurred circle to clip a temple that was not there because Temoc had already ducked back.
Fiercer they fought, power flowing into both from greater fonts. From their perspective the exchange contained long pauses, slow shifting moments in which each examined the other, considered options and rejected them, feinted and countered. Still they moved too fast for an outside observer to see anything but a blur.
Temoc had never fought like this, not even in the God Wars. Accelerating mass and perception to such heights cost Craftsmen dearly—more efficient to slay from a distance, to destroy targets that could not defend themselves. One might lose a fistfight.
As the King in Red would lose. Temoc’s hands were so close to his neck. He would break those bones, piece by piece. Craftsmen were hard to kill, but he could manage. He was faster, stronger than he had ever been. A bringer of vengeance. The last true knight in the world.
* * *
The monsters slowed. When the next came for Chimalli, he caught it, lifted it, threw it off the dragon. The second, when killed, did not rise again. There was pain somewhere in his body, from cuts and scrapes, and blood everywhere. He would deal with that later. The third monster jumped him, and he flipped it to the ground, knelt on top of it, and hit it in the face, again and again. Bones cracked. He hit it a few more times, and stood, trembling.
The King in Red fought Temoc, so fast. He tried to track their bodies, to tell his boss from his enemy. Maybe. Somewhere. Suggestions of shape within the blur.
He reached for the holster at his thigh.
* * *
Chel felt the gods fade and herself reduced. No. She remained. The divine grip that held her, the wrath that pulsed through her veins like a second blood, that eased. She became herself again, on this dragon’s back, a human being crawling toward the crimson-black cloud that was the King in Red, fighting Temoc.
Not good. Not bad, either, she decided.
At least she still had weapons.
She rose into a crouch, crossbow at the ready.
* * *
The last of the fuel consumed, the fires of Chakal Square began to die.
Elayne watched the dragon, and saw what was about to happen.
“Help her!”
Yes. To all the hells with the Craft and its rules, with word and bond. Just help.
She called her power to her, reached out—
But at the last her own promise bound her, held her. I will not save them.
Her Craft broke. The shield that warded them cracked, and oven-breath seeped through the gaps to sear their lungs.
She fell to the stone.
* * *
Temoc fought the King in Red. The gods’ power was his. Immense strength, battering the Craftsman to a standstill. He drew his knife and it splintered the staff, chipped it, sheared it in half.
He kicked out the back of the skeleton’s knee, caught its spine in the crook of his elbow, tightened. Bone creaked. Craftwork sparked and spasmed against him. Seconds more.
Temoc laughed, in the fullness of his power. “Why haven’t we done this before?”
“Because,” Kopil said, “I never needed to get you into position.”
* * *
Blur and whirlwind, dust and smoke, shadow and light, all coalesced into two arrested forms, the King in Red in Temoc’s grip.
And Chimalli had the shot.
His finger tightened on the trigger.
* * *
Elayne was too far away, but still she thought she heard the crossbow’s string, a single note plucked on the bass of the world.
* * *
Chimalli fell. The crossbow slipped from his fingers.
Chel stared down at the weapon in her hand, still singing its one note. She looked up again. The King in Red roared, threw Temoc back, and turned toward her. His eyes burned bright as he raised his hand.
She did not tremble, though she was afraid.
* * *
Elayne saw the captain fall, crossbow bolt through his neck. She saw the Craft the King in Red invoked, which she could have stopped, so easily, the slightest flick of her will even at this distance. But she was bound.
And so she saw, too, the round hole appear in Chel’s forehead, before she fell.
Tay screamed. She barely heard him.
Temoc tackled the King in Red, an instant too late.
He struck Kopil in the chest with a blow that would have shattered marble, and the skeleton staggered. Temoc hit him again, and again. The King in Red swept his arm around—the hand with which he’d killed Chel—and Temoc seized it and moved faster than even Elayne could see. Kopil’s wrist bent at a sharp angle, and there was a sound like a shot, of wards giving way.
Then the King in Red swelled, and his teeth grew long and the sparks in his eyes sharp and fierce as any hell. He thrust out his staff, and Temoc flew back through the air. His scars burned to seize the edges of the Craft that held him, but this Craft had no edge, just an endless torrent of will. The King in Red could not last long with such power in him—his mind would shatter in ten seconds, but he needed less than ten.
Temoc was about to die.
As the people of Chakal Square had died. As their risen remnants died. As Chel died.
And now Temoc. Old soldier. Broken shell. Father. Fool.
While Elayne stood in her circle, immune, because she played the game. Because she kept her word. And because she played the game she would be allowed these few she’d saved, scorched and shattered, to live as testament to the futility of change. Scraps at the table. The King in Red might pay their hospital bills, if it amused him.
She closed her eyes. They stung from smoke and other things. Through the forest of contracts and bargains and powers the King in Red called down, she saw the Quechal gods, shrunken to angry shades and fading, power spent in their rush toward victory. Betrayers and last casualties of Chakal Square.
No, not last. They would die first, and then Temoc.
She could not do this. Not her place. Not her fight. Not now, after sixty years of a chosen side.
For the first and last time in her life, Elayne Kevarian prayed.
Not to the gods above, traitors and accursed. Not to the gods of her childhood, whose people had hunted her through wood and field. Not to the Lord of Alt Coulumb or the squid kings of Iskar or the Shining Empire Thearchs. She prayed up, and in, and out, in broken desperation, in case something might hear.
Save him.
Please.
The answer came at once, so sudden and swift she mistook it for wishful thinking: a cold rush that covered her skin. But there was a mind beneath and behind the answer: cold, vast and alien and personal at once, a voice she’d known since she first caught a falling star, a voice to which time was something other people did.
How? it asked.
So little power left. The King in Red blocked Temoc’s avenues of retreat. The Quechal gods’ might was all but spent keeping him alive.
As, in Chakal Square and the Skittersill around, the last of the gripfire’s fuel gave up. Flame danced on rooftops, on corpses—no longer the King in Red’s fire, but anyone’s for the claiming.
She felt the fire through the dream map she’d drawn. Gathered it into her hands: not much power but, she hoped, enough.
Here, she said. Use this. Might have said more, set terms and conditions, proposed a bargain or a contract. She did not.
Was she mad? She heard no rage in that voice, no vengeance, no hunger. Had she merely committed the oldest error, called for aid in extremity and imagined a voice to answer her?
But with eyes closed she could stare into the horrorland the King in Red created, its grinding wheels and chains, its talons and its teeth, the million knives and its space warped in answer to malevolent will, and see Temoc. Then, impossibly, the darkness broke, and he was gone.
She opened her eyes. She knelt in and beyond Chakal Square, in a circle of Craft and of the living burned. Around her, the Skittersill stood beneath a blue sky—the same in every particular but for the dead.
Wardens and Couatl lay tangled with protesters. Charred meat clung to bones. Blood crusted on rock. The god melted atop his dry fountain in the center of the square.
Had they saved a hundred? Perhaps not even so many.
The dragon hung above them all. On the undead beast’s back, Wardens moved. The King in Red stood, staring. Chel and the captain lay still.
The square and the whole city fell silent.
Elayne felt that silence press her down. She wiped sweat from her face and her eyes. Only sweat.
Thank you.
No answer came.
Around her, the twelve wept, and Tay.
The people they’d saved moaned in their sleep.
The sun shone overhead, and she cast no shadow.