THE AERIAL VAULT hung over the Citadel like a dagger. The Dragon of Qarsazh perched on the side of the cupola, at the vault’s highest point, her wings shielding her from the wind.
In every direction all that was visible was the ruinous city. Hundreds of miles and still spreading. She could feel it moving outward, the hungry mindless crawl, seeding itself in open land and pushing on.
Breaking through the wards was no more difficult than the time Shuthmili had infiltrated the place, but she felt far more exposed now. She no longer had the fragment of the throne of Iriskavaal, and it wasn’t as though there were many others lying around. On the other hand, the Dragon had come into full power since then, and she had her own methods.
The wall did not exactly give way as it had for the pure fragment, but she did feel it … soften. It was enough. No elegant solution. She kicked and scrabbled her way through the final boundary with brute force alone.
By the time she was through, her wings were ruffled and disorderly. She snapped them open and closed as she stepped down into the tower. The upper chamber was almost exactly as it had been when Shuthmili had found Belthandros imprisoned there: a bare, open platform, with the nine concentric rings in the floor and the white sarcophagus at its centre.
Lying on their back on the sarcophagus, kicking their heels, was Tsereg.
“Guess you haven’t brought me anything to read,” said the child.
She could feel Tsereg’s presence from here, pushing at the edges of the circle, like the chill pouring off a block of ice. The child was clearly trying to project boredom, but there was a sense that something moved behind the projection, a distant and crafty intelligence.
“You’re not really Shuthmili, are you?” said Tsereg.
“As much as I ever was,” she said. “Just something else as well. As for that, you’re not really a mortal, are you? What, then? Another scrap of Iriskavaal?”
“Guess again.”
Tsereg grinned, and although their actual features were as ordinary and as wholesome as an apple on the branch, there was an impression of bare skeletal teeth and empty staring sockets.
Zinandour’s deep memory of the Unspoken One was a long history of wariness based on little actual knowledge. The Unspoken One was older even than Iriskavaal, who had been ancient when Zinandour had first come to full estate. And Shuthmili had visited the House of Silence, once, with Csorwe, and seen how the place made her shiver.
Then Tsereg folded their arms around their knees, and bit their lip. When they spoke again, the sense of doubleness was gone and they looked almost exactly like a mortal child. “Where’s Tal? Is he all right? Are you here to help?”
“You know,” said the Dragon, picking her words carefully. “I always thought, if I ever got to talk to you, I’d have a bone to pick. About Csorwe.”
“Oh, groan, bone to pick,” said Tsereg. “Thought you might. Look, it’s hard to explain. My mother was right about the cult of the Unspoken. They got it all wrong. The Chosen Bride stuff, that was all their thing. Their idea about how to show fealty. And they’re all still with me. My mum, and my aunt, and Ammarwe and Serwen, and Najalwe and all the others.” They gave the Dragon a piercing look. “Nothing is to be forgotten that belongs to me. All things that are lost come into my keeping. That’s the whole point. All form takes shape in emptiness—substance and nothingness need one another, to define their edges—a lot of things are clearer to me now.”
At one time, Qanwa Shuthmili the educated Adept would have dismissed all this as so much heretic mysticism. Now that she had become one of the old gods of the world, she knew what it meant.
“I bet they’re clearer to you too,” said Tsereg, echoing the thought. “Dragon of Qarsazh.”
The Dragon smiled, only showing her teeth a very little. Aside from a reptilian appetite for raw mutton, she didn’t really feel as though she had changed much at all.
“It’s easier to be Shuthmili, perhaps,” she said. And she liked how Csorwe said it, not that she intended to express that to the child. “My true name cannot be spoken by mortal tongue.”
“Snap,” said Tsereg. “Are you here to help or not?”
“I suppose I am,” said Shuthmili. She still wasn’t sure what to make of any of this, but she scuffed a gap in the binding circle with one foot.
Tsereg grinned, relief rippling out from them across the broken binding circle and lapping around Shuthmili in waves.
“Good,” they said, “because I have no idea what I was going to do if you weren’t.”
As they spoke, there came the sound of a bell ringing, loud enough to be heard even from where they were standing.
“Oh, shit,” said Tsereg. All their affected breeziness was gone at once, replaced with apprehension. “That’s the summoning bell, it must be Tal. Let’s go, let’s go, he’s fucked this up somehow, come on!”
“What’s he done?” she said, and then a worse realisation came to her. “Csorwe was with him! What’s he done?”
Tsereg swore again, hopping from one foot to another with their eagerness to be gone. “I told him this was a bad plan, the bloody idiot! He must’ve got himself caught, that bell is so everyone can watch him get drowned in the big fountain, come on!”
Shuthmili cursed, spread her wings, scooped Tsereg under her arm, and took off from the side of the tower.
The shapeless bronze statues in the Execution Gardens glinted with green fire. Belthandros Sethennai marched between the rows and dragged Csorwe after him.
Csorwe did not need much dragging. She trudged along, bent double with defeat and weariness. The defeat was feigned, but the weariness was not.
The Gardens rippled in Sethennai’s presence, opening like a water lily. At the far end was the drowning fountain, a great round pool with steps rising inexorably to the water’s edge, but now galleried tiers of seating rose all around it, a growing matrix like coral. The air smelled of hot metal and dust, dry grass and the faint freshness of salt water like a lingering dread.
There were people on some of the galleries, wearing ragged party clothes and dazed, sickly expressions. They had reached the end of their capacity to absorb fresh horrors. On the lowest terrace were Tal and Cherenthisse.
“He really does like to have an audience,” Tal muttered. Tal wouldn’t have survived this long if he hadn’t understood that men of power were fundamentally predictable.
“We have moved as many as we could,” said Cherenthisse, who was ostensibly there as his jailor. “All those who are not here are aboard the Blessed Awakening, but I could not take everyone without suspicion. Your mother and brother refused to come.”
“Sounds like them,” said Tal, without much interest, watching Sethennai. He fizzed and snapped with a hectic vitality, as though executing Csorwe was the most exciting thing that had happened to him in days.
“No,” said Cherenthisse, “they would not go while you were here.”
Tal had no answer to that.
Sethennai had Csorwe up at the water’s edge by now, making some speech to the ragged crowd about how he had captured an assassin. It hadn’t been much of an assassination attempt—Csorwe had hidden a butter knife up her sleeve, it hadn’t even broken the skin when she’d jumped out at him—but it had done what they needed it to do.
Tal had witnessed executions before, so he knew how the next step went. When Sethennai finished his speech, he would push Csorwe over the edge. If he was kind, he would hold her head underwater, but it did not seem likely he would be kind. The sides of the fountain were high and sheer. Csorwe would tread water until she passed out from exhaustion, and that would be the end of her.
Shuthmili and Tsereg landed behind a plinth, as close to the fountain as they dared.
Behind and above them, suspended in the wall like a cracked gemstone in its setting, was a shattered hoop of glassy black stone: the broken Gate of Tlaanthothe. More than a quarter of the upper frame was fragmented, but the fragments floated loosely in place, gleaming like polished metal, dark and silent, no song and no grass-green Gate-fire.
Csorwe raised her face to that great dead eye. There was a hard, shining expectancy in her face. She was no stranger to her own death, thought Shuthmili, and fury welled in her, white-hot.
Belthandros’ shields flowed around him as perfect and unassailable as liquid diamond. Shuthmili automatically raised shields of her own, as hard and dense as a flint knife, shielding her intentions. Tsereg did the same, closing off their presence until they were nearly invisible.
“What can we do?” said Tsereg, in a frantic whisper. “Do we need weapons? Should I have brought a sword? Where would I get a sword? Tal didn’t even have one.”
Shuthmili shook her head, blotting out their voice.
She was not willing to see Csorwe die again. Even if Csorwe wanted nothing more to do with her, even if there was never any getting back to what they’d had, Shuthmili would die clawing at Belthandros’ eyes with her bare hands before she sat by and watched Csorwe drown.
But what could she do? She was a newborn divinity, and Belthandros was older than worlds. She had no further leverage, no more tricks in the bag, no way to stop him doing whatever he wanted.
“You and Tal, you’re really good at plans, you know that,” she hissed, through gritted teeth. “He called her here to get her killed.”
“There has to be something we can do,” said Tsereg.
The empty socket of the dead Gate seemed to mock her, a gnawing absence, utterly without mercy.
And at last, she saw what it was that she could do. Something of the space-time folding that Vigil had taught her, something of the fire that devours.
She could corrupt the dead Gate, turn it in on itself, make it burn cold. Rather than that warm green radiance, a draining dark. Carve a path through to the outer darkness, and open a door not to the Maze but the void. She knew the way. After all, she had been there before.
“I never wanted it to come to this,” said Sethennai to Csorwe, and sounded as if he might even mean it. He sighed, his silk shirt rising and falling in a great billow. He had a sword, for some reason, and he was clasping it with unpractised awkwardness. He looked down at Csorwe as if they both were children who had forgotten the next part of the game.
“Remind me,” she said. “What was it you did want?”
“You could have had everything you desired, as my right hand,” said Sethennai. “I wish you had stayed.”
Light glinted on Sethennai’s sword and on the surface of the water, and Csorwe wondered why he was prolonging this. She didn’t flatter herself that Sethennai was having a personal quandary about killing her.
“I wish you’d hurry up and drown me,” said Csorwe.
The sword would be quicker, and probably kinder. But she didn’t want quick, she wanted this to take as long as possible, to buy time for the others: for Cherenthisse to get everyone out, for Tsereg to escape, for Tal to complete what she had started.
Sethennai doesn’t even know how to hold that sword, she thought, distantly. He’ll hurt himself.
“Very well,” said Sethennai. “If that is how you wish to end this.”
“Wait a second,” said a voice from behind him, loud enough to be heard from the galleries, and it was Tal, poised on the lip of the fountain.
Tal looked vaguely around at the galleried seating, the dazed spectators, the distant half-formed bronzes.
“Belthandros Sethennai,” he said. “I challenge you for the city.”
Tal felt he might be falling, as if the ground might drop away beneath his feet. The look on Sethennai’s face almost made up for it.
“What?” said Sethennai.
“I’m entitled. There are witnesses. That’s all it needs, right? Csorwe will stay out of it.”
She folded her arms and nodded, impassive.
“You’re unarmed,” said Sethennai.
“So kill me,” said Tal. “Or surrender, if you can’t be bothered.”
“The nature of my life is that people leave it,” said Sethennai. “I suppose I ought to know that by now. All the same—”
“Do you ever think,” said Tal, cutting across him, “that that might be your own fault?”
“Excuse me?”
“Normally the guy who’s about to get decapitated gets a final word, but if you’re going to kill me, I’m so glad I get to sit through another one of your treacly fucking monologues first,” said Tal.
“Did you have something you wanted to say?” said Sethennai.
“Oh, sure, I can probably do this one off the top of my head,” said Tal, in a conversational drawl. “It’s so hard that I’m immortal. So sad for me that other people die. So difficult whenever they don’t instantly fall over and kiss my arse. So tragic for me to be so much better than anyone else—”
“Talasseres,” he said.
“So tragic, and the worst thing is that I’m alone all the time and nobody will ever love me—”
“I think you’ve made your point,” said Sethennai, rolling his eyes. “I didn’t actually intend self-pity—”
“No, but you’re right, though,” said Tal. “You’ll be alone for as long as you live. You could probably choose not to be, but I bet you never will.”
He grinned and spread his arms. “Come fucking murder me, Belthandros, or don’t. Make your choice. I did.”
“It’ll work,” said Tsereg. “You can do it.”
She had sworn she would never go back. The memory was carved deep, all those millennia entombed within it, fruitlessly thrashing for purchase. Zinandour had spent so long making her escape, ignoring the cold breath of the past on the back of her neck. She would not turn back to its embrace. Not for anyone or anything.
“It’ll take me back,” she said. The void knew her as its prisoner. She should never have escaped from its grip.
“I’ll stay this side. I’ll get you out,” said Tsereg.
“I don’t believe you can.”
“Guess you’ll just have to trust me.”
“I won’t. I can’t.”
“Then all this is for nothing!” said Tsereg. “You think you’re the only one who’s ever been shut away? I could’ve run, you know. I got out, and I could’ve just gone off somewhere. Tal wanted me to. But it’s no good to be by yourself. You can get us all out, Shuthmili.”
She hadn’t been made for this kind of insane bravery. If she looked upon the void again, even if she escaped it, she would never be able to forget it was there. Anything she did she would do in its shadow, knowing all the time that it lay just behind her, beneath and above and within, that everything else stood hollow before this immense negation.
“All things have their fading,” said Tsereg, in that moment more god than child. “We stand in the darkness already.”
“… I’m alone all the time, and nobody will ever love me,” Tal was saying joyfully. There is a kind of delighted relief in speaking a terror out loud and finding it to be a laughable thing, a bitter falsehood that shrivels in daylight.
She saw Belthandros advance on him. In his anger the divine presence bled out around him, a dark brilliance, a blazing shadow, like the flaring hood of a cobra. The sword flashed like lightning.
“Make your choice,” said Tal, and as he spread his arms in surrender, Shuthmili saw that he was smiling.
I suppose there really are worse things than the end, thought Shuthmili, and she opened the gate to the void.
Tal was surprised that what he felt about all this was not terror but an instant of peace, a private serenity such as a spinning top must experience at its moment of perfect balance. He had done what he could, and he could do no more.
And then the Gate went dark. At first there was a bloom of blue flame, a creeping flicker, and then the whole circle flashed black, and opened.
A maze-gate sings with a faint high chorus, like glass chiming. The void-gate had a deep rumble that resonated in Tal’s rib cage. Like distant thunder, but unending. Like a tearing in the fabric of the earth itself. Tal had no more room for real thoughts. In that moment he felt like a small animal faced with a forest fire.
Even Belthandros faltered.
What burnt within the void-gate was not just the absence of light but its opposite, a sucking emptiness that drained all illumination. Darkness bled out where the frame was broken, spilling into the park in rays. The wind blew howling between the statues as the air itself was sucked into the void. The fountain was drained in an instant as all that dark water turned to vapour.
Up on the tiers, people were screaming and clinging to the balustrades, and at the very edge of the Gate, there was Shuthmili—or Zinandour, or whatever she called herself now—clinging to the frame with both arms, locked into place by an outgrowth of armour plating that made her look like a figurehead cut from the stone itself.
Tal tried to move away, but the pull of the Gate was insistent. Despite himself, as though the earth had tilted was sliding toward it. Belthandros, too, was drawn closer. He had lowered the sword, turning from Tal as though he was no longer there, to face the void-gate.
Tal braced himself against the wind and the pressure, but there was nothing he could do. The Gardens were contracting, collapsing in around their dark heart, and here was Tsereg, almost translucent before the majesty of the Gate.
Don’t panic, they said in his head. He knew it was Tsereg without explanation, though there was no speaking voice. This is meant to happen.
Oh, great! he said.
Just hold on, they said. Hold on and trust me.
“You bloody fools, you don’t know what you’ve done,” said Belthandros, only just audible over the shrieking of the wind. As shaken as he sounded, he took a step back, and raised a hand as if to extinguish the Gate once more.
Before Belthandros could complete the spell, something whipped past him, a white formless flash like foam on the crest of a wave. He stumbled back with a curse, and the flash took form again behind him. Tsereg, come together from dust.
The Gate loomed overhead, and as it flared again, Tal was thrown to the ground. He didn’t understand how Tsereg and Belthandros could still be on their feet. He dug his fingers into any groove in the stone he could find, and still found himself slithering closer to the void.
“Or maybe you don’t know what I’ve done,” said Tsereg.
“You can’t do this. You were bound,” he said.
“You got out, didn’t you?” said Tsereg. “Why shouldn’t I? This is your problem, you know—you don’t think anyone’s as smart as you.” They raised their hand in the Sign of Sealed Lips, and grinned.
Belthandros’ eyes widened. “Oranna. I should have known.”
“Yeah, you probably should!” said Tsereg, and Belthandros lunged for them with the sword, an unsteady strike made unsteadier by the gravity of the Gate.
Tsereg dissolved back into dust—flesh to dust and bone to slicing shards—and shot past him. A vicious cut opened on Belthandros’ cheek, and he spun round, slashing at the air, but Tsereg was already gone, taken solid form yards away.
Somewhere above, columns were breaking, and chunks of masonry blew past like dry leaves. Tal was thrown off balance by a dull crash as a bronze statue struck the edge of the fountain, bounced through the void-gate, and vanished.
Tal was knocked loose from his perch and fell headlong into the empty basin of the fountain. His head hit something hard with a crack and his vision blurred, but before he could tumble toward the Gate, someone grabbed him. It was Cherenthisse. Her hair had come loose and was blowing around her like a great pale flame.
“Hold on,” said Cherenthisse, hauling him to safety. All the air had been knocked from his lungs by the impact, and he could hardly stand. “Hold on, it’s working,” she said, steadying him on the ground beside her, and then looked down. The point of a blade protruded from her stomach. Blood spilled out over the point. She blinked. “Oh. I’m hurt.”
Standing over her was Belthandros. His handsome face was bloody and distorted with rage. He yanked back the sword with a hideous wet sound and stabbed Cherenthisse in the back again. Tal still could not breathe. He needed to stand—Belthandros was over him with the sword, and he could not get away—and then there was a scream of fury that might have been part of the wind itself, and something flung Belthandros to one side.
It could have been some kind of missile—a rock thrown by a giant—but Tal realised who it was before he saw her. Nobody else had timing that bad, and nobody else threw themselves into the heart of danger with that kind of reckless abandon, except maybe Tal himself. Nobody else would think it a good idea to throw herself into a fight with nothing but a wrought-iron poker. She skimmed across the shuddering ground and sprang up.
“Took your bloody time, Csorwe,” he wheezed. “Watch it!” Belthandros was rising again, and he still had the sword, and—
Gravity gave up its hold on them.
Plates and masses of stone tipped up and flew apart; the tiers broke free of their foundations and orbited the Gate in great concentric rings. Clouds of gravel whisked by like glittering swarms of flies.
All four of them were flung up into the flickering air. Csorwe flew past Tal, and he clutched at her, frantically trying to gather her close, and then a gust of wind sent the two of them spinning. They careened into Cherenthisse and Belthandros, and the impact threw them headlong into the Gate.
It was like hitting an ice lake. The air was forced from Tal’s lungs in a single puff of steam, and at first the breathless shock of the cold stunned his senses. He didn’t know if he was up or down, alive or dead. He felt as though he was being torn apart.
Then he got his eyes open and realised why. They were hanging off the frame of the Gate, dangling into the void below. The darkness opened up, immeasurable, featureless, hungering. There was no sound.
Csorwe was clinging to him, both her arms locked tightly round his middle. Shuthmili had hold of her somewhere up above, a dark scaly shape that no longer looked remotely mortal.
And Tal was clinging to Cherenthisse, and wrapped around Cherenthisse, spreading beyond the shape of her vessel like a monstrous opening flower, was the last remaining fragment of the Lady of the Thousand Eyes, Iriskavaal.
In the darkness, the goddess looked nothing like Belthandros at all, and nothing like a serpent either. Tal saw her only in brief glimpses as she thrashed and wriggled, twisting limbs and eyes and colours that shifted like oil on water, as his mortal senses tried to comprehend something beyond comprehension.
Cherenthisse looked up at him, their hands locked together. The goddess’ tendrils were wrapped around Cherenthisse to the waist, making her look as though she was about to be swallowed.
“I’ve got you,” Tal tried to say, but there was no air here, and he choked on the darkness.
Cherenthisse smiled—an expression of complete, beatific victory—and let go of his hands.
The last Tal saw of her was that glow of perfect triumph, and he never quite knew what it meant.
Cherenthisse and Iriskavaal dropped away into the void. The goddess’ shriek of rage tore across Tal’s psyche, rending his senses so that his vision burnt white. By the time he got hold of himself, Iriskavaal and her most devoted servant were nothing but a point of brilliance that shrank and then vanished.
Hanging free above the void, Tal felt that strange serenity again, as though he was floating on the surface of an impossible ocean, and coming to the end of his one held breath, he passed out.
As far as the horrified spectators could see from the tiers, the five of them—two gods, one Eye, one woman, and one man—fell into the surface of the void-gate as though dropping into a still black lake. They sank without trace, not a ripple on the surface, as the palace struggled through its death agonies.
The Oshaaru child in the battered grey jacket was still standing on the edge of the empty fountain, unmoved by the chaos around them. Waiting for something, bouncing from one foot to the other, one hand outstretched toward the void.
If anyone had been close enough to hear, they would have heard Tsereg mutter, “Nothing is to be forgotten that belongs to me.”
A few seconds passed, and something within the frame seemed to shatter. The Hand of the Empress struggled out of the Gate, crawling backward on her hands and knees in that hateful black armour, as though something was trying to pull her back in.
The Tlaanthothei knew her of old, and they had hoped this might be the last of her. The void clung to her like tar, but at last she broke its hold on her and fell to the ground with the crunch of a crushed beetle. The child pulled her through, and between them, they dragged the senseless forms of two mortals out after her. There was no sign of First Commander Cherenthisse, nor of Chancellor Sethennai.
The Hand found purchase on the enormous torso of a fallen statue. Clinging there, like a shipwrecked mariner, she pulled the battered gauntlets from her hands, held them for a moment between finger and thumb, and let them fall back into the void.
Then she extinguished the Gate. The wind cut out, and in its absence there was an echoing silence. The spectators were surprised to be able to hear themselves think again. The Hand curled up on her rock and lay still, as if this final effort had exhausted her utterly. Gradually, the tiers began to settle back into place, and the spectators clung to one another, unable to tear their eyes away from the scene.
The child knelt over the two mortals, checking their vitals. It seemed to be over. Then they startled, shrieking something inaudible, and the Gate flashed dark again, just for an instant, as though the void had winked at them, and someone else stepped out.
It was Sethennai. Bruised and furious, and somehow walking upright. Whatever they had thought of the Chancellor at his inauguration, after some weeks trapped in the inward spaces of the palace, hungry and thirsty and forgotten, their opinions had turned as one to hatred and fear, and so they took no joy to see him alive. He was somehow still holding a sword.
One of the fallen mortals tried to rise, and the spectators recognised him then, if they hadn’t before, as Niranthe Charossa’s other son, the difficult one. They found themselves digging their nails into their palms as he caught his breath and scrambled painfully back to his feet.
Tal’s head throbbed and his tongue felt swollen in his mouth. He wasn’t sure whether he was dizzy from the blow to the head or from asphyxiation or because the abyss beyond worlds had very recently swallowed him and spat him out again.
Either way, he did not have much time to feel sorry for himself. For some reason—which he ought to have predicted, because of course fate knew neither kindness nor mercy—here was Belthandros, again, with a sword, again, giving Tal a look of unqualified hatred.
No, not even hatred; it was simple bad temper, the look of someone who has tried several times to remove a spider kindly and now sees no option but to stamp on it. Belthandros looked older somehow, tireder, without a spark of his usual vital enthusiasm, and he didn’t even look Tal in the eye.
Tal himself was still unarmed. He backed away, looking for anything he could possibly get hold of that might serve as a weapon, but Cherenthisse had carried her sword with her into the void, and even Csorwe’s poker was lost in the chaos. Belthandros followed after him, relentless but slow. Somehow, they had not won. It was like a nightmare, where you fought and ran and never got anywhere.
What a sight, thought Tal. What an idiot fucking spectacle.
It would have been funnier if Tal had any way of defending himself against magic, or if he could have made his muscles behave properly. Belthandros’ sword looked impossibly sharp, and Tal didn’t want to risk even touching it, given what he knew about Belthandros and poison.
“Wow, nice sword, very shiny, very you,” he said, because maybe he could buy himself a little time, and because he had the drunken feeling of having been hit on the head. Belthandros had challenged the God-Empress for the city, and he had won. And Tal was still just Tal, still exactly the same person he’d always been, still nothing special.
Belthandros hissed something in a language Tal did not understand, though the sentiment was perfectly clear. How dare someone like you challenge someone like me?
Tal shrugged and grinned, finding that his stock of smart remarks had run abruptly dry. He had nothing to fight with and everyone else was down, and he was only himself, and Belthandros was a god—
Something skimmed across the ground and bashed into his ankle. Without taking his eye off Belthandros, who was beginning to circle him, he leant down and picked it up. It was a sword of glass—or at least, it looked like glass, but it was as strong and as light as steel—and Tal felt the weight of it settle into his hand as if it was meant to be there. Sprawled exhausted across her fallen statue, the Dragon of Qarsazh gave him a little wave.
Belthandros swooped in with his shining blade, and Tal stepped to one side, not even needing to parry the blow.
Tal discovered a few things quite quickly.
Whatever Belthandros was now, he had no magic, and he was no faster than an ordinary man. He was no stronger, either, and his sword was heavy, and he was tired. And in addition to all that, without the goddess to back him up, he had absolutely no idea how to fight. For all his menacing looks, for Tal it was like fighting a clerk who kept trying to swat him with a broom.
“So can you die, now?” said Tal, fending him off. Keeping him at arm’s length was almost embarrassingly easy. The thing was that for all his exhaustion, for all his despair, Tal was fucking great with the sword.
Belthandros growled at him again in that unfamiliar language and made a clumsy strike. Tal had only really been waiting for his moment. With two sharp twists of the glass sword, he disarmed him. Belthandros’ sword hit the ground with the predictable clang of steel hitting stone, and the blade broke in two.
Before Belthandros quite realised what had happened, Tal had tripped him on his face.
Tal prodded him in the shoulder with his toe until he turned over, and rested the point of the glass sword at his throat. Belthandros was breathing hard, though his face was blank with the shock of defeat.
“Can you die, now?” said Tal.
Another bitten-off remark. Tal thought it probably meant Why don’t you find out?
Tal shrugged. “Find out for yourself. I don’t care.”
He turned away, giving the glass sword an idle twirl, and realised with some shock that all around him the people of Tlaanthothe were standing up in the tiers and calling out his name.