Like a sudden storm blasting apart everything in its wake, the film went viral. Initially only the families of students in the Khălese region viewed it, tuning in to the university network to watch their children or siblings, but it soon spread from house to house as the word got out. Calls were made, messages sent, and soon it had reached all the regions of Tâbesh.
Cire, Hakim, and Adâ watched as the viewing figures doubled, tripled, and then multiplied to an unprecedented level. They remained for a while in the broadcast center. They had called in all the stragglers from outside and explained everything from start to finish, including their own treatment at the hands of the TNP. Their audience was surprisingly receptive of the news. While some constructed a makeshift barricade outside the center’s entrances to preempt any TNP return, the others began switching on other screens and tuning in to channels from across the country. They all watched as network after network broke free of censorship as the reality of what was being shown became all too clear. Within hours, there were journalists on the ground in cities across the nation, reporting on and interviewing the angry crowds now assembling outside every TNP branch.
As all this was swirling around them, Cire tried not to think too much about what they were doing. It was working, certainly, but she didn’t like to think at what cost to Bál this was all being achieved. Whenever one of the networks played a clip from the footage, she busied herself with something else or went outside under the pretense of getting some air. She knew they now faced a dilemma: the longer the film ran, the more it would generate a backlash against the TNP, and yet that very backlash was being fueled by Bál’s suffering. The longer they waited to intervene, the more pain he would have to endure. What was more, though the torturers clearly wanted a confession from him, she knew they would have many more captives lined up. She was sure they wouldn’t hesitate to finish the job if he proved too resilient.
“Is there any way we can find out where he is?” she asked for the fourth time, returning from yet another trip outside.
Hakim, again, shook his head. “The recorders don’t have tracking devices. I’m afraid we—”
But he was drowned out as someone turned the volume up on one of the screens.
Everyone clustered around to watch the report coming through on a national network. The footage, taken from the air, showed an imposing white building on the edge of the bay. A seething crowd of elves and others had punctured through the outer walls and surged into the courtyard. Smoke rose from some of the lower windows. The caption on the bottom of the screen read “Protesters Storm TNP HQ in Khălese City.”
“However,” Hakim continued more loudly, changing tack, “there’s a very good chance that he’ll be in there.”
Once off campus and into town, they were quickly swept along to the hot spot of the protest. By the time they reached the street that ran up to the TNP building, the crowd they had seen mob the courtyard had broken through the front entrance.
Smoke unfurled from the windows as if they were industrial chimneys, and the crimson glow from within hinted at the presence of flames. Despite the elves now storming the fortress, the threshold still heaved with angry bodies. There was an immense crashing as they passed through the double doors. Behind them, the polished white statue of a naked male elf bearing a sword and shield had been toppled to splinter, beheaded, on the concrete.
Bál had been left panting on the operating table when, at the behest of an electronic communication, his interrogators had swiftly departed. He had no idea how long he had lain there, too pained and exhausted to move, when the door crashed open again.
An armored TNP militant lurched into the room, clutching a bleeding wound on his side.
Noise swelled in from the open door—not the periodic screams of the orderly running of a prison but the perpetual shouting of a battle in full flow.
“Get up,” the militant barked, electrifying his baton.
In blistered agony, but knowing it would be much worse if he failed to do so, Bál obeyed. The militant waved him ahead, guiding him through the door and into the fray.
The corridor immediately outside was deserted, but from the cries and rumbling that echoed through the walls, it didn’t sound as though it would stay that way for long. The militant ordered him to the right, keeping the baton close enough to Bál’s neck so that he could feel the air rippling against his skin.
They reached a wider corridor and froze.
The three elves, clad in balaclavas and trailing alchemical light, froze too.
There was a moment’s pause as everyone took stock of the situation.
Then Bál felt his captor grab him around the neck and brandish the baton.
“Stop, or he gets—”
But the militant had not finished his sentence before a slice of alchemical energy hurtled past Bál’s ear and planted itself in the militant’s face. The latter howled and fell backward, and without a support, Bál collapsed too.
The three elves moved over. “Are you all right?”
Bál’s vision swam. He was almost sure there were nine faces rather than three hovering over him. He wheezed the first thing that came into his head. “But I’m a dwarf? Why? Why would you . . .”
The nearest elf in the balaclava seemed to understand what he was getting at and shook his head. “Why should that make any difference? You would do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Are you okay to get going?”
“I’ll be fine,” Bál croaked. And then, as the elves were just about to disappear around the corner, he said, “Thank you.”
He felt as though he were staggering through a war zone, semiconsciously finding his way toward the building’s exit.
People surged around him, and the very fabric of the fortress was being deconstructed: chandeliers pulled down, flags set alight, stone walls imploding as if by cannon fire.
He initially thought the riot must have spread straight from the campus to here, but there was something different. Besides the people who had just rescued him, the attackers were not just student age. The majority of the assailants seemed to be the last sort of people one would expect to take part in a siege: middle-aged adults; people in suits, looking as if they just arrived from an office; the elderly; even some policemen—all hurling alchemical blasts against the armored but increasingly outnumbered TNP. Narrowly dodging a jet of emerald flame, which had just dismantled a large portrait, he reflected that in a civilization saturated with alchemy, it was much easier to start a riot.
Judging by the continuing surge of protesters, he was nearing the entrance when he caught sight of Cire, Hakim, and Adâ. They were standing close together in the center a little away from the door, looking around with a mixture of satisfaction and bewilderment.
Cire, the first to spot him, ran to meet him.
In his weakened state, he was almost knocked flat by the force of her hug.
“Are you all right?” she asked, pulling back to look him in the face. “We watched you on video. We couldn’t believe what they were doing to you . . . I mean, I didn’t watch. I couldn’t handle it, but . . .”
Bál was alarmed, though not entirely unhappy, that Cire was almost in a state of tearfulness over what could have happened to him.
“Great work,” Adâ said, smiling, as she and Hakim joined them. “I’m sorry it had to work out this way, but it certainly did work.”
Bál looked at each of them, even more bewildered. “I’m sorry, but what is going on?”
Even once they had explained, however, Bál hardly found himself clearer on what to think. He was, in equal parts, angry that his suffering had been used as a means to an end, proud that he had withstood long enough, stunned at the level of public fury the truth about the TNP’s operations had stimulated, and relieved to be back with his friends—if not quite yet safe.
It was only then that the word really hit home—friends. He wasn’t sure he’d ever used it before, even among his closest acquaintances at his father’s court. Despite his fatigue, he felt strangely exhilarated by the idea that they had come after him, that they thought he was worth the risk.
“So do we join in?” Cire ventured. She had begun to kindle blue alchemy around her knuckles, clearly eager to sink her teeth into some TNP furnishings.
With his current burst of adrenaline, Bál would quite happily join her.
“Not yet,” Hakim replied. He kept turning his head as if looking for someone.
“Why not?”
“Because I know what I saw. The man I grabbed. Just before the campus riot began.”
Cire and Adâ looked confused, but Bál felt his mood sink. In all the commotion, he had forgotten the shock of seeing that face among the group that had started the riot.
“I saw him too. But how is that possible? We were both there—we saw it, in my uncle’s throne room, through the Cult’s mirror . . .”
“I don’t know. But I’m sure it means that this siege is unlikely to continue as swimmingly as it currently is—”
Adâ shook his shoulder. She was staring upward, and all color had drained from her face.
The three of them followed her gaze.
Amid the churning carnage, a single figure stood motionless upon the balcony at the back of the lobby.
Smoke streaming upward like ethereal hair, flames wreathing him like phantasmagorical wings, Zâlem surveyed them from above.
Something happened to their surroundings. The air seemed to shiver, the colors dulling, the people and flames about them slowing as if caught in an action replay. They were in some kind of matrix—a stain of color splattered on the lobby in such a way as to encompass only the four of them and the new arrival. The noise beyond their area plummeted and settled into a low rumble, so that when he spoke, Zâlem’s voice was quite clear.
“You’ve done it now, haven’t you? You’ve twisted their little minds, turned them against the one power that could deliver this republic from the dung heap. Know that when Tâbesh finally decays around your ears, it will be on your shoulders.”
Hakim was speechless, as were the others. Bál couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing.
Zâlem, as Archbishop Iago, had led the assault on Thorin Salr only months ago. But Bál and others, including Hakim and Adâ, had seen Iago’s final punishment enacted by the Emperor of Nexus. They had seen him consumed by Darkness, confined, as the Emperor had boasted, to all eternity in another realm.
And yet here he was, not only alive and before them but far younger than when they had last seen him. Bál wouldn’t have been surprised if Zâlem now looked the age he’d been when Hakim taught him.
“But how?” Hakim stuttered. “How can you be here? You’re dead . . .”
Zâlem gave a mirthless laugh. “Oh no, not dead. If only.” A look of agony and madness flashed across his face. “Thwarted by that incorrigible foil Sardâr and cast into everlasting Darkness for my troubles. Not dead but immersed in eternal torment. You can have no idea of that, you inglorious fools. Can you imagine a universe that is one, single collective? No distinction of time or place or things, just the same force continuing in agonizing perpetuity. A place where you are tortured continually with a choice: to surrender your individuality and make the living hell end but at the same time knowing nothing of you will be left. That is the Darkness; that is what I suffered and from where, by pure strength of will, I have returned.”
Hakim gestured around at the slow-motion riot and adopted a desperate, imploring tone. “But don’t you see how petty this all is now? The TNP, the nationalism, Tâbesh—it means so little in the grand scheme of things. Surely, surely now, you of all people have a new perspective . . .”
Bál couldn’t help thinking this was not the time for Hakim to be engaging in a philosophical debate, but Zâlem seemed all too happy to oblige him.
“On the contrary, it was through faith in Tâbesh that I survived. I escaped with the knowledge that somewhere there was a speck of light that was mine to conquer. Things have been put in perspective. You are all ants, but that is all you need to be to be ruled.”
He swooped down to stand before them, and there was something grotesquely nonhumanoid, almost arachnid-like, in the way he moved. It was as if the outer flesh veil were covering something entirely unlike an elf underneath.
They flinched, but he didn’t immediately make a move to attack.
“One more thing, before you are obliterated. Sardâr implored me to change before our last confrontation. I remember he asked to bear witness to my demon, the shred of Darkness that I carved for myself to bind to my soul. He was appalled, but I’ve had a veritable feast of demonic activity since then. Well, just look at me now!”