Two things were true.
Kolum was seeing Shaesara in a battle somewhere far away. And alumen were coming to kill her here and now.
The first thing gave Bela nothing but questions, but the second thing meant that questions were the one thing she didn’t have time for.
“I command them not,” Kolum said, and Bela was somehow certain that he wasn’t talking to them.
“Bela,” Tew implored. He was pulling at her one sleeve, trying to get her to move. “Please.”
Kolum turned to her. The lightning crackling along the edges of his sword made his face seem even more skeletal. “Her fight belongs to her. Close the portal, Bela. Run!”
The last word was a boom in the room, and it shocked her out of her paralysis. She turned, let Tew push her out onto one of the metal pathways crisscrossing the room. Then she was running, sprinting.
Behind them, the double doors exploded in a hail of wood. Bela glanced back, saw two alumen charging out, one behind the other.
“They are here,” Kolum said, and she didn’t know if he was talking to her or to Shae. With his blue sword humming, he charged.
Time. He was buying them time.
Tew was running along a track parallel to her right. His eyes were locked on the machine and the portal at the other end of the great room.
Through the crash of metal bodies behind, Bela heard another sound from above. A pounding. She looked up to her left and saw a third aluman bent over against the glass ceiling near the corner of the room, raining down blows with its metal fist.
Two strikes. Three. And the glass gave way with a crash.
Tew screamed. The aluman fell into the room, body controlled, its legs rotating up to land on its feet. It cratered down through the metal walkways and into the dust and debris of the lower level. The entire metal floor shook, and Bela stumbled, awkwardly keeping her balance without the familiar weight of her arm at her side.
A moment later, a metal hand clawed up onto the pathway where it had fallen. The aluman sprang up after it, hips flexing like a rabbit’s. It squatted, head scanning, until it saw them. Then, ignoring the fight at the entrance, it surged forward, big and fast.
Bela, looking back as she ran, saw how quickly the aluman was closing. It was leaping sideways over the wide-open spaces as it thundered forward, angling toward their path. Here and there, pipes burst and sprayed as the weight of its massive body strained the old lines. It was matching their pace.
No. Not matching their pace. Overtaking them. Closing faster than they could run.
Bela could hear Tew gasping for breath in the cold air. He didn’t have much energy left. Neither did she.
They were hardly halfway across the room. The portal was perhaps a dozen squares away. The metal man was only two. It passed behind a still-living plant, then leapt across an open space. The floor reverberated, bouncing at its pounding steps.
The aluman took two great strides, parallel to her at last. Then its huge legs coiled up the strength to pounce, just as they entered one of the beams beneath snow-cleared glass. Moonlight shone down, sparkling gold on the flecks of Char that stuck to its body when it fell. The pale blue eyes were unblinking. Unfeeling. Merciless. The claws of its hands were open and ready.
It launched into the air, and Bela dove across an open square to her right, shoving Tew down with the stump of her arm—right into a living plant.
They pounded into sharp fronds, bounced off one bulb, then smashed into the side of a second. The last plant snapped free of the grid, and they fell, screaming, to slam into the darkness of the littered half of the hall below.
Bela’s momentum carried her on. She slid through withered vine and crumbling leaves. Shadows and light were flashing and spinning. Above, the aluman roared in fury.
Her left hand caught on a crack in the floor. Her legs instinctively kicked her feet underneath her. She got up to one knee.
Tew was behind her. He’d hit his head. Dust was strewn all around him, but it didn’t look like he’d inhaled any.
Thanks be to the Mother.
The aluman crashed down to stand beside him. Tew twitched and moaned at its feet. The metal man bent slightly to look down at the little man of flesh before him. A clawed hand flexed in and out, as if anxious to begin his dismemberment.
Bela glanced toward the end of the huge room. She could see stairs, beyond the hanging masses of still more plants, bathed in blue light. The stairs weren’t far away, and not much farther would be Kolum’s machine and the portal. But she knew the metal man would slaughter Tew long before she reached them.
Too many had already died. Oni. Her crew. Even her ship. If there was any chance to save him still, she had to take it.
“Here!” Bela screamed. She waved her one arm wildly. “I’m the one you want!”
The aluman looked up at her. The moonlight shone on its shoulders, which were dusted with a snow of golden Char.
“Me!” she yelled at the aluman. “I’m Belakané!”
The aluman raised one metal foot. For a horrifying moment, she thought it might crush the reader with it, but then it put it down on the other side of him, stepping toward her.
Bela smiled. “Let’s race,” she said. Then she turned and ran, weaving through the open spaces, keeping as close to the plants as she could without touching them and disturbing the Char that dusted their roots.
The squares of light passed, one by one, stride by exhausted stride. Every step felt as if it would be her last. Every breath as if it would end in screams.
The aluman was behind her, feet pounding the floor, shoulders crashing into the plants she dodged, slowing it down.
She reached the steps and took them two at a time, bounding, breathing heavy. At the top, she faced the machine.
It rose up before her, shining in magnificent silver. Sweeping curves. Twirling gears. Dancing springs. A table sat before it, with straps and belts at its corners. The machine stretched two pairs of arms over it, and they held two rings between them. The rings, such a gleaming and glorious silver that they seemed nearly white, spun one inside the other, like two snakes chasing their own tails in opposite directions. They framed the portal—a glowing circle of pale blue, the color of the most perfect sky Bela could ever have imagined.
The aluman roared, coming closer. She ran up to the machine, staring at it with amazement and despair. She was sure that she’d never again see anything like it. She was also sure that she could scratch at it until her remaining fingers were bone, and she wouldn’t manage to close it.
Machine and magick, Kolum had said. Destroy one or the other.
She couldn’t do anything about the machine.
But magick …?
The aluman leaped up behind her. The floor shook from its footsteps. The great room echoed with its roar.
Alone, Bela turned and faced it. Alone, she took two steps and leaped toward its chest, reaching out with her one and a half arms as if to embrace it.
The aluman’s clawed hand swung forward. It caught her in the chest and flung her across the room. She hit the ground, slid, and stopped with her back against what might have been a shelf of books at one time. Bloody lines marked the scrape of its claws across her front. And half-healed fractures from the bear attack brought fresh pain with each breath.
She’d landed facing the aluman, but she wasn’t looking at it. She was looking at her one remaining hand, which was dusted with the Char that she’d wiped off its metal plates when she’d touched it. Her upturned palm shimmered golden in the moonlight.
She lifted it to her face. She said a prayer to the Mother. Then she put the dusted hand over her mouth and nose.
She inhaled the Char. She silenced her own scream.
The aluman had followed her. It was there. Clawing at her, groping at her flesh.
But she didn’t feel it. She didn’t even feel her own body convulsing, though she knew it was.
All she could feel was the wind, driving down from the broken ceiling. Reaching up to curl around the tower to where the ancient airship still floated, high above. She felt it stretch beyond, across the dead city, streaming up the canyon they’d descended. She felt it all the way to the mountain pass, to the deep canyon where Oni had died.
I am the wind, Bela thought. The wind is me.
She’d closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she saw the face of the aluman. There was blood upon it. Her blood. It made spots of darkness on its pale, glowing eyes.
The wind came to her. Between the blows of the aluman, her one hand twitched and flexed as she focused the will of her mind, gathering and twisting the air into hammer blows that buffeted the sides of the aluman’s head.
It screamed and took a step back, confused. Air filled her lungs. She could see it streaming like threads in the air, and she read them like waves, measuring their depth, their power, their motion.
Like a paddle turned against the flow, she pulled the threads back, held them between her and the aluman. She focused on them, willed them to bend, coaxed them to weave into one another.
In the eye of her mind, she made the knots that her single hand could no longer tie. The aluman tried to come at her again, but an invisible wall stood between them now.
The metal man roared and slashed, but the wall would not move.
The threads were loosening, though. The room was going dim. Her will was fading. Blood loss, she imagined.
Bela screamed in her frustration, and she threw the wall forward into the metal man.
The unseen wall smashed into the aluman’s massive chest, staggered it several steps away before she lost her grip on the threads and it dissipated. The aluman had its back to the machine and its glowing portal. Its torso turned left and right, looking for what had struck it.
“Bela!”
She blinked over, saw that Kolum stood at the end of the platform. Tew was in one of his arms, cradled like a babe. Alive.
The hand at the end of his metal arm held a crystal of soulglass, one of those he’d taken when he’d saved them. He threw it. Not at her, not at the portal, but at the space between them.
Time crawled. The crystal turned through the air in a slow tumble, end over end. Somewhere, her body was shaking. Dying, perhaps. But she had life still.
She pulled the air up from the floor, up out of her very lungs. It caught and lifted the crystal. Held it for a moment, floating. Weightless.
Such a small thing, she thought. But such great power.
The aluman had looked to Kolum when he shouted. Now it was slowly turning back to her.
She wrapped the air around the soulglass, spinning it tighter and tighter into a fist of wind that gripped the crystal like a knife. She could see it now, as specks of dust sucked into the churn.
The tightening air beat upon the crystal’s facets. It, too, began to spin. Bela smiled at the aluman. She hoped it was afraid.
And if Asryth was watching through its eyes, perhaps she would be afraid too.
Bela spun the crystal forward, buried its drilling point between the seams of the metal plates across the aluman’s chest.
The impact hurtled the aluman backward. Its legs hit the table with its straps and chains. It fell back onto it, splayed out, face up. Its eyes reflected the shimmering portal, blue on blue.
Bela’s body was gasping for breath, but she focused the energy she had left on drawing every last bit of the air in the room down and down, into the fist of wind that still had hold of the soulglass.
She felt it crack.
And then, after the space of a single heartbeat, it broke. The soulglass exploded. Down into the aluman. Up into the machine. And across the floor to Bela, who had time enough only to see the metal parts flying and the portal disappearing before her world went black.