Gods guided Temoc through Chakal Square. They stroked his skin, and left glyph-trails in his wake. Their voices thundered beneath the world: turn here, stop, left, place your hand on this stone.
He blessed his remaining people as he passed. The gods are here for you. You are ready for this struggle. He knew a hundred ways to ready warriors for their end, and he deployed them all.
Then it was done. He returned to the altar, knelt, and bowed his head.
Gods’ eyes watched him from inside his mind.
“Make this worth it,” he prayed, in the silence of his heart.
The gods should have some gentle touch, now at the last, for their servant before their altar—but the dark gaped, hungry and certain. The gods were tired, and the gods were old, and the gods did not need to keep up appearances with him. A sacrifice had woken them, but they were no more ready for this moment than was any soldier of Chakal Square. They were scared.
He smiled.
Well, he thought, that makes all of us.
His heart beat strong in his ears, a pounding drum like Shining Empire priests used to call their mountain men to wrestle.
No. That was neither heart nor drum.
He opened his eyes, and stood.
Chel stood beside him. She held the Warden’s crossbow from the night before. In their wander through the camp she’d collected more discarded bolts—replenished the crossbow’s supply and strapped the rest to a bandolier. She stared into the sky.
Black birds approached, high up. They neared, wingbeats slow and heavy, their snaky tails snapped javelin-straight behind them, for speed.
Chel cocked her crossbow, though they were far out of range. He did not stop her. She had to do something. Around the camp, others readied bows and spears and sticks and rocks. Temoc laid one hand on his blade, and opened his scars. Shadow flowed cold from them, and light. He gave himself to the gods and became less and more than human. Time ran slow.
Above, as one, Couatl folded their wings and fell like arrows toward Chakal Square. Sunlight coruscated from their wings. Stars glared from their foreheads, and silver chains draped their bodies.
But then the first wave pulled out of their dive, wings flared to brake and swoop above the square. Rainbows poured from them—no, not rainbows at all but a translucent fluid, a shimmering wet curtain that covered the sky and, as it fell, caught fire.
The Square began to burn.
* * *
The Couatl flew with clockwork precision, and the Wardens released their payload well. But gripfire was never an exact weapon.
Elayne had first seen it in a delaying action in the Schwarzwald, near Grangruft University—local small gods animated the forest to destroy the school before it could take flight. Roots lifted from the earth, twigs sharpened to thorns, vines braided into serpents. The grass itself sharpened to cut tendons and snare defenders’ feet. The faculty released gripfire in a circle around the university, pointed outward. At first, it worked, burning a dead expanding ring around the campus grounds. But the stuff was treacherous. A breath of wind, or a god’s dying curse, pushed it back onto the grounds, and they had to abandon half the campus before the end.
So when fire fell on Chakal Square, it hit the surrounding buildings too, and where it touched stone or wood or brick it caught and burned and spread.
Elayne knew what to expect, had tensed herself for it, holding the warding contract close, but the fire’s sheer weight staggered her. Sunlight crisped to ash. Noxious fumes seared her lungs. The fire ran through her veins, melted her skin. She’d woven herself through the Skittersill, and felt its pain.
The members of her circle writhed. Zip’s eyes popped open, rolled back in his head; white froth flicked from his lips.
A rainbow curtain covered the square.
She raised a shield within the meeting-tent ward: a shield technically outside Chakal Square, and so proof against her bargain with the King in Red. It buckled and flared spark-green, but held. Ozone and caustic alchemical stench tangled.
Outside, human screams rose amid the crackle of flame.
* * *
Temoc raised his hands as the curtain fell, and willed the gods’ power to roll forth from him, to block the fire.
It did not.
Shadow flowed, yes, and spread, but directly over him, in a small bubble surrounding the altar, a few feet from center to edge. Enough to enclose Chel and a frightened few beside him, but no more. The glyph-lines he’d walked woke too, but offered no shelter. He strained, pulled, called to his patrons. Help us.
He received no reply but the shuffling of divine feet. Silence, tension, delay.
He strained with all his soul, his eyes bulged like the eyes of a racing horse, but he was one man and they were more, and the fire fell.
His people burned.
The fire coated his shield, pressed against it, heavy with the distance it had fallen. Through the haze of heat he saw the others die.
* * *
Everywhere caught fire at once. Tents flared incandescent. People fell beneath the fire’s weight, and screamed where they lay. But Elayne and her circle were safe. Sweat beaded on her brow.
“We have to help them!” Tay leapt to his feet.
“Stay still,” Elayne shouted. “Temoc’s gods—”
“They’re doing nothing!”
“Stay in the circle. I can’t—”
“Fuck your circle.” Tay dove out into the fire before Elayne could stop him.
She needed Tay. Old reflexes took over, combat reflexes, extemporizing logic: she sat within the ward, and she was threaded through her dream-circle: she was inside Tay’s mind. So by protecting Tay she was protecting the part of herself in him—and she was, by definition, outside the Square.
She clad Tay’s limbs in a shield of hard air. The dream map around her swam, and her mind ached with the effort of maintaining the interlocking arguments that guarded them from the inferno.
Her shield buckled. At the edges of the Square, geysers of flame rose from a tar rooftop, and spread to nearby structures.
But Tay lived.
He ran through the heat, a rippling ghost, dipped his arms into the fiery lake, lifted a slumped body, and ran back to the circle. Elayne’s Craft wiped fire from his limbs, and from the woman he held. Her skin was blackened, her blouse burnt. Elayne saw a trace of bone, and smelled singed meat. The woman screamed, her throat raw. She was not the only one.
In the Square, they all were screaming.
But she was still alive.
Elayne drew the heat from the woman’s burns, and the pain. Pain was a form of art, after all: a concentration of the soul, an extension of time. Pain gave power, and with power, Elayne could—almost—hold the dome upright, and keep the Skittersill from burning. Maybe the woman would die. Elayne had seen worse burns—
—not since the Wars—
—but she’d not die yet.
Tay and the others stared at the woman, horrified, in the half-light Elayne’s Craft left as it drained the world to the dregs.
This was what came of staying within the lines.
No more.
She could not stand against the King in Red, but she could do more than she planned. She could save some of them. Not enough.
“Go,” she said. “All of you. Bring those you can. As many as fit inside the circle. Now!”
They ran, and she went with them in pieces.
* * *
Men fell, and women, aflame. Fire erupted from the viscous liquid the Couatl let fall, and flowed and stuck and dripped and rolled, splashed and clung and covered. Many screams became one scream from many throats, wet and hoarse at once as fire trickled into open mouths.
The grass mats burned. The water in the god-fountain burned, and the faceless god wept burning tears into a fiery pool. A woman struggled to stand, pressing against the fire that clung to her body. Her skin melted. She struck burning hair with burning hands and tried to breathe, but fire filled her lungs.
Temoc felt the first death at once. The second, a breath later. After that they came fast, each flowing into the next until only a single death remained, ugly and enormous as a scream. The air stank of oil and meat and singed hair. Chakal Square died around him, and yet he lived.
Beside the altar, Chel threw up.
The lake of fire rolled with waves where bodies tossed, whitecaps that were hands half flesh, half bone, clawing out of underflame.
Overhead, the Couatl wheeled around for another pass.
Is this it? he cried to the gods, through the torrent of death. Is this what you wanted?
Wait, the gods said.
For what?
For now.
And then there was light.