The Last Mortal Bond

59

The basement of Kegellen’s manse wasn’t so much a basement as a labyrinth of intersecting corridors, stairwells, and storage chambers, stretching out beneath the streets above like the roots of some vast, ancient tree. Clearly, the walled estate visible from the street was only the barest fraction of a much larger, subterranean compound: part fortress, part storehouse, part hidden passage for all manner of illicit goods. Valyn caught glimpses, as the Queen of the Streets hustled them through the maze, of rooms piled high with unlabeled crates, bolts of cloth, huge clay amphorae standing patiently as soldiers in the gloom. Steel gates blocked the largest of the intersections, each one thick as a castle portcullis and guarded by a handful of men. Kegellen’s toughs were an ugly lot-long on scars and short on teeth-but they seemed to know how to handle their steel, and they leapt into motion-uncoiling chains, hauling at the bars-the moment the huge woman swept into view.

“How did they know?” Triste asked, after yet another gate had clanged shut behind them. “How did the army know we were here?”

“I don’t know,” Kegellen replied tersely. Wrapped in a dress of exquisite red silk, her fingers flashing with rings, the flesh of her neck wobbling as she moved, the woman didn’t look like a soldier. She would have been as out of place on the Islands as some doe-eyed priestess of Eira, and yet there was something about her voice, about the way she carried herself, something about her conviction and determination as she guided them through the narrow passages, that reminded Valyn of his Kettral trainers. She was dangerous, this one, despite all appearances. The only question was, dangerous to whom?

“You could have been followed,” Kegellen continued.

Valyn shook his head curtly. “We weren’t.”

“Then you could have been spotted when you arrived. Even the back entrance is watched, although I’ll admit I didn’t realize the army had taken an interest in my humble home.”

Adare glanced back the way they had come, as though she expected to find soldiers racing down the corridor after them. “Our faces were hidden,” she said. “Both of them.”

Kegellen shrugged and kept moving. “It matters less how they knew than what they will do next.”

Valyn took a deep breath, sifting the scents of moldy stone and fine perfume, confusion and fear. He could smell the urgency on Kegellen, the bright tang of her haste, but there seemed to be no deceit. If she was lying, she knew how to hide it even from his senses, and besides, if the woman’s goal was to hand them over to the Army of the North, she could have done so without warning them, without the whole charade of escaping through the corridors.

“Il Tornja,” Kaden said. “He’s here. This is his work.”

Valyn turned to stare at his brother. The others were obviously frightened by the mention of the kenarang, but it seemed like a long time since he himself had felt frightened. Instead, he felt … eager. If Kaden was right, if Ran il Tornja was in the city somehow, it meant another chance, a final opportunity to put right what had gone wrong on that tower in Andt-Kyl all those months ago.

“That’s impossible,” Adare objected. “You said il Tornja was in the Ancaz … what? A week ago? A little more? Unless he used the-”

Kaden shook his head, cutting her off. “He didn’t. The kenta are too risky for him. He can’t bring his soldiers through the gates, which means he would have to travel alone, and it’s too easy for the Ishien to guard the island hubs. Too easy for them to set an ambush.”

“I thought the Ishien were dead,” Adare protested. “That he killed them.”

“Not all of them. It only takes one man with a flatbow to guard the whole island.”

Kegellen reeked of curiosity, but she kept quiet, letting them talk as she swept along ahead.

“The leach,” Triste suggested. “Maybe the leach helped him get back.”

Valyn frowned, considering the map inside his mind. “No one saw him during the days you were at Rassambur.”

Kaden shook his head. “It’s possible he left for Annur the moment Pyrre rescued us.”

“Why?” Triste demanded. “Why would he do that? How would he know?”

“The same way he’s known everything else,” Adare said bleakly. “The same way he knew the moment you escaped from the Spear. The same way he knew where to find you.” She stared into the darkness as they moved down the corridor, as though waiting for the kenarang himself to step from the shadows. “He’s been playing this game a long time, and he’s better at it than we are.”

“He knows where we have to go to perform the obviate,” Kaden said. “And he has the ak’hanath.”

Adare nodded. “The one thing brings him to Annur, the second to Kegellen’s mansion.”

As they spoke, Valyn traced the path on his mental map, calculating the various rates of travel. “He’s only on foot from the Ancaz to Mo’ir. From there, all the travel is on river, lake, and canal. He can keep moving all day, all night, and the current’s in his favor. He could be here by now. Him and the leach and those ’Kent-kissing ak’hanath.”

A grim silence settled over them as they walked. Valyn had lost all sense of direction in the twisting corridors, but Kegellen continued to forge ahead, choosing a path at every fork without pausing to think.

“They will have a difficult time following,” she pointed out. “My basement is … complex, even without the gates and the guards.”

“They’re not following,” Kaden replied. “Not all of them, at least.” He pointed up at the vaulted ceiling of the stone corridor. “Most of them will be up there, on the streets, tracking us.”

Kegellen raised an eyebrow. “That would be impressive. And inconvenient.”

“Where will this let us out?” Adare asked.

“We’ve been moving east, toward your command center on the wall. The tunnels won’t get anywhere close to all the way there, but they’ll get us clear of whatever cordon the army set up around my home.”

“We need to get to the Spear,” Kaden said.

Adare shook her head. “No good. I already told you-it’s packed with il Tornja’s soldiers. Has been since they showed up in the city days ago.”

“Kettral,” Valyn said. “We get a bird to fly us to the top.”

Kaden nodded. “Good.”

“Where are the Kettral?” Kegellen asked.

“In a square just south of the wall,” Valyn replied.

“That’s unfortunate,” the woman said. “You’ll need to cover at least two miles in the streets above.”

“So we’ll cover two miles,” Adare said. “We can stay ahead of these bastards for a couple miles.”

The words were bold, but Valyn could smell the uncertainty on her.

“No,” Kaden said. “The ak’hanath are tracking Triste. Maybe Triste and me both. That means that if we split up, Adare will have a chance to get to the Kettral while we’re here, in Kegellen’s cellar, undercover.”

“All right,” Adare said slowly. “And when I get the Kettral, what then?”

Valyn tried to figure the timing in his head. Two miles, through crowded streets. Adare was in sturdy boots, but she had nothing like the Kettral or Shin training. The whole thing ought to take about twenty minutes, but Adare was tougher than she seemed. The glare in her burning eyes said she could make the run faster, that she would make the run faster. “We count heartbeats,” he said. “One thousand heartbeats from when Adare emerges. That’s the timing. She gets to Gwenna, gives her our location. When we come out, if everything hasn’t gone straight to shit, she should be overhead, ready for the grab.”

Adare shook her head. “I thought things already had gone to shit. I thought that’s why we were fleeing through this tunnel.”

“I think you’ll look back on this tunnel fondly as soon as you’re aboveground,” Valyn said.

“You go with her,” Kaden said. “She’ll need your protection up there.”

Valyn shook his head. “Not a chance. Adare is expendable. You’re not.”

“We need her to get to the Kettral,” Kaden insisted. “There’s nothing you can do if the army catches up with us and we have no bird.”

“Of course there is,” Valyn replied. “I can kill them.”

* * *

Gwenna had spent the better part of the morning trying to figure out just what in the fine fuck was going on. The Urghul were encamped beyond the desolation Adare had made of the northern third of Annur, and though they’d arrived only the day before, the horsemen were already busy trying to clear a path through the still-smoldering rubble. Of Balendin himself, there was no sign, which was more than worrisome, but instead of flying patrols north of the wall to scout the enemy position, she and the rest of the Kettral were trying to figure out what had happened to the ’Kent-kissing Emperor.

“Valyn.” That was the Flea’s assessment. “He has the ability to do it, and the reason.”

Certainly, everything Gwenna had heard of the early-morning attack smacked of Kettral work: an ambush at a choke point, smokers and flashbangs, the Emperor gone without any of her guard spotting so much as a single soldier.… And, of course, Valyn himself was gone, missing since the night before. It all added up, except for one obvious question: If Valyn had gone rogue, slipping out of the compound to execute his sister, why wasn’t she executed yet? Where was the body?

Gwenna had had all five of her Wings scouring the city near where Adare disappeared, both on foot and in the air. So far they’d found nothing.

No, she reminded herself, staring grimly at the map that she’d unfolded across the table of her command post just inside the courtyard. Not nothing. She studied the series of black ko stones that she’d been adding to the map all morning. Each one represented a sighting by her people of Annurian soldiers, men under the command of General Van, men who should, given the Urghul threat just north of the wall, have been on that fucking wall getting ready to defend the city. The stones showed an obvious cordon, as though the legions, too, were searching for Adare. That search, however, was proceeding more methodically than Gwenna’s own, as though Van’s soldiers were privy to information that she lacked.

“What are we missing?” she muttered, staring at the map.

The Flea shook his head. Over Gwenna’s strong objections, he and Sigrid had both dragged themselves out of the infirmary. The new cloth wrapping the Wing leader’s arm was still spotted with blood, but his face didn’t look as ashen as it had the night before. The leach, too, looked better than Gwenna would have expected. Once again, her blacks were immaculately clean, her long blond hair perfectly coiffed, as though she’d been at it all morning with a fine Rabin comb.

“You use a kenning for that, don’t you?” Gwenna had demanded, squinting at the woman when she first emerged from the infirmary.

“We all have our own personal acts of discipline,” the Flea replied quietly.

Gwenna would have been a good deal happier if Sigrid had used her power to find the ’Kent-kissing Emperor instead of fixing her hair, but then, as Talal was always telling her, leaches couldn’t do everything. As the sun rose over the towers of the Dawn Palace, climbing past Intarra’s Spear itself, reaching its zenith, then dipping down toward the west, Adare was still missing, the Army of the North was still scattered over half the fucking city, and the Urghul were still massing to the north, preparing for their inevitable attack.

Gwenna glanced at the map again. “To Hull with it. The next time the birds report in, I’m sending them north. You don’t need an emperor to have a war.”

The Flea studied the deployment of the stones. “It’s hard to win a war, if you don’t know what’s going on on your side of the wall. Delka said she’d heard people whispering that il Tornja has returned to the city.”

“You’d think, if that were true, that the bastard would pay a little more attention to the horde of barbarians. He is the kenarang, after all, and defending Annur from the threat of annihilation is a fairly substantial part of his job. At the very least-”

She broke off at the sound of cries from the edge of the courtyard, searching for the source of the commotion.

“Well,” the Flea said a moment later. “That’s one question answered.”

Adare. The Emperor. She was running across the flagstones of the open square, flanked by a small knot of men who looked as ruthless as they were unkempt. Gwenna’s first thought was that they had seized her somehow, but no … they were moving in something like a guard formation, protecting her.

Gwenna left the table, broke into a jog, the Flea and Sigrid at her side. She met the other woman halfway across the square.

“Kaden,” Adare gasped. Sweat poured down her face and soaked her robe. She was desperately out of breath, hunched over and panting, but she managed to choke out the message all the same. “Triste and Valyn. Just at the corner … of the Wool District and the Flowers … where Anlatun’s old market spills over. They need … a bird.…”

It was tempting to ask why, but Adare hadn’t run herself half to death in order to play questions and guesses.

“Get her inside,” Gwenna said, turning to the Flea. “Make sure she’s all right. When the other birds come in, send them north, high, scouting the Urghul-we need to start getting ready for that fight. Jak,” she shouted, breaking away from Adare, racing across the courtyard to where Allar’ra waited in the shadow of the wall. “Get us in the air.”

Talal and Annick had been on top of Adare’s tower, watching the Urghul deploy. They had a clear line of sight, however, from there back into the courtyard, and by the time Gwenna reached Jak and the bird, they were already running across the cobblestones at a full sprint, the sniper with her bow in one hand. It couldn’t have taken more than a hundred heartbeats from the moment Adare arrived until they were flying, but all the time Gwenna felt her stomach twisting.

Too slow, she thought, shaking her head as they climbed above the slate and copper rooftops, remembering Adare’s exhaustion, her desperation. What if we’re too slow?

It was only a matter of moments to reach the corner of the Wool District. The miles Adare had covered on foot melted away beneath the great bird’s wings.

“What are we looking for?” Talal shouted, scanning the streets below as they approached.

“Probably something ugly. Kaden and Valyn. Triste. Maybe a fight.” She shook her head, silently urging the bird to go faster. “I don’t know.” Over on the far talon, Annick just leaned out in her harness, an arrow nocked to her bow, face calm, composed, even serene, as though they’d taken to the air simply to enjoy the breeze. Gwenna felt ready to jump off the talon and start running.

As they drew closer to the target, she ran her eyes over the streets below. There was a logic to the city, to the movement of people within it, a pattern that emerged from the thousands of random interactions, a pattern, she realized after a moment, that was being disrupted. At first she thought it was just one street, one inexplicable knot. Then she noticed another, and another: groups of soldiers, Annurians, forcing their way through the avenues and alleyways below.

“They’re not converging on the Wool District,” Talal said, pointing.

Gwenna followed his finger, gritted her teeth, then cursed.

“They’re not searching for someone,” she said. “They’re chasing them.”

They banked slightly, as though Jak were preparing for a slow, high circle. Gwenna yanked on the straps instead, a series of vicious tugs. A moment later, the bird tucked his wings in closer, and they began to drop.

“You have them?” Talal asked.

Gwenna pointed to a low stone building half a mile off. She couldn’t articulate what she was seeing, the precise nature of the pattern, the convergence of dozens of factors, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see it. “They’re there. Kaden and the rest of them. That’s where the soldiers are headed.”

“How do you want to make the grab?”

Gwenna grimaced. “We’re going to have put the bird down. You get the girl. I’ll take care of Kaden. Valyn can load his own ass up, while Annick shoots whoever needs shooting. We get ’em on the bird, get ’em up, and then we can figure out what the fuck’s going on.”

She was signaling to Quick Jak even as she spoke. Allar’ra dipped his head, and they were descending, coasting down the air’s invisible slope, then leveling off just above the tallest rooftops. It was easy to forget, when you were five thousand feet off the deck, just how fast the kettral really were. Ten feet above the rooftops, however, that speed was suddenly, gut-wrenchingly obvious. Tiles, chimneys, and shingles smeared to a blur beneath their feet. Gwenna fixed her eyes on the blocky skyline, waiting to make the turn.

She caught just a glimpse of them: Kaden and Triste running side by side, Valyn a few paces ahead, his axes naked and bloody in his hands, and then, while the bird was still forty feet up, something hard and viciously strong slammed into its side.

Gwenna’s world went upside down, turned right side up, and then she was hanging in her harness, twisting as the wind tore at her. The bird was screaming, Talal was tangled in his straps, while over on the far talon, Annick was trying to drag herself back into something resembling proper position.

“Another bird,” Gwenna shouted, as she got her feet under her, craning her head in an effort to see past Allar’ra’s wing. “Someone’s got another fucking bird.”

It only made sense, but when she scanned the sky for a second kettral, she found only a few high clouds, smoke drifting from the chimneys, and the wide, unblemished blue. Then, even as she searched, something smashed into the bird again.

“There’s no second kettral,” Talal shouted. “A kenning.” He was stabbing his finger down, not up. “It’s a kenning.”

Gwenna took half a heartbeat to absorb the information.

“New plan,” she said. “We drop-”

Another vicious blow hammered into Allar’ra, smashing him so hard that his right wing grazed the wall of a long stone building, and then they were peeling away to the east.

“Jak, you son of a bitch,” Gwenna cursed.

“He’s right,” Talal shouted, shaking his head. “We’re too easy a target up here.”

“I understand that,” Gwenna spat. “Which is why I need him to put the fucking bird down. We’ll do this on foot.”

She reached for the leather strap, but at some point in the violence it had torn free. Whatever plan she had, there was no way to communicate it to Jak, no way to do anything but hang in the harness and hope that Valyn could get the other two clear of the army somehow, hope that Gwenna’s own bird wouldn’t be slammed straight out of the air, shattered on the streets below. As she twisted in her straps, another blow hit the bird. Allar’ra opened his beak to scream, and then Quick Jak was nudging the creature lower, so low they were skimming along one of the wider city streets, windows and balconies whipping by to either side.

The moments that followed comprised the most terrifying flying of Gwenna’s life. She had no idea where the attacks against Allar’ra were coming from, no idea if they could be blocked or turned aside, no idea of anything, really, except that some leach they couldn’t even see was kicking the living shit out of them. She couldn’t communicate with Jak, but that hardly mattered now. He was doing the only thing he could-getting them low enough to hide, to stay alive.

An adult kettral had a wingspan of at least seventy feet, which didn’t leave much room for flying, even in Annur’s largest streets. Gwenna could feel the creature straining under its own weight, trying to rise above the buildings without fully spreading its wings. And then, when they were just clear of the highest roofs, the leach hit them again, knocking the bird a few paces sideways in the air.

’Ra screamed his rage and frustration. Gwenna had no way of knowing how badly the bird was hurt. That they were still in the air at all seemed like a ’Kent-kissing miracle, one that only an idiot would trust any longer than necessary. Jak seemed to agree. He gave the bird its head, letting it climb for seven or eight powerful wingbeats, and then they fell into another steep glide, ’Ra’s wings tucked halfway back against his sides, the city’s streets rushing up at them all over again. It was desperate flying, getting high enough to keep air speed, then dropping down to hide below the rooflines, soaring through streets so tight than any error meant all of them were going to end up as stains against the side of some tenement or temple. It was madness and genius all at the same time, and it kept them alive.

When they finally burst out of the final street into the wide-open space of Annur’s lower harbor, nothing hit them. Quick Jak guided the bird cautiously higher, then higher still. Nothing.

Gwenna glanced over at Talal. “We safe here?”

The leach spread his hands helplessly. “No idea. I couldn’t do something like that even if the whole world turned to steel.”

Great, Gwenna thought as Jak banked the bird north and west, back toward their improvised command center. An unknown leach of incalculable power who is not on our side.

* * *

Adare felt like a condemned woman climbing to her death as she mounted the stone stairs of the tower. There was no gibbet at the top, of course-just the bare stone with a clear view out to the north, but that view, in its way, was worse than any hangman’s noose. A noose might mean death for a single woman, but the Urghul army that waited-that might spell the doom of all Annur. And that was forgetting all about the disaster she’d left behind, the two brothers she’d abandoned in Kegellen’s tunnels.

She was still winded from the sprint through the city, a mad rush in which she’d barely managed to stay on her feet. The gamble had worked, at least for her. Whatever method il Tornja’s soldiers were using to track her through the underground labyrinth, it stopped working as soon as she split off from the rest of the party. Kegellen had dispatched a dozen men alongside Adare, but there had been nothing for them to do besides run and look menacing. She would have found more relief in the escape if the implications hadn’t been so obvious: the army wasn’t searching for her. As Kaden had suggested, the men were looking for him and Triste.

As she climbed the stairs, Adare stared south, where the huge, golden-winged kettral had disappeared. Gwenna and the three soldiers with her had proven themselves more than competent. If anyone had a chance to snatch Kaden and Triste out of the clutches of il Tornja’s army, it was a Kettral Wing with a bird. The plan was working, they had made the right call, and yet something inside Adare felt sick, soiled, cowardly. She’d run as fast as she could as long as she could in an effort to get to the Kettral quickly, to save the people she’d left behind, but that didn’t change the basic fact: she had run.

And there’s nothing you can do about it now, she told herself viciously. Whatever triumph or tragedy was playing out to the south, a contest compared to which the war with the Urghul was some pedant’s marginalia, she could do nothing to affect it. Either Gwenna would get to Kaden and Triste in time, would carry them to the Spear in time to perform the obviate, or she would not. Adare’s job now was making sure that if the others succeeded, if il Tornja didn’t manage to annihilate the very gods, that those humans who remained might inherit something other than the Urghul’s savage kingdom of agony and ash.

As she reached the tower’s top, Nira’s voice jerked her from her thoughts.

“If ya were pickin’ times to fuck off and disappear,” the old woman said, “this was a pretty shit pick.”

The old woman stood alone at the tower’s top, wind tearing at her tangled gray hair. Even as she turned to face Adare, she leaned heavily on her cane, as though the weight of her hundreds of years had settled down on her all at once. Her eyes were still bright, but sunken deep in their sockets. When her gaze settled on Adare, it felt like the gaze of someone in a portrait, someone once strong, determined, resilient, but long since dead.

“What’s going on?” Adare asked.

“Aside from an army a’ Urghul gettin’ ready to turn your nice shiny city into a stable?”

Adare took the final stairs two at a time, then stopped, staring north over the devastation she had visited on her city to the Urghul army beyond. For the better part of the year she’d been near the front, just a few dozen miles from the most brutal fighting, but not since Andt-Kyl had she actually seen more than a few of the horsemen at a time. The sight filled her with both dread and fascination. They poured over the low hills, more and more and more, until it seemed they would fill all the fields north of the burned barricade she had created.

“How many are there?” she asked.

“Enough,” Nira grunted, as though there were nothing more to say about the matter. “Was it him?”

Adare shook her head in confusion. “Him?”

“Il Tornja,” Nira replied. “Was he the one that grabbed ya?”

She was staring south rather than north, not at the Urghul, but over the innumerable walls and rooftops of Annur. Adare’s stomach went cold inside her.

“We thought he might have returned. Is it true?”

Nira nodded slowly, wearily. “And my brother with him.”

“How do you know?”

“I can feel him, for one thing,” Nira replied quietly. “Oshi. I never told ya this, but he’s my well. I can feel him moving through the city, somewhere to the south.”

Adare followed the older woman’s gaze. “If Oshi is here, then so is il Tornja.”

“Ya don’t need me ta tell you that,” Nira said, rummaging in the folds of her dress for a moment, then extending a gnarled hand. “He sent ya a love letter.”

Adare stared at the folded parchment. The letters she had received of late had brimmed with disaster. “You opened it,” she said.

Nira nodded. “’Course I opened it. Thought ya might be dead.”

“And what does it say?”

Even as she asked the question, Adare could feel the dread coiling around her heart, squeezing tighter and tighter, until her own pulse hammered in her ears, drowning out the awful noise of the horsemen to the north. War and worse than war had come to Annur, and yet that single sheet of parchment terrified her more than all the Urghul nation, more than whatever fight was unfolding in the streets below.

“What does it say?” she asked again, the words dry as sand inside her mouth.

Nira grimaced. “It says he has your son.”

It felt as though someone had closed a fist around her lungs. For a moment all she could do was gape, staring at Nira like some dumb fish hauled up from the depths to flop itself to death atop the tower. Finally, she managed one more word. “And?”

“Focus on the Urghul,” Nira said. “Leave what’s happening inside the city alone, and your boy’ll be fine.”

Adare exhaled slowly, the breath rattling out of her.

Just focus on the Urghul. That was what she’d climbed the tower to do, and yet, she’d already sent Gwenna south. Il Tornja couldn’t miss that golden bird knifing through the air. Would he see Adare’s hand behind it? Was it already too late?

Trembling, she placed her hands on the stone ramparts, trying to find some strength in the ancient masonry. Down the wall to the west, she could see Lehav readying the Sons of Flame. She suddenly wished Fulton were there, the longing for his stern, steady presence an ache so vicious that it momentarily stole her speech.

“So,” Nira said, the syllable simple and unforgiving as an anvil.

“So,” Adare replied, trying to keep the scream inside her from ripping free.

“What are you going to do?”

“What I came here to do. Hold back the Urghul while the Kettral finish what needs doing in the city.”

Nira narrowed her eyes. “And what is it, exactly, that needs doing? What is it everyone’s so worked up about that the whole ’Kent-kissing army seems ta have not noticed the arrival of the entire Urghul nation?”

Adare shook her head, unsure how to tell the story, unsure what words would suffice. “Trying to save us,” she said finally.

After studying her a moment, Nira nodded. “And if it comes ta your brothers or your son, who’ll ya choose?”

“It’s not going to come to that.”

“Sayin’ a thing don’t make it so.…”

“It’s not…” The words died in Adare’s mouth.

She stared north. While she’d been standing on the tower’s top, the Urghul had divided into two groups, separated by a wide lane. She hadn’t been paying any attention to the maneuver-they were still days from being able to attack. Or so she’d thought.

Without shifting her gaze from the Urghul, she groped at her side, found the long lens, and raised it to her eye. A figure leapt into view, riding down the center of that lane, a man she’d heard discussed a thousand times, but never actually seen. He was decked out in the Urghul style, all leather and fur, though his skin and hair were far too dark for any Urghul. Despair’s gray, sickly flower unfolded in Adare’s mind. Through the long lens, she could see the grim smile on the man’s face, the leashes trailing from his saddle, and collared at the end of those leashes, naked, terrified, and bleeding from some recent lash, a dozen prisoners, men and women, all Annurian.

“Balendin,” Adare said quietly.

That got Nira’s attention finally. The old woman turned, took up a long lens of her own, and studied him silently.

“He’s the leach, eh?” She shook her head. “Emotion. It’s a strong well. One a’ the strongest.”

“What can he do?” Adare asked. The story from Andt-Kyl was that he had used his foul power to hold up an entire bridge while the Urghul rode across. Adare wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not-the bridge had been destroyed by the time that she arrived, Balendin gone.

Nira frowned. “A lot. He’s not just leaching off those poor doomed fucks.” She gestured down the wall with her cane. “There must be five thousand men on these walls. They’ve heard a’ him. Everyone in the ’Kent-kissing city’s heard a’ him. Once they know he’s here, once he can feel all that hate, and rage, and fear”-she shook her head again-“even the Army of the North might not make a difference.”

* * *

When Quick Jak finally put Allar’ra down inside the improvised Kettral compound, the entire place was on the verge of madness. The other Wings were all there, back from their own scouting missions. No one had found Kaden, obviously, but everyone had seen the same thing north of the wall: the Urghul army parting down the center to make room for Balendin and his string of blood victims. Sigrid and the Flea had managed to impose some sort of order, but Adare was up on top of her tower, stabbing a finger to the north, and a string of terrified messengers were waiting on the cobblestones, all bearing the same message: kill the leach.

“Son of a bitch,” Gwenna cursed, dropping off the talon, “how long has he been there?”

“Not long,” the Flea replied. “Just getting ready, from the sound of it.” He nodded to the south. “What happened to you?”

Gwenna shook her head, unsure how to cram it all into a few words. “Nothing good. Valyn’s with Kaden and Triste. According to Adare, they all need to get to the Spear. I have no idea why, but everyone seems to think it’s pretty fucking important. Including the Army of the North, who is hunting them.”

“You couldn’t manage an extract?”

“The bastards have a leach. Almost knocked us clear out of the air, and we never even saw him.”

“A leach?” the Flea asked. He glanced over at Sigrid. The blond woman just shook her head, made an angry growl in the back of her throat. “That’s two of them,” the Flea said grimly. “Whoever this is south of the wall, and Balendin to the north. Sig thinks that after half an afternoon of cutting out hearts he’ll be strong enough to clear a path through all Adare’s hard-earned wreckage, maybe strong enough to punch straight through the wall.”

“Well that’s unpleasant,” Gwenna said, scrambling for anything resembling a plan, something that would save Kaden and Triste and Annur at the same time.

“Valyn and Kaden,” the Flea said, slicing through her thoughts. “What was their last location?”

“West of the Wool District, heading farther west.”

The Wing leader’s brow furrowed. “Thought you said they wanted to get to the Spear.”

“Yeah. Well. Looks like wanting not to get killed counted a little higher than wanting to get to the Spear. Valyn’s leading them west, which, given the way the army’s arranged, seems like a pretty good idea.”

The Flea glanced over at Sigrid. The blond woman met his gaze, then nodded.

“We’ll get them,” he said, turning back to Gwenna. “We don’t have a bird anyway, and this is a job for a foot team. You take care of Balendin.”

Gwenna stared. “Take care of him? You have any ideas how to do that?”

“Nope. That’s why it’s your job.” The Flea gestured toward the birds. “You’ve got five Wings here. Use ’em.”

For a moment, Gwenna couldn’t move. The thought was too large, the responsibility too daunting. Then the Flea stepped forward, set a solid hand on her shoulder. “You’re a good soldier, Gwenna.”

She met his eyes, but could find no words.

“This is what you trained to do,” the Flea went on, his voice quiet, low, steady as the waves on the shore. “No one ever thinks they’re ready for something like this, but I’m telling you now, and I’m only going to say it once, so listen good.…” He paused, smiled that crooked smile of his. “You’re ready.”

Then, before Gwenna could respond, he and Sigrid were gone, racing south toward Valyn, toward the Army of the North, toward a viciously powerful leach, and in all likelihood, toward an immortal Csestriim general against whom every human attack had failed.

“Well, shit,” Gwenna muttered.

“I agree,” Talal replied. He was standing just a pace distant, Annick at his side.

“We could go with him,” Gwenna said. “Provide air cover.”

“That didn’t work so well last time,” the leach pointed out, “and besides. Balendin’s here. We can’t fight all the fights.”

Gwenna nodded, looked past him to where Quick Jak was going over Allar’ra’s wings, sliding his hands beneath the feathers looking for damage.

“Can he fly?” Gwenna shouted.

The flier hesitated. “He can fly, but I need more time to assess the damage.…”

“We don’t have more time. We have to hit Balendin now. Once he knocks down half the wall, there won’t be much point.” She gestured to the other Kettral, most of whom had dismounted to check over weapons and birds. “Fliers and Wing commanders on me.”

The plan was as shitty as it was simple. They had five birds. Balendin couldn’t look five directions at once. Four Wings would come in from the cardinal directions, and one would stoop from almost directly above.

“Balendin shields himself,” Talal pointed out. “He did at Andt-Kyl, anyway. If the leach attacking us to the south was using a hammer, Balendin’s kenning will be like an invisible wall.”

Gwenna nodded, wondering if she had it all wrong. “He shields himself against arrows, flatbow bolts, spears. You think he can hold out against eight tons of bird coming at him faster than a galloping horse?”

Talal hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”

The other Kettral looked nervous. Quick Jak, for all his slick flying just moments earlier, seemed close to panic. He had picked at the cuticle of his thumb so viciously that the nail was awash in blood, but he just kept at it, not seeming to notice.

“Look,” Gwenna said, stepping forward. “Balendin’s only going to get stronger. The more people in this city learn that he’s here, learn who he is and what he does, the harder it’s going to be to kill him. I can’t say that my plan will work. Maybe we get lucky, maybe someone gets through, and maybe we all die.

“I will tell you this, though. You are Kettral, every ’Kent-kissing one of you. We called you washouts, but you’re not, not anymore. You went down in the Hole, you fought the slarn, you drank the egg, and you came back out. That makes you Kettral, you crazy sons of bitches, and let me tell you something about being Kettral. We don’t get the easy jobs. We don’t pull wall duty or guarding the baggage chain. In return for getting to fly around on these enormous, manslaughtering hawks, we actually have to go do the dangerous shit, the shit that gets men and women killed, and so if this isn’t what you signed up for, you tell me now.” She paused, shifting her eyes from one soldier to the next. “Which one of you isn’t Kettral? Who wants to wash out all over again?”

No one stepped forward. No one spoke.

Finally, Gwenna allowed herself to smile. “Good. Mount up.”

* * *

Their hastily constructed plan failed almost the moment they stepped from the shelter of Kegellen’s street-level warehouse and into the street beyond. They needed to go outside in order for the bird to find them, of course, but when they stepped, blinking, into the afternoon heat and sunlight, there was no kettral in the sky. Kaden stood with Valyn and Triste in a wide, treelined avenue, one of Annur’s larger thoroughfares. Shops occupied the bottom floors of the buildings to either side-leatherworkers, mostly, judging from the wares on display-and the street itself was busy with men and women haggling or selling, pushing handcarts loaded with stock, making purchases or deliveries. It almost might have been a normal city street on an everyday afternoon, except for the Annurian soldiers, at least a dozen of them, jogging up the center of the road from the south. They hadn’t spotted their quarry yet, but they weren’t bothering to stop, not even pausing to search inside the shops. They moved with the certainty of hunters who knew exactly where to find the beast they sought.

Valyn glanced at the soldiers, then gestured to Kaden and Triste. “North. Walk fast until they see us, then run.”

“Where’s the kettral?” Triste hissed.

“No idea.”

“We could retreat,” Kaden said, nodding toward Kegellen’s warehouse. The Queen of the Streets had remained behind, inside, along with a knot of her guards.

“No,” Valyn growled, dragging him into the foot traffic. “We can’t. You can’t hide, not as long as il Tornja has those ’Shael-spawned spiders. You go back in those tunnels, and you’ll die there. He’s got the whole Army of the North to pin you down, smoke you out.”

Even as he spoke, Valyn’s eyes roamed over the street ahead. He hadn’t drawn the axes from the belt, but that ruined gaze was enough to make anyone who met it jerk back, turn hastily aside, find somewhere else to look, somewhere else to be.

“The bird’s our best shot at getting to the top of the Spear.”

“And if the bird doesn’t show up?” Kaden asked.

“Then we do it the hard way.”

“What does that mean?” Triste demanded.

“We go on foot,” Valyn said. “Fight our way in, up. There’s no choice now-we have to keep moving.”

Triste stopped walking, turned to stare at Valyn. “Fight our way in?”

“There are three of us,” Kaden said quietly, taking Triste by the elbow as he spoke, urging her into motion once more. “Three of us against il Tornja’s entire army.”

Valyn’s smile was like something carved across his face with a knife. “I’m not sure you understand.”

“Not sure I understand what?”

“Everything that’s happened this past year,” Valyn replied, then trailed off, shaking his head. “I’m not the brother you remember, Kaden. I’m something … different. When you tally up the good people in this fight, the noble ones, the ones who’ve been doing the right thing: I’m not on that list. Not anymore. I don’t think I’ve been on that list for a very long time.”

The words were lost, haunted, as though someone had hollowed out this warrior who stalked down the street, his scarred hand on the head of his ax.

“That doesn’t matter,” Kaden said. “Not right now.”

“Yes, it does.”

Behind them, a sudden cry cut through the everyday babble of the avenue. The soldiers were shouting, bellowing questions and orders. Kaden risked a glance over his shoulder. The men weren’t jogging, they were running, fingers leveled directly at Kaden himself. When he turned back to the north, he found the far end of the street blocked by a hastily assembled cordon of armed men. Valyn was still smiling.

“The thing you don’t understand, my calm, quiet brother, is that sometimes goodness and nobility aren’t enough. Sometimes, when the monsters come, you need a dark, monstrous thing to pit against them.” He slid one ax from the loop at his belt, then the other. People cried out in alarm, lurched away. Valyn ignored them. “I am that thing, Kaden. The human part of me … the part that should feel camaraderie, friendship, love…” He shook his head. “It’s gone. There is only darkness. I’m not a brother, not really. Not a friend. Not an ally or son. I don’t know how to be those things. All I know is blood and struggle. It is all I am. This fight, right now, is what I am for.”

And then it began.

Kaden had spent years as an acolyte in the Bone Mountains, unseen atop the granite spire of the Talon, watching crag cats hunt. They had struck him as perfect predators, flowing over the stone like winter shadows, silently pacing their prey, moving from ledge to boulder so smoothly they seemed otherworldly, like creatures culled from a dream of hunting. He’d watched them stand utterly still for an hour, then uncoil all at once, leaping a dozen paces in a single, unerring strike. Death, Kaden thought, must be like that: perfect, patient, waiting one moment, striking the next, unstringing tendons so quickly, so precisely, that the dying thing-a bear, a mountain goat-was gone before the carcass struck the stone. Those crag cats, however, for all their perfection, all their silent, predatory grace, seemed clumsy, slow, almost comically awkward when Kaden compared them to the creature Valyn had become.

Valyn didn’t attack the soldiers blocking the street to the north; attack wasn’t the right word. An attack implied a fight, implied some defense-if only feeble, notional-on the part of those attacked. The Annurian soldiers had no defense. They might as well have stood at the ocean’s verge, trying to hold back the steel-gray sea with their feeble spears. When Valyn was still twenty paces distant, he hurled his axes, one then the other. Kaden could barely follow the flashing blur of the vicious wedges tumbling end over end, but in the moment it took for both to find their marks, Valyn had already slipped knives from inside his blacks and hurled those, too, at the line of men. The sound reached Kaden a moment later-four sick wet thwacks, steel hacking into unready flesh.

The line of soldiers shuddered as the four men at the center collapsed into their own agony. Valyn didn’t break stride.

Between him and the Annurians, an ironmonger’s wagon laden with pots and heavy pans had skewed across the street. The mules, panicked by the scent of blood, were bellowing, stamping, hauling their groaning load in different directions. The bearded ironmonger hesitated a moment, torn between the need to protect his goods and the awful realization that there could be no protecting them, not against the madness coursing through the street. As the baffled merchant hurled himself to the dirt, Valyn leapt over the wagon, stripping two heavy iron pans from the load as he passed, hit the ground with a shoulder, rolled to his feet, knocked aside the arrows flying at his face, and then he was among the legionaries, caving in faces and shattering arms, bellowing at Kaden and Triste to follow.

It was only a few dozen paces, but by the time they caught up, the legionaries were dead, blood chugging out onto the earth through ragged, ugly wounds, and Valyn was holding his axes once again.

“Let’s go,” he growled. “And this time, try to keep up.”

There was a moment early on in all the blood-slick madness when Kaden caught a glimpse of a golden-winged bird. The creature screamed, careened through the sky as though it were a huge puppet yanked by vicious, invisible strings, and then it was gone, vanished behind the rooftops. He ran on, waiting for the kettral to reappear even as dozens of men wielding spears and swords flooded into the street behind them.

“Where is it?” he shouted.

“Gone,” Valyn said. “Can’t make the grab.”

Even as he spoke, another knot of armored men erupted from a side alley a dozen paces ahead. Valyn, already charging, charged harder. Kaden had never seen any human being move so fast, had never seen anything move that fast. Valyn wielded the axes as though they were part of his own flesh, as though he’d been born holding them, and the Annurians could find no defense that availed against that brutal steel. Valyn went over their guard or under, found holes in whatever feeble attacks were thrown up, sometimes just slammed straight through a raised blade, shattering it or knocking it aside as though three feet of sharpened sword were no more than a reed.

“Come on,” he growled, gesturing through the hole he’d carved. Blood spattered his face.

The flight that followed was madness. Not since the Aedolians had come to Ashk’lan to kill him had Kaden run so hard. This time, too, the Annurian soldiers were his foes. This time, too, Triste ran at his side, her breathing ragged, but steady. This time, too, he understood the stakes, how it would only take a single misstep, a twisted ankle, and the race would be over. It was all the same, and yet it was not the same at all.

There had been a hope of escaping the Aedolians back in the Bone Mountains where the terrain favored the monks. Kaden enjoyed no such advantage on the streets of Annur. Worse, il Tornja’s soldiers weren’t trailing along somewhere behind, they were everywhere, lunging out of doorways and alleys, appearing at intersections, calling out to one another in ear-shivering blasts on their horns. Were it not for Valyn, the Annurians would have killed both Kaden and Triste a dozen times over, but Valyn, somehow, was everywhere.

When Annurians came on horseback, he killed the horses. When they came with spears, he rolled beneath the shafts and cut the arms from the attackers. Once, when Kaden rounded a corner to find two legionaries leveling flatbows at his chest, Valyn lunged in front. An ax flew end over end into the face of one of the bowmen. Kaden couldn’t see what happened next. Or he saw it, but his mind couldn’t work through the fact. There was an arrow. A flying arrow. Then there was not. It looked as though Valyn had snatched it from the air, but that was impossible. There was no time to dwell on it. Valyn had reached the other bowman, caved in his throat, retrieved the first thrown ax, and was waving them on again.

His look brought Kaden up short. Despite the blood bathing his arms, soaking the tattered cloth of his clothes, Valyn didn’t look like a man fighting for his life. He looked … glad.

No, Kaden thought. Not glad. Something else.

There was no time to ponder words. Even as he paused, the Annurians were closing.

“Come on, Kaden,” Triste said, dragging him forward by the wrist. “Come on.”

Kaden met her eyes, saw the fear and determination there, and he ran.

The red walls of the Dawn Palace nearly proved their undoing. They’d come at the fortress from the west and south, working their way through the streets until they burst from one final crowded lane into the open space before the walls and the short bridge leading to the Water Gate.

The Water Gate was nothing compared to the towering Godsgate that opened west onto Annur’s main thoroughfare. It was an entrance for minor ministers, deliveries of food and wine, workers come to repair roofs or walls. It was a small gate, but it was blocked by a steel portcullis, and for all Valyn’s ability to hack his way through human flesh, his axes would do nothing to get them past that grille.

“West,” Valyn said, checking his momentum before he reached the short bridge over the moat. “We’ll go in the Great Gate.”

Even as the words left his lips, however, a knot of twenty or thirty soldiers, half bearing loaded flatbows, marched out from a side street at the double to block the way west.

“East,” Kaden gasped. “The harbor.”

But there were men to the east, too, spreading out in a tight cordon across the street.

Valyn hefted his axes, as though testing their weight. “We’ll go through them.”

“That’s insane,” Triste hissed.

“She’s right,” Kaden said. “I don’t care how good you are, we’re not going to survive, not through that.”

“So we don’t survive,” Valyn said. “So we die.”

His voice sent a shiver up Kaden’s spine.

“The canal,” Kaden said, gesturing to the filthy water swirling along the base of the wall.

One twitchy bowman loosed his bolt. It landed twenty paces distant, steel head striking sparks as it skittered across the stone.

“We didn’t make it,” Triste whispered. “We didn’t make it.”

Then, before Kaden could reply, madness erupted in the western rank of soldiers. Men cried out in pain and surprise, turned, tried to bring swords and bows to bear on some new, unseen foe, calling out conflicting orders even as their companions fell. The line of men, so strict and disciplined just moments earlier, flexed, then caved inward, like a river’s high bank before the rising waters of a flood, calving off at first, then collapsing. Kaden could just make out, at the center of the violence, two figures, little more than shadows, really, in all the kicked-up dust, fighting back to back, hacking their way through the stunned ranks of Annurians.

“It’s another army…,” Kaden began, then trailed off as a gust of wind shoveled away the dust.

There was no army. There were no rows of newly arrived soldiers to rank against those other deadly rows. There were just the two shadows, neither of them as fast as Valyn, but fast enough, twin blades naked in their hands as they forced their way forward step by bloody step, leaving a screaming, twisted human wreckage in their wake. Then, a moment later, they were free, bursting from the front rank of the legion, charging full tilt at the bridge. Both wore Kettral blacks, but their similarity ended there. The man was short, pockmarked, coal black, shaved-headed. The woman was tall, beautiful but freakishly pale, her yellow hair streaming out behind her.

“Well, Holy Hull,” Valyn said, taken aback for the first time since their desperate flight began.

“Not Hull,” the man said as they reached them. “Just a couple beat-up soldiers.” If Valyn was some preternatural hunter stalking the streets of Annur, these two looked half dead. Both were drenched in blood; a vicious blaze had singed the hair from half the woman’s head. The man’s blades were notched in half a dozen places. Somehow, though, they’d come across the city, cutting their own way through the Army of the North, and when the man spoke again, his voice was hard, level, focused. “What now?”

Valyn pointed. “We need in, past the gate.”

Neither of the Kettral asked why. The blond woman just threw up a hand, a casual gesture, as though she were flicking water free of her fingers. Behind Kaden there was a groan like the earth itself were breaking apart, then a deafening crash. He turned to find the steel portcullis crushed, crumbled, shoved aside.

“Go,” Valyn said, seizing him by the shoulder, hauling him onto the bridge even as the bolts and arrows started falling once more. “Go.”

“Triste,” Kaden said, but the short man had her by the arm, was dragging her with him as he ran.

They were Kettral-that much was clear enough-although beyond that Kaden had no theories. It didn’t matter. There was only one thing left that mattered.

“The Spear,” he gasped, pointing up at the impossible glass tower looming above. “We have to get to the Spear.”

* * *

Adare watched from the wall as the Kettral attacked.

Balendin stood atop a small, charred knoll, the site, until days earlier, of some temple, the ruined walls and buttresses of which still stood, protecting him from anyone approaching from behind. He’d been plying his stomach-churning violence there for half the day, unseaming men and women as though they were dolls, opening the skin, holding up the dark, pulsing organs to the light, bathing in the cries of the surrounding Urghul and, presumably, the horror of the soldiers atop the wall.

He had just torn the tongue from another helpless prisoner when the five birds came at him, one from every point of the compass and one stabbing down from above. It seemed an impossible attack to stop. Each of those birds was the size of a large canalboat, all wing, and beak, and claw. Through the long lens, Adare could see the Kettral on the talons beneath, armed to the ears with blades and bows. They started loosing arrows early, and kept shooting as the birds closed.

“They’re going to do it,” Adare breathed quietly. “They’re going to kill that fucking bastard.”

Nira was silent at her side a moment, studying the battle through her own long lens. Then she shook her head.

“No,” she replied grimly, lowering the lens. “They’re not.”

The first kettral exploded into flames when it was still a hundred paces from the leach, the second a heartbeat after that. One moment the birds were flying, screaming their defiance, the next they were charred, already dead, tumbling from the air, the burning Kettral struggling to cut themselves free of their harnesses. Struggling and failing.

“Sweet Intarra’s light,” Adare breathed.

“They could use a little a’ that right now,” Nira agreed.

Whether the leach had used too much strength too quickly, or he just didn’t see the full scope of the attack early enough, the other three birds got closer. Closer, but not close enough. Balendin raised his hand, dropped it down, and the nearest kettral, already coming in low for its attack, slammed into the earth, scattering horses and riders, plowing up the soft ground. The mounted Urghul surrounded it, screaming, swarming over the broken creature and the soldiers beneath like so many ants on a rotting carcass.

The fourth bird careened off some invisible wall, and though it managed to stay airborne, even Adare could tell from the stuttering wingbeat that the creature was injured, and badly. This one, however, managed to limp off toward the north, and though a group of the horsemen gave chase, it seemed at least possible that the soldiers strapped to the talons beneath would survive, escape.

That left the fifth bird, the one dropping straight down out of the clouds.

That one’s Gwenna, she realized, staring through the lens. The largest bird, the golden one, is hers.

Adare allowed herself the smallest spark of hope. It was possible Balendin hadn’t noticed, that he’d been too busy knocking back the first four attacks to notice the fifth. He couldn’t see everything at once; he had to miss something eventually. The long lens was shaking so badly in Adare’s hand that she couldn’t see the leach’s face. She leaned it against the top of the stone wall, took a moment to find the range again, and then her stomach recoiled inside her. Balendin was staring straight up. Staring straight up, and smiling.

Adare clenched her teeth, waiting for the inevitable, for this bird, too, the last of a shattered hope, to burst into flame or be smashed into the dirt. At the last moment, however, the enormous creature sheered off, peeling away toward the east, abandoning the attack. Not that it mattered. Another blow, just as vicious as the one that crippled the other four kettral, hammered into the huge golden bird from the side. It tumbled sideways, screamed, managed to right itself, then disappeared behind the rooftops, flying toward the Broken Bay.

For a moment, it was all Adare could do to stay on her feet.

“They didn’t even get close,” she breathed quietly. “Five Wings of Kettral attacking simultaneously, and they didn’t even get close.”

“It’s worse than that,” Nira said. “That victory just dug his well deeper, filled it higher.”

Adare turned to the older woman.

“Think of your awe,” Nira continued quietly. She gestured to the Urghul, to the Annurians manning the walls. “Now multiply that by a hundred thousand.”

* * *

Gwenna was still cursing when Quick Jak put the bird down south of the wall, in the open square that served as the Kettral command and control. Only there were no Kettral left, none but her own Wing.

“The ’Shael-spawned son of a fucking whore,” Gwenna snarled. “That bastard. That son of a bitch.”

The curses weren’t directed at anyone, they weren’t even coherent, but they kept her from sobbing.

She’d known it was a risk. They all had. She’d known, when she gave the order to attack, that people wouldn’t be coming back, that Balendin would put up some kind of fight and that people would die. She’d known there was a possibility that the leach was just too strong, and she’d made the choice to go after him anyway, before he got even stronger. She’d known all of it, and yet seeing the birds burst into flame, seeing the men and women she’d so hastily trained burning, falling, dying … she hadn’t known how much that would hurt.

The fact that her own Wing had survived only made it worse, and when Quick Jak dropped off Allar’ra’s back, Gwenna went at him with a fury, seizing him by the throat and throwing him to the ground. The fact that she could see the fear in his eyes, that she could smell the stink of panic on him, made her want to kill him right there and be done with it.

“Why did you peel off?” she demanded.

“Gwenna,” Talal said quietly.

“Stay out of this, Talal.” She didn’t take her eyes off the flier. “Why did you peel off?”

Jak managed to shake his head slightly. “He … had us. You saw.…”

“You don’t know that,” Gwenna shouted. “You don’t know that, you worthless piece of shit. The plan, the fucking plan, was to go in hard and keep going. That’s what the other Wings did, or maybe you were too busy shitting your pants to notice.”

Jak’s face was purpling, but he made no move to fight back or try to pull free.

“Other Wings…,” he managed, “died.”

“Sometimes that happens,” Gwenna screamed. “Sometimes when you’re fighting, people fucking die. It doesn’t mean you stop fighting. The only reason you stop fighting is you’re too frightened, because you’re a coward, because something’s fucking broken inside you.”

The flier opened his mouth, then closed it, shut his eyes.

“Gwenna,” Talal said again, taking her by the shoulders this time, pulling her back. “Get off of him. We’re alive because he saved us.”

Gwenna slammed the flier’s head against the ground once, then straightened up to shove a finger in Talal’s face.

“He saved us,” she hissed, “by running away. I ordered those other Wings into the fight. I told them we were all going, that we were making a concerted attack, together, and then I ran away.”

“Would it be better if we were dead?”

“Yes!” she said, shocked at her own conviction. “Yes.”

Talal shook his head slowly. “No.”

Behind them, Quick Jak was getting unsteadily to his feet. Gwenna took a long, shuddering breath, held it for a few heartbeats, then let it out. Then she did it again, and again. When you fight, Hendran wrote, people die. It’s only human to care, but you need to cut out that human thing. If you care too much, you lose.

When she thought she could speak without screaming, she turned to face her Wing.

“Stay with the bird,” she said, then gestured toward the wall and the tower punctuating it. “I’m going to tell the Emperor we failed.”

* * *

Adare had just sent out a dozen runners east and west along the wall. The fight with the Kettral had been pretty hard to miss, but all the same, she wanted to make sure the Sons of Flame understood what was coming.

The leach is going to hit us today, she told the messenger. And we think he’s going to hit us here, at this tower.

That, at least, was what Nira believed, for reasons Adare didn’t fully understand. Maybe the old woman was right, and maybe she was just finally going insane, but after seeing the Kettral scrubbed from the sky, Adare needed to do something, and sending out a warning was something. She was searching for another task when Gwenna stepped up through the trapdoor and onto the tower’s top.

“Your Radiance,” she said, bowing her head. The genuflection was uncharacteristic. “The attack failed.”

Adare bit back the first sharp retort that came to mind. “I saw,” she said instead. “I’m sorry for your soldiers.”

The words sounded stiff, useless, formulaic, but what else was there to say? The leach had just shattered the best weapon that Adare could bring against him, shattered it without even the slightest hint of effort.

“Thank you, Your Radiance. We can mourn the fallen later. We have one bird left. What are your orders?”

Adare was still trying to formulate an answer when a runner stumbled up through the trapdoor, sweating and out of breath.

“The kenarang,” he managed after a moment. “Your Radiance, I’ve come from the palace. Kiel sent me. He says he had eyes on the kenarang.…”

Nira stiffened at Adare’s side. “Where?” she demanded.

“Inside … the Spear,” the man gasped. “He had a hundred soldiers, and he went into the Spear.”

Adare stared. She could feel the warning from il Tornja, the single slip of paper folded inside her pocket.

“That’s where Kaden’s going,” she murmured. “That bastard. He’s always a step ahead.”

Gwenna studied her. “I don’t know why in Hull’s name Kaden would want to get inside the Spear, but he’s not headed that way. We caught a glimpse of him. Valyn was taking him west. Away from the palace. Which is just as well, since the whole ’Kent-kissing Army of the North was in his way if he tried to go east.”

“West,” Adare murmured. “They changed the plan?”

Nira snorted. “Faced with a whole army. Wouldn’t you?”

Adare took a deep breath. She could feel a sudden spark of hope inside her, hot, bright, horrible. Do not interfere, il Tornja had warned her, with anything south of the wall. I have your son.

Adare shuddered, replied silently, But I have you. Now. For the first time. I have you trapped.

“When?” she demanded, rounding on the messenger. “When did he go in?”

“Long time ago,” the man replied. “It took … time to cross the city.” He shook his head wearily. “I’m sorry, Your Radiance.”

“A long time ago,” Adare said, hope’s spark kindling to a fire. “And he hasn’t left?”

The man shook his head. “Not that I know, Your Radiance.”

“Good,” Adare said, nodding slowly. “Good.”

“’Fuck’s good about the kenarang takin’ control of your palace?” Nira demanded.

“He’s not in the palace,” Adare replied, smiling. “He’s in the Spear. It’s time for Intarra to pull her weight.”

“Meanin’ what?”

“It’s time for a miracle.”

Nira studied Adare from beneath hooded lids. “And if the goddess don’t comply?”

“Oh, I’m through waiting for the fucking goddess.”

“Meanin’ what?” Nira asked again, even more quietly this time.

“Meaning I’m going to set her Spear on fire.”

* * *

We’re killing good men, Valyn thought as the palace guardsman crumpled beneath his ax. He’d hit the man with the blunt back of the metal head, trusting to the soldier’s helmet to cushion the blow. He’d probably survive. With any luck, most of them would survive. The Flea was fighting mostly with the flats of his blades, and Sigrid, too, but sometimes the only way past a man was through him, and Valyn would be shipped to ’Shael if he failed in this last, mad dash because he was too delicate to spill the necessary blood.

After Sigrid smashed through the Water Gate, the Dawn Palace had erupted into utter madness. The normal guardsmen, baffled by what seemed an unprovoked attack, were coming at them from every direction, spears waving stupidly in the air. If there had been more time, Kaden might have talked to them-he had the eyes, they would accept him in his own palace-but there was no time. Il Tornja’s soldiers were inside the red walls, too, just behind them, fighting their own way forward, and if that weren’t enough, the Aedolians, drawn to the sound of violence, kept attacking in knots of two or four.

At least Kaden and Triste had managed not to panic. They moved forward in the center of the rough triangle of Kettral, Kaden trying to shield Triste with his body. Trying to shield her, Valyn thought, or the goddess inside her. His brother’s claim still sounded outlandish, insane, but there was no time to dwell on it. They were ducks moving through the various avenues and courtyards of the palace. Whatever had to happen inside the Spear didn’t matter, not in the instant; getting there was a simple, tactical imperative. The staircase above the lower floors was almost perfectly defensible. With high ground and a vertical choke point, the three Kettral should be able to hold against whatever soldiers il Tornja threw at them. They just needed to get inside.

The Jasmine Court was the last open space before the Spear, and they hit it at a full run. The Flea had snatched up a bow somewhere in the fight. Halfway across the courtyard, he dropped to a knee, loosed half a dozen shafts at the cordon of men lined up in front of the entrance to the tower.

Not palace guards, Valyn realized grimly. Il Tornja’s soldiers.

“Army,” the Flea shouted, noticing the same thing, dropping the bow, and drawing his blades once more.

“Stay behind me,” Valyn bellowed back to Kaden. “Stay low.”

There were seven or eight men remaining, three with flatbows. He could see the terror painted across their faces, could hear the panic in their smashing hearts. They were legionaries, like the ones he’d been killing in the street beyond, but that didn’t mean they were evil. They were following orders, obeying the general who for the past year had saved Annur over and over. Maybe they were good men and maybe they weren’t, but they hardly deserved to die for their loyalty. It had been a long time since he’d lived in a world where anyone got what they deserved.

Without breaking stride, Valyn threw one ax, then another. Two soldiers crumpled. The third managed to get off a shot without even aiming. It flew preposterously wide, and then the Flea and Sigrid were on them, moving like dancers, all steel and fists as they slashed knees, broke faces, opened the bodies for Ananshael to do his final, quiet work.

Only when they were inside the tower did the violence die off. It was like racing from the chaos of a stampede into a quiet chapel, all polished wood and bronze, robed men with soft flesh and quiet slippers going wide-eyed at their approach, then jerking back to the sides of the staircase, standing still, silent, frozen as deer, waiting for death to pass them by.

“We made it,” Triste groaned.

“Not yet,” Kaden replied. “We need to reach the top.”

The Flea grunted, kept his blades out. “Lot of stairs between here and there. Keep the feet moving.”

And so they moved, climbing first through the human floors built into the ancient structure, then clear of that mortal work, into the enormous column of light and empty air. Valyn paused, his chest heaving inside him. It had been almost ten years since he was last inside Intarra’s Spear, ten years since he and Kaden had climbed these same stairs together, pausing on the landings to spit over the edge, ignoring the admonitions of their Aedolians as they watched the spit fall away, break apart, disappear long before it struck the roof below. The memory twisted inside him like a knife. That child was a stranger, one more Annurian murdered in the war, vanished without even leaving a corpse.

He glanced over at his brother. Kaden’s eyes burned. Hotter than I remembered, Valyn thought. Brighter. He was still calm, preternaturally so for someone who had just fled for his life through the streets of Annur, who had just watched dozens of men cut into meat, who carried in his breath and bones the Lord of Pain himself. That glacial indifference Valyn had smelled on him back in the Bone Mountains, however, was gone. There was no monastic self-abnegation in the arm he had wrapped around Triste’s slender shoulders. Kaden cared what happened here. Valyn could smell the sorrow on him, the wet-rain scent of coming loss.

“More movement,” the Flea called out. He and Sigrid had taken up a position just behind them. “Il Tornja’s friends can climb stairs the same as we can.”

The warning was hardly necessary. Valyn could hear the heavy clomp of boots. Ten floors down, maybe twelve, but coming. He turned back to Kaden.

“Where?” he demanded.

Kaden raised a single finger. “Up,” he said again. “We need to reach the top.”

Valyn nodded. “Get to the prison level. Sigrid, the Flea, and I can hold them there. How long does this ceremony take?”

Kaden shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.” He seemed, suddenly, to be struggling with something, some unexpected pain welling up inside him. His face twitched, then went still. “Just get us up there.”

He held Valyn’s gaze a moment, then turned back to Triste. She was crying, tears standing in her violet eyes, obviously exhausted. Despite it all, she nodded. Then they were moving once again.

The fierce, vicious bliss that had buoyed Valyn up during the whole race through Annur had faded the moment the violence lapsed. His legs were a leaden blaze as he labored up the stairs. Breath burned his chest. From the sound of it, the others were struggling, too, and yet it was working. Once they reached the prison level they could throw shut the steel doors. The soldiers below wouldn’t be able to touch them.

He glanced over at Kaden.

“We’re going to make it,” he said.

Then he smelled the smoke. There was just a hint of it at first, faint and acrid, then stronger and stronger. He paused, holding the railing to keep from falling over, closed his eyes, and listened. His stomach twisted when he realized what he was hearing: below the rumble of boots on the stairs, below the desperate breathing of the people around him, below his own blood pounding in his ears, a quieter, more dangerous sound: the hiss and roar of fire, fire inside the Spear itself, gnawing through the floors below, quiet, but getting louder.

* * *

Quick Jak was going over Allar’ra’s tail feathers when Gwenna returned to the Wing. Annick and Talal were talking quietly a few paces from the flier-Gwenna couldn’t quite make out the words. She hesitated at the edge of the large square, stayed in the wall’s cool shadow for a moment. It was easier than facing them all again, easier than seeing her failure reflected in their eyes. She started to lean against the stones, then shoved herself upright.

“Knock it off, you bitch,” she muttered to herself.

She straightened her shoulders, checked her blades, then strode from the shadows into the open space.

“We failed,” she said. The three turned to watch her approach. Talal looked concerned; Quick Jak, wary, then scared. Gwenna shoved down her own fury. “We failed,” she said again, “but we are not done fighting. Right now, I need to hear it, all your best ideas on how we can get at Balendin before he blows the doors right off this ’Kent-kissing city.”

“Go in on foot,” Annick said after a pause. “He’s seen the birds. He knows we escaped, so he’ll be prepared for another air attack. If we can infiltrate that group of prisoners, get close to him…”

“We’ll just be easier to kill,” Talal said quietly. He shook his head. “He’s too strong. He has the awe of the whole Urghul nation to draw on, and the growing terror of every citizen in Annur. Right now, he might be the most powerful leach since the Atmani, and that power’s not going away unless a million people suddenly forget all about him.” He shook his head again. “I’ll go with you. I’ll try it the way Annick says. I just don’t see how we can win.”

Jak hadn’t spoken, hadn’t met Gwenna’s eyes since she returned.

“What about you?” she asked, more harshly than she’d intended.

For a long time, he didn’t reply. Then, instead of turning to her, he leveled an unsteady finger over her shoulder, southeast, toward Intarra’s Spear. “What,” he asked quietly, “is happening?”

Gwenna knew what was coming, and still she couldn’t help but stare. The base of the huge tower had begun to glow. It might have been a trick of reflected light, the sun’s low rays glancing off the unbreakable glass. That light moved, however, writhed inside the column, growing brighter and brighter until the whole tower seemed ablaze with it.

“The Emperor,” Gwenna replied grimly. “She heard il Tornja went inside, so she lit the fucking thing on fire.”

It had seemed like an insane plan, reckless and desperate, but then, Gwenna’s own plans hadn’t worked out so well, and so she’d kept her mouth shut when Adare sent the orders. She was the Emperor, after all. She could set fire to her own tower if she wanted to.

The blaze, however, was like no ordinary fire. The glass walls soaked in the light, and though the glow had started in the lower floors, the whole Spear was red-gold with it now, like a lance of flame stabbed into the cloud. Quick Jak’s jaw had dropped wide open, and even Annick looked impressed. Adare had wanted a miracle, and she had one, a raging, golden column high as the sky. Gwenna could hear the amazement up on the walls, soldiers gasping, turning, pointing at the pillar of fire in the center of their city, forgetting, if only for a moment, the army to their north.

And then she saw it.

“The bird,” Gwenna growled. The urgency was so sharp it hurt. She shoved Jak with one hand, dragged Talal with the other. “Get on the fucking bird, this is our chance.”

The Kettral stared at her as though she’d gone mad.

“They’re all looking at the Spear!” she shouted. “The Urghul, the Annurians, everyone.”

No one moved for moment, then Talal nodded. “Holy Hull,” he whispered. “No one’s thinking about Balendin.”

It was the ugliest liftoff since Gwenna’s first year as a cadet-all tangled straps and shouting, unbuckled harnesses slapping in the wind-but Jak got them in the air less than twenty heartbeats after they started running.

It has to be enough, Gwenna thought as they soared clear of Annur’s wall. Please, Hull, let it be fast enough.

Behind them, the Spear was still burning; not the glass walls, of course, but the wooden floors built into the tower’s base, illuminating the entire shaft. For a moment, Gwenna could only stare. It was as though Intarra herself had come down at last to plant her pennon in the center of Annur, to claim the ancient structure for her own. The streets were filled with people, every house, temple, tavern emptied out, the princes and paupers of Annur speechless, staring, rapt.

Gwenna wrenched her gaze away, north, toward the Urghul. She could see the low hill clearly enough, the burned-out temple, and Balendin surrounded by his victims at the center. They, too, were staring south, at the impossible pillar of flame. Jak banked the bird, fixing on the target, coming in low and fast.

“Is this going to work?” Gwenna bellowed to Talal.

The leach had his eyes trained on the ground below. “I don’t know. The Spear will be stealing a lot of his power, but not all of it. Those poor people dying in the mud around him might not even notice the light. Even if they do, it won’t wipe out their terror. He’s weaker, far, far weaker than he was, but weaker doesn’t mean weak.”

“Sweet ’Shael on a stick, Talal, can you just tell me it’s going to work?”

The leach smiled at her, a grim, quick smile. “It’s going to work.”

It seemed like she should say something else, something more, but then, suddenly, she was wrenched sideways, almost yanked down off the bird’s talons as Jak pulled Allar’ra into a vicious climb. Gwenna regained her footing, then stared in horror as the ground fell away below; the ground, and Balendin with it. She seized the hastily mended leather strap, hauled on it furiously, the same simple code over and over: Attack. Attack. Attack.

Quick Jak did not attack. Instead, they continued to climb, each beat of the bird’s wings carrying them farther from the target.

“That son of a bitch,” Gwenna bellowed. “We have one chance at this. One fucking chance, and he’s running away.”

Talal’s face was grim, his jaw tight. Over on the other talon, Annick was shaking her head in disbelief.

“I’m going to cut his fucking heart out and feed it to him,” Gwenna snarled. It didn’t matter. It was a stupid threat. Jak was on the bird’s back, and she was below, with no way to get at him, no way to reverse the disastrous climb, no way to force the bird back down. Even if she killed the flier a dozen times over when they finally landed, it wouldn’t matter. The window for the attack was tiny, and already she could feel it closing.

Allar’ra’s wings kept beating even as they rose above the clouds. The climb grew steeper and steeper, as though Jak were trying in his mindless panic to force the bird all the way into the stars. Gwenna could feel the air thin in her lungs, frigid on her skin. The bird’s angle of ascent had grown so severe she had to strain to stay on the talon.

“No,” Talal said, the syllable almost lost in the wind.

Gwenna turned to him, her heart like stone inside her chest. “He can’t hear us. It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” Talal said again, staring at her, head cocked to the side as though he were listening to some impossibly distant tune. “He’s not running away.” The words were slow, quiet, but filled with grim triumph.

Gwenna stared. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“He’s not running away,” Talal said again. “He’s getting more height.”

The bird had gone absolutely vertical, beak stabbed through the center of the sky. And then, suddenly, Gwenna was weightless.

As a child, before she left for the Islands, one of her jobs had been splitting wood for the family farm. She’d spent whole weeks of the late spring at the work, and she could still remember the feel of the maul in her hands, the way she had to strain to swing it up, and then that wonderful moment of weightlessness as the steel head moved through the top of the arc, poised for a fraction of a heartbeat against the blue sky.…

“We’re the axhead,” Gwenna whispered.

There was a moment of stillness, silence. She could just hear Quick Jak’s voice, trembling but determined, the same mantra repeated over and over:

“I am Kettral. I am Kettral. I am Kettral.”

Then the bird screamed once, the sound bright as the sun, and they were twisting, tumbling over, falling backward, wings tucked tight against Allar’ra’s side as they plunged toward the cloud, toward the earth beneath it, toward Balendin.

The leach had time for one desperate blow. Gwenna saw the surprise and fear in his wide, dark eyes, saw him throw up a hand, felt the air around them stiffen, then shatter, as though they’d smashed through a pane of ice. She drew her blades, ready to jump, certain she couldn’t survive a landing at that speed. And then, like spring’s first green shoot, invisible beneath the warm dirt, then suddenly, inexplicably there, the arrow sprouted from Balendin’s eye. He raised a baffled hand, touched it, turned in a slow half circle, as though surveying the carnage, looking over the broken bodies piled around him. Then he fell. It seemed like there should have been more. More rage, more fight, more uncertainty and violence, but humans, at the bottom of it all, were weak creatures, souls bound so lightly to their bodies that a single arrow, a little metal grafted to a shaft of wood, could end them. The thing that had been Balendin, that had wrought so much pain and horror, was gone between one heartbeat and the next.

As Quick Jak hauled the bird out of the stoop, Gwenna looked over. Annick stood on the far talon, her bowstring singing like a harp in the wind, tears streaming from her cheeks.

* * *

It happened almost too fast for Adare to understand. One moment the bird had seemed ready to attack, the next, it disappeared abruptly into the cloud above. Adare had almost turned back to stare at the blazing immensity of the Spear once more when Nira hauled her around.

“There,” was the only syllable the old woman managed before the bird, which had plunged back through the cloud, leveled out over the Urghul horsemen, wheeling around to the east. When Adare raised the long lens to her eye, it took her a long time to find the corpse of the leach sprawled out across the mud. His prisoners, some mutilated, some dying, were already swarming over him, tearing him apart. Adare couldn’t hear their cries, but their faces weren’t human. They were the faces of beasts.

“They killed him,” Adare breathed, setting the long lens down.

Nira nodded. “It was the Spear. Everyone was looking at it. Gutted that bastard’s well.”

Adare blew out a long, unsteady breath, understanding it at last, then raised the long lens again, studying the land to the north. “Now what?”

The Urghul were milling around, some riding away from the site of the recent violence, others forcing their horses toward it. One thing was clear-without the leach, they had no way to shove past the wreckage of Annur’s northern quarters, no way that didn’t involve days of hauling timber and clearing a path.

“Now we wait for your general and my brother to die,” Nira replied quietly. She was staring at the Spear, eyes distant, hard.

Adare turned. “They’re dead already, Nira.” She laid a hand on the old woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, but nothing can survive that.”

“Roshin isn’t dead,” Nira replied. “I can feel him. Feel my well. This close, I would know if he had died. I would feel him … gone.” She gestured toward the Spear with her cane. “The bottom floors are burning, but the fire doesn’t reach the top. That’s just the light in the walls.”

Adare nodded slowly, then gritted her teeth. “If Oshi’s still alive…”

“Then il Tornja is, too.”

Adare closed her eyes, studied the afterimage of flame scrawled across her lids for a long time, then finally opened them. “Can you kill him?”

“Il Tornja? Or my brother?”

“Both,” Adare said.

Nira sucked a long, unsteady breath between her yellowed teeth. She might have been watching her thousand years slide past, a thousand years watching Oshi, the last of the mad Atmani, guarding him, loving him, always searching for a cure.

“I can kill them,” she said, “if I get close enough. My brother is strong, but his power is mine.” She shook her head. Her sudden, unexpected laugher was sharp as something breaking apart. “And he’s fucking crazy.”

“The bird,” Adare said, stomach lurching inside her as she spoke the words. The huge kettral soared back over the city wall and settled in the courtyard below. Gwenna and the others had just dismounted from the talons. “The bird can take us to the top of the Spear.”

“There’s no us,” Nira growled. “Your place is here, on the walls defending the city. Did you forget il Tornja’s warning?”

“No,” Adare said quietly. “I did not forget it.”

Nira locked gazes with her. “He does not play games, girl. He will kill your boy if you defy him.”

Adare watched the woman helplessly. “He might have killed him already. He might kill him even if I do exactly what he says.” She felt as though someone had opened her up, stitched her organs together, yanked the thread too tight, then tied it off. Every moment hurt. Breathing hurt. Thinking about Sanlitun, about his grasping hands, his bright, baffled eyes-it all hurt. “My son is not the only child in this city,” she forced herself to say. The words were like blades. “Maybe I could save Sanlitun, maybe not. Il Tornja is the foe of everything we are. How could I look at my son, how could I look at anyone, knowing that I let him go.”

“You’re not letting him go,” Nira growled. “You’re sending me.”

“We are both going,” Adare said, surprised by the iron in her own voice. “The creature who murdered my father, blinded my brother, and stole my son is inside that tower. I am going.”

Nira spat. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“I can see him die.”

“Or die yourself.”

Adare nodded. When she spoke again, the words felt right. “Or die myself.”

* * *

The steel of the prison blocked the fire. Blocked it, at least, for a brief time. As the prisoners screamed in their cages, Valyn slammed shut the huge metal doors, wrapped them with chain, trapping il Tornja’s soldiers in the horrible furnace below. Strangely, of the prison guards there was no sign, as though they had abandoned their post long before the fire came to the Spear. Kaden could think of no reason why, but there was no time to ponder the question. Even as they climbed, he could hear the protestations of the wooden beams and metal plates supporting the floor, screeching, snapping, warped by the vicious heat. Finally, the whole thing twisted, screamed, cracked, and then collapsed.

Kaden seized the railing of the stairwell as it bucked and shuddered, waiting to be dragged down with the rest of the structure into the inferno boiling below. The wave of heat hit him a moment later, knocking him back into the shadow of the stairs. It was like standing inside the huge stone hearth back in Ashk’lan, and though the flames were too far below to reach them, the air seared his throat, scalded his lungs. He squeezed shut his eyes against the heat blasting up from beneath. Triste wrapped her arms around him, seeking solace and giving it in the same gesture.

The Kettral were talking in low, urgent tones. There was no fear in their voices, only weariness mixed with determination. A few moments later, the staircase stopped shuddering. Valyn leaned out over the edge, stared down for a moment, then pulled back.

“It’s gone. Broke off about five hundred feet below us. Takes care of the soldiers.”

“Beats having to fight them,” the Flea said.

Triste stared up at the stairs twisting away out of sight. “Why haven’t we fallen?”

“Cables,” Valyn said, gesturing up without looking. “The lower stairs were built from the ground up, the next section hung from the prison level. Both of those are gone. We’re on the last part. It’s suspended from the ceiling, not built up from the floor, but we need to keep climbing, get clear of this heat.”

The climb was an agony of burning lungs and legs pushed past all exhaustion. Kaden counted a hundred stairs, then a thousand, but instead of flagging, the fire below burned higher, brighter, gnawing through the wreckage, rendering all human instruments inside the Spear to ash and char, as though the goddess herself had come down to purify the monument, to consecrate what was divine in a bath of perfect flame. It seemed, for a while, that the fire would overtake them, claim them, too, but there was nothing to do but climb, and so, soaked with sweat and blood, the stairs swaying ominously beneath them, they climbed.

Finally, after another thousand stairs, the air began to cool. Kaden dragged a breath into his lungs, savored the relief, then another, then another, pausing to haul in great deep gulps of it. He tried calling out to Valyn, who was plunging up the steps above, blood burned onto both axes. His voice came out a desiccated husk. He licked his lips, swallowed, then tried again.

“We have to stop,” he managed. “We have to stop.”

Valyn paused, turned. He looked lost, as though he’d forgotten where they were or why they had come. Those ravaged eyes roamed across Kaden’s face for what seemed a long time. Finally he nodded.

“Good a place as any.”

Triste leaned against the railing, groaned, then slid down until she was half sitting, half slumped. She vomited noisily onto the platform, over and over, long after her stomach was empty. The Flea and Sigrid took up opposite positions, one a dozen steps above the landing, one below. What foe they expected to fight, Kaden had no idea. Neither soldier had asked why they were here inside the Spear or what they had come to do. Their presence should have been a comfort; without them, il Tornja would have won the fight already. And yet, there was something terrible about warriors willing to kill in the total absence of question or explanation. What they felt about the trail of corpses they’d left littered across the city, Kaden couldn’t say. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe that was part of what it was to be Kettral. Maybe, like the Shin, they trained the feeling out of you.

“What now?” Valyn asked.

Kaden glanced at his brother, then looked over at Triste. She had stopped throwing up, mopped the vomit from her chin, then closed her eyes and nodded.

“The obviate,” Kaden said slowly, trying to frame a truth larger than the human world with a few words. “It is almost time to free … what we carry inside us.”

The Flea didn’t turn. Neither did Sigrid. Just soldiers doing a soldier’s work. Suddenly, Kaden envied them that simplicity. Kill. Run. Guard. Already they’d faced down dangers by the thousands, and yet those were human dangers-swords, arrows, fire, threats such as men and women were built to face. They might die in a fight, but no one would ask them to grind out their own lives.

“This tower,” Kaden went on after a pause, “is a link. A bridge. Between this world and another.”

“Whatever that means,” Valyn growled.

“I don’t understand it any more than you. The only thing I know is that this is the only place from which the gods can ascend.”

Valyn looked like he was going to object, question the notion further. Then he just shook his head. “Great. We’re here. We’ll get you to the top. What happens then?”

Triste let out a small noise. It might have been a whimper or a twisted little laugh.

Kaden put a hand on her shoulder, but turned inward, to the mind locked inside the depths of his own mind.

We are close, he said to the god. It is time. Explain the obviate. Tell me how I can set you free.

For a long time, he thought Meshkent would not respond. Hundreds of feet below, flame chewed eagerly through tons of flesh and wood, roaring as it feasted. Each breath was ash and hot iron. Kaden’s legs quaked beneath him. Triste’s sweat-drenched skin was molten beneath his touch.

Tell me, Kaden said, or you will die here.

Inside, silence. The world beyond, fire. Then, at last, the god spoke.

Submit, and I will burn these foes to ash.

Kaden shook his head grimly, released Triste, then stepped to the edge of the railing.

Explain the obviate, or I will end you myself.

Meshkent’s snarl was a notched blade twisted in the brain.

You would pit yourself against your god?

Kaden gazed down into the conflagration. I trained at the feet of an older god than you.

I will flay you with a blade of screams.

Kaden shook his head. You cannot flay what is not there.

Then, with a motion of thought, he brought the honed blade of his own emptiness to bear against the god’s throat, a promise, a threat. I carried you this far. Do not test me further.

Meshkent, the Lord of all Pain, shuddered, raged, and then went slack. His voice, when he finally gave up the truth of the obviate, echoed in Kaden’s mind like a child’s voice lost in a vast cavern.

“What happens when we get to the top?” Valyn demanded at last. “The gods just … float away?”

“Not quite,” Kaden said quietly, the truth heavy and simple inside him.

“What does that mean?”

“There is a ceremony to perform. Words to speak.” Kaden paused, forced himself to meet his brother’s eyes as he said the rest. “And then we have to die.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Valyn’s face twisted with something that might have been rage or confusion. As though something human were trying to tear itself free of the bestial fury in which he had fought his way across the city. For a fraction of a second, there was confusion there, confusion and grief and anger. Then it was all gone, the emotion wiped away like so much blood-something messy, unnecessary once it had been spilled.

“What’s the other way?” Valyn asked.

Kaden shook his head. He hadn’t explained this part back in Kegellen’s manse. There had been no reason, and he could find no words. “There is no other way. Humanity depends on Ciena and Meshkent. No one will be safe until they are free, and they can’t be free while we are still alive.”

“How in Hull’s name did the bastard get inside you?” Valyn growled.

“I told you already. I let him in.”

“So let him out.”

“This is the only way.”

“Well, we’ll find another way,” Valyn growled. “We’re safe here. We’ve got time. We-”

He broke off mid-sentence, cocked his head to the side, then closed his eyes as though listening to something. Kaden watched his jaw tighten. Valyn half raised one of the axes, as though he were about to attack Kaden himself.

“No,” he said, dragging the word out in a long, quiet growl. Then again, “No.”

“What is it?” Kaden asked, though he could already see the bleak contours of the answer.

Valyn’s eyes opened. His face was blank, awful.

“They’re above us.”

Triste stumbled to her feet. “Who is?”

“Ran il Tornja.”

“Alone?” the Flea asked. He didn’t look down, didn’t raise his blades, didn’t move at all. It was as though he were getting ready, wringing out every last moment of rest, savoring a final stillness, preparing for whatever had to come next.

“No,” Valyn replied grimly. “There are at least fifty men with him.”

“How do you know?” Kaden demanded.

“I can smell him. Them.”

Fear surged like a fire inside Kaden. He wrapped it in a fist, crushed it out. There was no time for fear. He leaned out over the railing of the stairs, craned his neck to look up.

“We’re maybe three hundred feet from the top.”

Valyn nodded. “They’re coming down.”

“Can you hold them?”

The Flea shook his head. “Not for long. They have the high ground.”

“And a leach,” Valyn said.

Sigrid’s head snapped around at that. Valyn nodded.

“He almost knocked Gwenna’s bird out of the air. I thought he was down in the streets somewhere. I was wrong.”

Sigrid bared her teeth, made a vicious sound somewhere deep in her throat, and abandoned her post below them, climbing the stairs until she stood shoulder to shoulder with the Flea. Her blacks were a spray-spatter of gore: blood, and brain, and chips of bone. Sweat-streaked char smudged her face. She closed her eyes, put a hand on the Flea’s shoulder, and then, as Kaden stared, the grime lifted away from her clothes, her face, her arms, rising clear of her, then sliding aside, hanging in the air a moment like a shadow, then collapsing, blown away on the hot wind. The woman was immaculate, radiant, as though she’d just stepped from a day in the baths. Even her hair fell in graceful waves around her face. Her eyes, however, might have been chips of ice.

The Flea looked over at her, then chuckled. “You always did say you wanted to die looking good. Well, I’ll tell you, Sig, you’re stunning.”

Triste ignored the woman. She was pacing around the narrow landing like a trapped animal. “We’ll do it here,” she said finally. “We’ll do it here.” She turned to the Kettral. “If you keep them back, we’ll do it here. The obviate.” Then she faced Kaden. “You know how, don’t you. He told you.”

Before he could respond, she crossed to him, took his hand in her own, then squeezed it gently.

Kaden met her eyes, held them, then nodded.

“Are we high enough?” Valyn asked roughly. “You said the top of the Spear.”

“I don’t know,” Kaden replied quietly. “But we’re as high as we’re likely to get.”

“I hear them now,” the Flea said. The Kettral commander turned to Sigrid. His voice was soft, but Kaden could hear it clearly enough. “What do you need from me?”

The woman met his eyes, then reached out to take both of his shoulders in her hands. She made no effort to speak.

“Do it,” the Flea said.

She didn’t move.

“Do it,” he said again. “I’m ready.”

She didn’t move.

“I’ve been ready since he died, Sig.” His voice was quiet, gentle. “Do it.”

Then, the movement so fast that Kaden almost couldn’t follow it, the woman slid a knife from her belt and slammed it into the man’s side. He stiffened with the blow, almost fell, then steadied himself.

“What…,” Triste said, lunging forward despite herself.

Kaden held her back, his arm wrapped tight around her shoulders. He could feel her heart slamming in her chest.

“Her well,” Valyn said grimly. “It’s pain. He’s giving her the strength to fight il Tornja’s leach.” He exhaled slowly. “And I’ll do the same.”

“No,” the Flea ground out, his voice on the verge of snapping. “You need to fight … shield her while … she works.”

Valyn gritted his teeth, but even Kaden could hear the footsteps now, dozens of boots pounding down the stairs from above.

Sigrid drew another knife from her belt, more slowly this time, then drove this one, too, into the Flea’s flesh. He dropped to his knees. Dead, Kaden thought, then paused, made himself really look at the wounds, at the angle of the steel where it entered the skin. They were savage, cruel, almost too painful to contemplate, but they weren’t fatal. And slowly the Flea rose, met the leach’s eyes, and made an animal noise. No, Kaden thought. Not a noise. It was a word: Another.

And so a third time the blond woman buried a blade in her commander’s flesh, a third time he dropped, and a third time he rose slowly to his feet.

“Is it enough?” he whispered.

Sigrid watched him a moment, then took him by the shoulders, leaning over to kiss his blood-smeared forehead with those perfect lips. She nodded, and they both turned toward the stairs, to hold at bay whatever was descending from above.

“We have to do it, Kaden,” Triste said finally, roughly, breaking him free of what felt like an awful dream. “We have to do it now.”

Kaden nodded. It seemed impossible that after all the running, all the fighting and climbing, all the fire and dying, it should come down to this. A whole life, whittled to a few final instants. Slowly, his legs trembling with the strain, he knelt on the narrow landing. Triste knelt beside him.

“How do we…?” she asked.

“Close your eyes,” he replied. Men were shouting above them, pounding down the stairs. Kaden ignored the sound.

“Wait!” Triste said, clutching his face in her hands.

Kaden shook his head. “There’s no time, Triste. If we had a year or ten years, there wouldn’t be time.” He reached out to touch her cheek. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to say it.”

Tears poured down her face. All over again, he saw her as he’d seen her that first night in Ashk’lan, the same violet eyes, the same perfect face, the same fear.…

No, he thought, gazing at her. Not the same at all. Her face was scarred now, and her eyes … there was fear in her eyes, but this time, it wasn’t a fear of him. This time, when she reached out to touch him, there was none of the frenzied desperation he remembered from that night in his tent, none of the mad, animal haste.

All my life, Kaden thought. I’ll remember her all my life. It was an inane thought, given they were both about to die, but somehow that didn’t matter. Everyone was always about to die, always a breath away, a dozen breaths, ten thousand-that was the lesson of the Skullsworn, the surprisingly gentle tutelage of Ananshael.

“I’ll remember you all my life,” Kaden said. For some reason, he wanted to speak the words aloud.

The Shin had been wrong about so many things, but the old aphorism came back to him all the same, spoken, for some reason, in Tan’s gravelly voice: Live now. The future is a dream.

Triste smiled at him, smiled through her tears, leaned forward, kissed him once, then settled back and closed her eyes.

In the stairwell above, steel smashed against steel. There was a savage, animal howl, half defiance, half hunger. Valyn, Kaden realized. Valyn, standing alone against il Tornja and his army while Sigrid drew from the Flea’s agony to hold back the leach. Kaden listened for a moment to the discordant music of his brother-the screaming, the ringing of blades-all of it, too, beautiful in its own way. There was a time when he might have wished something for his brother-luck, maybe, or strength-but they were, all of them, well beyond wishing. Kaden closed his mind to the carnage, focused only on what was inside of him.

“When the goddess entered you,” he said, repeating what Meshkent had told him, “she built a doorway. All you need to do is open it.”

He could hear Triste panting just a few inches away. “A doorway? What kind of doorway?”

“Like the kenta,” Kaden said. “But in your mind.”

“How do I find it? How do I open it?”

“The phrase isn’t in our language,” Kaden replied. “Not anymore.” He closed his own eyes. “Ac lanza, ta diamen. Tel allaen ta vanian sa sia pella.”

He felt something shudder inside his mind, as though the language were a pry bar, as though some deep-buried stone foundational to his very being had shifted.

“I am a gateway for the god,” Triste translated, voice terrified, awed. “I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

Kaden nodded, and then, this time together, they spoke the awful words.

Above them, men were bellowing, screaming, falling from the staircase. The air shuddered with fire. None of it mattered. Only the words mattered, words growing, spreading, until they were huge as the world itself.

“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

The staircase trembled, as though it were about to plunge into the abyss.

“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

Il Tornja was shouting something, voice hard, confident.

“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

Triste was sobbing through the words, her hands clenched around Kaden’s own. He held them, as though through that holding he could keep her from some unfathomable abyss, as though she, in her turn, might bear him up even as the world itself collapsed.

“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

Each time they said the phrase, Kaden could feel the gateway opening inside him. At first it was uncomfortable. Then the pain came, a bright, invisible knife carving a hole out of his mind. He shuddered. It was bright beyond any human light. Too bright.

“I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

Inside his mind, Meshkent was bellowing. No. NO! Not here! THIS IS NOT THE PLACE!

Too late, Kaden thought, the doorway opening on its own now, prying him apart, destroying him. He held tight to Triste’s hands. They were the only thing left. It’s too late.

* * *

Hanging in the harness from the kettral’s talons as the bird rose up above the city was the most terrifying and exhilarating thing Adare had ever experienced. She stared, heart in her throat, as Annur fell away beneath her, the streets, and squares, and avenues, everything she’d been trying so hard to protect suddenly small, then tiny, then miniscule. There was the Temple of Intarra, small as a gem and flashing in the sun. There was the wide avenue of the Godsway plunging through the city’s heart, the statues of the gods smaller than bugs. There were the green-brown canals, winding from the Basin out to the sea, and the boats bobbing at anchor in that Basin. There were the crooked alleys of the Perfumed Quarter, and the long docks lined up along the harborside. There were the red walls of the palace, the leafy, flowering pavilions. Her city, so slight at this altitude it seemed impossible it could be the home to a million souls, so fragile that a single blow might break it. Adare would have stared at it forever, had Gwenna not pulled her around, a rough hand on her arm.

“They’ve taken the top of the Spear,” she shouted, pointing.

Adare squinted. The bird had climbed so high so fast that even the top of Intarra’s Spear was below them, flashing with trapped fire. She could barely make out anything at that distance-how Gwenna could see, she had no idea-but as the kettral drew closer, she saw them, dozens of tiny figures spread out on the tower’s top. One of them had to be il Tornja. Even with the fire, he’d escaped somehow, escaped again. Not anymore, she swore silently, turning her attention back to Gwenna.

“Can you…”

“Kill them?” she asked.

Adare nodded.

The Kettral woman’s smile was feral. “What the fuck do you think they teach us to do on the Islands? Write love letters?”

“What should I…”

“You stay out of the way, right here on the bird. You and the old woman. We’ll drop on the first pass, Jak’ll circle, then bring you in when we’ve cleared the space.”

Adare wanted to protest, to object, to insist on joining the others, but that was just pride and idiocy. Besides, there was no time. The bird had dropped a thousand feet, level with the tower’s top. Adare stared as the Spear approached. Now that she had a way to gauge the speed, it seemed like madness. They were going to die, all of them, dashed against the tower’s top. No one could survive that approach. Then, as they swept overhead, just a pace above the tower’s top, Gwenna was gone, and the sniper, and the leach, the three of them leaping from the talon into the mass of men. There was a flash of steel, a sudden chorus of shouts and screams, and the bird was past the tower’s top, dropping down the other side.

Stomach lodged in her chest, Adare looked over at Nira.

“Did you see Oshi?”

The old woman’s face was grim. She held on to the strap above her head with one clawlike hand, but unlike Adare, she didn’t seem frightened by the flight. “No. Not him or the Csestriim.”

“They must be below,” Adare said. “In the Spear itself.”

“Those three idiots we just dropped on the roof better hope they stay there. I don’t care how handy they are with those blades. Oshi’ll leave them splattered across the wall.”

When the bird came back for the second pass, however, the Kettral were most definitely not spattered. They stood in a rough triangle near the center of the tower, blades bare and dripping blood. The soldiers around them were dead-dead or dying-frozen in the awful postures of their slaughter. Annick and Talal began stalking the platform, cutting throats, working with all the bleak efficiency of laborers in the field, trying to get the last of the grain in before the rain.

“Sweet Intarra’s light,” Adare whispered.

“That glittery bitch of a goddess already did her work,” Nira snapped, gesturing to the glowing Spear below them. “It’s our turn now.”

This time, the flier put the bird down right on the roof, ignoring the corpses altogether. The whole space stank of blood and urine. When Adare tried to walk, to cross the empty tower’s top, she slipped in the spilled viscera.

“They’re down there,” Gwenna said, stabbing a finger at the door leading into the Spear. “And there’s ’Shael’s own fucking fight going on, by the sound of it.”

Adare took a slow breath through her nose, tried not to vomit. They were doing what they’d come to do, kill il Tornja’s men, find the kenarang himself, and yet she found her eyes drifting away from the dead. Grimly, she forced herself to look at the bodies, to witness, even if for just a moment, the carnage she herself had ordered. The Kettral might have held the blades, but Adare had helped to make these men dead. And they weren’t finished yet. She glanced at the trapdoor, the woman’s words registering for the first time.

“Fighting?” Adare asked. “Il Tornja’s supposed to be in here alone. Who is he fighting?”

“How the fuck do I know?” Gwenna spat. “You want to stand up here with our thumbs up our cunts while we talk about it?”

Adare found herself grinning viciously in response. “No,” she said. “I don’t. I want to go down there.”

Her grin vanished as soon as she stepped into the tower. The wind outside was cool, sharp. Inside, there was nothing but flame and screaming and heat like a brick to the face. Most worshippers thought of Intarra as the Lady of Light, but there was another truth to the goddess, a harder truth, one Uinian had learned as he burned inside his own temple, one Adare herself had had seared into her flesh at the Everburning Well: Intarra was a goddess of heat as well as light, the awful mistress of all conflagration and the annihilation it brought.

“He’s here,” Nira said, following the Kettral down the winding staircase, breaking into Adare’s thoughts. “Oshi. He’s close.”

“Can he feel you the same way?” Adare demanded, pulling up short.

Nira shook her head. “He’s my well. I’m not his.”

When they reached the first landing, the old woman shouldered her way past the Kettral, then paused, gazing down the stairs into the inferno.

“This is my fight now,” she said. The words were quiet, as though meant for no human ears.

“Hold on…,” Gwenna began.

“No,” Nira said, rounding on the younger woman. “I will not. I am going down there to kill my brother, and then to kill the creature who made us what we are, and I am going alone.” Her voice softened. “You’re a vicious, feisty bitch, kid. I like that. But believe me when I tell you there’s nothing you can do down there but die.”

Gwenna opened her mouth to reply-to argue, no doubt-but Adare laid a hand on her arm.

“Let her go,” she said. “There’s more to this than you know.”

Gwenna gritted her teeth, then nodded. “You have two hundred heartbeats,” she said, “and then we’re coming down.”

Adare searched for the words. It seemed a lifetime ago that Nira had pulled her out of the crowd on the Godsway, seeing a truth that no one else had seen. After all the months fighting and marching, what Adare remembered was the woman’s swearing, her mockery and recriminations. A hundred times she’d thought of sending Nira away, of being free of her constant abrasion. But she wouldn’t have gone, Adare realized, staring at the old woman’s seamed face. She never left Oshi, and she didn’t leave me.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Oh, fuck off with your thanks…,” Nira began. Then she broke off, shook her head abruptly, closed her eyes, straightened her back. When she opened them again, that gray gaze was level, regal. When she spoke, there was nothing of the gutter slang, no hint of the profanity that had marked her every utterance since they first met. She was a queen, once a leader of millions, and the weight of her years was in her words.

“You are a fine emperor, Adare hui’Malkeenian,” she said. “A truer sovereign than I ever was, and mark this well, because these are the last words I will speak to you: if you survive this day, you will be a light to your people. Whatever you believe of your goddess, it is your own fire that blazes in your eyes.”

She held Adare’s gaze for a moment, then nodded once, as though that were something done, done well and finished forever. Then she smiled, tossed her cane aside, and turned away, descending the stairs toward the screaming, and the dying, and the fire.

Gwenna took a long breath, held it for a moment, then blew it out.

“Where the fuck did you find her?”

Adare just shook her head, counting off the heartbeats in her mind, each one final as the great bronze bell that had tolled her father’s passage. The stairwell shuddered, steel screamed, as though wrenched awry by some vicious hand. Adare stumbled, seized the railing to keep her balance. There was a great thunderclap, then another, and another; fires of unnatural color leapt up around them, then fizzled out in the hot air. By the time Gwenna waved them forward, the sounds from below had subsided.

“Let’s see who’s dead,” the Kettral woman said grimly. “And who’s left to kill.”

They found Nira and Oshi first, two hundred feet below, seated, leaning against the low railing with their arms wrapped around each other. At first, Adare thought they were still alive. Then she saw the blood soaking Oshi’s clothes, pooling beneath him, and the vicious wound that had caved in the side of Nira’s head.

They look so ordinary, she thought.

The palace was filled with paintings of the Atmani, storm-eyed, muscle-bound figures striding an earth that cracked and groaned beneath their very feet. Nira and Oshi, by contrast, looked small and gray, slight, like someone’s grandparents, just people like any of the people living in the city below; not rulers, just a brother and sister who had lived out a normal life. And, of course, they had. Not just one life, but dozens, all those centuries side by side, posing as peddlers and farmers, haberdashers and fisherfolk, dozens of names and disguises, one after the next. Despite the violence of their end, their eyes were closed. They may have died fighting, but Nira’s arms were wrapped around her brother, holding him as she had held him so many times before, cradling him finally to sleep.

Gwenna scanned the corpses.

“That the leach?” she asked.

Adare nodded mutely.

The woman stepped over the bodies as though they were so much stacked wood. “Il Tornja’s further down.”

Slowly, Adare let go of the railing. She was sweating, her heart beating so hard she thought she might die. “Then let’s go kill him.”

Together, the four of them descended the trembling steps.

Another twenty feet below, on a narrow landing, they came to the battle-what was left of it, at least. There were bodies, dozens of them, scores, hacked apart, strewn across the platform, the blood so thick it poured over the edge of the landing into the fiery abyss beneath. Annurians, Adare thought dully. They all wore the uniform of the Army of the North.

Amidst the carnage, there were only two men standing, one holding a slender, elegant blade, the other wielding dripping axes: Valyn and il Tornja, facing off again, just as they had that awful day on the tower in Andt-Kyl. Despite the slaughter, the kenarang looked calm, even urbane, endlessly patient. Valyn, on the other hand, might have been a monster out of nightmare, a horrifying figure in filthy wool and leather, hair plastered to his face, scarred eyes empty as the winter night. Unlike il Tornja, who stood perfectly still, poised, Valyn shifted back and forth, moving his weight from one foot to the other as though there were some violence inside him kept just barely in check.

Then, even as Adare watched, he loosed it.

She could barely follow what happened next. Despite a year of marching with her armies, despite witnessing one of the most important battles in Annurian history, Adare knew almost nothing about fighting, dueling, or swordplay. It didn’t matter. Even to her untrained eye, even in the whirlwind of all that mad, dizzying steel, the difference between the two warriors was obvious.

Valyn was faster. His axes were everywhere at once, high and low, striking in concert sometimes, sometimes in counterpoint, shattering in a steel hail against il Tornja’s guard. And yet, somehow, that guard held. The long, elegant sword was always there to deflect the blood-smeared wedges. Valyn roared and snarled his rage, but il Tornja moved in an eddy of calm. He was slower than his opponent, far slower, but was always where he needed to be, always sliding into that slender empty space where Valyn’s axes were not, as though he’d seen the whole fight in advance, had studied it for years, had rehearsed every step of this savage dance.

But there’s a gash along his arm, Adare realized as Valyn broke off his attack. Valyn’s chest was heaving, but his bloody teeth showed in something that might have been a smile.

“Hello, Adare,” il Tornja said, speaking into the momentary stillness without taking his eyes from her brother.

“Kill him, Annick,” Gwenna said.

To Adare’s shock, the kenarang dropped his blade and turned, hands raised. “I give myself up.” He met her eyes and smiled, that same smile she’d seen so many times before. There was no hint of concern in his voice. “My work here is finished, and there are Urghul to fight.” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t need to remind you I have your son.”

Valyn took a predatory step forward, but Adare threw up a hand. “Don’t kill him.”

She half turned to find the sniper holding that strange bow of kettral bone, the string drawn back to her ear, sighting down the arrow’s shaft at il Tornja. Annick’s eyes didn’t waver from the target, but she held the string.

“Oh, for ’Shael’s sake,” Gwenna spat.

“Don’t kill him,” Adare said again, louder this time, more forcefully.

Valyn shifted forward, his axes light in his hands. Like Annick, he kept his scarred eyes on il Tornja even as he spoke to Adare. “We have been here before, sister.”

“Indeed we have,” the Csestriim agreed cheerfully. “You might recall that the last time, in Andt-Kyl, I urged you to put down your blades. As I told you then, there’s a lot that you don’t understand.” He spread his hands as though welcoming the group. “A lot that all of you don’t understand.”

“That was a long time ago,” Valyn said, testing the weight of his ax. “We’ve been learning.”

Then, before Adare could object, before she could even think, he spun. The movement was too fast to follow, as was the single ax hurtling toward il Tornja. Somehow-she could not begin to fathom how-the Csestriim had seen it coming, had managed to slide aside as the steel parted the air inches from his head. He turned, unconcerned, to watch it fly into the void, smiling as it disappeared into the roaring fire far below.

“That’s not what I had in mind,” he said finally, turning back to Valyn, “when I asked you to put down your blades.”

Valyn’s lips curled back, showing his teeth. “I am going to kill you,” he said. “I am going to cut you apart.”

“No,” Adare insisted, stepping forward.

“Get out of the way,” Valyn said.

She pressed ahead despite the death in his voice. “I won’t.”

“What’s wrong?” Valyn demanded. “You still want him to fight your wars? You still think you need him? You still willing, after all this, to play your fucking politics?”

“No,” Adare said, meeting her brother’s ravaged gaze as she slipped the polished poisoned hair stick-Kegellen’s gift-from the coils of her hair, then turned, slamming it into the kenarang’s gut, screaming as she shoved it deeper and deeper still, pulling it out, then stabbing him again. The Csestriim half lifted a hand as though to protest, then let it fall. Adare stared at the wound, the blood soaking the cloth, then raised her eyes to il Tornja. “You can’t kill him,” she said quietly, “because I’m going to do it.” She held the poisoned stick in her trembling hand, then buried it between his ribs once more.

Il Tornja’s eyes went empty as a starless sky. The jocularity was gone, the wry act he’d worn for so long replaced by his true face, that unreadable, unknowable alien gaze. Even now it made something in Adare quail.

“But I had your son,” he murmured.

“What did you do to him?” Adare hissed, seizing her kenarang by the lapels of his coat. “What did you do to him?”

The Csestriim shook his head. “Nothing. He is safe.”

Adare stared, scouring that inhuman gaze for the truth. “I don’t believe you,” she whispered. “Why? After everyone you’ve murdered, why would you spare one infant?”

Il Tornja stared past her, past the landing and the stairs, into the bright, empty air of the Spear. “One grows tired,” he said finally, voice slender, “of killing one’s own children.”

Adare’s sob was like some jagged, broken thing torn bloody from her throat. The tears sheeted down her face. Il Tornja cocked his head to the side, studying her the way a botanist might scrutinize some strange, inexplicable flower.

“So broken,” he murmured, slumping to the floor. “All these years I tried to fix you, but you are still so broken.”

* * *

Strong hands gentle as air under his arms and legs, lifting, carrying.

Kaden tried to cry out, but there was nothing left inside him that could still cry. Where his mind had been, there was only a gaping hole, a passage to nothingness, oblivion. Meshkent was bellowing his fury, clinging with long claws to the remnants of Kaden, but Kaden himself was failing, unraveling. There was no way to undo what he had done. A few more heartbeats now, just a little more time, and it would be over.

We failed.

The words were vague, more sounds than words. He struggled to put a meaning to them, then gave up.

“… up. To the roof. Both of them…”

A brother’s voice, fierce and urgent, so tightly tethered to the world.

“… breathing’s weak. Can’t find a heartbeat. Wait…”

The voice went with a woman with hair like fire.

“… go. Go. Go…”

He was floating. The furious violence was gone, and he was floating up, light as smoke into the light.

We failed.

Meshkent raged desperately inside him.

Kaden could feel, with the little life that he had left, a sharp knife of regret, but even that was fading.

“… there. Open it. Open it! Through the door…”

“Kaden.” A sister’s voice. “Kaden!”

He tried to open his eyes. Failed. The hands were lowering him onto something hard and impossibly far away.

Meshkent-instantly, awfully silent.

We failed.

Then the god’s voice, composed this time, free, huge as the whole world, brutal and triumphant: NO.

The hole in Kaden’s mind, so dark a moment earlier, filled with light, so much light, too much. Kaden opened his eyes to escape it, and there, lying against the ironglass a pace away-Triste, her violet eyes fixed on his.

She smiled.

Something that had been Kaden remembered falling, a cold place full of stone and snow. A memory of falling like this falling. He waited to strike the ground, but this time, there was no ground. The whole world was those eyes, that face. Her name was gone, but the name didn’t matter, had never mattered. There was only the falling, endless, effortless, only a death that felt somehow as wide and strong and bright as any love.