paraklausithyron (n.) a lover's song at his beloved's door, in which he begs for admission and laments his exclusion.

Green-garbed devils dropped from the sky as though the clouds gathering over the walls had decided to rain flies down onto these pathetic ruins of what might, once, have been a city. They rattled onto the roofs below. There was a spectacular kind of catharsis to the gore, after the long and anxious hike through empty, echoing woods to reach this place.

Dafydd Rhydderch had always imagined Illéa as a great grey block, squatting on the landscape like a toad, like the building of the Security Bureau at home in Opona. He had not imagined this: he had not imagined that the devils would have faces and red blood. He had not imagined that they would have broad, cobblestoned avenues and pretty plazas with wicker baskets of flowers overhanging the entrance archways. He had not imagined how much strength it took to pull a trigger when his hands were shaking, the initial tug that produced nothing and then the second, more decisive, yank at the trigger that produced the great burst of smoke at the muzzle.

They were a small squadron, no more than thirty men, but they were all that was required: the Illéan devils, savage though they were, had no frame of reference for the guns that the Kur infantry carried with them. They lunged with long silver swords, and they were cut down in return, strewn across the street in large pieces that sometimes still moved even after they had landed and they had bled.

Some wore red and some wore blue, and true enough, Dafydd had nearly taken a shot at a devil in blue before Myghal Enys' voice had roused him from the stupour of war – not our Khal, you dumb cunt!

The Hanged Man wore sapphire blue and a dazed expression. Her hair was longer than it had been in the photo Enys carried with him, pulled back in a low ponytail. Dafydd could see her bones through the paper-white skin of her face. She had thrown the coat over her shoulders, a hasty disguise, for the sleeves hung empty beside her.

And in the same moment that he had raised his weapon, before Enys had even called to him, he had felt the cold touch of silver to his throat. The Hanged Man stared at him, and her eyes felt as cold as the knife she had summoned to his neck from afar. It hung in the air like the proverbial Great Sword; it moved with him as he shook.

Devils all.

Enys had touched Dafydd's shoulder, a quiet warning – don't look at her – and he had not needed to ask to whom he referred. The Lover was climbing back to her feet beside the Hanged Man, slowly, and something about the way her dark hair hung over her face reminded Dafydd of a noose. She was speaking softly to the Hanged Man as she stood, and she swayed. It smacked of conspiracy. Her voice was soft and lovely. It sang like a harpsichord; it sounded like lilac.

The knife moved a little faster.

The Hanged Man had set a white, bruised hand upon her comrade's forearm; she stared at Enys with a peculiar, open, flayed expression. He stared back.

No one moved. Somewhere behind his left ear, Dafydd was distantly aware of another volley of gunfire: a group of men in green had crested the enormous wall of Illéa, and fallen just as fast. At this rate, would the Schreaves run out of devils to fling at them? Their squadron leader seemed ill-inclined to find out: he was calling for a retreat and his men were listening, falling back into the tree-line of the awful woods through which they had marched weeks ago.

Hours ago. Surely.

Enys staggered forward to assist; for a split second, the Hanged Man shrank from him. She recovered quickly, but not too quickly: Dafydd had seen it. Yves and Santiago had seen it as well; unlike Dafydd, they did not pretend that they hadn't.

When she fell back thus, the knife faltered, and fell with her. It impacted deeply in the soft brown soil. The normalcy of that image galled: what had floated now lay. What had sang across the air to him now sounded flat and unhappy; the Lover was calling to the Hierophant, who answered her command as though cursed-compelled-condemned to do so. He was a desolate figure when he landed: he had eyes like an open grave, and a face as sharp as scalpels.

The Hierophant turned his eyes across each person in turn. Of all the Warriors, this was the one Dafydd feared. His mother had encountered a Hierophant in her youth. She said it had been terrifying: a world thrown off its axis. This, from a woman who'd lived in the Kur ghetto all her wretched life long and died at thirty-five.

That Hierophant had told her she would die so young. He'd relished in it.

"Myghal," said this Hierophant. He sounded unsurprised. He sounded tired.

Enys said, "saw me coming, did you, Czarnecki?"

Two by two – they had arrived two-by-two, all of them, like something mythical: two-by-two. With the Hierophant had arrived a xrafstar upon which the army had not been briefed: a skeletal man with sunken black eyes and a face that looked as though it had been skinned – skinned and shredded in long uneven lines along his jaw, coming to a matted, melted point upon one cheekbone. He was hunched over himself; when the Hierophant landed, the xrafstar fell to the ground, and lay there, and the grass around him blackened as though withered.

"The Radiance," said Yves, and the Warriors did not deny it.

They were ordered to seize him; Dafydd shrank from the duty, and was relieved to find that Yves and Santiago had been compelled forward in his place. When they stretched forward their hands, he was, for a moment, convinced that the air itself would shred their muscles and skin into the same awful, flayed strips that now formed the xrafstar's nightmarish face.

Their hands fastened around his biceps undeterred; he was hauled up, and Yves and Santiago still looked the same; he was marched forward, legs dragging behind him, slumped forward in their arms as though he was nothing more than a carcass being brought to the butcher's table. That was it – Dafydd had, at last, put his finger on it: he was less a man than he was meat, something living and human which had been reduced to the mere sum of its parts. Meat. Blood. Hair. Teeth. Eyes, blind, rolling in sunken sockets.

Spiders spilled from the grass where his boots passed through it, carving a long swathe of movement and dark, twisted legs.

It was as though Oroitz Txori had become druj. Maybe he always had been. That thought eased the guilt a little. Kane Hijikata swung his sword with a little more force each time he reminded himself: you have already killed him. Oroitz barely seemed to have noticed: the fight had left him in a place beyond pain. His eyes were glassy and unfocused; he clung to the roof with the flats of his fingertips; his skin shone a stranger, shinier silver than the knives he seemed to produce, quite endlessly, from his belt.

They had already killed him six times by Kane's count. Still, he stood. Still, he came for them. Kinga Kaasik was a green blur in green smoke: on the narrow space of the rooftop, she fired hooks and fell back in her harness, not to rise, but to swing and twist and dart through Oroitz's grip, delivering as many slashing strikes as she could without allowing the ersatz Watcher to answer her with a red gift of his own.

Sanav had called to them: "another!"

Another? Kinga had been distracted by her comrade's call: her head had turned, automatically, and Oroitz Txori had reached a strangling hand for her throat. Kane had forced a sword through his arm before he could touch her; Txori's hand fell to the tiletop, still grasping. Even then, the wretched thing had only stared at Kane with an unreadable expression, and advanced again. Kinga had recovered enough to deliver a kick with enough force that it forced Oroitz's knee backwards in a most unnatural way, driving bone and marrow through skin and fabric alike. He fell to his knees, silent; Kane had turned in search of the reason for Sanav's warning cry, and –

He felt something in his throat drop to the pit of his stomach. The world had abruptly been doused in a greater darkness as the rising sun was blotted out in its entirety by the thing moving towards them. Through the wreathes of verdant smoke which ensnaked the spires and walls of the palace, a tragically familiar figure was forging forward: the enormous figure of the stone druj which had killed Rakel. It was smaller than Kane remembered it being – a different specimen of the same species, perhaps? – but it was no less strong: the broad shoulders of its design, those tiny eyes set into a helmeted head, spilling gold light across the floor of the world like an avenging angel.

They stood on the edge of the palace roof: a poor shield against a universe that seemed determined to fell them. Sanav had shaken to see the thing advance forward from the darkness; he shook still. Kinga had split open her knuckles, so tightly did she grip her sword; she looked at Kane with an awful, aching uncertainty. Kane had felt, for the second time in almost ten years, that jagged edge of mind-ruining fear. Like to trying to hold the sky itself at bay.

It was the thing that had killed Rakel. He would bring down the sky to do her justice, if that was what it took. He would hold the stars themselves at bay if it meant protecting this world and the people who dwelled within it.

Lorencio Suero had warned Kane that the royal family were keeping human beings beneath the palace. Asmund Falk had warned Kane that Oroitz Txori was one of those beings. Now Oroitz Txori lay behind them, a human corrupted, wretchedly, to druj. How many more of these lay in wait?

How many had they encountered before? Kane almost shook to think of it. How much had he dirtied his hands with the blood of the royal family's petty experiments.

Behind them, a gasp: "I know you."

Kinga turned to Oroitz first. That dark eye of hers contained more contempt than Kane knew his lieutenant could hold. Her sword shone; she advanced on him with the look of a woman about to take her first head.

"Your only legacy is death," Oroitz said.

Sanav drew in a shuddering breath. Kane knew the question roiling through his mind: all of the druj he had killed – the monsters they had beaten back from the doors of innocents and innocence. Humans, all? Prisoners, captives, experiments?

People, with a past and – once – a future?

"I am your only legacy," Oroitz said. "I can see it on you. You wear it like a skin."

The thing that had killed Rakel had forged a path through the enormous zandik gardens of the palace; now, at the point where it should have broken through the palace walls and vanished into the city beyond, it had stopped, and it had turned back – that enormous sandstone head, turning slowly as though it had to be winched thus. That gold light practically burned as it spilled across their wretched tableau; Kane had the sudden impression – impossible, but impossible to dismiss – that it was watching to see if Kinga would follow through with her silent menace.

Kinga. He had killed Oroitz for her – he had intended to. In the moment, it had not felt like a dereliction of duty.

But this...

Oroitz said a word without meaning, consonants tripping onto vowels – "jagapekkamatthiasrakelvoskidagmaraiwanghjuvan..."– and Kinga had silently raised her sword and brought it down, quite hard, knuckles white, on his neck. Her sword had carved through his flesh with little difficulty, but the hours of combat had blunted it to the point of uselessness when it came to bone: the blade met Oroitz's spine, and refused to advance further, lodging it where it stood and holding it fast.

If he had been beyond pain already, then now, at least, she had put him beyond speaking. That was quite enough – and yet, even as he watched, Kinga raised her sword again and brought it down upon Oroitz again, in a great bludgeoning that had even his seasoned gut begging him to look away, to take in anything but this horrific sight. No matter what he had glimpsed this night – Oroitz still looked like a human being.

Kinga didn't seem to care.

The stone druj remained where it was quite immobilised. For a split second, Kane had been certain that Kinga's mutilation of its ally thus would provoke some great act of aggression, but the whole damned thing was as still as –

Well.

Against the green smoke billowing about it, Kane could see a dark figure silhouetted on the druj's shoulder. A person, he thought, or a damned good impression of one, a person standing on the druj with as little concern as a Watcher stands astride a Wall. He could distinguish no features of this person. He could not even tell their gender: a grey, featureless person.

Their words carried across the air: "Szymańska!"

Sanav glanced at the captain, all a-panic. The Wall. He was calling the name of the Wall. How did that make sense? They had already felled Szymańska; the Wall had fallen recently, so recently, and in any case, they were already here, in Ganzir, in the palace itself, so what reason had they to consider an outer wall which had, in any case, been overrun weeks past?

It would not matter. This thing would not get the chance to move a single foot further. It had killed Rakel; there was time enough to whet their blades of this thirst which had arisen at the sight of it. They had come close last time. The whole sky and all of the stars it held seemed to scream for vengeance.

Kinga had wrenched Oroitz's head from its body, and come to the edge of the roof to stand with them again. She was carrying the dead druj's head by its hair, so that it swung lazily by her side. Kane was struck again just how inhuman it seemed, even now, even in death: the skin was sheened with a crescent-silver clamminess; eyes and mouth and brows alike seemed nothing more than dark slashes in a parchment face. She tied it to her belt; Oroitz's slack jaw gaped into nothingness, spinning in empty space.

The man on the druj's shoulder called again: "Szymańska!"

Kinga said, "you always told Kenta that I needed watching."

Kane glanced at her, suddenly and hard. This was the talk of a man on a ledge; this was the talk of a man about to jump.

There was a hiss as she fired her hooks.

He reached for her. He was too late. Wasn't he always? Hadn't he always been?

She said, "don't watch."

She was reeled away – at first through darkness, the gloom of the night drawing close as though by conspiracy, and then rising into the gold light of the stone druj's awful, blinding eyes. She was a slash of spilled ink in that light, an awful dark blemish in such a patch of aureate illumination. She shed green smoke as she moved, tangled around her boots and coat.

She was moving too fast – Sanav saw as much as well, the way he breathed the gas, and that was true as well, she didn't have enough fuel for this to be anything but suicide – too fast, so fast that she did not even have time to draw her blunted swords.

He couldn't watch her die. Not another one. Not her. Not again. Not her.

Then the silhouette on the druj's shoulder reached for her, and caught her by the hand. It was an easy motion; it was a movement which had taken one hundred times to perfect, and perfect it they had. She had seized him once like that: hand-in-glove, when the druj's maw had gaped and death had seemed a cousin to existence as he knew it.

Kinga landed onto the shoulder of the druj – the silhouette wrapped an arm around her, tightly – and the enormous stone druj winched its enormous stone head away from the palace once more, and took another enormous stone step towards the wall.

It was leaving. Leaving with Kinga, And it was fast – faster than Kane had ever realised it could be. Only a few steps forward, and it had broken out into a sprinting gait like nothing he had ever seen before. It traversed neighbourhoods in only a few great strides; districts vanished beneath its towering height.

"Sir," Sanav was saying, though he was only distantly aware of it. How long had he been saying it? "Sir. Captain. Kane..."

It was easy – too easy – to pursue it into the rising sun, as though it was indeed the sun itself that he intended to hunt.

It was the ocean: the ocean, at last and longed-for. He had not even thought to miss it, but these long months without sight or scent of it seemed to strike him as a single great weight. It glinted diamondesque; they could trace the constellations home. Was this as the other Hierophant had seen it, lovely and lonely and quiet?

Gijs had not told them what a beautiful day it had reddened into, dawn creeping over the horizon like a blush.

In the rippling reflection of the ocean, Zoran saw the sun fall and rise a thousand times. He saw the Kur Empire crumble; he saw the Schreaves flee across the sea to sanctuary; he saw Decebal Nicolescu stumbling in the surf, leaking cardinal, crying jasper; he saw Zoran and Inanna falling onto the beach; he saw the sand wave and ripple and turn to glass, and in the reflection of that glass, he saw himself: eyes wide and blind, Ina's hand around his, Ina's head bowed over his, and he was weeping. The whole scene shone white.

A hospital, he thought dully, a hospital. Preferable to the grave, at least. What use are the stars with a compass in your hand? How can you dream of heaven when you're anchored to the land?

"We have to go back," said Ina.

The contingent of Kur soldiers had arrived in an airship: its turbines were turning lazily now, whipping up a crescendo of white spray from the edge of the surf as it prepared for the air. It felt like years since Zoran had seen such a thing: it appeared, for a moment, less natural to this world than any of the devilish acts which he and his comrades had wrought since taking initiation. They belonged here, on Illéa; this thing, this modern craft, did not. The last time he had seen one, he had felt similarly: he had looked down upon the petrified form of poor, darling Klaara Aas, hand outraised in a final goodbye to her brother Decebal, and he had seen his own death encroach towards him through the grass.

Myghal was forging his way through the sand; the Warriors trudged behind, granted a wide berth by the remainder of his squadron. Silas Schreave's trailing foot scarred a long line through the beach; Belle had fixed her eyes upon it, just as Khalore fixed her eyes upon the back of Belle's head. They were silent but for Ina's exhortations: she had turned to Khalore, pleading, and then, when the Hanged Man offered her no succour, to Zoran, her eyes wide and desperate, something awful lurking in their golden depths.

Zoran looked away from her eyes before he could see what it was. Matthias was still gone, but his legacy remained. All around him, the future lurked.

Behind them, the past snarled.

The tagma were racing across unseen rooftops towards them, the familiar hiss and clank of their hooks like a peculiar kind of shrieking alarm in a place only Zoran could see. Hijikata was growing closer; panic was growing in Inanna's heart like a strange weed. Zoran could not say whether it was curse or care which so informed him, but he knew – he knew he was right. Strange, how quickly she had learned to fear him as the others did – as Kinga always had. "We have to go back."

She hissed this last word with enough power that the soldiers around them froze in their march. The tide hissed over their boots, unheeded; wind and salt whipped across their faces and tangled through their hair and tore at their clothes. A single moment passed; Myghal swung on his compatriots, panicked, as their Irij commander emerged from the airship and squinted suspiciously down onto the white spit of the beach. Then, as one single body, the soldiers spun on their heels – they carved a perfect circle in the sand beneath their soles – and began, in perfect unity, to mark back the way that they had come, their eyes alive with newfound fervour.

Myghal stared in horror. He called to her – he called her by her name: "Ina, please."

"We have to go back," Ina said. "Kinga. Ilja..."

A third and fourth and fifth name went unspoken.

Zoran said, "darling, don't ruin it now."

She looked at him. The whites of her eyes stood out, stark, like she had added a drop of blue to it all: a splash of ocean amongst the starch white hospital walls. She said – she breathed it, in that dangerous way she had – "darling?"

He said, "it's all going to work out fine."

He tapped the skin below his eye. He smiled weakly.

"I forgot it hadn't happened yet," he said. "I forgot that you'd need to hear it from me."

He smiled weakly, and it wavered.

"Trust me: everything's happening as it should."

"They'll come home with us?" She was breathing faster than she should have; her eyes darted, back and forth between his, examining each iris for the future he alone held. She wanted to believe him – desperately, did she want.

"Of course," he said. "Of course."

Of course.

She relaxed fractionally: she loosened some of the tension she carried in her collarbones and swiped a hand across eye and scar alike. With that relaxation, the soldiers relaxed as well, shoulders slumping, eyes darting, coming back the way they had gone with a suspicious, acridly bitter look upon their faces. If they had averted their eyes from the Lover before, then they now kept their gaze fixed, rapt, upon her.

Zoran imagined he could hear the ammunition rattling in the guns they carried in their shaking hands.

He extended his own shaking hand. Inanna steadied it with hers. The gangway had descended, Silas Schreave had already disappeared into the bowels of the machine, and Belle had followed him like a shadow. He and Ina advanced up the way slowly; their shoes sounded hollow on the metal covering of the ramp they had to climb, and the interior offered only hard wooden benches for a moment's rest. For a moment, standing on the edge, it felt so surreal that Zoran was convinced the world was tipping away from beneath him: this could not last. This could not be sustained. They would have to wake, sooner rather than later: they could not persist thus. Irij did not care for them; Irij was not coming for them. It would not be – it could not be – this easy, if you could call any of this easiness. Then there was a hiss and a clank behind him, and before he could turn (Ina had sucked in a great gasp beside him) he felt a hand clasp his shoulder, tight tight tight, a manacle driving him down into the ground, and the Chariot of Kur said, "did you really try to leave us behind, Czarnecki?"

He laughed. He extended his own shaking hand; Inanna steadied it with hers. They were still in the shade of the forest, but only just: it was a dappled shadow which shed more light on Ina's face than on his. In the woods, on their way here, they had seen again that deer which had marked their first long nights in this awful place and he knew that Ina's heart had been steadied by the sight of it. It seemed to have grown bigger in their absence, if that seemed at all possible: it seemed impossible now that such a thing could exist obscured in any place, so high did its antlers curl, but when Zoran glanced over his shoulder to cast about for it now, the darkness cloaked all. He could only see the two ice-cold ice-gold eyes of the Tower, staring through the gloom, as inscrutable as ever it was. He almost laughed again to see it – so they had made it – was there a part of him that was disappointed? – and extended a hand to turn Ina towards the sight which would so gladden her heart.

He extended his own shaking hand; Inanna steadied it with hers. The ocean stretched lovely and blue before them; the sun rose, and did not set, for Zoran had been anchored most decisively – at least for the moment – in the present, and he was being held there fast. Ahead of them, Belle was helping Khalore into the airship, for the effort of using the excubitor's harnesses seemed to have stolen all the strength from the Hanged Man's legs. The dawning light had slit open the horizon, which bled now in layers through the sea. Behind them, there was a rumbling gasp through the soldiers and a scream from their most faint-hearted, and then the faint breeze of the turbine was replaced by an overwhelming gust of wind as the Moon of Kur sailed over their head, a single powerful push of those awful feathered wings churning ocean and sand alike as it struck out across the water towards home, trailing the silver wire of some ill-fated excubitor who had tried to reel it back to earth.

He extended his own shaking hand; Inanna steaded it with hers. He thought, I've seen it now. I've looked for it and I've seen it.

It wasn't a lie anymore.

The Walls had been breached. The city had been overrun. The kingdom had fallen.

This was, then, to be the end of Illéa.

From the Tower's shoulder, they had an uninterrupted view to the horizon as they crossed enormous fields of red-robed figures and skull-faced hounds, deers with enormous knife-like fangs, hands stretching from the grass where no arm hid, great skeletal figures stretching from the trees with grasping multi-jointed fingers.

From this high up, it was impossible to ignore the stretched ape-like things which swung forward on the buildings, arms as long as streets, teeth gnashing, claws tearing up the cobbles.

From here, they could pretend not to hear the screams. It did little for the ache in her heart. It did nothing to assuage the feeling of lead in her heart.

Ilja had lashed Azula to the stone surface of Pjotr's druj form. It was far from comfortable, but it prevented them from being thrown to the ground as the Tower loped through the kingdom, racing towards the ocean. With every thunderous step, Kinga felt her throat tighten a little more. It couldn't be, she thought. This couldn't be it. This was entirely too sudden; she was still Kinga Kaasik, wearing Kinga Kaasik's wristband and Kinga Kaasik's cloak.

She had never been Kinga Kaasik. She was a Warrior. This was all she had ever wanted. And they had won.

She tore the eyepatch from her eye. Another lie. She could undress her lies, layer by layer. There would be a full person waiting beneath. There had to be.

The breaths came narrow and painful. The screams spiked and keened, loud and awful, wavering across the air, interminable.

Pjotr laboured forward, slower now, uncertain of the darkness ahead. Every nerve in her body stood out, hot and screaming. Phantom hisses echoed around her shoulders. In every moment that passed, she anticipated a death that did not come; she felt a sword which did not swing. He would, at least, make it quick when it came.

If it came to it, she thought grimly, she could take the burden. They weren't so far from the ocean, and there wasn't so many of them – just three, she thought, she could carry three, and the sky posed a sanctuary if they needed it. Three people. She would struggle, but – she could manage three. She could sleep afterwards; she could fall. But she could do it.

Azula was so small and so dead. She'd weigh nothing at all. It would be almost too easy.

Kinga crouched down; her boots kept threatening to slip from the stone surface of Pjotr's shoulder, though it was formed of a rough enough material, more sandstone than the marble which formed his breastplate and throat. Each motion flung them back and forth, but it was better here than dead. They were already approaching Wall Alliette; they were already approaching the very edge of this wretched place. They would acclimate to it quickly – Ilja, in particular, looked as though he had travelled by druj every day of his life. He looked just as at ease with the harness and hooks. Was there anything, Kinga despaired, that he was bad at?

She did not say, did we take the Radiance? She did not say is this it, have we won? She did not say, we're going home, aren't we?

She said, "who did it?"

Ilja's mouth twisted. He could lie to her. She wouldn't blame him. She would keep his secret. And Pjotr would contradict him none, caught in this stone form as he was.

He said, "I did."

"Did it come to that?"

"It did."

Kinga stared at Azula's slackened face. Her head hung forward against her chest, chin resting against the wire Ilja had bound around her to hold her in place as they moved. It was an anchor which had been attached with great gentleness and affection: in death, as in life, he had loved her. She was going to turn sixteen in two weeks. She would have been surprised to hear that Kinga had remembered.

Nearly sixteen. Older, still, than Jaga had been.

They had all just been babies.

Ilja glanced to the east, and Kinga looked with him. Someone had fired a sapphire flare; it arced through the air, closer to them than Kinga would have liked. She stood straight; she stared into the darkness. She strained her eyes, searching for some hint of greenery amongst the gloom.

Bells.

There shouldn't have been bells ringing at such an hour – the tagma should have all been drawn to the castle.

And the cannons had started up again, that unmistakeable volley of great explosions in the darkness, temporary stars bursting into existence before fading and flaring again.

Cannons. They knew the cannons would do nothing to the Tower. Were they hoping simply to unbalance Ilja and Kinga, or…?

She knew in the same moment that she had thought of the question. She had been too distracted by the spectre of Kane in their wake.

She had forgotten the real threat.

Lorencio.

She was right: each cannon fired, not a cannonball, but a long wire and hook, a simulacrum of that which Kinga wore at her own hip. Each wire was as thick as grown man; each hook was the size of a boulder.

The first hook struck the Tower with a great cracking, crashing, crunching sound; they pierced deep. The wires whirred, and held fast. Pjotr took another step forward, and found himself arrested in place: he could move forward no further, though the wire tensed and flexed and creaked and weakened with each enormous effort he made.

Kinga dropped the blades from her sword handles, and attached a new pair – sharper, she thought, she would need them as sharp as they came.

It must have been Lorencio behind this initiative, for there was a sudden volley of fire around them as the cannons began to set new constellations in that lovely dark sky. It was all chaos – all firing and flaring and flashing – so fast and so relentlessly that Kinga thought she might be blinded with the sheer incandescence of it all. A second hook hit the Tower, and then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth.

A sixth struck his face, passing straight through the gap in the stone through which the light of his eyes spilled, holding him fast by the eye-socket.

A seventh hit his shoulderplate. Ilja pitched forward, and caught himself with a hand flung out to Azula's body and the ropes which held it up.

An eighth hit his knee, and threatened to fell him; he could not even stumble forward, so fast had the hooks affixed him to this place in the world, only strain against the wires and the hooks with such enormous effort that the man he had been was almost visible anew. Lorencio must have been working on this since the Tower had first manifested. He had never told Khalore – had he always mistrusted her, then?

Ilja lurched to his feet. Kinga felt her heart slow. Her hands became heavy. Fall Day had passed; her curse had returned to her. She could chase it out, if she needed it. It would be hard: she was already exhausted from the battle with Oroitz. But if she needed to – if Ilja needed her to – then she would rip muscle and ligament and tendon and bone to forge the beast.

"Go," Kinga said. "Go catch up with the others. Go home."

The look Ilja threw her had three distinct parts: exasperation, and fond humour, and fear. "You're making a habit of staying behind. Trying to keep all the glory?"

"Makes more sense for me," she said, "than you."

"Ki."

"I'll be there before you know it." She smiled wanly. "I made it here on my own, didn't I?"

He could argue no more: it had been decided. Ilja said, "we'll be nowhere."

Kinga smiled. She could feel that her smile was wider than it should be; her mouth had stretched wide, opening her face like a wound.

She had, she thought ruefully, her sister's smile.

"I'll follow you there."

Ina had screamed to see him: she hadn't, at first, been sure if it was her voice or his which had keened out so, but Ilja was not the screaming sort. He had fallen from the woods, quite gracelessly – did you really try to leave us behind, Czarnecki? – and then fallen into Ina's arms with considerably more grace, embracing her with a fervour somewhere between celebration and panic.

Zoran had watched his friend with something like surprise in his eyes.

"We have it?" he said, his voice low and excited, and it stared at him from its shackles in the airship cell with a hollow expression.

"We have it," Ina said.

Azula's body was carried in by a Kur soldier. They did not watch it pass; they did not acknowledge it. The Kur soldiers stared; their Irij commander blanched, and turned away with a curled lip.

If Ina tried to think about it, her mind would finally spiral over the edge into true, endless, emptiness. Poor Azula. Little Azula. That way, she thought, madness lay. True madness. The kind which had tempted her, when Pekka had died, when Ghjuvan had died, when Eero had died.

She had lost so many threads.

"You had us worried for a second there, Schovajsa," said Khalore. Her voice sounded like a pastiche of itself. It had none of the careless barbed venom to which they were so accustomed; any sardonicism or wry affection seemed rehearsed and scripted. She was trying. She was trying, so hard, so desperately hard.

"Don't pretend you weren't delighted to have an excuse to leave me, Angelo."

Ina said, "where are the others?"

Zoran's eyes burned into Ilja. Ilja said, "you know how Kinga likes to show off in front of soldiers."

A manic laugh bubbled from between Ina's lips. Just so: Kinga wouldn't have known that there was an airship waiting for them, and would have had little need for it even if she had. She had found her way to Illéa – she could find her way back.

Certainly, she was alive: the bronze chain hung from her wrist, reassuringly heavy. The red thread, shot through with silver, which bound her to Zoran had been the first to return; now, as they entered the airship, and the enormous gangway closed up behind them, and they took uncertaiun seats on the wooden benches, she saw the rest of the set fading into existence to complete the set: Ilja's thread was a gorgeous mossy green, dark and earthy, rich in colour in a way that the real man was sorely lacking; Khalore's thread was a wondrous navy blue with tiny hints of silver interwoven as though by accident; Belle's thread was beige, sandy and pale, the colour of sandalwood and old paper; even Myghal's thread was here represented, a bright yellow, sunnier than any Ina had glimpsed before. It moved as he moved, though he was moving little; he had taken a seat next to Khalore, and was trying to speak to her softly, though Khalore was rather reticent in her replies.

Surliness was too kind a word; Ina's sister looked exhausted and sick and suspicious.

The airship rumbled into life. The turbines had whipped up into a brand new frenzy. Gravity was loosing its grip and losing its hold upon them: they were rising wingless now, effortlessly. The harnesses of the Illéans had only ever aspired to this kind of weightlessness.

And for a split second, Inanna knew that it could not be. This was not the way these things were meant to go.

Any moment, an excubitor's sword would slice through the metal skin of the airship and carve them from the sparse sanctuary it had accorded them,

Any moment, one of the royal family's xrafstars would tear through them, the burning angel that Gijs had seen, and send them to be with Pekka and Azula and Ghjuvan, into the place they all followd.

Any moment, she would wake in the ruins of Aizsaule, and tell Zoran that she had been dreaming of Myghal and of home.

The airship rose. The airship rose. The airship rose.

The navigator at the controls said, "six hours to Opona."

Khalore's voice was very small. "Six hours?"

"Probably less," Myghal said. "The wind will be with us this time."

Six hours, Ina thought. Six hours to the end of a nightmare. Six hours to the end.

They had left the beach behind, and they had been pursued by no burning angel as Gijs had foretold. She wore that knowledge in her front pocket as they went; she practically ached with it.

More to come. There was more to come. There had to be more to come.

But for now, there was a calm. There was a quiet.

The wooden bench upon which they were sitting was smoother than the pews upon which they had toiled their long hours of study as cadets in the academy; there was a polished finish to its surface, a peculiar kind of sheen which hid the grain when Ina passed her finger along it. It gave it an oddly sanitised feel. It didn't feel like something which had ever before been living. No splinters, she thought, no wear, no carved sigils or initials. She ran her fingers across the patterns which should have been there.

This was obviously an Irij airship: the Kur infantry were uncomfortable in it, standing too straight, breathing too shallowly. It was all entirely too shiny to belong to Ina's people: the curved roof was made of a polished fine metal, glowing with light that it had reflected back onto itself. There was a small doorless threshold leading into the cockpit; Ina could only glimpse the outlines the navigator and the squadron's Irij commander, just the suggestion of their clothes and the edges of their hair. They hated one another: the thread between them was a sickly pale green, and stretched tight to the point of splitting, so tightly that it threatened to snap each time one or the other made a movement.

The soldiers were still staring at her, clutching their guns to their chests like soft things. She felt the word curl around her tongue: stop. She wanted, desperately, for them to stop staring. But there was nowhere to go here: they were trapped here, in a metal box, in an unburnt sky, in a whole world, and they were staring at her, and there was nothing she could do to make them stop. Stop. She had to hold her tongue. Hadn't they all seen what Azula had wrought with such a single careless word? Azula. Like a corpse surfacing downriver, the thought rose: azula, azula, azula. Zu. Darling Zu. Their devil. Their sister. They had both been the Hämäläinens Who Weren't. Azula had relished in it. Azula had loved Ina for giving it to her.

She had never had a family name before.

It was fine that Ina had given away what had never been hers to gift; Pekka would have done the same. He would have thought of it sooner. He would have found it funny, how much Azula had struggled to spell it in that first month of Illéan subterfuge, how badly she had mangled it, how fervently she had pleaded illiteracy whenever the prospect of writing her own name came up. They could have picked their own spelling for it, Ina thought. They should have. Who would have told them that they were wrong? In Illéa, it had belonged to them only – no matter what the World had said. Eero. He was still a synonym for the man that he had not been: she could not divide in her mind one from the other. They were as indivisible as the fibres of Ina's threads. Who had he been when she had told him that Pekka was dead? Who had he been when she had cried into his shoulder?

Who had he been when she had stared at his mouth and wondered about kissing him?

A liar, she thought, which meant that he had been in good company: Ilja and Kinga and Khalore and Zoran and…. Ghjuvan alone, she thought, Ghjuvan alone had been honest, or maybe his lies had died with him. It was easier to remember him smiling. It was the only way that she could remember him by now: that dark, handsome face and that white, beautfiul smile.

Did Belle still carry some of that smile with her?

God, but she wanted them to stop looking at her. It was a scream barely caged: stop!

"Stop," Zoran said.

She looked at him. They had always teased Kinga for her eyebrows; Zoran had escaped that ridicule, though by rights he should have taken his share.

"Whatever you're thinking about," he said. "Stop."

She said, "I was thinking about the benches."

He couldn't help himself: he smiled at that. It had sounded so forlorn – Ina had heard it herself, just as the words fell from her. It was true, she thought. She was not one of these liars.

She was glad to see him smile. He looked so tired, and so thin; he would, she realised with a jolt, only be tired and thin for a little while longer. They would allow them that much, wouldn't they? To sleep as late as they wanted; to eat as much as they wanted; to wander the streets, as Jaga and Avrova and Matthias had, and to wait for their fading with a genteel tranquility, reconciled to all, resisting none. They would go to delis on the plaza and darling cafés on corners; she would finally show Zoran what an espresso was, after so many hours in so many sleepless nights under so many discovered constellations.

Kinga had always asked her why she didn't simply ask for more than a thimbleful of coffee.

Kinga would be there too; she would have no choice but to become herself, to leave behind the Warrior identity to which she had clung so feverishly. Pjotr could be someone as well – that was a thought which struck hard, and twisted, and hurt, but Ina was not one of these liars – Pjotr could be someone, rather than the shade of one who was no longer, if he wanted to be, if he was able.

Ina tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. The soldiers were still staring. Zoran was as well, just a little, but he usually did. He thought she couldn't notice. He thought she never had.

She didn't stare at him. She didn't even need to look at him anymore: she had him memorised. She had learned him by heart as a child and never last weeks of hunger could not change him so radically that she would not know him in her marrow: his cleft chin, which meant that he always had some part of his face in shadow, no matter how bright the day; his whip-mess hair, all tangle and twist even in peacetime; his long, pale fingers and his calloused palm, the hands that had strangled her; his pale blue eyes, which she had always remembered by remembering what they were not.

What was not, and what would never be again.

They had buried so many – and left others to the wild dogs of the district – and what had been their sin?

Zoran said, "you."

Ina had made a liar of herself: she stared at him, more wild-eyed than she had intended. "What?"

"Yew," said Zoran. "The benches."

He ran a hand along them, mimicking Ina's motion. The soldiers had stopped staring now; they had bored, she supposed, of what little entertainment she had offered them. Perhaps they trusted Zoran to keep her leash tight. The urge in her rose again, less desperate, more calculated: s t o p.

Ina said, "how do you know?"

"It's elastic," he said. His fingers bumped against her. "Or as good as – look at the crossgrain, these long lines."

Ina was not going to let her father down. Before she had been the Lover, she had been the carpenter's daughter. She said, "yew's usually paler."

He nodded. He looked up at her. She wondered what omens he saw in her eyes. His words were utterly unpatronising: "they've sealed it with black shellac."

The light which had pooled on the metal ceiling had filtered through his hair; little wild strands, where they came away from his head, shone gold and silver and bronze and russet along the edge, fracturing into tiny rainbows. He had always liked his hair long – not as long as she, but long for a boy, long for a cadet. He had been spared the scalpings to which Pekka had been subjected. He had always been a good person, her Zoran, but he had lacked a certain self-sacrificial urge.

Was it a lie to say that Ina had always thought a little less of him for it?

Maybe that was why he had never loved her as Pekka had. It was a form of self-harm, loving Inanna Nirari.

The string between them shone as red as a sunrise. Harm enough.

"Sealed it," she said.

Across the ship, Myghal had realised, for the first time, that one of Khalore's sleeves hung empty, and the realisation had struck him mute for the first time in all his life; across the ship, Ilja was kneeling over Azula and wiping away tears that would not come; across the ship, Belle was sitting on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees, and staring at the thing that Silas Schreave had become, and the thing was staring back.

Militat omnis amans.

When she kissed him, she found that it was warmer than she remembered it being: his mouth was warm, which should not have surprised her, but which did, a little, just a little. His face was cold; her fingers curled about his cheekbone and the stray strands of hair. He'd scraped his face somewhere in the chaos; her fingertips glided across graze and scab. It should have felt stranger; it should have felt wrong.

He was desperate. It was nice to feel someone else's desperation. He pressed back against her, lips parting, breath hot, mouth searching; his fingers curled around her wrist, as though he could not bring himself to touch elsewhere.

It should have felt like the first time. It didn't.

He wrenched himself away. It was a violent movement; it was panicked. He stood. No one else noticed. No one else was paying attention. No one who mattered.

She stared at him – liar again, she thought, she'd made herself a liar thrice over – mouth parted, eyes steady.

He said, "Ina."

He had never said her name like that before.

Like he hated her.

The descent had been gradual. Ilja had not realised that they were even falling through the clouds until there had been a enormous jolt as they collided with the earth once again.

Zoran had fallen asleep on his shoulder, or pretended to; for these last two hours, his breathing had been too measured, too shallow, for Ilja to believe the facade.

And everyone called him a liar.

Khalore had not fallen asleep, but her voice was thick and bleary anyway. She said, "are we there?"

"We're home," Myghal said.

"We're there," said Inanna.

Ilja didn't have to rouse Zoran. The Hierophant was already straightening himself, and staring through dark eyes at the metal floor of the airship. The soldiers had risen, and moved towards the back of the cargohold; their commander had emerged from the cockpit, stooping to fit in the low-ceilinged space. He said, "straighten yourselves up, Kur."

Quite without realising, Ilja had straightened his posture. Zoran pushed a hand through his hair, as he always did when he was upset or stressed or thinking. Khalore tugged at her filthy coat. Ina stared at the officer, her eyes dark, her jaw set with the tenacious precarity of one who might be about to bite.

The officer had produced grey coats from the chest at the back of the airship. Grey again, Ilja thought, would he ever escape the grey? This was, then, a clear sign that this was all some kind of strange nightmare. The grey had worked its way into his dreams now. At least these coats were soft: they were woollen, and expensive. Khalore had, quite impulsively, rubbed the sleeve against her face to feel that softness and filthied it all over again. Zoran had pulled it on like an automaton; Ilja found himself examining the gold filigree buttons and the immaculately embroidered hem like he had anything resembling expertise. He just didn't want to put it on. Putting it on would mean walking out of this place into Irij; putting it on would mean this had all come to its final, inadequate end. What had they accomplished? What devilry had they managed to drive from this world?

Illéa persisted when so many did not.

That final image still haunted him: Kinga had fallen.

Pjotr had been felled, and the Moon of Kur had fallen.

He pulled on the coat. It was easier than thinking about it. Easier than wondering.

It was like they were back in the academy: Zoran acted as his mirror. Ilja faced him, and the Hierophant assessed him critically – "blood on your cheek, Schovasja" – and then, in turn, Ilja looked at him – "hair, Czarnecki" – and that was that. Coats buttoned in fumbling fingers, still aching from the awful strain and stretch and stress of the hooks and harness and the strength it had taken, even with his curse, to travel as quickly has he had.

Myghal was pinning up the sleeve of Khalore's new jacket, carefully, with a caution that suggested a level of discomfort that the other Warriors had quite forgotten to feel. He was putting a commendable amount of effort into avoiding her skin with the needle. Ilja wondered if one of them should have warned him that he would only benefit Khalore thus – provided he let her keep the needle, of course.

Ina had not even bothered. Her long dark hair had been matted with soil and blood during their fight with the excubitors; it hung in long black tendrils around her face and those staring gold eyes.

She looked as much a devil as any that had died this night.

And Azula? There had been a coat prepared for her, and for Ghjuvan as well; the officer returned them to the trunk, unworn. Her body still lay in the corner of the ship, Belle's hand fastened around hers.

The officer nodded, and the soldiers began to winch down the gangway of the airship. Instinctively, Ilja tensed: the light which drifted in through the widening gap was grey, slate-grey, smoke-grey, like they had descended into a wildfire.

The Irij commander said, "enjoy it while you can."

The gangway collided with the concrete road below. The sky outside was a charcoal grey; there was a light rain misting over the crowd which had assembled on the docks to greet them.

The crowd…

He couldn't see Frida. That was his first thought, though the crowd was many thousand deep, and he could not see the faces of all who thronged against the hemp rope which bound the cobblestone pavements of the docks. He could not count Frida amongst their number. Everyone in Opona must have been here: every space was occupied by a body.

These past weeks, such crowds had only ever seemed an omen of a massacre at the Warrior's own hands.

Now…

They stood at the edge of the airship as a quartet, staring out uneasily at the crowd; the moment that the light first struck their faces and bounced, gold and lovely, from the shiny buttons of their new coats, the masses erupted into a chorus – a shrieking, hollering clamor – of cheers and laughter and shouts and applause. They were manic with it; they were rabid with sound.

"Our Warriors!"

They had dispatched them to Illéa thus. They had cheered them away as a group of nine.

Four arrived back, and they feted them like heroes.

The Warriors were merely martyrs who had failed to die.

Repent. Atone. Salvation.

He couldn't see Frida.

Ina gasped, a deep, awful sound, and moved past Ilja, practically shoving past him, moving down the gangway at a pace that would have seemed undignified for absolutely anyone else. There was a knot of dark-haired youths pressed up against the rope, four in all, standing as close as they could to the airship so that the slowing turbines had whipped their hair up into a frenzied mess.

Ina ran to them, and embraced them, bowing her head to meet theirs, shoulders shaking in a silent sob. The woman who must have been her mother – she had the same gold eyes, the same kind mouth – was trying to reach past her children to grasp at whatever part of her daughter she could reach, clutching at Ina's sleeve and wrist and hair. There was a man with them, tall and broad and blonde; when Hani Nirari had, at last, released the Lover, Kaapo Hämäläinen hugged her next, so tightly that Ilja thought he would break her, stooping to kiss her cheek and smooth a hand over her ruined, lovely hair.

Beside them, a dark-skinned man stood with a baby in his arms, staring up at the airship, smiling wide and white. He was waiting. How long would he be waiting?

Hadn't they told him?

Khalore put a hand on Ilja's sleeve as she passed him. "Let's go together," she murmured, barely moving her mouth. He had to strain to hear her over the noise. The crowds were still screaming and cheering, and waving tiny triangular flags. Irij colours, Ilja thought numbly, they were celebrating him with the colours of Irij.

They went out into the world. Zoran had gone ahead of them, but slowly. His family had been assigned to another place close to the airship: his sister had to bounce on her tiptoes to see over the rope, searching for the brother she had never known. Ilja wondered whether, when Joanna Czarnecki hugged her son, she realised how little his expression changed, how tense he held himself, how lost his eyes remained even as his mother wept.

Bogdan Czarnecki could only set a hand against his son's shoulder, so overwhelmed with emotion had he become at the sight of the Warriors returning.

With Khalore beside him, Ilja felt a little more able to descend. With each step they took downwards, the buildings around them rose a little higher. After so long in Illéa, with its old-fashioned construction and rudimentary materials, this architecture seemed almost alien, so perfectly crafted the rococo ornamentations on each balcony that overlooked the harbour, each one packed with people overlooking the arrival of the Warriors home to Opona.

And it was Opona. It was. It had to be. So why didn't it feel real?

He said, "where's your family?"

They moved forth. The crowds thronged forward in a great crush. Khal's voice was whisper-soft.

"Not here."

Ilja was staring at a Khalore standing by the rope, a Khalore with both arms and long curly hair, dressed in a navy blue blouse and soft grey trousers, a Khalore as Khalore might have been.

Ilja said, "are you sure about that, Lore?"

Khalore's voice was very steady. "I'm sure."

He still couldn't see Frida.

They moved forward. He cast his eyes across all those people who lined the route, searching each one for a familiar face. They searched him too. They examined him for signs of devilry. They wanted to see his curse. He stared back at them.

Was this what redemption felt like? This awful, horrific staring?

He made the mistake of meeting one man's eyes. He had been watching them rather expectantly; unlike the rest of the crowd, he had not clapped and had not cheered. He had remained quite silent, and quite still.

They were close enough to the rope that, when he spoke, he didn't have to speak too loudly: "welcome back, Ilja."

Ilja felt his voice dry up on his tongue.

He would prefer the mortal danger. He would prefer the blood and the bone and Silas Schreave begging him to let go. Even that – even that – was preferable to the spectre of speaking to this man, soft-spoken and soft-eyed as he was. This man, who was smiling.

This man, whose gaze was silently searching the crowds, exactly like Ilja...

He said, "Kinga didn't come back with us, Mr. Szymański."

Krzysiek Szymański smiled. He was a gentler man than Kinga's father had any right to be; he was wearing a thick sweater and a scarf, glasses and a watch. Ilja had never imagined what an uncursed Szymański might look like, how normal they might seem. He said, "I understand."

"I'm sorry," Ilja said. Khalore's hand twisted over his sleeve. She was staring at the man with an empty expression. "She… she said that she would..."

"Don't worry about her, son." Krzysiek smiled. His voice broke, just a little. "Yours is the honour. You have done your nation proud."

He did not have his daughter's talent for lying. He did not sound like he meant it, even a little bit.

"It was atonement," Ilja said.

It came out sounding more like a question than he had intended – atonement?

Krzysiek had parted from the rope. He said, "son, what could you possibly think you have to atone for?"

He disappeared into the crowd. Ilja watched him go, even as the cheers of the crowd swelled and the rain beat down all the heavier, dispersed only a little by the slow-whirring hum of an airship about to take off once again. Silas was still in the ship, he thought, Silas and Belle and Azula.

He could not muster enough energy to wonder where they were being brought. It wasn't for them to wonder now.

They had done their duty.

"This is it," Khalore said. "This is it?"

It was a cold day that had ochred into a rain-streak grey, storm clouds brewing red and brown between the buildings. The chill had crept into Ilja's coat; his fingers were going numb. They had years left, he thought. Years. Time enough for another war. Time enough for another martyrdom. And then they would go. They would fade in their turn.

It had been as it had been promised to them.

"Yeah," Ilja said. "I think this is it."