dustsceawung (n.) contemplation of the dust; reflection on former civilizations and peoples, and on the uncomfortable knowledge that all things will and must inevitably return to dust.
This was an inherited hunger. It clung to her, desperate for air and blood. It was as much a birthright as the dark eyes of her mother or her grandmother's high cheekbones. An inherited hunger like this could not be shaken off or satiated – only quelled and contained, for now, for the time being, for a moment. And quell it she did, contain it she did; she wrestled it back into its cage, and steeled herself with thoughts of Jaga, and thoughts of Pekka, and thoughts of Ilja Ghjuvan Inanna Khalore Zoran Azula of promises made of promises kept of promises to a mass grave which had been hers before and would be hers again.
The scales fell slowly from her eyes. Kinga realised that, above her, the sky was dark and devoid of stars. Smoke and dust had obscured any hint of light which might have leaked from the city beyond the wall; she was lying on her back in the debris of something that might once have been a home, or maybe a hospital, or maybe a prison. There was only wood and stone and bits of bone left to divine a history; it was a ragged skeleton of a building, wreathed in the dark smoke which rose slowly from the carcass of the monster she had been, to which she was still tied by blood and sinew. She could still feel her own blood pumping through the veins wrapped around her wrists and wound tightly about her throat, cutting off one artery even as another surged somewhere near her fingertips.
She reached up, and ripped it away, her nails searing through her own sinews – no, she thought, that was all the Moon, this all belonged to the beast of Kur. Something blacker than blood and thicker than viscera burst over her collar; she shuddered beneath it and swayed to her feet, her boots sinking deeply into the innards of the beast in whose skin she had crawled only a few moments ago. Her breath rasped through her chest; for a moment, she could taste only smoke and dust. It choked her; it pulled her ribs in tight, so tight she thought they might crack. She screwed her eyes shut, and ripped fabric from her sleeve to bind around the black pit which had replaced the eye lost to Hijikata's blade.
It was almost automatic by now; she knew she didn't want to risk glimpsing whatever it was that this eye had to show her.
When she lifted her hands to stare at them, she realised, first, that her arm was healed and whole, though black veins coursed through them. Like strings of rich colour through marble. She realised, second, that some red powder was raining down from the dark canvas above. The remnants of a fired flare, she thought – druj in the city, druj beyond the walls. Was she still in Mag Mell? No – she'd returned to the wastes of Tiamat. And the gate? She'd promised to meet Ghjuvan at the gate.
She started to move, stumbling over her own bones and then over the bones of whatever poor bastard had fallen here to the druj six months ago. To the gate, then. She wasn't going to summon him here, not if she could avoid it. He had legs, didn't he? Legs and a mind of his own. She'd meet him at the gate.
Hard to say where the gate was, without even the familiar contours of the night sky to guide her. Each light named after a loved one, just as Jaga had taught her, until the stars themselves felt like your friends.
Away from Ilja, she thought, away from Ilja, as quickly as she could… She had thought the same only a few hours ago, she thought ruefully, the last thought conceptualised by the girl called Kinga before the curse had swallowed her whole. Away from Ilja, then and now. She should move towards the twin lights, Pekka and Inanna, which normally would have occupied the eastern horizon, if she could see them, and then north towards Ragnar and Myghal. Jaga had given them different names of course – for her, they had been Oxana, Decebal and Esteban, Matthias and Avrova.
Two stars flickered into sight before her, high, high, high in the sky. Small and narrow, elongated into thin almonds. They glittered a very pale golden – a gold without richness, the reflection of light whose warmth had long ago faded. They did not twinkle as stars ought, but stared straight forward without the slightest waver or shudder. Small, and yet they shone, with a strange flatness, their tails spreading out in arcs rather than the tiny spikes she might have expected. The light bore into her. It dug deep. It was like a sabre against her skin. It hurt.
She realised, abruptly, too late, abruptly too late, that they were not lights but eyes.
It was a druj, enormous and utterly still, still enough that she could not discern anything about it – anything but those eyes – until she had drawn closer, slowly, cautiously. The Moon stirred within her again, threatening to overwhelm, as those eyes gazed down, down, down.
Now she was closer to this enormous druj, and she could see exactly how huge it was – the size of a clocktower, the size of a cathedral. It would have come clavicle-high to the walls that surrounded Illéa, Kinga thought, and that terrified her, deeply, root-deep. Its limbs looked like trunks of stone, its trunk a slab of marble. If not for those eyes, she might have mistaken it for some strange misshapen cliff, an oddly shaped outcropping of rocks, approximating a silhouette, mistaken for a human shape.
She had seen it before, on the day that the first wall had fallen – on the day that it had broken through the wall. And now he was here, just outside the second wall, and he was utterly still. Asleep? Maybe if druj slept. Thinking? Druj didn't think.
Dreaming?
Those eyes…
The golem did not move, and, for a long moment, neither did Kinga. All was still around them, but for the black smoke rising and the red dust falling. The smoke rose. The dust fell. All was still, and all was silent. The world could have ended, and she would have noticed little. Maybe the world had already ended. Maybe she had ended it. The smoke rose. The dust fell.
The silence and stillness was broken by a low whistle that came from somewhere over her shoulder, ringing long and rich. She returned it at once, a more shrill note cutting through the air, zinging high as it escaped her lips. There was a soft hiss, and as she moved back from the druj, leaving it to its shroud of night once again, Ghjuvan moved to find her. In the dark, their hands first met – then her hand found his shoulder, his hand her wrist, and he said, low, so low and deep she could feel it reverberating in his chest: "how did it go?"
"Many dead," she said softly, "so many dead."
He nodded. He wound an arm around her waist, and she wound hers – healed and whole and unhurting – around his shoulder. Then there was another hiss, and they were rising, and Kinga was wondering when exactly she had started to feel more kin to the golem in the wastes below than to the comrade pulling her effortlessly towards the sky.
"This was always going to happen," Matthias said. "She's been dead since the beginning."
Zoran thought, you're going to die in your best friend's arms, and you'll play along because it will be funny, because it has been written down, because you memorized it and it's all you know. And we'll say all the right phrases to keep it all going and make all the right mistakes to keep it all rolling and everybody will play along. It's better, isn't it? Better than the alternative? Better than chaos?
Aloud, he said, "you're really not the biggest bundle of fun to be around, Kloet."
Ina's room was empty. Her bed was neatly made, with her red blanket folded over its foot. Zoran had bought that for her in Kass; it had reminded him of the quilts she had brought with her to training as gifts for those Warriors-to-be who had no parents, no family, to send them gifts or necessities. They had been dyed red cotton, and thin, so thin. But her younger sister, Sherida, had spent hours on them, stitching little amateurish drawings into their hems. Azula's blanket had been hemmed with tiny flowers, Zoran remembered, Ilja's with tiny black cats. Nez's blanket had been decorated with little eyes and little hands, delicate hamsas, and she had unpicked the embroidery only an hour after Ina had given it to her, leaving strands of silver thread lying about the floor of the dormitory like forgotten bits of stars.
The window was open, a soft breeze stirring the curtains gently. The Mag Mell bells had fallen silent maybe an hour ago, but no cannons had roused to replace it; Zoran wondered if that meant that there was no one left to ring them, to fire them, or if Kinga had simply already fallen to the hooks and knives of the tagma. If that was the case, shouldn't he have seen it? Sensed it? Felt it? If Kinga had fallen, if Kinga was gone, if Kinga was dead? Matthias said, over Zoran's shoulder, from his pale reflection in the window, "she's been dead since the beginning."
A book lay abandoned on Ina's little bedside desk. She had been reading here, last he saw her. He had asked her whether she actually trusted her stringless man – her stringless man – and she had demurred. It was too early to tell either way, she said. It wasn't a question of trust, she said. She didn't even know his name, she said.
Zoran could tell that meant yes.
He wasn't sure why he wasn't following her out. He could look for her, couldn't he? Search the streets, until he caught some glimpse of her. But Nez and Belle and Hyacinth were still here, here and to-be-guarded. Azula was still here, the youngest of them, the least likely to know what to do if something went wrong. Ghjuvan and Ilja and Kinga were off waging war, doing the jobs they had been sent here for, using the curses for which they had cut short so gleefully their own young lives. And –
Khalore spoke from the doorway. "She snuck out?" That should have been amusing, Zoran thought; it was amusing, Zoran thought. It was mundane. Incongruously mundane. Inanna had snuck out to see a boy. Ina had jumped out her window. Ina was taking a night for herself. Like they were back in the academy, and she and Pekka thought that no one was awake to hear them slip out the door and towards the forest. Like they were back in Opona, and they were ordinary teenagers, who went to dances and stayed up late at taverns and spent nights wandering through Old Kur laughing and ignoring the stars. Like it was winter again, and she had gone with Decebal and Voski to light fires on the hilltop, from boredom, sheer boredom. That was all. Ina had snuck out.
That, or she was dead.
Zoran waved away Matthias' words before the former Hierophant could try to chime in with the usual line. Yes, yes, yes. Dead since the beginning. Zoran wasn't exactly disputing him; he knew that much was true. Dead since the beginning, all of them, the curses rotting their bones and weighing down their hearts and dragging them, inevitably, towards dust. But Matthias was being something of a broken record tonight, moreso than he usually was; Zoran wasn't sure if that was because he was tired, or if it was because they were running to the end of what Matthias had seen. He wasn't sure which option he'd rather opt for. After that ran out, what would they be left with? Useless scraps of paper pasted around a workshop and empty reflections. He could see one now, or at least one part-empty, in the polished metal mirror hanging over Ina's desk; it was like Khalore was alone in the room.
Khalore looked a little apprehensive at Zoran gesturing at nothing. She might not have begun to use her curse, but she was getting better at reading her fellow Warriors, so in the end she did not mention the strange wave. She merely pressed on. "She will be fine, Zoran."
"Thought I was the oracle here?"
He winced slightly at the words, even as they left his own mouth. Some oracle. He thought again of Matthias Kloet, of Arkadiusz Wyrocznia, of Dimitar Hristov, of more names, stretching back, back and back and further back again. Nineteen generations of Hierophants who had more rightly earned the name. Nineteen generations who had paid their lives for prophecies, and followed their predecessors into the grave, calmly, serenely. But they had received their prophecies, hadn't they? They'd paid their tithe for something. It had been worth it.
Insofar as you could say that any of this was worth it.
If the Hanged Man saw the uncertainty in his face, she made no mention of it; she merely crossed to the bed and sat down on it, creasing the otherwise perfectly crisp sheet. She had a bruise on her face, where a barely-conscious Hyacinth had struggled and struck her; it was a darker black than Zoran could remember seeing a bruise before, and seemed to be darkening by the moment. An ink blot blossoming along Khalore's left cheekbone. Matthias said, almost gleefully, before Zoran could stop him, "she's been dead since the beginning."
"No one could hurt Ina, even if they wanted to." Khalore smiled. "And have you ever met someone who wanted to?"
That wasn't true. Zuen had hurt Ina. Pekka had hurt Ina. Ina was wounded by love. Everything else was secondary. Loving her, being loved by her, felt dangerous, like taking her heart in your hands. It put you in a place of power, like nothing else could. Zoran was almost glad not to have that responsibility on his shoulders. Almost. Almost. Almost.
He hoped this stringless man would not hurt her. He hoped, desperately, that she would not accord him the chance.
Mag Mell District was sheltered in the shadow of Wall Szymański; the tagma here were green and naive, more accustomed to hassling drunkards than to handling druj. Their swords were unfamiliar weights in their hands, on their hips; they still stood unbalanced in their harnesses. And so they had fled, many of them – cadets in their dozens, tens of soldiers, abandoning their green coats in piles along the wall and dropping their blades as they went. They had been bathed in shadow as they went, that awful shadow of the flying druj above the city, and they had died, many of them, despite their cowardice. Rakel could not find it in herself to blame them. They were children, many of them; there was no saner reaction, when you glimpsed the impossible, no braver choice, when you were young and scared.
And those that had remained had fared little better against the onslaught of the terrestrial druj which had taken advantage of the broken gate, the undefended wall, the quiet cannons, to crawl over Szymański and light off into the city in search of blood. The resident watchers and excubitors had fallen in swathes, as wheat to a sharpened scythe; faces had been mutilated beyond recognition by the time Rakel landed on the wall.
By then, the bells had rung six hundred and twelve times. Moments after Rakel arrived, as she unsheathed her blade, even that had fallen silent. The ringer had abandoned his post, or had been devoured attending to it. The screaming had continued, long after the bells had quietened.
The screaming belonged to the civilians only. There were so few tagma remaining here now; the cannons lay unattended, the rooftops empty, the druj unchecked. At first sound of the bells, Hijikata's contingent had sprinted towards Mag Mell desperately, faster than Rakel could ever remember moving through the air before. Her equipment had protested at every enormous leap, every time she asked it to carry her another mile, just a mile further, just a mile faster, but it had done it. She had done it.
They had arrived, and found that they were alone. Facing a district full of druj. They were not even a full unit – Kudrna had quietly disappeared somewhere around Leptir, and Láska had abandoned the wall almost as soon as they had landed there. Rakel found she could blame them a little more. Two of the cadets, Kaasik and Mannazzu would be with their families – that was good – but Oktawia Chlebek had failed to dissuade brutish Torsten Müller or chirpy Sanav Mahesar, both still in training, from following them head-first into the warzone. They had regretted that slightly, when they had looked out over the twilight city – at the twisted black wolves with skull faces pursuing civilians as they fled, at the robed red figures, several storeys tall, moving silently through the streets, at the long-legged hooved monsters with long tentacles stretching out from where faces might otherwise have been. The whole city was crawling with druj, more than Rakel had ever seen in one place. And the excubitors...
They did not even number ten in all, and Rakel could see no hint of relief on the horizon. It seemed that no one else in the corps was keen to rush into suicide and call it salvation; the Nav group had come here alone, and stood alone, and would die alone. The captain had been quietly incandescent with rage. But all he had said was, "if anyone wants to leave… I'm looking away."
Rakel's hand had tightened over her sword. She had thought of Obušek, of the animals trying to tear through barbed wire in an awful attempt to escape what was coming, of the strange keening noise that her mother had made as she had died. She had thought of Mønt, of the enormous stone golem that had torn down their wall, of the cannons flashing and flashing as the druj had rolled down from the forest like a living tsunami. She had thought of Tiamat, of the floods of refugees without anywhere to seek refuge, of how they had beat against the stones of Wall Szymański pleading for help until it was streaked with blood and they were piled by the hundred where they had fallen around its perimeter.
And when Kane Hijikata had leapt, Rakel had followed without hesitation.
Sanav had remained there, frozen, on the edge of the wall. He had not run. But he had not followed. He had only continued to stare.
Carlu Panettiere had jumped with them, and been snatched nearly as quickly, by a misshapen druj clinging to the side of the wall, its enormous anvil-shaped head, mostly big wet eyes and bigger wet maw, rolling on a body far too small to support it. Torsten Müller had reversed direction, firing his hooks into the wall, and reeled himself back the way they had come, cleaving the druj's head in two, tearing open its jaws, but even this rapid action had come too late: Carlu fell to the ground in two pieces.
Jooa Tuominen had dived towards the ground, his silver blades shining as the only defence between an approaching red-robed druj and the children penned in their own back-yard, caught like cattle. No sooner than his knives had started to slice than a second druj, and a third, and a fourth, had begun to advance towards him over the rooftops, through the streets, bursting from the ground like some strange, awful earthworm. Oktawia Chlebek had raced to his side, and lost one sword almost as soon as she swung it. Hooks hissed, over and over again, as excubitors were forced into retreats that were safe no longer, returning to rooftops for only a moment before diving for cover from that awful flying druj. The beast above raked black claws through roofs, and dove low, hooked wings digging deep into concrete roads and houses alike, bone-white fangs gnashing as it lunged, again and again.
Rakel had slung her bow into her hands, and, with an approving look from Captain Hijikata, she had fired hooks high and spun into the air even higher. Nocking an arrow, she had fired a singe arrow towards the awful flying monster –
And she had been snatched from the air by the long, spined appendage of a hooved druj. It had wrapped its whip-like limb around her, six times in an instant, and pulled her down, so that she hit the edge of the parapet very hard and then slid off, pitching towards the writhing mass of black feelers which had opened to reveal a very round mouth, ringed with a very neat set of needle-thin, needle-sharp teeth.
Her heart had stopped. Everything had moved very slowly. She could feel every hair on her arms, every nerve alive on her head, every tiny twitch of her fingers. Her heart had stopped, and terror had coursed through, and she had thought, I am going to die I am going to die I am going to die.
She had freed her blade. She had cut herself free. She had fired her hooks into the central mass of tentacles, where this thing might have once had a face. For a single instant, she imagined it was the druj that had killed her mother; she felt that she slashed with a particular kind of savagery once that thought had crossed her mind.
And she had killed it.
And so it had gone. Over and over and over again.
Over and over and over again.
Over and over and over again.
And the screaming – the screaming kept going. Kept going. At points, Rakel wasn't sure if the sound was even outside her anymore. Maybe she had swallowed it. Maybe that scream came from somewhere deep inside of her, somewhere she couldn't feel it until the wind was whipping past her and her swords were in her hands and she could feel the flesh of druj giving way beneath her hands. She replaced her blades, over and over again, as they shattered against the bone armor or sharp fangs or hardened scales of the druj. She fell, more than once; she got back up again. Every part of her bloodied, every part of her hurting, every part of her – heart and all – aching. Hooks hissed around her, ceaselessly, and then, very slowly, they stopped.
Captain Hijikata had been the mere impression of a silver blur, somewhere in the distance, working his way towards Vanth Gate, where civilian survivors had slowly started to bottle-neck and amass, pleading for access to the inner ring. Oktawia had fallen somewhere to the west, and when Rakel had gone to help her, she had found Torsten lying on a balcony over what might have been a cute café. One of his legs was lying at a strange angle, ninety degrees to the way his knee should have turned; the other was lying on the terrace below, still booted. The candles lighting the edge of the balcony painted his face strange and terrifying reds.
He had begged her to kill him before the druj could get to him; instead she had twisted one hand around his collar and hauled him into the destroyed bedroom within, leaving him lying against the wardrobe and pressing a blade into his hand. "We'll grow old yet," she had whispered, and hoped desperately that she was telling the truth. "All of us."
His eyes had been wide, wide and scared. That had stayed with her for the rest of the night, even as she had left him behind, wondering if it might have been kinder to do as he had asked. It weighed on her. He was a boy, really, only eighteen or nineteen – and if the druj didn't get to him, he might just bleed out before anyone was able to help. Slower, more painful, than a blade through the throat.
Was this how Rakel's cowardice took shape?
So caught in this net of thinking was she, that she barely noticed the druj until it was too late. A horn-headed thing, two storeys tall, with strangely human eyes – soft eyes – and grasping pincer extremities, a slate-grey body shaped like a child's first unwieldy drawing of a person. It rose up before her, bloody-mouthed, interrupting what had been a clear path to the west towards where Oktawia had fallen. Rakel had reached for her sword, and swung, and almost immediately broken her blade on its hammer-shaped horn. When she set a hand to her waist, she found that she had no replacements; her chamber hung empty from her waist.
She yanked the lever, and released it from her waist. It fell to the concrete with a dull thud. The empty handles of her swords followed them, clattering loudly as they landed.
A sob tore its way from her throat. She was tired. For every druj she felled, three more swarmed forth; for every glimpse of Captain Hijikata in the distance, a comrade fell a few streets away. It may as well have been an entire world's distance, for all the hope Rakel had of reaching them. She couldn't remember how many she had seen fall, how many were still fighting. Was she alone? She might have been. She might as well have been. A tile broke under her boot, and rattled over the edge of the rooftop as she slowly retreated back from the druj in front of her, straining to arrange her thoughts. Survival. Please, she thought, and wasn't sure to whom she was pleading. Please, I don't want to die today. I don't want to die like this. Please. Unarmed. Vulnerable. Had this always been her fate? She had survived Obušek, only to die here the same way, alone and scared? Districts had fallen, over and over again. People had died, over and over again.
Was this really the best she could have done?
Reeling, Rakel could only fire a hook behind her and drag herself away from the druj, hoping desperately that she had enough time, sharp enough grappling equipment, that she could make it back to a safe place before…
And, then – quite impossibly – the druj before her reached up and, with the edge of its strange pincer claw, swiped through her line. Rakel felt herself jerk, first left and then right, impossibly far to the right, horrifically far to the right, as her line tensed and her hook buckled and – then – the whole thing failed and she felt all the tension being drawn out of her harness.
Gravity reasserted itself, and drew her down in a whirling embrace of buildings on all sides and the druj high above. The world opened up below her, wide and red and hungry.
And down, down, down, she fell.
She could not find it in herself to close her eyes, or turn her face away, or cover her head, even as every fibre of her being screamed at her to do so.
If this was the end, she wanted to face it.
Then her harness tightened abruptly around her, and the wind changed directions, and the sky was so blue, so very blue, it felt like she was drowning in it.
She hit the edge of the nearby roof, hard, and propped herself up on one elbow, gasping for breath, waiting for her heart to restart. The slates slid under her, pockmarked with grime and dust. Blood dripped down her forehead, and slowly off her lips, gently falling to the tiles on which she lay.
She looked up. The sun had begun to rise slowly over Wall Szymański; the faint rays of light which had escaped over its edge framed her saviour in warm amber light, obscuring most of his features – all but that familiar, broad, white smile.
Was she dead? Was she dreaming?
A dazed Rakel could only say, "Ghjuseppu, it's your day off."
"Really? I don't think these druj got the memo."
He reached down; they gripped one another's forearms, and Rakel found herself hauled to her feet like she weighed nothing at all. Ghjuseppu kept a tight grip on her until he seemed satisfied that her legs could hold her up in his place; then, he stepped back, and surveyed the city, his expression unreadable. Was he sensing how utterly hopeless it all was? How lost they were?
The rest of the world had fallen to the druj hundreds of years ago. Had it been hubris to think that Illéa alone could survive?
No. It felt like her heart was calcifying in her chest, turning hard like marble, heavy like lead. She swayed slightly on her feet, but she stayed standing. It wasn't over. This wasn't the end. Not until they were all dead, not until there was no hope left, not until there was no one left standing. And she was standing, she was alive, she was here. Everything would crumble, inevitably, in the end everything would fall – but not today, Rakel thought, not today.
She just needed a weapon.
Ghjuseppu might as well have read her mind. He spun a sword in his hand, and offered it to her handle-first. "You've been busy," he said. "All used up?"
Rakel accepted it. It was a familiar, comforting weight; it felt like taking the hand of a loved one. "It's been a long night."
He was a tall, broad man – more muscle than anything else – but he had soft eyes. "Who's left?"
Rakel racked her lines and hooks, and stared down at the ground. "Who knows."
But Ghjuseppu had come. He hadn't needed to – no one would have blamed him. But he had arrived. He had raced to their sides. And by the looks of him – the ichor on his coat, the blood on his boots, the broken blade hanging from his waist… he had fought his way here. He had, painstakingly, cleaved his way to save Rakel, to help the other excubitors.
And then, behind Ghjuseppu, in a spinning flash of grass-green and knife-silver, one-eyed Kinga Kaasik made a typically graceless landing on the rooftop, hitting the slates hard and offering her comrades only the grimmest of smiles as she assessed the state of the city with a cold gaze. Rakel wasn't sure why that surprised her so, the arrival of Ghjuseppu and Kinga – they were soldiers, weren't they? – but it did. They were only cadets. They had not been ordered here.
And yet here they stood.
It was strangely touching. It gave her hope.
Hope, even as she looked out at the city and realised that these poor cadets were probably going to die alongside her.
"Sorry we're late," Kinga said. Her coat was closer to black than to green. Rakel could not tell where the cadet's hands met her swords – they were too stained with ichor. "The western precincts are cleared."
Rakel's heart leapt. "Cleared?"
Ghjuseppu smiled. "You didn't think we were late to be fashionable, did you?"
Boom. Somewhere behind them, far to the south, the cannons at Wall Szymański were roaring into life. After the first, the second and third and fourth and fifth followed in a volley, like thunder exploding only a mile away. Rakel had never been so glad to hear them. There was a fervor to the sound; she had never heard them fire so rapidly, so desperately, in such quick succession. They overlaid one another, a chorus of pounding artillery and shrieking rounds.
Rakel almost wanted to sob again. God. In all her time as an excubitor – she'd never been so close to despair. Never been pulled back from the brink so quickly. It was positively whiplash-inducing.
"Mahesar must have roused enough people for the battlements," Ghjuseppu murmured.
Kinga, tightening the strap around her thigh, said, "took him long enough."
"Be nice, Kinia." Ghjuseppu glanced at Rakel. "What are your orders, boss?"
Boss? She almost smiled. "I think the situation is self-explanatory, kids."
Gazing past Rakel, Kinga flinched slightly. Rakel glanced over her shoulder to see Captain Hijikata approaching them slowly. God, she hated the captain sometimes. Even his boots still shone – not even a drop of ichor or blood. His hair was still slicked back. His cuffs were still starched and firm around his wrists. If not for the black-and-red slick of his blades, she thought it might have been believable that he had just been hiding in some bunker this entire time. And here she stood, looking like nothing less than death half-baked, her hair straggled about her face, breathing hard and feeling every muscle in her body ache.
She said, "I'm not convinced you're actually helping, sir, if you've managed to stay that clean."
He cocked an eyebrow. "I play an important role maintaining morale, Sjöberg."
That was one word for it. She wondered if he had counted their dead yet.
Captain Hijikata was gazing at the cadets, something like melancholy in his eyes. He didn't say anything – they had made their own choices – but he looked away with some slight hint of uncertainty marring his features.
"The cannons will keep the druj pinned in Mag Mell," Rakel said. "And keep more from getting in."
Ghjuseppu glanced at Captain Hijikata. "Did Morozova get the gates open?"
Rakel could practically hear the captain's teeth grinding. "Someone did."
Her heart relaxed slightly. So people would be getting out. People would be able to make it into Vanth. There was no question of stemming the flow. They just had to kill the druj. The walls were intact. They could still salvage Mag Mell. This wouldn't be the same as Obušek, Mønt, Tiamat. They could save it. They could win. Stem the apocalypse, for one more day.
Her heart pounded. Oktawia. Torsten. Jooa. Carlu.
It was with renewed strength she lifted her swords in her hands. "It almost seems simple."
"Deceptively," Captain Hijikata agreed. In the town below, there were still druj – so many druj, more than Rakel could count with a single glance. But this was all. They were caught here now, trapped like rats. The narrow band of excubitors – four in all – might have been a small group, but the cannons were still roaring and ripping the monsters to ribbons. The flying druj had vanished into the clouds at some point in the night. Right now, Rakel could not quite bring herself to be apprehensive about that fact. Take it as a gift, she thought, take it as a blessing.
Get the job done.
This time, when Kane Hijikata leapt, Kinga was the first to follow, in her typically inelegant fashion. Firing her hooks, she only narrowly missed the corner of the nearest building, careening around the turn and launching herself almost immediately into the jaws of the nearest druj, her swords spinning. "Suicidal," Ghjuseppu murmured, and then he was gone, slower than the captain, neater than his fellow cadet. He was a steady sort, Rakel thought, never rushed, never ruffled – not a killing machine like his friend, but a good soldier. They'd both get their crests for this, Rakel knew. They weren't cadets anymore, not really. They had proven themselves, today, to be real excubitors, worthy of the title, worthy of their positions.
As she was.
Rakel leapt last. Hiss. She fired her hooks, dropping low to the street, one heel skimming the cobbles as she whipped around each corner. Hiss. She kept moving, fast, firing each hook, racking herself faster each time. She rounded into the town square, and found – as she had hoped to find – the enormous tentacle-faced hooved druj that had earlier caught her in its appendages. Flipping her blade in her hands, she spun and slashed out its ankles, slicing through tendon and sinew and vein, ripping flesh. The enormous thing had been mid-step; she didn't even give it a chance to fall.
Firing her hooks into its enormous torso, skin stretched tightly over a gargantuan ribcage, Rakel yanked herself into the air, turning to brace her boots decisively against the druj's trunk, and plunged her swords deeply, to the hilt and to her elbow, into what would have been a heart. If this wasn't a monster. If this wasn't a druj. If this was a real thing, a natural thing, and not some awful nightmare wrought of black magic.
She tore her blades as far as they would go, opening up an enormous wound from which no blood or flesh fell. Like it was empty inside. Like it was hollow. But when she fired her hooks, and reeled herself rapidly back to the safe retreat of the nearest balcony, perching carefully upon the railing – yes. It was collapsing in on itself, those awful tentacles writhing, those awful long legs shuddering and folding up. The druj crashed, slowly, momentuously, to the ground, sending red dust and black smoke in every direction.
Rakel could not quite contain the little smile that flitted across her mouth to see one of the largest druj fall, at her hands, at her hands alone. She had done something. She had fought. There was still hope.
She turned, to assess the situation, to pick her next target, to check on Kinga and Ghjuseppu –
Just in time to see the jaws of a skull-faced druj close, decisively, sharply, over Captain Hijikata.