pareidolia (n.) psychological phenomenon in which the mind perceives a specific image or pattern where it does not actually exist.
The threads were returning to the world, as though a spider hidden in the sky had been set back to its spinning. They flickered in and out of existence, as the gold thread of the Tower had done; Ina could not depend upon them, and knew that she could not depend upon them, but as they returned to her vision, she nurtured them nonetheless, winding them about her fingers and letting them slip away again, running them through her hand to test whether they might yet be strong enough to depend upon. To pull at. To strangle with. Were they strong enough?
They were not. Now, of all moments, they had to starve themselves of humanity if they wanted to make this – any of this – mean something.
What thread would bind Silas Schreave to them? She could only imagine it: black, she thought, something inky black would suit him, like a thread of his very own hair. He was all black-and-white, and made moreso by the dark; Ina had pushed him ahead of her on the short march back to the wall. In this dense gloom, he stumbled over himself more than once, still shaking from the physical exertion of initiation; the first time, and the second time, and the third time as well, Belle had moved forward as though to offer him a guiding hand. Khalore had held her back.
They could not risk getting this wrong now.
They passed the corpse of the guard that Khalore had killed, glowing from the dark like a spectre in his pale grey coat.
Silas had looked away from him as they passed.
Didn't he know how many others had lost their lives in his name? The thought rose in her like a rage. What right did he have to look away? What entitled him to a life safely ensconced behind these walls? He had taken the Radiance. He had made himself into a weapon of Illéa. He should have stared brutal reality straight in the face. The rest of them had.
The rest of them had been made to.
They came to the edge of the palace grounds. There was no need to signal or whistle; Zoran had already landed beside them, face drawn and focused. There was no need to speak or confer; Zoran had already bolted Silas Schreave to his own harness, and sent his hooks rattling back towards the top of the wall. There was no need to discuss next steps or plan further; Zoran had already risen, and Khalore had tied Belle to her own harness and followed him, and Ina had taken only a brief moment to look back at the palace, still shrouded in darkness, still calm, before she joined them atop the wall.
No sign of Kinga. No sign of Pekka.
That was better than the alternative.
Then, above the trees, between the spires of the palace, she saw it: green smoke to the north, seeming strangely flattened against the grey press of clouds which so occupied the horizon. The emerald cloud had carved open the night sky; Zoran had compared it once to an alien wound. It was followed by a long, loud screech which seemed to tear right through her, and then a second flare burst into verdant beauty, a green flower unfolding, to the west.
The tagma were on their way.
The news that he had not been brought here to die was most disconcerting. Death, at least, was something he had done before; death, at least, was something he could do again.
Living – a most upsetting prospect.
And the king must die.
"I don't…. think," he said, slowly, in a moment of tragic, irritated realization, "that we're…. on the… same page."
The Moon laughed. She was wrenching at the black harness she wore around her limbs and torso, pulling at the hooks attached to her waist as though to ensure they were correctly positioned. She had come here to kill someone. Would she deny him that part in their story? "Bit late in the game to realize that, Petja."
"I apologize."
"You should."
She knelt in front of him.
For a second, he thought she was going to stab him again.
Instead, the Moon said, "there's a forest and an ocean and field after field of druj out there. Something needs to carry them past it and over it and through it, or else they're dead. That's what we're here for."
"The… Moon…"
"...has prior commitments, I'm afraid." The Moon smiled. "Your girlfriend has been most thorough in her planning."
The Tower said, "then… I must…"
"Do as you're told." She glanced down at her blade as she rose. "Ilja Schovajsa –" She corrected herself hastily. "The Chariot. You're to meet him here."
The Tower looked around the room. It was a young woman's bedroom. The wallpaper was purple. The bed was soft. He said, "...here?"
"Well," the Moon said, "not… like, I guess? If you wanted."
The Tower decided that he would rather not.
The Tower was most unaccustomed to deciding things.
The Moon had pulled open the window and swung herself out onto the sill, leaning back as far as she could lean and staring upwards with her eyes narrowed. She said, "Schovajsa would probably prefer it if you didn't make it so difficult to find you."
"Schovajsa," said the Tower.
"Chariot," said the Moon.
"Schovajsa," said the Tower again.
"Yeah," said the Moon. "You're getting it."
She fired her hooks. Jumped to put her feet beneath her, and then fell from the windowsill in the same moment that the hiss of the propellant lifted her up into the air. She vanished into the darkness, quite silently, and the Tower wondered if this would be the last he ever saw of her.
He did not think he would miss her. Certainly, she did not seem to have missed him.
The forest was beautiful in the darkness: moonlight slid along the leaves like quicksilver, soaking the rich soil with glow. When he raised his torch and passed it across the thickets of thorns and nettles tangling the terrain, he found no eyes glowing back at him.
That should not have unnerved him so much but: the whole place was utterly silent. No birds or animals dwelled here. It was a dead sort of silence, cold and awful.
"Be careful," he said. "Stay on your guard."
This was still Illéa: this was still the land of druj and monsters and Schreave.
Kinga had scaled the palace quickly: it was a simple matter of placing hand over hand, firing her hooks as little as possible, trusting in the training of the academy to keep her hanging so far above the earth with so little holding her there. There was a peculiar kind of strength which rushed through her in such situations. Somewhere beyond her vision, her sister would be watching her; Matthias would be judging her. She couldn't embarrass herself by falling now.
She distracted herself by composing another letter: dear pekka, does dying hurt very much? it looks like it does. it should.
When she looked down, the world swam beneath her. She was very high up now. Everything on the ground seemed very small. This was the view she had as the Moon. It seemed different, seeing it with human eyes. It seemed less real.
Rather than fire her hooks, she drove them by hand into the stone on either side of the window, hammering them into place until she was confident that she could lean back into her harness, boots planted against the glass, and not plunge head-first onto the courtyard below. She lifted her feet, curled her knees back into her chest, and then swung forward with all her strength.
With her first kick, the window flexed and bent; with her second kick, the window cracked; with her third kick, the window shattered and Kinga Kaasik tumbled into Asenath Schreave's study, racking and releasing her wires as she did so to ensure that, as she landed and forced herself back up to her feet in front of the fireplace, it was without tether.
To his credit, her target took only a moment to leap to his feet, his chair toppling over in his wake. She must have shocked him from a stupor; his was the panicked, clumsy movements of one who had thought himself safe. One who had not thought to fear.
And to his credit, Oroitz Txori did not ask who she was or why she was there. One monster recognises another: he turned his black, awful eyes upon her, and he knew.
Azula was not in her bedroom, or in the office of her mistress, Lady Chou, or in the maids' drawing room, which meant that Ilja found himself retracing his steps back to the front entrance of the palace, something kin to panic swelling in his tendons as he moved. His curse was still merely spectral, hanging somewhere over his shoulder, in the precise place that he could not feel for it, in the precise place that he could not quite spot it, no matter how hard he tried. That alone was not reason for concern – it would return, Kinga had assured them that much, this was simply the ebb and flow of things on Fall Day – but Ilja could feel the moments slipping away as he turned another grey corner and found himself on another interminably long corridor.
The other Warriors would be in the air by now. They would have crossed Ganzir; they'd be getting closer to the rendezvous point.
Ilja was scared that they would not wait for him. He was terrified that they might.
Down another set of stairs. There was a large mottled window set above these steps, and a silhouette moved without, someone on wires, a marionette ascending. Kinga, or someone hunting her?
Ilja reached the landing and turned again, heedful of the Schreave eyes on him as he passed each portrait in turn. They had the Radiance. They had taken it. This was it. It was as Gijs had seen.
The hard part was over.
So where was Azula?
The answer came to him when he wanted it least: it was abruptly as though all the strength had leaked from his limbs, for they were abruptly leaden and – no, worse than leaden, so much heavier than mere lead. Someone had weighed his pockets down with stars, he thought, so quickly did his knees buckle beneath him and he found himself hitting the floorboards of the entranceway, hard. His head hung forward on his neck as though it had been broken; his hair obscured his vision, so that the foyer was transformed into the mere impression of shapes and silhouettes. There was someone standing in front of the door. Someone standing guard.
Had he been stabbed or shot, then? They said that you didn't feel it sometimes. That wouldn't be so bad, would it? If it just meant slipping away. Hadn't he atoned? Even now, his comrades – his Inanna and his Khalore and his Zoran – were racing home with the Radiance. This was redemption, no matter how clumsy. He had always imagined he might meet salvation on his knees.
That tagma girl had fallen thus. Before they had killed her. Before they had made her into a monster. She had broken her kneecaps. She had pleaded with Kinga to run.
Ilja found himself pleading now: "Azula, if you don't go now, they'll kill us both."
For it was Azula, standing in front of those enormous obsidian doors, her expression unfathomably sorrowful.
The palace was dark and silent, the walls unmanned and still. The sight of the spires lurching from the gloom, wreathed in darkness, backlit by grey clouds, shot more fear through Sanav's heart than could any number of druj swarming Ganzir. The place was utterly calm, though the jagged wound in the architecture caused by the golem's explosion still gaped open, foundations lying exposed to the night sky. But there was no sign of the golem this day. There was no sign of any druj. It did not even seem that anyone was still awake in the place.
It could not possibly have been a false alarm…?
The captain landed ahead of him, slaloming fast around one of the palace towers to drop down onto the balcony of the reception room on the fourth floor. On an ordinary day, such an arrival would have been a breach of etiquette of the highest order – he would have risked losing title and head alike.
But tonight –
Sanav landed after him, recalling his hooks and scanning the height of the palace nervously. That same urgency which had fuelled their sprint to the palace fuelled the captain still: when he found the balcony door locked, he shattered the glass of its face with the pommel of his sword and forced his way in, heedless of the noise.
There was no point in subtlety. Not when there was a cavalry coming hots on their heels.
Sanav had never before encountered a place which so felt like a haunted house, but he thought that the palace after midnight had to qualify: ghosts seemed to whisper in the vaulted ceiling as the captain strode across the space, boots sinking into plush red carpet, and pulled open the enormous mahoghany door at the end of the room. Sanav half-expected another druj would be waiting for them behind, something enormous with long fangs and sharp claws, but there was only another long, empty corridor.
Kane was resting a hand on his sword. Did he feel as uneasy about this situation as Sanav did? He must.
The captain was no fool. In this, Sanav typically found some amount of comfort.
So why did it feel like someone was playing some awful trick on them both?
He had enough time to order Her to leave. For once, She listened to him: She vanished from the room, leaving only Her shadow in Her wake, and the xrafstar had watched Her go with a dead-eyed one-eyed druj-eyed look that suggested that she would hunt Her next.
He would not allow that to happen.
He had flung her over a table; she had punched him in the face so hard that he had heard his own jaw fracture. He had struck her with one of Her glasses, the one She had been drinking from, over and again, until there was only glass shards in his hands and he was just punching the xrafstar, once and then again and then over and over again.
She had put a hand on his face, over his face; she had put a hand flat on his jaw and a hand on his throat, and for a moment, he had understood that a single wrench of her hands would snap his neck. If she realised that, she did not act on it; she had lurched forward instead, so that she fell beneath his reach, throwing him entirely off-balance, and then she had stumbled back.
She had stumbled back. He had pursued. He had almost forgotten what a joy it was to move thus: without strings. He knew the servants called him Her rabid dog – it was not an unfair assessment. It was a delight to invest, for the first time in a long time, in his own savagery.
She had blocked most of his hits, though she was shorter than he; she desperately pushed away fist and hand and foot and knee, and responded in kind each time. She had a similar kind of horrific desperation to the way she fought. She had no compunctions: there seemed to be no part of her body with which she would not strike at him, elbowing and headbutting and shoving him when all else failed. She had kicked his legs out from under him and kneed him in the face, very hard; he had wrapped an arm around her leg, and thrown her with him.
He heard something break. His or hers?
He had wrapped an arm, tight, around her throat, squeezing life and air from her with the swell of his bicep; she had kicked herself off the nearest bookshelf with enough force to send them both to the floor. They had grappled; she had fixed her hands around his neck, and leaned in, close, closely enough that he could see the tiny fragments of gold in her dark eye, the streaks of red where she had burst a blood vessel.
His hands scrabbled at hers; she pinned one to the floor by planting her knee on his elbow, firmly, bearing down with all her lean strength.
He pulled at her eye, tearing at face, drawing long lines of blood. He'd take the other one from the bitch, if it killed him.
She bit his hand, hard.
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't breathe. His head was swimming.
He was dying.
Overhead, the sky embraced all. All that was falling or flying was held tight in a strangling embrace, and those stars, which did neither, were being squeezed of all light and strung out like a necklace through the inky dark as a warning to any that might dream of following them to ignition. Who would dare?
Not he.
It was too easy to let go.
Too easy to slip.
And he died.
She rose. She stared at him.
She stumbled back. One step, then two. A third. She was shaking, though not from fear or shock. Hers was the shudder of one whose bones have tired of their place within her skin.
Oroitz had been right to suspect her.
This was not a girl who had been trained to kill druj.
This was a girl who had been trained to kill other xrafstars.
Khalore had known that they would be hunted, but nothing could have prepared her for the spike of adrenaline which jolted through her at the sound of the tagma's hooks hissing in their wake. They were still a few miles back; the Warriors still had time to build up distance.
Belle's arms were wound tightly around Khalore's waist; if the Hanged Man had thought that moving with the gas canisters attached to her was difficult, then this extra weight was almost unbearable. The harnesses of the excubitors had been constructed to take more than one person if the situation demanded it – it was, all-too-frequently, the only way to carry back the wounded and the ailing and the dead – but Khalore was not an excubitor. None of them were. Each of them were shaky in their flights: even graceful Ina was moving slowly and landing heavily. Though Ghjuvan had provided them with elementary tutelage in the art of the hooks, it did not escape Khalore's notice that the three Warriors were swinging more than firing themselves through the air as Ghju and Kinga usually did.
They had pulled cloaks over Belle and Silas alike in the hopes that it might create some semblance of confusion amongst their pursuers; Ilja was under similar instructions when it came time to carry Azula with him. Zoran had fled in one direction, Khalore in the other, and Ina had cut a golden path between them, ready to defend them at a moment's notice.
Khalore had never appreciated before how perfectly this city had been constructed for travel through the skies.
No wonder they had held back the druj for so long.
No wonder it had taken the Warriors to bring this kingdom to its knees.
She glanced over her shoulder. The tagma were moving even faster than she could have dreamed possible, though thankfully they were still heading towards the palace. This was their domain; this was the terrain to which they were best accustomed. The Warriors were interlopers onto that territory: invaders and thieves and saboteurs.
No matter. She dropped like a stone onto the next rooftop, and forced her exhausted limbs to run again. Belle was quite silent. Was it fear or shame which silenced her so? Khalore was grateful for the lack of distraction. This did not come naturally to her. Kinga made everything seem like a single motion – Khalore had to focus on each individual action, stitching them together into a shoddy semblance of fluid motion.
She fired the hooks again, and fell into empty air. To her right, she saw Ina disappear, lower to the ground, and, as though in tandem, Zoran rose up in turn.
Khalore could not be the one to slow them down. Khalore could not be the one to let the Warriors down.
They had to make it to the rendezvous point if they wanted a chance of making it home.
They had to keep going if they wanted all of this to mean anything at all.
At the end of the corridor, there was an enormous stone staircase, overhung with enormous hanging banners upon which the symbols of each Wall had been embroidered. The captain did not waste time with the steps; he used his hooks. Sanav followed him closely, mirroring his every motion; the captain came over the banister of the staircase fast, hardly pausing at all in his movement onward. Sanav perched upon the railing for a moment, irritably adjusting the oversized harness, pulling at the chest plate to alleviate the uncomfortable pressure it was exerting on his ribcage. Like existing in a constant vicegrip.
How far away could Åsmund be? With equipment that fit, with swords that had been sharpened?
He could not shake the discomfort that came with trusting in the Watcher. He had been Oroitz's second, as much his shadow as Kinga was Kane's, and Oroitz had gone missing, and the royal family had been involved in all of it.
So this palace, empty and silent and awful, was almost a physical pressure on Sanav, as painful as the chestplate.
Then that silence was broken: someone had seized him, quite abruptly, by the shoulder-strap, and pushed backwards and backwards and backwards, until he was hanging over the stone staircase, chasming into nothingness that was not-quite-nothing-enough. With nothingness, at least, there could be no prospect of a painful landing; from this height, Sanav did not think the fall would do him the simple favour of killing him outright.
Reiko Morozova said, "to what do we owe the pleasure, excubitor?"
Their hand, tight upon him, was the only thing holding him up. Sanav said, "there was – we received – I thought – an SOS, sir."
Their eyes skated across his face: faintly amused, mostly irritated. For a split second, he thought they would let him drop just for the fun of it. Always falling, he thought, always about to fall.
Reiko's voice was husky; they must have just been roused from sleep. "Whence?"
Sanav bit out the words. "Here."
"Ridiculous."
It was starting to seem so. How could there have been an alert if the personal guard to the princess herself had been asleep until this moment?
Reiko tightened their hand around Sanav's harness – he sucked in a last breath as his heart jerked in uncertainty – and then they hauled him forward and deposited him gracelessly onto the floor. "Hijikata – is this my excuse to behead you at last?"
The captain had glowered from the darkness. Quite unlike him: none of his usual impeccable politeness, even in the face of Morozova's overt hostiltiy. "The kingdom is under attack, Reiko. I hardly have time to explain this to you from first principles."
"There has been," Morozova snapped, "no attack."
"Then there will be," Hijikata said. Somewhere in the guts of the castle, a clock was tolling two o'clock. "We have pre-empted it."
Morozova's lip curled, but they clearly thought better of whatever they had been about to say. "What is your source?"
"A guard called it in," Sanav said. "A scout saw the smoke–"
They were speaking at a normal volume, but the gloom and quiet of the palace made it all seem so much more clandestine. There was a phantom absence which galled, like a missing limb. Sanav did not think he was the only one who noticed it. Kane struck a particularly solitary figure without his lieutenant at his shoulder.
"My people are the only ones on duty," Reiko was saying. "Twelve of us in all. I assure you – if there was a druj on the grounds, then I would know."
Kane Hijikata was not a man whose expressions Sanav could usually, easily, read, but there was no mistaking the thought which had just flickered across his face.
They had just walked into a trap.
Azula had not been sure if she was dreaming. She didn't seem to dream much anymore. She only Remembered, and forgot, and Remembered again. The memories were not hers, though, of course, they were hers. Hers only. How could they be someone else's? She was the one who did the Remembering.
This string she had tied to Ilja – she had bound it to a memory they had in common. Did he even realise that he had forgotten this? Did he even realise that he remembered it from the other side now? Did he even think about her enough to realise how much had been lost to him?
How strange, to see herself through his eyes. He saw her as small. Breakable, she supposed – the kind of fragile that could be protected or exploited. Had he viewed Nerezza similarly, before he had killed her? Maybe he hadn't killed her. Maybe one of the others had actually done the deed. Did that matter? Azula didn't think so. They had all forsaken their mission. They had all endangered their people.
For Irij. For that place. For the people who had oppressed him, her, all of them. For the people who had poured poison into them and set them loose upon an innocent city. For the people who had killed children, over and over and over again, so that they could cower behind the corpses.
Azula had slackened her hold on Ilja's strings. Without her to hold him up, he had fallen. Now she considered him at length, and moved forward, and studied his strings intently. Could all Devils see these? She thought not. Céluiz would have still had some use, even struck mute as he had been, if he could have perceived all of the wires holding up all of the individual pieces of the world. Would they not have learned about Ǵavol in school if that was the case?
Maybe they had learned about all of this. Maybe she did not Remember. So much of her skull was full of Oroitz and Reiko and Xynone and Ilja and Hyacinth and dead soldiers, whose names she knew though she had only reached them in the cutting of their strings: Adem and Cathal and Etienne and Lazar, who had risen up against her and who had fallen before they even had time to realise what she was. They lived on in her mind; each of their strings hinged upon a memory, and Azula was dripping now in strings.
She should cut Ilja's now, as she had cut Hyacinth's. Hyacinth had lived, had she not? Ilja was strong; Ilja would live. And Oroitz was here; Ilja would live. And Kasimira had been careful in her tuition; Ilja would live.
She would just stop him. Just… make him stop.
That was all. She just wanted him to stop. She wanted all of them to stop. Just that. Simply that.
Azula only had to think it, and she saw the strings begin to unravel around him.
He had died, but he was not dead. He was Death. Life had a stranglehold on him.
The clock had tolled two.
"I am xrafstar from a lineage of xrafstar." Oroitz rose again. His black eyes were alive with a fervent mania. This was veritably air to him. "Do you know what that means? The blood of Ignacja Szymańska flows through my veins. I am born of the Walls; I am borne forth of the Walls."
The xrafstar swiped a hand across her mouth, smearing blood. "Oh, you're not fucking special, sweetie."
A month ago, that would have made him smile.
A month ago, meeting the Moon of Kur would have seemed a dream or a delusion.
He stood. For a moment, they both caught their breath.
He said, "I will not do you the mercy of killing you."
"I would not consider it a mercy."
She was lying.
Ah-h-h. Where the hours in which he might have considered this honour enough? She thought herself cannibal: he knew better. She had never killed her own kind. Only her superiors – only her inferiors. It was Szymańska enough to make Szymańska bleed. Did she follow the old ways?
Did she intend, too, to carve out his heart and eat it?
She pulled a knife. Her cousin said, and could not keep the disappointment from his carrion voice, "that seems a bit beneath us."
"Disagree," she snarled. Her blade glimmered moonlight-silver in the dim light of the overturned lamp. He saw in her all of his own tendencies. He saw in her, for the first time, himself. "How many lives do you have left, Szymański?"
Oroitz smiled. "Enough."
Another check of the time: twenty minutes past two o'clock. There were still hours to go before sunrise, but adrenaline and anticipation and expectation rose in his chest nonetheless. He swept his torch back and forth across the forest's face, though he could not say what he hoped to see.
They were safer lingering where they were, at the edge of the forest, with the ocean in their sight. The forest was full of druj and the ocean was full of druj and here, at the edge of both and either, they were –
Could this be called a safe place?
Footsteps behind them: Sanav turned in the same moment that Reiko said, "Lady Obušek."
Evanne Chae was a girl undone: her hair, wild around her shoulders, and her veil, thrown back across her head, looked like a crumpled halo. She had bled through her bandages again, and was limping heavily upon her prosthetic. She clearly hadn't expected to be spotted from so far away – the guard's acknowledgement stopped her on the stone stairs, as suddenly and abruptly as if she had been shot. She said, cautiously, "sir," but her breath was coming faster than it ought.
She looked like a girl who had been searching for them for a very long time.
"You should return to your quarters," Reiko said. They must have been taking this situation with a semblance of seriousness: there was none of their usual wry nonchalance apparent in their voice. "I will tell his highness that you wished to call upon him –"
"The druj," Evie said, "the human druj – I saw him. It. I saw it. Lieutenant Kaasik brought him into the palace about – I don't know if it was twenty minutes or forty minutes..."
The captain had gone very still and very silent.
"They're gone," Evanne said, rather helplessly, "they were in my chambers and – they must have gone out the window – "
Out? Kane caught Sanav's eye, and jerked his head, dark curls bouncing. Sanav understood immediately: to the nearest window, then. Kinga would doubtlessly have gone after the human druj if it had gotten away from her – but why, then, hadn't she told them? Why had she rushed in without them?
Why did she never seem to value her own life?
Reiko's voice had tightened like a noose. "Stay where you are, Hijikata," they ground out. "If this is true – "
("It is," Evie said, "I wouldn't mistake him for anything else –")
"Then we need to co-ordinate a response."
Their very presence, Sanav thought, was the response.
"The tagma are on their way," Kane said. "If there is a human druj in the palace, then you must evacuate. Protect your principals."
Reiko rolled her eyes. "Do you think I have to be told, Hijikata?"
"Clearly."
His voice was a fraying thread; his voice was on the verge of snapping. Reiko was staring at him, almost aghast. This was not their usual dynamic – there had been no interplay, no back-and-forth. Kane was a live wire, alive and hostile, and the moment Reiko's eyes slid away from him, he was moving again: disappearing back into the grey shadows at the end of the hallway, quickly enough that Sanav had to sprint after him, his boots landing hard enough on the flagstones that he felt as though he were loudly announcing his presence to any enemies dwelling in the gloom: here i am, here i am, here i am.
Reiko had fallen silent behind them; Sanav was quite certain he could feel their eyes boring into his back as he followed Kane away. And then, as they reached the window, the palace guard snapped back to focus: "go wake Sahar, Chae, and then find yourself a harness..."
They dropped from the sky like stars.
Ghjuvan had made this look so easy: Ina had joined him in mocking Kinga for her clumsiness, the way that she ascended hard and landed harder, her tendency to do herself more harm than any of the things that she fought. She couldn't bring herself to regret those words very well now: she couldn't really bring herself to experience anything except the sensation of striking the ground and feeling her breath leave her. That felt purifying: like she was breathing out some of the grief that had bundled up inside of her. It left only the wrath, which burned clean.
Khalore landed just ahead of her. Belle struggled to looose herself from the harness; after a moment of infuriating patience, Ina ripped the straps from her, and put her hand between the girl's shoulder blades, pushing her in front of her. "Move," Ina said, "we don't have time – "
"We haven't been followed," Khalore protested.
"Yet," Zoran said. His voice was low and unhappy. He was checking the knots that bound Silas Schreave's hands, and Belle was pretending not to notice the way he was staring at her.
Khalore had pulled out the map in her pocket; she glanced at it cursorily. She shouldn't have needed to; Ina knew that she had pored over it since they had stolen it first.
Between Gjoll and Mønt: they would go more quickly beneath the ground. They certainly had not been followed: there was no sign of Ilja or Azula behind them. Maybe they had taken the tunnel route out of the palace; maybe they had been delayed; maybe they were following behind, but lower to the ground, more invisible.
Maybe not. Maybe none of those things.
Khalore went ahead of them, glued to her map. They had landed just two streets off-target; Kass had never been home enough to them for these streets to become as familiar as those of Aizsaule, where Ina had known neighbours and shops on every avenue and alleyway. All of these pretty wide boulevards, and the white facades of each enormous town house that they passed, and the manholes each carved with the silhouettes of tiny animals that the people of Illéa had never seen – would never see.
Khalore prised up one such manhole now – or, at least, Khalore indicated the cover in question and Zoran and Ina did the hard work, bringing up blood under their nails as they scrabbled at the metal and the concrete. The access chamber below was awash in grey shadow: Khalore went first, latching her hook onto the edge of the cavern and dropping herself down, before she was joined by Belle. Silas and Zoran went next and Ina joined them at last, leashing her hook onto the manhole cover before she jumped so that the wire whipped after her and dragged the seal back into place.
As if they had never even been there.
The darkness closed back over them, black and velvet, illuminated by only a single point of warm amber light.
Khalore's voice was very small. "Sir?"
Lorencio Suero raised his torch aloft, and smiled. In the moment, Ina could not decide whether he resembled an angel or a demon. The general said, his voice gentle, "so you do believe that there is a world outside the walls, Khali."
Azula only had to think it, and she saw the strings begin to unravel around the Chariot.
It was beautiful in the way that weaving was: seeing something change so fundamentally, watching the state of something alter in a way that could be undone but carefully, carefully. It would take love to reweave what had been unwoven; it would take expertise.
She could set him aside, unwound. She could deal with him later.
Kasimira could guide her.
Azula would give him no excuse to harm her in the way that he had harmed Nez. And Mielikki, she thought, for Mielikki, too, had died, had fallen when she ought not. And Hyacinth. Azula had not killed Hyacinth. She had not done her that damage. She had undone her; she had untied her. She would not deny that. She could Remember that much.
She did it carefully, stitch by stitch. She had only begun. They had only begun to unravel.
And something which was not a string – something real and physical and tenable it hurt – fixed around her throat and lifted her into the air.
Her shoes dangled in the air, empty. She could not have been further than a few inches above the ground. That distance might as well have been a mile: it was equally impossible to overcome. She hung there, helplessly, and she Remembered.
She had not sensed the approach of another person. That was impossible, she thought. She should have seen the strings move and stir. She was as a spider: how could she have missed the vibrations rattling through her woven world?
When she reached for strings, she found none.
And it
But she couldn't focus. Ilja had sucked in a great, awful, rattling gasp and stumbled upwards. It was a real stumble; his knees failed him the first time, and he had to catch himself on the wall, his chest heaving. She saw the strings waver and reassert themselves. She had not undone enough; she had not loosened all of his knots.
So she
The hand around her throat loosened; she was set back onto the ground. Her head swam as though she had just awoken from a dream. She could not decide where she was. She could not determine who she had been. The light filtering down the stairs was smog-grey, the same as Azula. Her head hurt. Where was Ina? Ina should have woken her. She had slept too long – Commandant would realise that she had missed muster. Her throat burned when she tried to breathe. Had kasimira already rung for her tea? Damned oroitz, she thought, that bastard, he should have woken her –
but then it
ilja said, "please."
was he speaking to her? how could he hope to speak to her? she had not bidden him speak. she had not moved his mouth. his strings lay slack. she would show him. she would move him.
the man without strings said, "think of the cause, schovajsa."
his voice was so familiar. she wouldn't let him down. she would get back before the cut-off.
ilja had a knife. she thought that he intended to use it. he pulled it. and then did not use it.
the fool, she thought. she hadn't even realised that he had a weapon. now she had a weapon.
she pulled at his strings. she had refined her grasp: it was not merely a matter of piloting limbs, but worming her threads into the finest of nerves and motor function, wiring herself into his smallest twitches and shivers. thus could she raise his sword, and force him forward.
if a man bore no strings, then she would cut him down the old-fashioned way.
she turned ilja's hand and lunged him forward. the man without strings did not even move. he seemed almost amused at azula's efforts: he stood stock-still as the sword arced forward, and bounced from his shoulder as though glancing off marble.
he said, "devils are all the same. vrata would have liked you, gehörtnicht,"
she wasn't sure who he thought she was – GEHÖRTNICHT – but before she could force open her own mouth and ask the questions – she didn't usually ask her own questions – GEHÖRTNICHT – she usually made oroitz ask them for her – it was easier, simpler, more satisfying – to pull on the threads – GEHÖRTNICHT –
the man without strings – Pekka, she thought, in a bewildering, muddled moment of realisation, Ina's Pekka – was not the only man without strings now. ilja didn't have any strings either. that wasn't true, she thought. the blood running down her chest was strangely cool. she had expected something warmer. he still had strings. she had just pulled upon them. she had just used them. why, now, had they vanished?
commandant had called their morning exercises death marches. had he known? had he intended to march them thus? her chest hurt. she hadn't realised she could hurt so much. she thought the strings had taken it. now he had taken the strings. it ached. she
ilja's face swam into existence above her. she had started to shake, without knowing why. he said, "why would you do that, zu?"
her mother would chide her. her uniform was all stained red now. it stood out against the grey.
céluiz was good enough to embrace her while she went. he had always been good to her. he had understood. céluiz took her as the strings unravelled and azula Remembered no more.
"So you do believe that there is a world outside the walls, Khali."
"Yes," Khalore said. "Yes. There is. I've seen it."
Suero said, "Is it a good world?"
Khalore stared at him, and Ina stared at her in a silent, anguished plea. She wasn't even certain what she was pleading for.
"No," Khalore said. Her voice broke. It sounded like a sob. "It isn't."
Ina had never wanted so badly to embrace her little sister. She was right. Irij had never been kind to them, though it was the place where dwelled all the kindness that they had ever known. They would never be of Irij. They would never be from anywhere else. It was the place that Pekka had been born. It was the place that had killed him. They would never grow old there. They would never be young elsewhere.
It was home. It was hell.
Lorencio said, "are there walls?"
"Not so many," Khalore said. "Not so high."
He nodded. He smiled. And he gestured with the flat of his sword that they should move past him.
"Go."
Khalore stared at him. Inanna shared her suspicion. "Sir?"
"I suspect this is a fight I won't win," Lorencio said. He was regarding Ina with the wary gaze that people usually reserved for Kinga or Nez. The thread between them was black as ink, so utterly invisible in the shadows that Ina had only the impression of its existence rather than a true idea of its shape. The turquoise string which joined him to Khalore was far more apparent: gem-glow and shiver-shimmer, joining them fingertip to fingertip. "I'd rather live to hunt you down another day. If it's all the same to you."
Inanna said – because she knew that she must say it – "we should kill him now."
"No," Khalore said. She shook her head, as though she needed to physically act out each word and convince herself that she meant them. "No – "
Ilja would have told her to do it. Ghjuvan would have said that she must. Myghal would have asked why she hadn't got it over with already. Ina wondered which of them she was meant to emulate now.
And then Khalore put a hand over Ina's, and forced her to lower her sword.
"Khal," Ina protested, in vain.
"One life," the Hanged Man whispered to her sister. "One life. On a doomed island."
It wasn't such a price to pay. And they needed to move.
With every step that she took past General Suero, Ina expected to feel his blade slide between her ribs, pierce her skin, wick her skin in long, scarlet lines.
Nothing. They kept going. Khalore looked over her shoulder, and they kept going, and the light of the general's torch faded into gloom as the earth closed over them once again. Khalore was crying softly, and Inanna was pretending not to hear it.
She could not pretend to ignore the bells which followed them before long. Lorencio may have let them go, but he clearly did not intend to let them live.
Maryam's twin sister, Sahar, met them at the western Ganzir gate. She must have seen the flares; she must have realized what it meant. She had clearly expected them to come over the walls, but at the sight of their horses racing through the streets without even the pretense of subtlety, she had raced to the guardpost and wound up the gate so that the small squadron could burst unabated across the threshold of the royal estate. No sooner had they done so than the bells over the city burst into existence, clanging with a desperation.
This was agony, Maryam thought: the bells were ringing over Kass, but the flares had ignited over Ganzir.
They were being torn in two. Purposefully?
"Maryam!" Sahar called above the clatter of horseshoes on cobble and the milling sound of soldiers assembling in a quiet courtyard. Sometimes Maryam forgot they were identical; sometimes Maryam forgot what it was like to look into a mirror thus uncracked. Sahar must have come straight from bed: she was wearing the expected gray coat, but her sword had been slung haphazardly over one shoulder and her headscarf was untidily wrapped around her hair, small wisps escaping around her ears. "Equipment?"
"Please!" Maryam wheeled her horse around, keeping one tight hand on the reins, scanning the palace for any sign of disarray. All was quiet. All was still. She held out her other hand, and, quite without looking, caught the harness that Sahar had thrown to her. She pulled it on, jumping up to balance on her saddle as she finished buckling its straps. Åsmund must have reached the palace before them, though there was no sign of him; nor was there any sign of the captain or his fellow excubitors. Their absence should not have stood out as it did: they had rallied as impressive a force as Maryam had ever seen, made moreso by how depleted the corps had become. Had a single tagma been permitted to stay retired or insane?
Speaking of insane -
She would have to catch up with Åsmund and the others. Her zweihander, Sadiq, practically sang to her as she jumped to the ground and offered her sister a cursory salute, scanning their surroundings closely. It could not possibly have been a false alarm. And yet there was none of the destruction they had expected. All was whole. All was still. All was quiet.
This was not like the night that Oroitz had died.
Euphrasie Barden, head of the northern Watch, had come hot over the heels, her own flare gun still trailing emerald smoke. She barked over them both: "What's the situation?"
"Human druj on the grounds," Sahar said.
Maryam glanced at her sister. "One of our old friends?"
"Morozova seemed to think so."
"And the bells?" Euphrasie snapped.
"I don't have a clue," Sahar said and gestured to the grounds. "Boss has fallen back to protect their principals; the excubitors have gone after the druj in the palace."
Barden looked clearly torn. The bells could not go ignored: dealing with the human druj in the palace would do no good if they let a set of inhuman druj to tear through the rest of the kingdom unabated. "Yakhin," she said, at last, "take a company – "
The twins exchanged a look.
"Maryam," Barden said, exasperatedly. "West – one company.."
Maryam was a Watcher, but she spoke now as though she was not. She said, "and my Åsmund?"
Sahar gestured at the palace behind her. "Followed Hijikata up."
Barden did this kindness for her. She called to Sahar: "go. See it through."
She would. Of that, Maryam had no doubt. Sahar nodded and fired her hooks, latching onto the trellis above the front door of the palace. No sooner had she reeled herself in and seized a hold of the ledge than she had fired again, and then again, and then again, practically gliding up the side of the palace.
Maryam watched her sister go, Sadiq practically humming its approval from her shoulder. To hell with this all. She would go west – she would contend with whatever nightmares the night had dealt them.
They would meet again. They would drink tea.
This was not like the night that Oroitz had died. It could not be. She would not permit it to be.
Oroitz met his cousin when she sprung forward, blocking the first wild slash of her blade with his forearm, and answering it with a punch straight to her gut, driving all of the air out of her lungs. The knife bit deeply; it didn't matter. He twisted his wrist, and seized the dagger by its blade, and wrenched it from her grip, flinging it aside. What did pain matter, when death lay out of reach?
What was the worst she could do to him?
He was righteous.
He barely had time to form such thoughts: she had lunged forward again, so quick that Oroitz was at first certain that she had made a fatal error of judgment. But no: she struck true. She hit him in the face again, very firmly, so hard that he could feel the bones shift about unnaturally in their joints; he stumbled back; she pursued him with a round-house kick, which he evaded narrowly; then she struck him, hard, with a hook-kick that caught him in the throat.
He responded by throwing her through the window she had broken. For a split second, he thought that she had followed her ancestors down; for a split second, he thought that she might have revealed herself as the monster she was.
Instead – a hiss and a shadow and he knew she wanted to take this to the roof. To the open sky.
Typical.
He followed her. There was something intoxicating about a good scrap: he had experiecned so few these last long days.
And she was a xrafstar. Oroitz knew that She would be pleased with him if he brought Her the Moon's head. Ever moreso if it was accompanied with her heart. He would reward Her. He would show Her what he was worth.
He would prove Himself.
What reason would She have to doubt him then, the bitch?
So he followed the xrafstar out. No sooner had he found the edge of the ceiling then she had hit him, very hard, and he thought for a second that she intended to bring them both down. They could spiral down together, he thought. There was something about a night so dark and a moon so slender which made self-immolation seem tempting.
Their balance wavered at the edge. The palace had not been designed for the tagma; its architecture had not been constructed with hooks in mind. The footing was uneven; the spires rose from the tiles at odd intervals, so that when he produced his knife and swung at her, he found himself cracking stone instead of bone as she slipped around the wall of the nearest turret.
She fell back and fired a hook; it impaled through his shoulder, sharp and impossibly painful. He tore the wire from its shaft, and went after her, his hands slick with blood, sliding on the roof when he tried to climb after her. She had ascended a little above him; she dropped down again onto him, boot-first. He fell under her weight. She fell too, unbalanced; there was blood on her hands as well, and on her boots. He could work with this: he could grapple her.
She was good. Her blade was sharp. But he was taller, and he was stronger, and he was better, and his blades were sharper.
And her hair was dangling over the roof. She was dangerously close, he thought, to slipping as he had slipped. It would be as easy for her as for him. All he had to do was let go. All he ever had to do was… let go.
And then, all around them, clouds of green smoke were erupting into existence, over and over again, in an enormous volley that brought to mind the cannons of the Walls. So many flares were firing at once, he could not even hope to count them all.
The tagma were here, and they had brought an army.
He could not help it: Death smiled.
And the Moon smiled too.
He said, "it's over."
"Far from it."
She smiled. Her teeth were stained bloody. His attack had left little shards of glass embedded in her face, like so much starlight.
"Wir sind nicht," she said, "die Jäger."
He said, slowly, as only Death could, "nicht..?"
"Wir sind," said the Szymańska girl, "der Köder."
He barely felt the blade go in.
There were no safe places here. They had known that well enough, before. He thought of them thus, with a not-insignificant amount of irony: children with curses. Children who had been trained to kill. Children on a terrible crusade.
Children, who had torn through a wall and a province, leaving only destruction and monsters in their wake.
Was he a child too, then?
He may as well. He followed reluctantly. He would have preferred to stay in sight of the sea, where he could pretend they were in view of home.
Did it matter? They would be home soon enough.
Ina had hoped to have more time. Ina had expected to have more time. They had risen up from the underground, and the horizon had seemed clear; they had risen above the ruins of Mønt, and the horizon had seemed clear.
But then the tagma were on them like wolves.
The first dropped down on her from above, a red blur. Ina fired her hooks and veered wildly to the right, struggling to evade them, but these were the experts at what they did: they did not need to swing wildly around each corner, and they could wield their weapons with as much expertise as if they were standing stock-still upon the ground.
They should have had more time. Why didn't they have more time?
To her left, maybe a few hundred yards away, she could see that one of the grey-garbed guards had hit Khalore, very hard; the Hanged Man had dropped from the air and hit the roof of a nearby building, very hard. She was scrambling to undo her harness, enough that Belle could pull herself free and sprint away as Khalore scrambled to her feet and engaged with the enemy.
Ina could watch no longer: all of the tension had abruptly disappeared from the wire upon which she had been so depending. She fell. The other wire did little to hold her up, but it did slow her: she hit the ground hard, palm-first, and when her face hit the ground she thought she felt her nose break.
One of the tagmas had cut through the wire upon which she had been so depending.
Ina had her sword in her hand even before she had risen. The tagma which had so pursued her was falling upon her with blade in hand; Ina darted from her path, forcing her into a slower descent as she came around the corner, and that was when Ina lunged forward with the sword. The tagma – not one she had seen before – parried her first thrust, and Ina remembered, not for the first time, that her sword was not designed for fencing. It was made for piercing.
She pierced the tagma's jacket.
Pierced skin and flesh as well. Drove it deep.
She had wanted to do this since she had seen Eero. She had wanted to do this since Ghjuvan had told her that he loved her and left her behind. She had wanted to do this since Zoran had come to her after initiation and she had heard her own scream echoing back to her as though amputated from her by force.
The sword went forward and forward and forward. Her hand came to rest against the sternum of the poor tagma who had drawn the short straw in pursuing her. Who was this person?
Who had they been?
Ina forced them from her sword again, and lashed her hook to another wire. Hiss. This was sooner than they expected to be pursued – this was too soon.
But they had made it far enough. For as another tagma – blue-suited like a Scholar, the fool – took aim at her and rose into the air, less like an avenging angel than he might have liked, Ina watched as a skeletal druj rose behind him in turn, silhouetted ivory against the scarlet-black terracotta jigsaw of the Mønt skyline.
The druj reached out a single eight-fingered hand, and closed its grasp over the blue-garbed Scholar. He burst into red gore; Ina could not tear her eyes from the sheer unreal simple horror of what she was watching.
The druj turned its hollow eye-sockets upon her. Ina fired her hooks again, and reeled herself backwards as quickly as she could, not once taking her eyes from the monstrous thing before her.
Fuck it, she thought. She would take it if she had to. What else was a xrafstar good for?
Was this not why they called her a Warrior?
fuck!
Khalore dove and flipped, desperately calling and firing and recalling and refiring the hooks so that she was pulled rapidly across the balcony of the abandoned viceroy's house, untrusting of the sky, untrusting of the ground, turning as she went to try and find her footing again. They were on her as fast as she could try to evade or parry, swords flashing, and their blades bit into her more often than they did not, edges flashing, gouging out chunks of flesh and scattering blood across the brick like some kind of bizarre confetti.
They called back and forth to one another. They knew one another. They were comrades, just the same as Khalore and her team. "Barden," called one, and "Shae," called another. Evanne Chae was there – Evanne Chae? Khalore thought, befuddled, and a hysterical laugh tore through her, for it felt pointed that the one-legged girl had been sent in pursuit of the one-armed Warrior – and there was a woman called Yakhin who wielded a sword longer and broader than the rest, two-handed, like she was carving through the sky itself.
Lorencio was somewhere in the mix: she had heard his name. She did not see him. It was for the best. His presence posed a question she had no desire to answer.
It was all a whirl of ruby and grey coats; she searched the horizon for any sight of Ilja, and found that he was not there. Bastard, she thought, but did not have the breath to spare to say it aloud. She was graceless on this new terrain. She just needed some space, she thought, just some space –
She had already opened up her wrist with her own hook; now, as she hit the ground, she found that she had torn through her knees and her fingertips, so that she left bloodied prints in her wake like a wounded animal. She scrambled up, seizing hold of the ladder which led to the roof, and clawed her way across the tiles, still straining to stand.
Her enemies had no such compunctions. They might as well have been born to this. When she spun, Yakhin's sword swung down like an executioner's axe. Khalore found herself scrambling back on her hand to avoid it, and reached for the reel – these fucking things! – to recall the hook. Shae was there in a split second and before Khalore could fully intellectualise her next step, she reached back, and yanked the trigger with all the force that she had left in her arm.
The final hook fired directly in front of her, and fired true, splitting Shae's face neatly in two as it moved through it and snapping open its claw to wrap around her skull as though trusting of this new safe purchase it had found. There was not much blood; the incision had been a clean one.
Evanne Chae screamed. Khalore stared. The corpse that had been Shae Txori fell to its knees and slid from the roof, wire whistling across the tiles at it fell.
Of course, it was still tied to her. It took Khalore with it.
She didn't even have time to swear.
Zoran had risen to catch Khalore; Inanna was not sure whether it was vision or intuition which had so compelled him, but she was relieved that something had. They would head towards the rendezvous, undeterred by their tagma attackers. She would join them there. What else could they do?
Ina's mind was too tangled by threads to think clearly. She could only forge forward.
She had fired through the air towards Wall Alliette, that which the Tower had broken down in their great, terrible, arrival to Illéa. The jagged scar in the wall was an enormous shadow in the gloom; she rose above it, and for a moment, she found herself staring out at the fields and forest which had seemed, for those first few nights, their entire world.
There was a druj moving in the forest, a druj that was not a druj. In the darkness, Ina found a kind of comfort; she was invisible enough for a moment that she could afford to stare at the thing moving at the edge of the forest.
She had seen this one before: that was strange enough. She hadn't expected to recognise anything on this long journey home, so tangled had their route away proved. The druj was a deer – Ina remembered thinking that this was not unexpected, when one tripped through the woods. It was enormous. In a forest of such enormous cedar trunks, rising to entirely blot out the sky and stars, the animal must have been thirty metres tall at its withers, all shaggy mane and amber eyes aglow with a light it did not deign to share with the rest of its surroundings. Its antlers stretched out in an enormous spiral of intricate curlicues, engraved with the constellation patterns Ina and Zoran had traced night-after-night, wider than Ina knew how to measure.
In this animal seemed to be contained the whole spirit of the night. It calmed her. It settled her.
She heard another flare gun fire. When she glanced back towards Illéa, she saw that blue smoke had burst over Mønt, an enormous mist drifting in a great invisible current, staining the gray stormclouds sapphire.
And then she was struck, hard, from behind as the excubitor dropped down onto her, their green coat a near-invisible gleam amongst the emerald blur of the forest around them and the darkness of the night. Ina barely had time to catch herself on her wires as she dropped onto the soil on the wall below. Her hook dug into the smooth stone surface of the Walls; she unfurled her wire in a great spiral, spinning over and again, more a fall than she had ever experienced before.
She hit the ground hard – she was getting better at it, but not by much – and shoved herself back up to her feet. The excubitor had already unsheathed their razor, which spun towards her in a gleaming spiral of silver. She screamed something incomprehensible even to herself as she staggered back – the blade caught her coat and ripped it open across her arms, shiveringly close to skin – and reached desperately for her own sword. Too late, she thought, too late and too slow, too slow and too weak and hadn't Pekka warned her she needed to work on her reflexes?
In only a moment, she would be able to tell him how right he had been.
Khalore was sprinting towards her. She would not get there in time.
She could not see Zoran. Had he decided to look away from that which he had known was inevitable?
The excubitor's sword glinted with holy fire as it caught the sunset.
Of course – gold.
"What were you thinking?"
Kinga had dropped to her knees as soon as she had been able; Kane had kept his hand upon the strap of her harness, as though afraid that if he did not maintain contact, then she would stagger into some other situation from which she would require rescuing.
He was not incorrect. She did not tell him that. She bent over herself, and tried to keep the clawed thing inside of her.
Sanav said, his voice small, "are you okay?"
"Kinga," Kane said, and she wasn't sure that she could name the emotion which had so clouded his voice. He didn't sound like himself. He sounded stranger and scarier. He had fallen to one knee beside her, but he had not touched her. His hands shook a little beneath his glove. Adrenaline, Kinga thought. Did he feel as alive as she did?
He had killed Oroitz Txori for her. Or – at least – he had believed, in the moment, that he was killing Oroitz Txori for her. Had he ever killed a person before? Did he understand what a dereliction of his duty that was?
Oroitz wasn't a person. He was become druj now.
She thought, dear kane, i won't get the chance to write you a letter because i'll be dead before you are. are you as afraid as i am? of outliving your own purpose? not dying when you ought?
She could see no sign of Pjotr or Ilja; the palace was still wreathed in green smoke. Hellfire – she could feel irritated concern rising in her chest. How much longer would she need to stall here? How much time did she have left to harvest the curse?
Would the other Warriors flee when they ought?
She would stall for as long as she could.
Kinga pointed. She said, "it's him, he's a – he's not going to stop."
Death was relentless: he had crawled up the spire after them, spider-like. His hands clung impossibly to the smooth stone; his chest gaped open over the wound that Kane had dealt him. His throat had turned black beneath Kinga's hands. In this darkness, she could only distinguish the broad strokes of his face: those enormous black eyes yawed open over that inky slash of a mouth, smiling broadly.
Kane said, "oh."
"Well," Sanav said, "that was all you had to say."
Somewhere above her, there was a sound like a muffled explosion. Like a bomb in a jar.
The excubitor who had been atop her –
She didn't have a head anymore. It happened so suddenly, and the sound followed only a moment later, that for a split second Ina stared at the place where herhead had been, the gaping hole that had once been a neck, the blood. She slumped forward on top of her. Some of the blood got in Ina's mouth. She choked on it.
Khalore said what she could not: "gross!"
The Hanged Man had seized the corpse by her shoulder and hauled her off Ina, who was struggling to catch her breath. "I didn't..."
Khalore's eyes floated across their surroundings.
They caught on something.
She screamed.
Ina turned. She saw.
She saw, and she did not understand.
It was not real. It could not be.
"Oh my god," she gasped, "you are a sight for sore eyes."
Truth be told, she had barely remembered that he existed.
"Tell the truth," Myghal Enys said. He had a shotgun slung across his shoulder; he was wearing the gray uniform of the Kur corps of Irij. For a moment, Ina was certain that she had died and that this might be hell. For a moment, Ina wasn't sure whether she was dreaming or lost in the fade of her curse. "You barely remembered that I existed."