Last First Snow (40 page)

To break her vow was to break her power. Technically, she had done neither.

One hell of a risk to run on a technicality. Many hells, even.

Temoc walked among his people, wreathed with gods, offering blessings. Where he touched, the light of his scars lingered. Chel followed him.

Elayne said yes, because she did not want to fight the King in Red. Because the Craft was the way of peace, truth, freedom. So she believed. If the system is broken, do what you can from within to fix it. What else was there?

The argument tasted like sand in her mouth. She said yes for those reasons, and also because she could not defeat the King in Red in his own city.

She tested once more the reins of obligation with which she held the Aberforth and Duncan contract. She never could have made that signature stick without Kopil's support. If she hadn't agreed to work with him.

Yet the deal tied her hands. Once, young and fresh with illusions of independence and power after heady victory in the Wars, she'd let another bind her to his will. She fought free, beat him at his own game, cast him into the outer darkness of academia, but years had come and gone and here she sat, bound again by her own tongue.

We gain strength from ties, she thought. That's the Craftswoman's way. Web yourself to others with bonds and debts, mortgage your life for power, and use that power to make nations dance.

Until one day you are called to dance yourself.

Reviewing the dream map of Skittersill she'd carved in stone, she frowned, and drew breath, and centered herself.

A drum beat in the distance. She looked north, and saw the war approach.

 

60

Gods guided Temoc through Chakal Square. They stroked his skin, and left glyph-trails in his wake. Their voices thundered beneath the world: turn here, stop, left, place your hand on this stone.

He blessed his remaining people as he passed. The gods are here for you. You are ready for this struggle. He knew a hundred ways to ready warriors for their end, and he deployed them all.

Then it was done. He returned to the altar, knelt, and bowed his head.

Gods' eyes watched him from inside his mind.

“Make this worth it,” he prayed, in the silence of his heart.

The gods should have some gentle touch, now at the last, for their servant before their altar—but the dark gaped, hungry and certain. The gods were tired, and the gods were old, and the gods did not need to keep up appearances with him. A sacrifice had woken them, but they were no more ready for this moment than was any soldier of Chakal Square. They were scared.

He smiled.

Well, he thought, that makes all of us.

His heart beat strong in his ears, a pounding drum like Shining Empire priests used to call their mountain men to wrestle.

No. That was neither heart nor drum.

He opened his eyes, and stood.

Chel stood beside him. She held the Warden's crossbow from the night before. In their wander through the camp she'd collected more discarded bolts—replenished the crossbow's supply and strapped the rest to a bandolier. She stared into the sky.

Black birds approached, high up. They neared, wingbeats slow and heavy, their snaky tails snapped javelin-straight behind them, for speed.

Chel cocked her crossbow, though they were far out of range. He did not stop her. She had to do something. Around the camp, others readied bows and spears and sticks and rocks. Temoc laid one hand on his blade, and opened his scars. Shadow flowed cold from them, and light. He gave himself to the gods and became less and more than human. Time ran slow.

Above, as one, Couatl folded their wings and fell like arrows toward Chakal Square. Sunlight coruscated from their wings. Stars glared from their foreheads, and silver chains draped their bodies.

But then the first wave pulled out of their dive, wings flared to brake and swoop above the square. Rainbows poured from them—no, not rainbows at all but a translucent fluid, a shimmering wet curtain that covered the sky and, as it fell, caught fire.

The Square began to burn.

*   *   *

The Couatl flew with clockwork precision, and the Wardens released their payload well. But gripfire was never an exact weapon.

Elayne had first seen it in a delaying action in the Schwarzwald, near Grangruft University—local small gods animated the forest to destroy the school before it could take flight. Roots lifted from the earth, twigs sharpened to thorns, vines braided into serpents. The grass itself sharpened to cut tendons and snare defenders' feet. The faculty released gripfire in a circle around the university, pointed outward. At first, it worked, burning a dead expanding ring around the campus grounds. But the stuff was treacherous. A breath of wind, or a god's dying curse, pushed it back onto the grounds, and they had to abandon half the campus before the end.

So when fire fell on Chakal Square, it hit the surrounding buildings too, and where it touched stone or wood or brick it caught and burned and spread.

Elayne knew what to expect, had tensed herself for it, holding the warding contract close, but the fire's sheer weight staggered her. Sunlight crisped to ash. Noxious fumes seared her lungs. The fire ran through her veins, melted her skin. She'd woven herself through the Skittersill, and felt its pain.

The members of her circle writhed. Zip's eyes popped open, rolled back in his head; white froth flicked from his lips.

A rainbow curtain covered the square.

She raised a shield within the meeting-tent ward: a shield technically outside Chakal Square, and so proof against her bargain with the King in Red. It buckled and flared spark-green, but held. Ozone and caustic alchemical stench tangled.

Outside, human screams rose amid the crackle of flame.

*   *   *

Temoc raised his hands as the curtain fell, and willed the gods' power to roll forth from him, to block the fire.

It did not.

Shadow flowed, yes, and spread, but directly over him, in a small bubble surrounding the altar, a few feet from center to edge. Enough to enclose Chel and a frightened few beside him, but no more. The glyph-lines he'd walked woke too, but offered no shelter. He strained, pulled, called to his patrons. Help us.

He received no reply but the shuffling of divine feet. Silence, tension, delay.

He strained with all his soul, his eyes bulged like the eyes of a racing horse, but he was one man and they were more, and the fire fell.

His people burned.

The fire coated his shield, pressed against it, heavy with the distance it had fallen. Through the haze of heat he saw the others die.

*   *   *

Everywhere caught fire at once. Tents flared incandescent. People fell beneath the fire's weight, and screamed where they lay. But Elayne and her circle were safe. Sweat beaded on her brow.

“We have to help them!” Tay leapt to his feet.

“Stay still,” Elayne shouted. “Temoc's gods—”

“They're doing nothing!”

“Stay in the circle. I can't—”

“Fuck your circle.” Tay dove out into the fire before Elayne could stop him.

She needed Tay. Old reflexes took over, combat reflexes, extemporizing logic: she sat within the ward, and she was threaded through her dream-circle: she was inside Tay's mind. So by protecting Tay she was protecting the part of herself in him—and she was, by definition, outside the Square.

She clad Tay's limbs in a shield of hard air. The dream map around her swam, and her mind ached with the effort of maintaining the interlocking arguments that guarded them from the inferno.

Her shield buckled. At the edges of the Square, geysers of flame rose from a tar rooftop, and spread to nearby structures.

But Tay lived.

He ran through the heat, a rippling ghost, dipped his arms into the fiery lake, lifted a slumped body, and ran back to the circle. Elayne's Craft wiped fire from his limbs, and from the woman he held. Her skin was blackened, her blouse burnt. Elayne saw a trace of bone, and smelled singed meat. The woman screamed, her throat raw. She was not the only one.

In the Square, they all were screaming.

But she was still alive.

Elayne drew the heat from the woman's burns, and the pain. Pain was a form of art, after all: a concentration of the soul, an extension of time. Pain gave power, and with power, Elayne could—almost—hold the dome upright, and keep the Skittersill from burning. Maybe the woman would die. Elayne had seen worse burns—

—not since the Wars—

—but she'd not die yet.

Tay and the others stared at the woman, horrified, in the half-light Elayne's Craft left as it drained the world to the dregs.

This was what came of staying within the lines.

No more.

She could not stand against the King in Red, but she could do more than she planned. She could save some of them. Not enough.

“Go,” she said. “All of you. Bring those you can. As many as fit inside the circle. Now!”

They ran, and she went with them in pieces.

*   *   *

Men fell, and women, aflame. Fire erupted from the viscous liquid the Couatl let fall, and flowed and stuck and dripped and rolled, splashed and clung and covered. Many screams became one scream from many throats, wet and hoarse at once as fire trickled into open mouths.

The grass mats burned. The water in the god-fountain burned, and the faceless god wept burning tears into a fiery pool. A woman struggled to stand, pressing against the fire that clung to her body. Her skin melted. She struck burning hair with burning hands and tried to breathe, but fire filled her lungs.

Temoc felt the first death at once. The second, a breath later. After that they came fast, each flowing into the next until only a single death remained, ugly and enormous as a scream. The air stank of oil and meat and singed hair. Chakal Square died around him, and yet he lived.

Beside the altar, Chel threw up.

The lake of fire rolled with waves where bodies tossed, whitecaps that were hands half flesh, half bone, clawing out of underflame.

Overhead, the Couatl wheeled around for another pass.

Is this it? he cried to the gods, through the torrent of death. Is this what you wanted?

Wait, the gods said.

For what?

For now.

And then there was light.

 

61

Elayne almost lost the city.

Her volunteers ran through the fire, senses webbed to hers: sulfur and acid vapor and char, burnt leather and metal and melted rubber from the soles of shoes. Around her, atop that perfect-imperfect map, the bodies piled, packed close: in a few minutes they'd rescued dozens, and Elayne took what she could from them, the heat in their flesh and the pain in their souls, to keep them safe. Her shields trembled and almost failed. If she had not been familiar with this feeling—if she had not learned from a twisted master in her youth how to span the gaps between minds, to split and recombine herself—if she had not learned those black arts, she would have broken in the first minute.

She nearly broke anyway.

The Skittersill blazed. A slick layer of flame covered the wooden shops that lined Bloodletter's Street and the brick-and-timber fronts at Crow, fire eating stone, crisping and cracking earthworks—fire that laughed at the rules of fire, fire that burned what could not burn.

With all the focus she could spare, she opened the line to Aberforth and Duncan, called on the insurance contract, invoked true names and serial numbers. The dream map she'd drawn seared her thoughts. The city burned, and she, with stolen power, told it to stop.

Beside her, a man curled into a ball and wept.

The insurance contract responded grudgingly to her call. She felt buildings burn, heard them scream in her mind, and demanded Aberforth and Duncan to perform. This would work. Had to work. She hoped.

There had been no time to negotiate Purcell's agreement; a poorly written contract might let his employers slide out of their obligations to protect and to defend. But though she did not trust Tan Batac in any other particular, she trusted his greed and cunning to have negotiated a good deal.

But still the firm moved slowly, so slowly, to honor her call. Fiery plumes erupted from rooftops. Screams bubbled and choked off. With her eyes closed, she saw the green web of the crowd's faith pulse with their deaths. Hundreds in a few minutes, tight spiraling souls burst like fireworks.

All for nothing, all for a scorched stretch of earth where some developer would build a shopping mall, and everyone left alive would profit, and none would remember, unless this contract moved. Now.

The power came.

It flowed smooth and slow and gold and heavy as a flood of honey down from Aberforth and Duncan, into her, and from her into the dream map. Eyes still closed, feeling rather than seeing the contours of the map, she directed the power to dormant wards in the Skittersill's nails and mortar.

The argument was easy enough: the gripfire tugged matter from matter. Windowsill, rafters, casement, insulation, and drywall all burned on their own. But each piece was part of a building, and the building as a whole did not burn merely because one piece burned. And yet how could a part be burning if the whole was not on fire?

Sophistry, but you didn't need to work hard to outfox flame. Even Craftborn demon-fire was pretty dumb.

The Skittersill burned around her but was not consumed. This trick would not work forever: even the most massive building had a flashpoint. For the moment, wood and insulation glowed, but they did not erupt—excess heat seeped into surrounding stone and metal. The Skittersill's buildings would not burn until they all burned together.

It hurt, intensely.

Not as much as the men and women around her hurt. Even those she shielded were singed by metal buttons and buckles, parboiled in their own sweat.

The bodies—the people not yet dead—mounted around her as Tay and Cozim dragged the fallen to safety. She saw no one she knew. They must be on fire already.