“I won’t let my people die at the hands of yours.”
“Listen to him, dammit,” Elayne said.
“I have. For days. And here we are.”
“This is a mistake.”
“Not mine,” Kopil replied.
A drum beat inside Elayne’s chest. Shadows crossed the face of the sun. The crowd’s screams changed from rage to terror. Elayne looked up. Through the shield’s blue arc she saw two feathered serpents dive. With twenty feet to spare, their wings unfurled, braking, and cast scalloped shadows upon the square. Talons gripped the shields’ slick surface, and with mighty wingbeats the Couatl rose, bearing the Wardens, Elayne, the King in Red, and Tan Batac north toward the Bloodletter’s Street camp. Below, faces merged into a carpet of rage—unbroken save for a small space beside the meeting tent where Elayne saw, in receding miniature, Mina and Caleb, and Temoc fighting toward them.
“Don’t let this happen,” she shouted, weaving Craft to carry her words to his ears. “Don’t.”
If he answered, she could not hear.
“Not at all,” said Tan Batac, “what I expected.”
31
The Couatl landed behind the Wardens’ sandbag rampart. The King in Red released the shield, and they settled onto pavement. To the south, the crowd’s voices roared.
“We have to go back,” Elayne said. “Before this gets worse.”
“We must do nothing of the sort,” Kopil said. “Bullets. Honestly. Who still uses those?”
“Someone who thinks their target isn’t warded.”
“So Batac was not chosen at random.”
“He was the most vulnerable,” she said, and bent again to her patient.
The second Couatl set Zoh down nearby. He staggered when the shield released him, and wheeled with arms raised as if expecting an attack. Even through the silver mask, Elayne could see his fear.
A Warden cried “Medic,” and two more wheeled a stretcher toward her; Captain Chimalli followed close behind. “What happened?”
“Someone shot him.” The medics lifted Tan Batac onto the stretcher. Elayne helped. She felt very cold. “Zoh tried to find who. It turned ugly. A kid’s dead.”
“Did he find the weapon?”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t see.”
Chimalli frowned. “That’s bad.”
“You are a model of perspicacity,” Kopil said.
Elayne grabbed a medic’s arm. “Get Batac to a hospital. He lost a lot of blood, and I took his soul to keep him from losing more.” They nodded, yes ma’ams all around, and ran off, wheeling the stretcher.
Batac’s eyes fluttered open as he passed, rolled, fixed on Elayne. He smiled. Smiled. A baby’s expression, soft with idiocy. She remembered the dead child in his mother’s arms, white flecks of bone against wet blood and black hair. She wanted to strangle Tan Batac for his smile, wanted to tear her Craft from him and let him die.
“Man the wall! Companies Forty-seven and Forty-eight, get up there! Move!” Wardens ran for the barricade. Weapons lockers opened and Wardens passed out stun nets and lightning rods Elayne hoped they knew how to refrain from using. Some of the weapons she did not recognize, which she hoped was a good sign. Crowd control. Nonlethal. In theory.
The medics rolled Tan Batac to a hospital wagon. She noticed a red handprint on one medic’s arm, and realized it was hers. Blood covered her hands, and soaked her shirt and jacket cuffs. Sticky, thickening, still warm. She pulled its heat into her. Blood froze into red crystals. She flexed her fingers, and the crystals fell like crimson snow.
“We have a wounded man,” Chimalli said. “But no evidence, and with that crowd out there, we won’t get any. They’ll cover the assassin’s tracks. No evidence, no killer. We’re in for a bad few days.”
A flash from atop the barricade, the colors of the world inverted.
“Or more,” he said, and ran to meet the assault. Elayne followed.
* * *
The crowd near Temoc convulsed with rage. Ten thousand wills condensed to one around that mother’s scream. Couatl bore the King in Red and the murdering Warden north and east to the Bloodletter’s Street barricade, and the crowd followed them, united by anger. The protesters near Bloodletter’s could not know, yet, about the dead child, about Tan Batac, about the murders. Still they washed against the barricade, first waves of a rising tide.
Temoc flailed among them. Grabbed a passing red-arm. “Find me the one who shot Tan Batac.”
The red-arm pulled back at first, not realizing who spoke. Temoc turned the man to face him. The red-arm’s eyes reflected the flames of Temoc’s face.
“Hear me.”
He did not mean to raise his voice, but the words came out as a roar. The red-arm flinched, cowered. Good enough.
“Go into the crowd. Find the one who shot Tan Batac. Now.”
The man obeyed.
They had to catch the killer, and hope Batac survived. Craftsmen would tend him, which was more than Temoc could say for the child. Gods. The mother. He should have sent that red-arm to shelter her. And—
Mina.
All the world’s a mess, and we within it smears of flashing teeth and narrowed eye and clutching hand, cloth and spit and hair. Near the tent, he saw a flash of his wife’s face, Caleb in her arms, a blink and then gone. He cried her name.
With power upon him, he moved through the people of Chakal Square. Most gave way. Those that did not, he forced: grabbed a man around the waist, picked him up, and set him down elsewhere, swept confused protesters aside with one arm. Shouts and curses trailed him, cut off as people realized who it was they cursed.
When he reached Mina, he hugged her, crushing Caleb between them. The boy squirmed, grabbed his mother around her waist. Temoc smelled his son’s hair, his wife’s skin, beneath the rising stink of panic. “You’re okay.” Perfect, not even bruised. He wanted to pull them closer, pull them inside so they would never be apart again.
He heard a metal twang, a gravelly voice: the Major. “Vultures! They lie and kill and run, afraid to stand for their crimes!”
He ignored everything but her, but him.
“We’re fine,” Mina said in his ear.
“We’re okay, Dad.”
“It’s falling apart. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Cheers ripped through the air. Were they cheering the Major? Themselves? “We have to get you out of here.”
“Can you stop this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Chel stood nearby, directing a band of red-arms to attend the fallen. “Keep them in the tent. Protect them.”
“I will.”
“I should stay.”
Mina grabbed his arms. He felt her fingernails through his shirt. “We’ll be fine.” She had to shout for him to hear her, even so close that he could smell her shampoo. A few hours ago, he’d made eggs for breakfast. So few, so long. He’d thought himself clever: the broadsheets out of the picture, the end in sight. You’ll see history, he’d said. He hadn’t lied. But not all history was pleasant in the making.
The tide grew stronger. People streamed toward the barricade. The Major’s voice rolled on, invoking rage spackled over by millennia of civilization. Temoc could not hear the words. Demon wind smelted them to war cry, prayer call. “This isn’t what I wanted.” Temoc’s arms were steel bars, himself a statue, unmoved by the crowd.
Moved, though, by her hand on his chest, pushing him back into the current. He never could resist her. “These people need you.”
Mountains fell with less reluctance. Caleb clutched her, and reached for him. So much Temoc wanted his face to show, such pressure building in his chest, in his stomach. But he wore the armor of faith, and he could not show his son weakness. This was what a man did, when it had to be done. Stood against a mob. Led his people. Gave himself to the greater good.
Left his family.
Temoc turned away. He wanted to throw up. He forced himself downstream. Glanced back, once, allowed himself that, saw Mina carry Caleb int
o the tent, saw Chel and her squad stand guard. A last meeting of eyes. Her lips moved. He wished he could hear what she said.
He waded west through the human flood toward the mother of the fallen boy. Red-arms followed him, confused. He found a clearing: people stood around the woman and her child’s body, insulating them from the riot. Kapania and Bill knelt beside her, not speaking. They had a child, too. A daughter. Far away, he hoped.
Bill’s eyes widened when he saw Temoc. “What’s happening? I ran here right off.”
Like he should have. “The Major is leading a charge,” Temoc said. “These red-arms will help you.”
“What should we do?”
“Take care of her. I’ll stop this.”
“How?”
“I’ll think of something.”
Not that there was time to think. Only time to force through the crowd, to call upon reserves of faith to lend him majesty. Robed in shadows he advanced, and this time there was no need to move people out of his way. They bowed to let him pass, shouted his name. Their awe augmented his power: it was blasphemy to offer such a gift to any but the gods, and blasphemy to accept, but he would atone later. He needed the might they offered. He strode through them as in times past he’d strode through the ranks of his army.
Flashes of light from the Bloodletter’s Street barricade, and screams. Stun nets—wire webs threaded with lightning which tangled those they caught, rendering them an obstacle to their fellows in a charge. Temoc saw no lethal weapons yet; no Couatl descended to strike. Perhaps they would not. Couatl were vulnerable near the ground. The Wardens would not risk their aerial trumps so early, not when they might serve other uses later: reconnaissance, or bombing.
Old wartime instincts returned so readily. As if he had spent four decades fighting this battle in his head unawares, and now the plans bubbled up like tar pit gas.
He found the Major near the barricade. Armored minions surrounded him, and flocks of angry people watched and listened and obeyed. “Press Bloodletter’s Street, but send parties east and west down Crow and Coyote. We’re boxed in to the north, but if we flank them they’ll retreat. Go!” With an imperious gesture as if parting an ocean.
They went. Gods help them.
Temoc approached. Eyes widened. Men lowered sharpened sticks and lengths of pipe. Some fell to their knees.
“Temoc,” said the Major. “Welcome.”
“You might not think so when I say what I have come to say.”
“Peace has failed.”
“It will, if you cut off the Wardens’ retreat. They’re not trying to hurt our people yet. They will lose restraint if you make them desperate.”
“We want justice.”
“You want to kill that Warden.”
“Don’t you?”
“I want to stop this riot before it becomes a war.”
“So we let them murder a child and get away with it.”
“He will be punished.”
“No.” So much anger in that last word. “The Wardens will claim it was a mistake. Their man responded on instinct. A fine, perhaps a brief prison sentence. If one of our people did the same to them, they’d be gutted in Sansilva at high noon.” Playing to the crowd. This was a performance, not an argument.
“Hold your assault. I will go to the barricade. I will bring us the Warden.”
“Talk costs time. They’ll cut us off and kill the revolution before it begins.”
“Will you throw us into war without even trying for peace?”
The Major raised one gauntleted hand, revealed a wristwatch strapped between his makeshift steel plates. “Half an hour. Convince them if you can.”
A chance. Not much, but still.
“Half an hour,” he said, and marched toward the barricade.
32
“It’s been too long since my last siege,” said the King in Red atop the rampart. Elayne stood beside him, looking out and down.
“This isn’t a siege.”
The skeleton laughed. “What would you call it, then?”
Protesters climbed the sandbag wall, boosting one another, pressing toward the heights. A bulky bearded man dragged himself up with sheer muscle, two feet from the top, one. As his hand cleared the rampart, a Warden grabbed him and pushed. The man fell, screaming. Elayne cushioned his fall with Craft.
Wardens dropped another stun net over the side, and where silver threads struck climbers the climbers fell. Cries rose from those whose jaws the current did not clench.
“A day at the beach,” she said.
“Unfortunate metaphor. The ocean wears beaches down.”
“We don’t have infinite nets.”
“A small oversight, easily corrected. At any rate, we don’t need them. I could join the battle. Or you could.”
“I won’t. And as your counsel, I urge you not to, either.”
“You’re no fun.”
“First, this isn’t fun. And second, you don’t pay me for fun.”
“I suppose I do pay you.”
“Trust me,” she said. “When this is done, you won’t have to wonder.”
“They attacked us.”
“You don’t get a free pass on atrocities just because they hit first.”
“We have the deal.”
“People are dead, and more are dying. Those nets aren’t toys. We have to stop this before it gets worse.”
“If they send someone to talk, then I will talk. What’s wrong with enjoying a little skirmish in the meantime?”
She pointed to a burst of green light approaching through the sea of limbs and angry faces. “There’s your someone. Vacation’s over.”
He sighed. “Very well.”
* * *
Temoc crossed Crow toward Bloodletter’s Street and the Wardens’ wall. A knot of red-arms near the barricade urged the attackers on. Their leader kept shouting even after her fellow red-arms noticed Temoc and fell silent. She did not stop until Temoc tapped her on the shoulder.
“We are changing plans,” he said. I must speak, he prayed, and the gods answered, yes. “Fall back,” he cried, and his voice echoed. “I will speak with the King in Red.”
* * *
Stillness rippled out from Temoc. Those among the crowd that could, turned to watch him. Fallen protesters writhed on the pavement, quivering as stun nets sparked.
Kopil spoke. “What do you want?”
“To stop the fighting.”
“Your people attacked us. We defended ourselves.”
“Murdering a child is an interesting form of self-defense.”
Their eyes met across space. They had fought, in the God Wars: wrestled in midair above the obsidian pyramid at 667 Sansilva while gods writhed broken below.
Elayne liked most parts of a Craftswoman’s life—liked carving dead things up and waking them, liked manipulating the hidden forces of the world. She did not like waiting beside a client, hoping he would not say something stupid. She knew the King in Red, and knowing him knew he was pondering responses that ranged from sarcastic (But you have so many, surely you can’t miss one!) to professionally inhuman (These things happen.). Unfortunately she could not call for a recess in this court.
“I am sorry,” he said, and she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she held.
“Sorry is not enough. We want justice. We want the murderer.”
“He will stand trial.”
“Will he stand masked?”
“Masked as a Warden,” Kopil said. “He did what he did—if he did anything at all, a claim of which we have no proof—in uniform. His family deserves protection.”
“Who will hold him until the trial?”
“We will,” the King in Red replied, too fast.
She hoped Temoc would accept that. Hoped he would realize how little ground the King in Red could give. Temoc had to see that, standing atop a barricade manned by Wardens, with Wardens at their back and a mob in front, they could not offer a Warden up as sacrifice. If they had time to conv
ince the captain, then maybe, but there was no time. Temoc was barely holding the battle in check.
“Not enough,” Temoc said.
* * *
How could it be enough? Temoc could read a crowd. These people wanted blood, and failing that, victory. Blood he could not, would not, give them. As for victory, how might they accept something so intangible as a guarantee the right Warden would be punished?
I need more than that. He glanced from the King in Red, imperious atop the ramparts, to Elayne—could not implore them without losing the crowd, but he wished he could, so much his bones ached.
“How do we know the right Warden will stand trial? He hides behind a mask. Strip the mask and give him to us. We will hold him safely while you prepare the trial.”
The skeleton laughed. “You expect me to surrender one of my people? We have seen the dangers of Chakal Square. Tan Batac would attest to them, if he were conscious.”
Unconscious, not dead. One point in their favor, at least.
“One madman’s actions do not taint us all. I say your Warden will be safe.”
* * *
“Let me go with him,” Elayne said under her breath. “This will work.”
“No.” The King in Red could talk without moving his jaw.
“You’re trying to protect me.”
“I will not give them a bargaining chip.”
“You just don’t want to lose.”
“What happens when you sleep? When Temoc or some gutter witch defeats your wards and you and Zoh wake up to find yourself splayed on an altar?”
“You are being irrational.”
“We cannot trust you,” Kopil said, loud enough for all to hear.
* * *
Godsdamn it to all hells. So close. The refusal with a pause was even worse than one without. The pause showed reflection, consideration, rejection. “Show him to us at least. Give us his face, his name, so we will know him when he stands trial.”
“And expose his family.”
“You can protect his family. Let the man choose, at least. Let him refuse us.”
* * *
“That’s it,” she said. “He can’t back down more. Ask Zoh.”
“Not without a concession.”
“Ask for one.”
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