Cloud was nowhere to be seen, though whether he was himself being spun about or was hanging somewhere more in control she could not guess.
Something slammed into her. For a moment she was sure the tornado must have uprooted a tree from one of the practice pitches outside the room they had been in, the tree sliding through the air like a ship in a stormy sea, then finding its way to her. She wondered if she had broken any bones.
Then, just as fast, she realized it was no tree. She hadn't been hit by something, she had landed on something. In the next moment the storm disappeared, the dark winds and dust and dirt they had stirred up disappearing as quickly as they came.
She was on hands and knees on the highest wall of the castle that surrounded the palace. Arrow was beside her, flat on his back, staring up at the sky and muttering darkly under his breath.
Cloud stepped down out of the air as lightly as if there had been an invisible staircase there.
"I see the trip was a bit nicer for you," said Sword. Arrow muttered a bit more forcefully at that, and she was glad she couldn't hear what he was saying.
Cloud just smiled, though it was a tight smile, nearly lacking in warmth. He pointed.
Sword rocketed to her feet – or tried to. Even after the relatively short trip from the palace to the castle wall, she must have spun at least a hundred times or more, and now discovered that her mind was still busily spinning. She stumbled, and only a quick hand from Cloud kept her from going right over the side of the wall.
She looked at him. He didn't seem in the least dizzy. "I think I hate you right now," she managed.
Arrow was no longer muttering. He had managed to turn over and was busily throwing up.
It was almost surreal: the spinning, the dizziness, the sense that this was some strange dream –
(like Phoenix in my room what's going on what's wrong with the world)
– and under it all the screams.
Sword finally managed to get her feet under her enough to walk, and made her way to the edge of the wall. Inside the castle was the palace itself, and outside the castle wall was the dry moat – no water within, but studded with spires that could impale any who fell within, and itself encircled by the spikes that stood as silent warning to any who sought to escape Ansborn.
Beyond them: fields, shops, homes – a city that had sprung up around the center of Ansborn, the center of the world.
The screaming came from an area only a dozen rods from the wall a stone's throw from the bridge that spanned the moat. The wall there had been pulverized, knocked to half its height by some unknown force. Rocks had been thrown high in the air, then rained down on the shops and kiosks that grew in the shadow of the spires. The people down there were crying and screaming – some in shock, some in pain.
Some in grief. Sword saw several bodies, laying in the dirt and grass.
"Are you here for him? Are you his protectors?"
Sword looked to the sound. That same mechanized voice, harsh and ugly. It sounded like it was coming from above her, which was impossible since this was the highest point of the wall. But she looked up and gasped.
It was a suit of armor and iron, shaped like a man but larger. Gears shifted on his shoulders and arms, and fire seemed to shoot out of his feet and back, flames that somehow held him aloft. The symbol of a Bishop of Faith – what many simply called the sign of Faith – could be seen on the armored helm, glowing even in the daylight.
The thing nodded. "I have no need to kill you. Not now. Bring me Malal."
Sword ignored him. She turned to Cloud and made several hand motions. He seemed to understand them. So did Arrow, apparently, because he said, "Oh, no, not –"
Then the twister came again. This time it left her alone, whisking Arrow away and depositing him on the highest tower of the palace. Sword saw that Cloud was, in fact, floating in the exact center of the small tornado. Not turning, not spinning as Arrow did – she saw him pass by every second or less – he was in perfect control of himself, if not of those he transported.
The storm dropped Arrow at the tower, then returned to the mechanical man.
There were no words to start the fight. Cloud was like Sword – he wasn't a warrior-priest like Brother Scieran, someone bound by ideas of honor and fair fighting. He had been born to a family who loved him, been raised to avenge them. He did not stop to announce his attentions, the tornado simply engulfed the metal man.
Sword became aware of others on the wall: soldiers posted there, who had scattered, first fleeing from the destruction, then the bravest of them running back again to see what could done to help those injured in whatever blast had taken the wall apart. Now they were running to her, aware that she was part of the Emperor's inner circle, not daring to ask what was happening, but surely hoping that they would be given instruction – and perhaps some information – if they were nearby.
She said nothing. Just watched as Cloud's tornado threw itself against the armored giant who hung in the sky. She could barely see Cloud, but the metal man was easier to spot – the fires of foot and back glared so brightly that they were visible even through the swirling winds.
He hung there as easily as he had in the clear air of moments before. Sword felt something change around them, felt the air pressure shift as Cloud gathered more power to himself. The maelstrom grew, broadening until it took up most of the inner courtyard of the castle, pushing against the boundaries of the palace itself. People fled from the grounds, trying to get away from the sucking winds, but Sword saw several people hauled into the twister, only to be softly pushed out a few moments later by other, smaller tornadoes.
The power it would take Cloud to maintain that many different storms, to be aware of so much while maintaining his main attack – it had to be astounding. Yet even now, with no more room for the tempest to grow, it swirled faster and faster, chunks of the barracks on this side of the castle pulling up, then the entire structure –
(empty, thank the Gods)
– yanking up in a single piece, flying into the tornado and then dashing to pieces within it.
And still the fires that showed the presence of the metal attacker did not move. Still they hung motionless.
Thunder bellowed. Rain began to fall. The soldiers that had gathered around her fell back as the rain thickened, and suddenly was rain no more. Instead, hail the size of bullets fell on the castle wall, pelting the stone with sounds like a million bones snapping.
Sword was forced to back away as well. She couldn't see Cloud at all, the impossible weather the only thing serving to prove he existed at all.
And the fires held still.
Lightning arced. It tore the sky, the first two strikes seeming random, but the next two coming down directly into the center of the tornado. For a moment the center was illuminated and she saw the perfect shadow of Cloud, arms outstretched, back arched in effort as he called down the lightning. She also saw the metal man, still hanging motionless in the air.
The lightning cascaded over the armored creature. It flowed over it, rolled through every crack and cranny.
The armored thing hung for another moment, then ascended to an even greater height. Once again that shrieking, grinding voice came forth.
"I TIRE OF THIS GAME."
The thing moved so fast Sword could barely see it. One moment it was hanging there, the next its back flared and it shot forward… and all the weather fell back to its normal spring glory in one terrible instant.
Cloud was falling. Falling, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
13
The world slowed.
Sword screamed.
She had known only two families. One had been as a Blessed One – one of a handful of Greater Gifts pressed into service as assassins for the Empire. In the other assassins – in Armor, Garden, Scholar, Teeth, Siren, and even Marionette/The Poppet and Devar, though they alone of all of them had been truly evil – she had found friends. People who understood her. Brothers and sis
ters and a father.
When she discovered that the Blessed Ones worked for a corrupt Empire, when she found that the revolutionaries known as the Cursed Ones were the people she should be helping, the change was hard at first. But she found the Cursed Ones to be just as worthy of her love, and in them found her second family. In them found new brothers, sisters, fathers, friends.
And now one of them tumbled from the sky. Cloud, falling from high enough that when he hit there would be nothing left to bury.
And nothing she could do about it.
She screamed, and screamed, and –
(and maybe Wind will come maybe his sister will come maybe she'll catch him maybe she'll hear me scream but she can't hear she's deaf just like him oh gods please don't let him –)
– and watched him fall.
Then, before he touched earth, the thing that had thrown him down also brought him up. The armored thing swept down, fire on its back blazing. It caught Cloud only a few feet from the ground, and held him by the neck, dangling there unconscious.
"I will not let him die so easily," said the voice. One hand was still around Cloud's neck, but now the other cradled his head almost gently. "He will die in pain, unless you bring me the pretender. Bring me Malal."
Something whined through the air. A spark flew off the helmet, and Sword smiled. That was why she had told Cloud to carry Arrow away: it never hurt to have someone covering you. Especially someone who had better eyesight than a hawk and who could shoot a thorn from a rose at three leagues' distance.
A second spark flew, and the suit looked at the palace. Something whirred within it. "I see you, little Gift," said the voice. The helm spun to look at the spot where smoke still billowed from the hole in the wall. "There's a nuisance on top of the high tower," said the voice. "Deal with it."
Sword didn't know what she expected to see. Surely not a little girl holding a woolly in one hand, leading a huge young man with gaping mouth and widely-staring eyes with the other. They clambered over the wreckage of the hole, the girl equally careful of both her charges, then into the courtyard area. The big man stumbled at the last, and almost fell, knocking into the girl. She held him up carefully, as though it were even possible for someone her size to stop a man of his girth from tumbling to the ground should gravity so will it.
He managed to right himself, though, then swept her up into an awkward, painfully sincere embrace. She grimaced and whispered something into his ear, and he let her down with a look of remorse every bit as sincere as the embrace had been.
The whole of it was so strange that it tore Sword's attention away from the danger Cloud was in. She couldn't help but stare, and, staring, the girl saw her.
They locked eyes.
The girl smiled. And the woolly ran up her shoulder and jumped into the air.
Like all such creatures, the woolly was small – barely the length of a man's forearm. But as it flew high, it seemed to swell – slightly at first, then more and more. Soon it was the height of two men, with legs and arms that were jointed in the way of nightmares, and a mouth that gaped with far too many needle teeth.
The girl, though… what happened to her was far stranger. She melted away, like a pile of sand in a wind. Sword saw that she was connected to the woolly-thing by some kind of leash, and that leash pulsed with the same light that made the symbol on the armored creature's helm glow. The girl melted away, melted into the leash, melted into the woolly, and as she did it reared back and shrieked at the Heavens.
The big one, the simple young man, laughed and danced. He leaped atop the creature, wrapping thick arms around a thicker neck, and suddenly the thing was off, running in a strangely broken gait across the courtyard, leaping over or just straight through anything that got in its way.
Headed, Sword knew, toward Arrow.
Arrow apparently knew it, too. She heard bullets firing, the metal bits Pushed by their magic at speeds too fast to see. The creature roared as it ran, but did not falter, or even slow.
Arrow.
The next shot took the simple man. Sword would have felt bad for him, were it not that he was clearly part of the plot that was trying to bring down her friends – if not destroy the Empire.
And wasn't I trying to do just that, not long ago?
But not now. Now I'm trying to set it right.
The simple man rocked back with the impact of the bullet. Arrow didn't miss – he never did – and the bullet no doubt hit him straight in the eye, or found its way to the base of his skull through his neck. But he didn't fall.
The woolly kept charging.
And still he didn't fall.
Instead, he began to change. Not anything she could really see – the change was one of his bearing, his manner. Suddenly gone was the simpleton, replaced by –
(What?)
– a creature. A thing.
A beast.
He still looked like a young man, but he roared a wordless roar that was the mirror of the screams of the woolly creature. He shifted, and no longer was he holding the beast in his arms, no now he was riding it, his knees clamped around its withers. He raised his hands skyward, then leaned forward and reached for his prey.
Blood flowed down his chest, and Sword saw that Arrow's bullets were finding their mark. They just weren't stopping the creature.
She looked back to the machine-thing. It still held Cloud casually in its hand, in the courtyard far below. And unlike Cloud she could not control the winds, could not fly.
The machine seemed to sense her frustration. She felt like whatever was below the helm was grinning at her.
She had not flight.
But she did have Gifts – and Greater – of her own.
With a roar, fire exploded from her hands. The armor shifted, and in the same way she sensed the simpleton had disappeared, she sensed whoever was inside the iron was at last taking her seriously – surely he must, for the fire that she held was greater far than the fire that came from his suit.
She screamed… and threw herself over the wall.
She twisted in midair, feeling the fires of her Gift wrap around her hands, more of the flames enveloping her feet. The people of Knowledge favored some of the stranger weapons, but those came just as easily as the more typical ones in the castle armory. So she could handle shuko and ashiko as easily as rapier or broadswoard.
The spikes that gripped themselves to her hands and feet were not primarily weapons – any more than a rock was a weapon. But if it could be used as such, then she could use it. So the teeth of fire bit into the side of the wall, and bit deep. Her mad fall became a controlled descent as the claws on foot and palm gouged great furrows in the wall, slowing her more with each passing foot.
But still fast. So fast that when she hit the ground it was with a hard jolt that would have broken most people's bones.
But, again, she was not most people. For she was the master of fighting, and fighting was nothing if not motion.
She rolled, absorbing the impact with every part of her, spreading it out so that instead of a bone-smashing blow it became merely a discomfort. And when she came to her feet, the claws had disappeared from her hands and feet. In their stead, she bore twin javelins that she threw at the armored creature – one at his eye, one at his center.
He moved, calmly but quickly, shifting slightly so that Cloud was between him and the incoming missiles.
Sword felt her stomach clench. She waved her hand, and the twin shafts of light and flame disappeared an instant before impaling her friend and brother.
Now the armored thing moved, letting go of Cloud with one hand and aiming his arm in her direction. Atop the arm was a tube, and it glowed for an instant. Sword reacted in the same instant. A glowing katana appeared in her hand, batting aside whatever had been fired at her.
There was an explosion, knocking her back in a storm of bright sound. Her feet dug tracks in the dirt, she almost lost her balance. She looked at her katana and saw that it ended halfway up the blade. A
moment of concentration, and it reappeared, but still, she had never before encountered something that could nullify her power this way.
What is that weapon. What is this thing?
The thing seemed to be considering her.
Then, at last, it cast Cloud to the side. At the same moment, it fell the last few feet to the earth. The fires on back and feet did not extinguish, but they dimmed to near-nothing.
The thing crouched. The helm opened and Sword found herself looking at an old, old man.
"You fight well." The helm snapped back. The armored man crouched, and there was nothing feeble or infirm in his movements.
"Now, let us see how you die."
14
The world was a thing of moments, of intersections occurring at varying speeds.
That was what most people didn't understand about Arrow's Gift. They looked at him and thought he was merely someone who shot, who shot fast. But it was more than that. He understood the ways things came together, the collisions things would make, the way each individual particle would glance off any other. It was perfect sight, aligned with perfect understanding.
The fact that he could draw a bow and fire an arrow, that he could level a gun and fire all the bullets and then lock in a new cartridge or shell or cylinder when most people were still trying to aim their first shot… that was all mechanics. That was the thing his body did, as opposed to the miracle of what his mind knew, and could understand.
Angles, intersections. Actions and reactions.
Usually it was confined to things. To the bullets and shells and arrows and bolts that he sent through the air, always perfectly, to hit whatever target he decided to hit. To the way they would impact, and whether they would lay dead in what they hit, or glance off at an angle to hit something else. To impact dully, and lay in a single piece within whatever he shot, or to shatter like glass and become a thousand shards to destroy the insides of his marked prey.
Usually, it was things. But sometimes he saw the intersections in other ways. He saw it in the way his father had looked at his family – a love so unadulterated and pure that Arrow knew even as a child that such a love could never veer far from the objects of its affection. That Creed, Lord of the Southern Grasslands, was an arrow that would dodge whatever obstacles, would make its way through any weather, to stay close to those he loved.
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