by Jon Hollins
She tore into their ranks, pirouetting, whirling, ducking, leaping. She arced through trails of blood. Her knives rose and fell, rose and fell, stitching out a pattern of violence, of defiance, of escape.
She stood panting, in a circle of bodies.
Balur was standing nearby, head cocked to one side. Will was standing, bent double, hands on his knees, sucking in air.
“Damn,” Balur said.
“Shut up and just get those gods-hexed doors open.”
He didn’t even bother removing the bar, just kicked five times, until it split. Cold air rushed in, and they rushed out.
16
Some Like It Hot
Quirk’s stomach rumbled. Of everything, that was probably the worst of it. That the smell of cooked flesh filled the small cell, and her stomach rumbled.
Two corpses stood before her. Silhouette sketches of men. One had a sword held out toward her, clutched in ashen fingers. The other stood farther back, pointing at her. Then, slowly, they fell apart. The sword clattered to the floor as the finger that clutched it flaked to ash.
She was alone in a room of dust and smoke.
A noise left her. Something like a sob. Something like a laugh. Something like horror and something like ecstasy. She had done this. She had. And they had deserved it. Gods, they had deserved it … But … Had she?
Had she been worthy to be their judge? Their executioner? How could anyone? Wasn’t she in this moment as bad as Diffinax himself? Her unilateral decision to simply end a life. Who had given her that right?
And yet, even as her head reeled, her heart sang. She had done it. She had unleashed herself, been truly herself for the first time in years, in decades. She felt … complete. As if this was meant to be. As if she had been born for this.
“Gods.” She put her head in her hands. Her stomach growled again. She felt her knees giving way.
Something was rising out of her, and for a moment she didn’t know what it was. And then she was screaming, howling out all of her fear, and her rage, and her hate. She was storming through the cell, kicking at the swirling ashes, screaming obscenities, until she was left gasping and panting, watching the tears drip from her face to make small craters in the ashes on the floor.
And then she heard another noise. Someone else’s sob.
Afrit.
Gods, she was so wrapped up in herself she had forgotten all about the other woman. And with that thought came the realization that this had not—perhaps—been wholly selfish. That she had been trying to do some greater good. That she had been trying to save someone.
Her cell door was still open. Stumbling slightly, feeling as if she were in a dream, she pushed it wide and stepped out into the central hallway. She could smell the damp, and the rot, and the filth—undertones to the stink of roast flesh and hot steel that still emanated from the room behind her. She could feel the uneven flagstones, smoothed by the footsteps of countless souls, slightly slick with algae and mold.
She went to Afrit’s cell. The door was sealed by a heavy bronze lock. And the keys were back in her cell, buried in the ash of dead men.
So she took the lock in her hand. And for a moment she hesitated. But Afrit was in that cell. And if she could hang on to nothing else, she could hang on to that. Rescuing Afrit was the right thing to do.
Fire unfurled within her. And it was not a ripping or a tearing this time. It was not a moment of fear or hate. This time she chose to unbind the fire. This time she coaxed it to life. And she felt its warmth spread through her. And she felt strong, and sure, and for a moment she knew that this was exactly what she should be doing.
Then, in a moment of a cresting ecstasy, the heat in her palm rose, and rose, and rose, and then erupted forward.
And then it was over, and the door’s lock was just so much slag on the stone floor. Quirk felt spent, and oddly forlorn, as if she had been grasping toward some greater meaning of life and then abruptly veered from the path.
“Afrit?” she said. Her voice sounded small and tentative now. “Afrit, are you there?”
In the shadows, something moved. Quirk caught sight of a chain that snaked into darkness. It tremored. One end was attached to an iron hoop embedded in the floor. She stepped toward it.
Afrit whimpered.
“It’s okay,” Quirk said. “We’re going to get out of here.” She knelt, took the end of Afrit’s chain, and slowly followed it, hand over hand into the darkness. She stopped moving when she heard Afrit whimper.
“It’s okay,” she said again. And slowly, slowly, she let the fire uncurl. The metal began to glow, dully at first, but with increasing fierceness. And she could see Afrit’s face sketched out in the dull light. The bruises. The pain. The disbelief that she could hope again. Then the chain fell apart in molten spatters.
Quirk opened her glowing hand, let its light fill the space between them. And despite the blood and contusions that marred Afrit’s face, she forced a smile onto her own. With the fire thrumming through her, it was not as hard as she had expected. “See?” she said. “Sometimes there is a light in the dark.”
Still supporting Afrit’s weight, Quirk hesitated just before the top of the steps that led up and away from their cells.
Fill the space with fire, whispered a voice in her mind. There’s no one here who deserves to live. And for a moment it was Hethren whispering to her, reaching out of her past, telling her to do terrible things.
No. She shook herself slightly. This was her voice. That was one of the first lessons she had learned: Take responsibility for my own actions, for my own thoughts; recognize them as my own, and respond accordingly.
In some ways, the preemptive strike was the safest thing to do. End everything before it began.
It’s not a question of whether I live or die, she thought, but rather of how I live. Of what I can live with.
So she balled her courage and rounded the corner without summoning a flame.
And she stared onto an empty corridor. She felt foolish and relieved in equal measures.
The corridor continued the theme of the cells below. Stone, lichen, dirt, and piss. A few torches guttered at the far end. There was little light.
“We’re still in the dungeons,” Afrit said.
Quirk took stock. “This must be the Northern Barbican,” she said. “That has plentiful dungeons. It moves people out of the city center, away from the city’s eyes. Out of sight and mind. I had heard they were taking political prisoners there.”
Afrit nodded and they carried on shuffling down the corridor. Then a noise made them stop. Quirk felt flame flare in her heart, but Afrit stopped and cocked her head to one side. Then she looked at Quirk. “Did you say prisoners? Plural?”
They moved as a pack now.
Quirk had gone back, gone through all the doorways, checked all the cells. Each one had held someone, sometimes more than one. And so fire had flared in her again and again. Each prisoner had stumbled into this imitation of freedom asking questions, gabbling with them. Shushing them did no good, and so Quirk just moved on to the next door, the next prisoner, and one by one they fell into line. A murmuring pack pacing behind her.
Her blood felt hot. Her arteries were lines of fire striping her arms and legs. Flame had infected her. Her breath steamed in the corridor. And she remembered this. This seduction. She remembered feeling this way. That piece of rogue divinity inside of her infecting her thoughts.
She held on to herself desperately, repeated the mantras. And yet her wrath was righteous. She knew it in her bones. As she walked down the corridor with the others at her back. As they moved as one, with the same deadly purpose, the same anger, the same desperation.
We are getting out of here.
They finally arrived at the stairs, at the dull arc of light that had defined escape for so long now. And they did not sneak up now. They surged.
Burn. Burn. Burn. The word beat through her with each heartbeat.
Be the lake, she whispered back. And sh
e somehow held on to that image in her head. But the rage did not subside. Her calm was murderous.
They burst up from the stairs, from the dungeons, and from their captivity in a silent wave. A guardroom greeted them. Soldiers sat at a table, playing cards. Two carved a roast. Two leaned beside a washbasin arguing together. Another sat on a bench polishing his shoes. Another was working away at a stain on his tunic.
He was the first one Quirk incinerated. Flame shot out from her hand, a thick ribbon of it spilling from her palms. She cracked it like a whip, set their table ablaze. Cards flew like flaming butterflies.
The other prisoners spilled out around her, filling the room to the left and right. Three of them fell upon the guard polishing his boots. They kicked and bit and tore. Others grabbed the two at the washbasin.
She filled the center of the room with a cone of flame. She felt her body become little more than a conduit. The fire was a lake, and she was nothing but a burst dam. The other prisoners grabbed a guard, shoved his head into the fire. His struggles died quickly.
A few guards had more wits, or better reflexes. They flung themselves toward the edges of the rooms. They grabbed swords, slashed into the prisoners. But they were only a handful, and they had locked up so many men and women.
It was all over in a few moments. Blood and bodies littered the floor. Quirk’s heart slammed against her ribs like a caged bird. She wrestled with herself, managed to erect once more the walls that kept her fire contained.
So long, she murmured in her head. How did I go so long without this?
Then the smell hit her. Ash and roast corpses. And she remembered how. Pieces of limbs had been carved from their owners. Blood lay in great sprays up the walls. Three prisoners were dead. Another was on his knees clutching his guts. Another was sitting desperately trying to stanch a great slash that ran up her arm.
“Shit,” Quirk whispered. “Shit.”
“Where now?” someone asked.
Quirk looked around trying to find someone to answer the question. Then she noticed that everyone was looking at her.
“I don’t—” she started, but Afrit cut her off with a hand on her arm.
That was not what these people needed to hear, Quirk realized. They were traumatized, brutalized, and probably on the edge of collapse. Hope and rage were the only things keeping them on their feet. So she looked around, pointed at the first door she found.
“That way,” she said.
They moved. A few grabbed the guards’ fallen swords as they went. And she found that she was nodding as they did so, the same way she would at the fast learners in any class.
Gods, what am I teaching them? And then, straight on the heels of that thought, I’m teaching them? Then we truly are all doomed.
But there was no time for doubts, because the prisoners were smashing through the door, pushing down a short corridor, and breaking out into a courtyard dappled in faint light. She heard the clash of steel before she made it there. She pushed through the crowd, desperation clawing at her. They needed her protection. She could do so much more damage. Could stop the prisoners from being damaged themselves.
The courtyard was chaos. The guards must have been halfway through some drill or other. They all had weapons in hand. Were all hacking into the escapees.
“No!” Quirk yelled in horror, and then she was lashing out. Fire slammed into one man like a physical blow, sent him sailing through the air, knocking over others.
Revulsion quaked in her as she set a man’s head on fire. This was far from the melting of cell bars. This was far even from a momentary burst of violent self-defense. Even the mental shield of righteousness was failing her now. This was moving closer and closer to murder. These men could not stand against her.
And still they fought on. Still they hacked and slashed at the people she was trying to rescue.
“Stop!” she screamed at them. “Stop it! Run from us! Run from me!”
But they didn’t hear her, or they didn’t care, or they were solely employed for their suicidal tendencies, and so she lashed out again, and again, and again, cutting swaths through their ranks.
Finally a group of guards started to pull back. They were a knot of bristling swords, jabbing tentatively out as the prisoners gathered about them jeering.
“Stop!” Quirk yelled at the escapees. “Let them go! We don’t need to kill them! We are the resistance. We have to be better than what we aim to supplant.”
And that sort of speech, Quirk thought, is why the academics are never the ones to actually carry out the revolutions.
For a moment she thought her voice still went unheard, but then the prisoners did step back. They kept their swords up, but they stopped pressing forward, and they stopped their jeering.
“We just,” Quirk said, addressing the group of guards, “want to be let go.” There were eight or nine of them, she thought. “We don’t want to do any more harm.”
There was shuffling in the knot of men, and Quirk prepared a smile for whomever they elected leader.
Then the crossbow bolt lanced out of the mass, thundering toward her skull.
She flinched, but it was far too little, far too late. Instead what saved her was that she had personally immolated a score or more of the bowman’s friends, and seeing that sort of thing could put a quiver in a man’s hands no matter how hefty his loins. And so the man’s aim was just short of true. The bolt glanced off her forehead, scoring a deep gash that screamed with pain, but her skull remained surprisingly whole.
There was a moment of hesitation, of perfect calm. Then the prisoners roared, charged the knot of men. And then they were charging at nothing more than a bonfire.
And for a moment, Quirk was lost. She was ignorant of the prisoners staring at her in awe. She was ignorant of the blood sheeting down her face, reflecting her flames in dull crimson. She was ignorant even of the screams of the guards as their skin cracked, their muscles blackened, and their bones cracked. She was aware of only a single word, a single thought, a single intent.
Burn.
Then she was spent, and the guards were little more than ashes on the ground. She dropped to her knees gasping. The world felt distant, hard to understand. She had the sense of having been somewhere else, some dreamscape that was slipping through her fingers. She was only half-aware of Afrit helping her to her feet and guiding her through the field of bodies. Someone had found the stables, horses were filling the yard. They milled about, seeming the only real things in the smoky haze of torched bodies. Weapons were being recovered, distributed. Someone was helping her up onto a horse. Then the gates of the Northern Barbican were being opened. The great gates that led not into the city, but north and away, out onto the great plains, toward the Rosalian hills and Quirk’s childhood.
And then she was riding, out into the grass and the wind, swept up and away, the scent of burnt flesh swirling on the air about her.
17
The Hand in the Puppet
“That Lawl chap. He’s a bit of a bastard, isn’t he?”
The crowd went nuts. They roared, they whooped, they ate it up like pigs at the trough bowl.
To be fair, Firkin thought, he’d probably sold the line a bit better this time. He’d found some hatred to put into the words. A little fire in his belly and his balls to spit out at the world. Because screw Lawl. That pretentious god pretending that he sat above everyone, that because others were squished beneath the fabulous weight of his arse, he was better than them.
Take him down, whispered a voice in his head. Show them all what a fool Lawl is.
Also helping sell the line, perhaps, was his improved location. This was no sweaty little temple he stood in now. The inhabitants of District Three had, in fact, managed to dig up an abandoned amphitheater. To be fair, it seemed as if it also doubled as a midden heap, and most of those gathered here were knee-deep in refuse, but it was far more than Firkin had believed his audience capable of.
A lot had changed since his first app
earance in the Third District. He had gotten a feel for his audience, for what they liked to hear, and how they liked to hear it. And his audience had gotten a feel for him. And just as in Kondorra, their feeling for him was now much like their feelings for a whore on Cois’s feast day. And so the crowds at his temple had grown and then they had burst its walls and he had preached on the streets. And now he was here. And people shouted his words between sermons. And District Three was still a festering hole of a district, but now its inhabitants held their heads higher, and kneecapped people from other districts. And that hadn’t exactly been Firkin’s intent, but he was going with it.
The whisper was less enthusiastic about their new location. Looks like that arsehole Lawl took a shit here and expected us to be happy about it, it whispered. Firkin decided to use that.
“Look at this place.” He swept an arm around the filthy amphitheater. “It’s like Lawl took a shit here and expected us to be happy about it.”
And the crowd ate that up too. Firkin wasn’t entirely sure where the whispering voice had come from, but it did have the most tremendous ideas.
“We are honest,” he howled at the crowd. “We are true. We are authentic. When we shit, we know it is rotten, foul, and septic.”
That, he thought, was true enough. But the crowd did not disappoint. They came right along with him. He grinned.
“We’re not like the High Priesthood, are we?” And that they loved. That they lost their absolute gods-hexed minds for. He could pretty much say anything he wanted as long as he turned it back to the High Priesthood being a bag of dicks.
“They’re just like Lawl. Just like that frothing fuckhole that deserves to choke to death on a horse’s—”
He caught himself. That was … Had he meant to say that? He shook his head. He’d never given Lawl two spare thoughts before. Or … had he? Something like a memory rumbled in his head, turned over, and was out of his grasp.