And was about to live without a father, she realized. The boy . . . he was Eklor’s son . . .
She’d known he wouldn’t trust just anyone, but she hadn’t guessed he’d had a son. And Lorn had ordered his son’s execution. No wonder . . .
Stop. Do not feel pity for him. There was no purpose in understanding why he had done what he’d done. Only in stopping him from ever doing evil again. “Are we really playing who-is-more-evil? Your army is slaughtering children right now! If you’re the hero, stop your war. Order your army to withdraw.”
He smiled. “Let me complete the spell, and I will stop my army and tell the good people of Cerre who saved them: the new grand master of the Bone Workers Guild, who foiled a plot by the Five Heroes of Vos to—”
Kreya held up her hands. “I am going to cut you off right there because that’s absurd. Correct me if I’m wrong, but your plan is to make yourself essentially immortal by stealing the lives of all the bone workers, slaughter as many people as you can, and then announce that you’re actually the hero? And you expect people—meaning the ones you haven’t killed—to believe you?”
“They will when I use that stolen immortality to bring their loved ones back to life.”
“Except the bone workers, because they’ll all be dead. And whoever else you need to kill to give the select few life. You’ll be the one who says who gets to live and who gets to die. Basically, your plan is to become a god.” It was an awe-inspiring plan, both in its arrogance and in how close Eklor was to pulling it off.
She spared a thought for Jentt and Stran and the people in the thick of the battle.
“The good will live, and the evil will die,” Eklor said placidly, as if his whole explanation weren’t enough to make her feel ill. “I am so pleased you understand me. And I am equally pleased that I understand you.” His eyes flickered to the shadows on either side of the office, and she heard the whirr of gears as his mechanical constructs lurched forward.
One was as Amurra had described: with wire tentacles emanating from its back. The other was a grotesque human-shaped soldier, with a skull that was half metal and half bone. It held a rusty sword in each hand. She took a step backward and lifted her own knife in front of her chest, blade out.
“Oh, Kreya, always so angry, always so unbending,” Eklor said, his voice dripping with false pity. “Once again, you have come alone to defeat me. And once again, you will fail.”
She took another step backward into the arch of the doorway.
The wire construct sliced through her rag dolls, and they fell from his wrists and ankles. “No!” she yelled as they dropped to the floor. They hadn’t deserved that fate—they’d been loyal and brave. But there wasn’t time to mourn them now.
Leaving the now-free Eklor, the construct scuttled beetle-like around the desk. Both monstrosities advanced on her. She took another step back, one foot still in the room and one foot in the hallway.
Eklor lifted a silver cup of blood as if to toast her. “We are not so different, you and I. Violating the rules for the sake of love. Making our own future, though no one understands our choices. Needing to be the one who alone rights the wrongs—”
Beyond him, through the glass panes of the window, Kreya saw a hint of movement. “I’m going to cut you off again,” she said. “Because I am not the same as you. And this time”—the glass shattered as Zera burst through, feetfirst—“I’m not alone.”
Eklor dropped the silver cup.
Blood spattered onto the floor.
He opened his mouth to say a word, one that would activate a talisman—perhaps to fight, perhaps to run, perhaps to fly. He didn’t get a chance to say it. Zera plunged a blade directly into his heart, shoving against it until the metal was buried up to the hilt.
“See, I did change,” Kreya said. “This time, I didn’t need to be the one who killed you.”
Zera shoved Eklor’s body backward, and it crashed into the desk. Cups scattered everywhere, and the blood of a hundred bone workers splashed over the floor.
Kreya then turned her attention to the two constructs as they attacked, and Zera joined her. Together, they fought, the old muscle memory returning with each strike, as the spilled blood of the bone workers stained the stone.
Chapter Thirty-One
Jentt ran and then slid, his knife out. He sliced the hamstrings of one inhuman soldier, stabbed another in the groin and a third in the ankles. He rose and winced—he was going to pay for this later in aches and bruises, if there was a later.
He spun to face the next one as one of Kreya’s statues—a granite slab carved like a bear’s skeleton—plucked a soldier off the street and ground it between its stone paws. Another three soldiers hurled themselves at the statue’s legs. Knocked off balance, it crashed onto the street, and the constructs swarmed over it, hacking at the stone with axes and swords until one of them hit the bone that powered it.
Another one down, Jentt thought.
Her statues were strong but not fast. And they were vastly outnumbered.
Like us.
Beside him, Stran was using up talisman after talisman. Powered by two at once, he was an unstoppable bull. Every construct he encountered fell to his fists and blades. Yanking a chunk of a stone out of the wall, he hurled it at a spider-shaped automaton. It crashed into the creature with such force that the spider tumbled off the edge of the tier to smash into the ground below. Glancing over the edge to make sure no innocents had been harmed, Jentt saw citizens from the first tier swarming over the spider, bashing at it until it quit twitching.
He wanted to feel good about that.
He hadn’t died (again) yet, which was excellent. Neither had Stran. He wanted to feel good about that too. But for every one he and Stran brought down, another three escaped them. The mountain kept disgorging more and more of them, a seemingly endless stream from the caves beneath the city. It was clear that the tangled mass of metal and bone they’d found on the plain had been a trick—he bet if they’d chiseled into its heart, they could have found mere dirt and stone and bones gathered from the forbidden zone. Eklor had saved the vast bulk of his army and brought it here, via the valley and then through the caves beneath the city.
Jentt caught a glimpse of a line of city guards, marching against a construct with a torso of twisted metal and arms like claws. It swung a mace of thick iron, catching the first guard in the chest and hurling him back against the second. Two houses down, a giant horse statue was being pulled to the ground by a swarm of vicious beetle-like constructs with saws instead of pinchers.
We can’t fight them all, he thought.
Seeing a blur out of the corner of his eye, he dodged right. A massive blow slammed into the ground where he’d been standing, the fist of a massive construct. It fractured the paving stones. He sped around the giant. “Hey, Stran, got another one for you.”
“Excellent,” Stran replied. “I was getting bored over here.” He shoved back three machine-men with a horselike kick. Across the way, another of Kreya’s statues—a former pillar carved like the vertebrae of a snake—bashed into a line of Eklor’s soldiers, before the mechanized soldiers leaped on it. The stone snake reared once, knocking them aside, but more attacked. It would be overwhelmed soon.
“We need an endgame!” Jentt said. He tossed aside a drained speed talisman and withdrew another. He was running dangerously low on talismans and knew Stran’s supplies had to be even lower. Using it, he zipped across the plaza and extracted a city guard a second before a spear would have skewered him. “Watch your swing. You leave your left flank open.”
The guard stammered thanks.
Across the street, Jentt saw another bone worker wielding a tree trunk as if it were a mace. But he didn’t see the smaller construct made of gears and wheels roll behind her until it was too late. The bone worker stiffened as needle-thin blades sprouted from her chest.
Jentt swore as he darted to her. He smashed the construct and caught the bone worker as she fell. He la
id her gently on the street and then whirled around to duck beneath the blade of a bearlike horror with a face of twisted metal.
A horrible thought hit him, with certainty: We’re losing.
It didn’t matter how fast he moved, how hard he fought. There were simply too many of them, and they kept coming and coming. Sooner or later, he’d make a mistake. He’d run out of energy or out of talismans.
Time would defeat them.
We need a new plan, he thought. But what? He had no answer, and he couldn’t stop moving or stop fighting to think of one. It was all he could do to keep up with the endless stream of enemies. If they could trap the army somewhere . . . Or lead them out of the city . . . Or force them back into the caves and collapse the caves . . . He wished Kreya were here to see the possibilities and make the call. In the middle of fighting, he couldn’t clear the space in his mind to plan anything larger than the next strike or parry. He tried not to worry about Kreya, facing Eklor. She had Zera by her side. The two of them could handle themselves.
He wished he’d taken the time to tell Kreya that he finally understood. After seeing Stran nearly lose his wife, he knew why Kreya had made the choices she had. He even understood why she hadn’t told him. In her place, he’d have done the same—it had taken him a while to admit that, but he’d gotten there at last.
He wanted to say he was sorry for being angry, sorry for dying and leaving her alone, sorry he hadn’t swept her away from all of this before Eklor came back into their lives.
He swore that if they survived this, he would devote every day he had left to making it up to her.
Across the street, Stran was cornered by three multiarmed constructs. His blades were blurred, moving quickly to parry and strike. Sweat poured off his face. Jentt darted toward him, jumped onto a cart, and launched himself in the air.
He landed on the back of one of the constructs and drew his blade across its neck, severing the wires that connected its head to its spine. He then yanked out the bone lodged in its chest. The construct collapsed beneath him.
Springing out of the way, he went back-to-back with Stran.
“I’m out,” Stran said.
“What?” Jentt heard him, but he didn’t want to believe it.
“Last talisman failed.”
“Then we stick together,” Jentt said. “Protect each other.” He scanned the street. “Need to find a defensible position. Can’t fight them all at once.”
Stran grunted as he beat back the closest construct. “Need to find Amurra. And the others. If we’re going to die, I’d rather”—he ducked beneath one of a construct’s many arms—“die together.”
It wasn’t a plan for victory. But it was better than what they were doing here. At least if they found their friends, they could protect one another.
But first they had to make it out of the second tier.
“Cart,” Jentt grunted as he swung his blade at a half man lurching toward him. He sprinted for the cart that he’d vaulted over. Stran jumped into the front. Whirling his blades, he carved a path through as Jentt used the last of his talismans to push them toward the gate to the third tier.
“You!” Jentt called to one of Kreya’s statues, a marble elk that was twice the size of a live elk. “Clear the way!”
The elk obeyed, bashing through the gate, and Jentt and Stran followed in its wake. As they passed through the gate, he felt as if he were abandoning the citizens, statues, and bone workers that still fought on the second tier. But then the feeling vanished as he saw the state of the third tier: the battle was here too.
And the people were losing.
Littering the street were the wounded and the dead. Constructs lay between them as well, broken or twitching, but the fighting raged in the streets around them. He spotted another one of Kreya’s statues—only for an instant, as a pack of constructs lifted it off the ground and tossed it into an aqueduct. Both the statue and the aqueduct shattered in a spray of stone that rained down onto fighters below. One boulder crashed through a roof.
“Shit,” Stran said.
All the work they’d done, all the fighting, to contain the enemy in the first and second tiers . . . It had been pointless. The constructs they hadn’t defeated had poured into the third tier, and Jentt didn’t doubt they’d reached the fourth tier as well, and would soon reach the fifth.
“The city is lost,” Jentt said.
“But we aren’t yet,” Stran said, and charged forward through the street, with only his own strength in his body.
With a roar, Jentt chased after him.
The hopelessness of it began to sink into his bones, and he fought harder with tears blurring his eyes. This was a fight they couldn’t win.
Kreya waited for a moment to feel something: Eklor was dead. Finally. And this time, she was going to make sure he stayed that way. Whispering to a strength talisman, she hoisted Eklor’s body over her shoulder and carried him over the two mechanized constructs that she and Zera had sliced through, with the help of the talismans.
“Bonfire time?” Zera guessed.
“Oh yes.” Like the fire that had burned her tower.
Together, they carried Eklor’s corpse through the corridor. They encountered no one—everyone was outside fighting the army, she guessed—but she remembered the way. There had been funerals while she was a student, each of them burned into her memory.
They climbed to the roof, where the pyre was ever ready.
From here they could see the city. Dawn had risen, and light had spread across the tiers. The fighting had spread from the first and second to the third, fourth, and fifth to engulf all of Cerre in screams and smoke.
Together, they laid Eklor’s body on the pyre. The wood was stored in a dry cabinet on the rooftop. Zera unloaded it and carried bundles that she placed beneath the pallet the body lay on. The pallet was a latticework of iron, able to be used and reused.
Kreya tried to focus on the task at hand—making sure Eklor couldn’t return—but her eyes kept being drawn to the battle that raged on every tier. She spotted several of her stone giants, and as she watched, one was yanked down to the street. Constructs swarmed over it as if devouring it. It didn’t rise. Her heart squeezed as she thought of Jentt and Stran in the middle of the chaos. She prayed they were all right.
I should be with them, fighting alongside Jentt and Stran and Marso. Zera should be feeding us all talismans. We should be back-to-back, watching one another.
This didn’t feel right.
We should all be together. Never mind that she was the one who had ordered them to separate, and never mind that it had been the right decision, even the only decision. They couldn’t have both stopped Eklor and fought the army if they’d stayed together.
Instead of a talisman, Zera offered her a fire rod. It was stamped with the symbol of the Bone Workers Guild. “You want to do the honors, my dearest friend?”
Kreya felt the weight of the fire rod in her hand. It had been used to light many pyres. She wondered if it had been used for anyone she knew. Staring at it, she didn’t move. She heard the sounds of the battle—the screams, the scrape of metal on stone, the crash of walls collapsing. She tasted smoke in the back of her throat, of fires that burned in fallen homes, and she inhaled the coppery metal tang of Eklor’s army.
Destroying Eklor wouldn’t end the battle. He’d built his constructs to last.
“First Eklor, then the army,” Zera coached her.
Still holding the fire rod, Kreya crossed from the pyre to the lip of the roof, looking out across the city. Not far from the guild, she saw the body of a child, twisted unnaturally. A woman lay not far from him, her throat torn. A man in a bone worker’s coat was clutching his leg, and even from far above him, she could see he was spattered in blood. Another of her statues tumbled, falling from the third tier to the second. A guard fought, outnumbered, by the gate. She saw a construct’s spear pierce his throat.
We’re losing, she thought. Eklor may be dead, but he’s
still won.
There were too many of them, and the city was ill prepared. It was going to fall, Kreya realized. Maybe not in the next hour. Maybe not this day. But she could see it already beginning to turn. So many bodies already lay strewn in the streets.
“The aqueducts will run with blood, and the city will fall,” Kreya said. “There’s no way for any of us to stop it.” Only the army’s creator could stop it. “No one alive can stop it.”
She hated what she was thinking.
But she could see the battle and the future stretched before her in blood and smoke.
“He has to stop this.”
“Oh no. Kreya, no, absolutely not. You have had terrible ideas before. Trust me when I say this is your worst yet.”
Kreya turned to face her, the battle at her back. “I can’t think of any other way. His creations . . . they won’t stop, they won’t slow. At least not soon enough to save the city. You know that. He built them to last for years.”
“He’ll never agree to help. He wants this, his revenge!” Zera waved at the destruction. “He already has everything he wants!”
She was right. What could they offer him to get him to agree to help? “He doesn’t just want that,” Kreya said. “He wants to be seen as a hero. You heard him. He wants to be a benevolent god, who was wronged by the evil people he destroyed.”
Yes, it was a terrible idea. But she didn’t have any other. And if they didn’t stop the army, she’d lose them all. Jentt. Stran. Marso. Amurra. All the people who had risen to help defend their city. The bone workers, the guards, the innocents.
Lowering the fire rod to the ground, she approached the pyre. She’d have to cut out the bone he’d pushed into himself while casting his warped spell so that he couldn’t reactivate it, and then she’d have to give him some of her life.
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