“No more than I was when I killed Ashea,” Cyrus called, then moved swiftly away from his hiding place, which disappeared under the scorching fire a second after he’d cleared the area.
“You lie!” Enflaga screamed, unhinged.
“If you look a ways to the south, you’ll see a shrunken, waterlogged corpse that says you’re wrong.” Cyrus sprinted now, rising up from below the cover of the stalls, taunting all the way. “Okay, well, she doesn’t actually say anything, because she’s dead, but—”
Enflaga trailed flame after him, whipping her hand around with fire, trying to head him off. She was just a little too slow, though, the fire arcing out after him all the way, a constant stream that simply couldn’t keep up with his sprint.
“Now!” Terian shouted from somewhere behind Enflaga, and Cyrus thrust out his palm. Enflaga was not moving from the spot on which she stood, which made it easy for him to aim directly for her and release a spell.
The force blast distorted the air around him as it traveled the distance between them. It hit her squarely in the chest, knocking her back a step just as another spell swept her legs from beneath her. Caught between the two, it was as though she’d had a log knock her knees out as another caught her below the chin.
The Goddess of Fire snapped and twisted, landing hard in the middle of two stalls. Lumber crashed and broke, shattering under the weight of her impact. Cyrus charged toward her in an immediate turn, Praelior at the ready, prepared to strike her squarely in the face—
But he was too late. She was shrinking already, her size only just larger than the biggest of trolls, and Terian was standing over her, Noctus raised. “This is for my head,” he said and swung the axe in one smooth motion.
Her scream caused Cyrus to flinch, but Terian did not hesitate. His strike parted the goddess’s neck cleanly, and he gave her skull a powerful kick. Her head went flying, and her body made one last bucking motion before it settled to the earth, fingers twitching in death.
“And now to be sure,” Terian said. He raised his hand, blanketing the corpse in a heavy ice. Cyrus lingered above, waiting, and then Terian brought up his axe again. The hints of fire that had surged beneath the surface of Enflaga’s skin seemed to have passed, the flesh now cold and dead. The paladin raised his weapon up again, then brought it down, and the corpse shattered like broken glass, shards pinging off Cyrus’s armor.
“Two down,” Terian said, staring down at his grim handiwork as Scuddar appeared from behind a nearby stall, his scimitar in hand. “Two to—”
Cyrus heard the scream cut across the night and turned to look north. Virixia hung there in the sky, her gaze anchored on them, on him, before she disappeared in the flash of a teleport spell.
Cyrus charged up into the air, Terian a step behind. As he got high enough, he looked to the east, following the trail of Rotan’s chaos with his eyes. It stretched off toward the guildhall quarter and ended there, in streets flooded by—
“Gods,” Terian said, “is that—”
“Endeavor and Burnt Offerings,” Cyrus murmured. There was other motion in the streets to the south, too, the Reikonos Guard on the march in crisp formation, clearly moving in to defend their city, even against gods.
“Do you think they got Rotan?” Terian asked as Scuddar, Ryin, Dahveed and Bowe came up to join them in the air above the city. Fires raged around them, and all throughout Reikonos.
“No, I don’t,” Cyrus said, peering at the spectacle in the guildhall quarter. “No sign of a rocky body, not that we’d necessarily see it from here, but …” He shook his head. “There’s no celebrating. I think he fled when Virixia caterwauled to tell him that Ashea and Enflaga were down.”
“Should have used cessation spells, I guess,” Terian said tightly.
“And fight them on the ground, without Falcon’s Essence, here in Reikonos?” Cyrus shook his head. “This was the only way to win.” He looked over the destruction. “Without spells at our disposal, we would have lost this fight. We were only lucky they stuck with their usual elemental repertoire and didn’t pull out something really godly.”
“So … what now, then?” Dahveed asked in his solemn, slightly drawling voice.
“They’ll be back in their realms now,” Cyrus said, looking out over the ruin of his city. They pillaged Reikonos. They destroyed Sanctuary. They killed Vara.
HE killed Vara.
“But we’re going to go after them, right?” Terian asked, his breathing still quick, coming in gasps. Cyrus could see the others now, heading for him. He counted them in his head, both groups, streaming toward him in the night, and found, to his relief, the numbers were right. No one else died tonight because of me.
“Of course we are,” Cyrus said, shaking himself out of his reverie. “But first …” He pointed to the fires around him. “We need to extinguish these. We need to … help where we can.”
“But the gods—” Terian said.
“Aren’t going to make any more big moves tonight,” Cyrus said, a chill wind blowing out of the north, off the Torrid Sea, which was sparkling under the moonlight. “They know we’ll come for them, and they’ll want to be ready.” He narrowed his eyes as he stared down at what the deities had wrought.
They will pay for this, he thought as he cast a jet of water at the nearest flames. They sizzled, smoke rising off them in a hiss.
“But if they’re going to be ready for us, then—” Ryin started.
“Don’t worry,” Cyrus said, spiraling down in a run, moving as quickly as he could to save what remained of the city of his birth, the city where he was raised—but not the city where I’ll die. “We’ll be ready for them, too.”
48.
Alaric
“We argue around the point,” the Yartraak said in a hissing voice, his disdain for my language plain upon his thin face, his eyes refusing to so much as look at me where I stood behind Chavoron’s chair in the cabinet chamber. “Without slaves, our empire dies.”
“Perhaps our empire should wither, then,” Timmas, the Drettanden said, leaning forward at his place to Chavoron’s right. It was a sunny day outside, but you would not know it by the way they were speaking to one another, the chamber stormy in a clash of temperaments. “We are no longer blind to the harm we do. How can we justify our society after what this man showed us in the Coliseum? That humans were not our equal was the fundamental lie upon which our entire system is built.” He pointed at me. Such things had become common in cabinet meetings, and I felt like a prop much of the time when I was here, since I was not allowed to make arguments of my own. Not that I would have made any; I still felt far too small to be heard in this place.
I had learned the names of the others in the cabinet now, and could understand roughly half of what was said in a conversation spoken entirely in Protanian. Replying was still a challenge, but I could make myself clear in a basic, broken way.
“It proves nothing,” the Mortus sneered. He was looking particularly satisfied today, wearing a wide cloak that covered his body, which looked unusually bulky. “Save that dogs can be taught tricks.”
“I pity you the first time a dog sends a fire spell up your nose,” the Eruditia said, staring at him with her falcon-like eyes. “And why are you wearing that ridiculous cloak in this weather?”
The Mortus stiffened in his chair, but I saw a smile appear on his lips. “Oh, this?” He touched the silken breast of his cloak and drew it back. “I didn’t want to flaunt, I suppose.” He opened the neck wider and suddenly I could see why his cloak looked bulky.
A few inches beneath his armpits lay another set of arms. They looked frailer, more insectoid than the rest of him, but they snaked their way out as he let the cloak fall and exposed his bare torso. He unfurled the arms as the room took it all in. I saw plain shock on the face of the Aurous, a man with an immense beard who was in charge of moderating the empire’s winters and summers with his branch of spellcraft. Meanwhile, the minister of social harmony—the Levembre—s
eemed to be favoring the Mortus with a distinctly lustful look, which seemed fitting given that her position was to engineer the advancement of the empire through encouraging breeding and caring for offspring.
“Do you like my little alterations?” The Mortus was as pleased as could be; it was plain even to an unpracticed observer like myself that he was delighted at the opportunity to show off his new arms. “It’s a new branch of spellcraft I’ve been dallying with.”
“You must show me how you’ve done that,” the Yartraak said, fascinated. I shuddered as I stared at Jena’s father; he was looking even more lustfully at the Mortus’s new arms than the Levembre was, and I tried to imagine him adding additional limbs to his already hideously gaunt figure.
Timmas seemed to be the only one who found the change unpleasant. “I can’t imagine what sort of armor you’d have to craft to fit that,” the Drettanden said, shaking his head, lips pursed in distaste. “And you look like a horror.”
The Mortus growled through his teeth. “You are a fool, Drettanden, locked in your box of idiocy and unable to see the promise of this power. Imagine altering your form however you wish. Why, with this magic you could remain forever young and avoid the ravages of age entirely, almost like the elves.”
There was a solemn silence that fell over the room, sullen and dark. I wondered at its origin, but finally Chavoron broke it. “Some of us find our mortality an advantage rather than a hindrance,” he said. He didn’t tend to talk much at these cabinet meetings, preferring to let others argue around him. “Take those elves, for example—eternal, slow-moving in mind and even slower in body, fractious, intractable, they cannot even solidify their city-states into an agreeable kingdom or empire. They may live forever, but their lifespan is the enemy of their of progress. Old grudges never die but merely fester on for thousands of years, and cooperation fails under the weight of millennia-old slights still remembered.”
“But they live forever,” the Yartraak said, as though none of Chavoron’s other points mattered in the face of his.
“Living forever as you are now would be a pollution upon the existence of all others,” the Eruditia said, her voice indicating restrained rage. “A pox upon all the other nations, your corruption spread eternal.”
There was a moment’s pause as breath was drawn around the table. They always seemed to come to this moment. Once the first real insult flew, the others often leapt at the opportunity to open the floodgates, whereupon the meeting would descend swiftly into vitriolic argument. It reminded me of an argument I had witnessed when spying unseen in a market and a group of stall keepers nearly killed each other over the practices each used when hawking their wares. Why such a comparison occurred to me in this moment, when the stakes were obviously so much higher than the display of goods in a market town, I don’t know.
Or perhaps I do, and the lesson is that, whether Protanian or human, argument often turns petty, regardless of its import.
“There is no need for this,” Chavoron leapt into the middle of it all, as he usually did in these moments. “This is quite enough for today—”
“This is quite enough, entirely,” the Eruditia said, stiff and stern, her hands folded one over the other at her place in the table.
“I agree, we should adjourn for the day,” said the Pacem, the minister of state.
“That is not what I meant,” the Eruditia said. “We have reached a point where these sins become intolerable to any person with eyes to see, yet still there is pointless argument.” She rose, her robes unfolding as she stood. “There is no point in meeting again until we are ready to end this practice of slavery. Only then can we decide what our next step is in ruling a just empire.”
“You are simply going to leave?” Chavoron asked. “Never to return until we make this wholesale change?”
“Yes,” the Eruditia said. “Do not send for me until it is done, and do not ask to meet with me in private in hopes of swaying me. I can no longer tolerate being here while this atrocity goes on. Now is a time for action, not talk.” Without a further word, and ignoring the protests of some on her own side, she swept from the room.
“That will make the next meeting somewhat quieter, I expect,” snorted the Vidara, his green attire shining as the sun caught him. He looked across the table at the anti-slavery coalition. “Are any of the rest of you planning to leave forever?”
“I think my fight is still here,” Timmas said, leaning in, a determined look in his eye, chin pointed pridefully. “What good would I do out there when there are minds to be changed and work yet to do in this chamber?”
“Agreed,” Chavoron said, nodding slowly, and the air of the meeting, which had grown still, started to shift as people sensed the end, standing and stretching. “For what good will it do us to free these long-beleaguered peoples,” he ignored the hardening of expressions to his left, “if we give them nothing but the freedom to die in starvation and civil war instead of servitude?”
49.
Cyrus
“I think we need a moment,” Quinneria said once the fires of Reikonos had been put out, and the pillars of black smoke that hung over the city came from smoldering ashes rather than blazing flames.
Cyrus looked at his mother almost indifferently. They stood in the square where thousands thronged around them: those who had lost homes, those who were trying to get back to their homes to see if they were still standing, and the armies of Reikonos as well as representatives of the guilds of Endeavor and Burnt Offerings. Cyrus surveyed the milling chaos, distracted by the dull roar of ten thousand voices, and his mother’s words barely touched him.
“A moment, sure,” Cyrus said, the blue sky above marred by the smoke that still hung over the city. It had left the air with an ashy quality that Cyrus could taste on his tongue, even over the conjured bread that he’d been handing out to the citizenry by the hundreds. He’d taken a little for himself, remembering that he hadn’t eaten in a day. “We’ll need one.”
“Yes, we will,” she said, conjuring a warm and crusty loaf of bread and handing it to a woman who was shepherding a dozen children. She conjured another and handed it to the same woman, who crowed her thanks. “Cyrus … these last few days—”
“I’ve lived them, I know what happened,” he said, creating another loaf and realizing it was not only half the size of those his mother was producing, it was also cold and stale, hard like the tack he’d carried with him to war. He frowned and handed it to a man who gazed longingly at the loaf his mother was producing even now, wafting steam coming off hers while his sat in the man’s hand like a crusty brick. “I wouldn’t eat that, either,” Cyrus said to the man in apology, and watched his loaf promptly tossed aside as the man rushed toward Quinneria with pleas on his lips.
“You should stop,” she said, after handing the man a loaf of his own. She strode up to her son and placed a hand on his shoulder, wrinkles on her fingers that had not been there before the battle with the deities. He studied at her face, and the lines were evident; she’d aged after the fight with Malpravus, but this was different, less subtle. Her hair was streaked now with grey. She caught him looking and brushed at it self-consciously. “You should stop before you end up looking like me.”
“You still look like my mother,” Cyrus said softly, averting his gaze. “You just look like you’ve felt the battle.”
“As have you,” she said, her fingers sliding off his filthy pauldrons. “You need time to breathe, to let things settle in your mind. To … to rest yourself—”
“I will,” Cyrus said, “as soon as—”
He stopped as a clamor cut across the crowd, a murmur of alarm from out of the south. He turned, looking toward the fountain and the portal, where the people were thronged so deeply about that even with his height he could not see clearly through them.
But he could see over them, and that was where they were all looking, in any case.
“What the …?” Cyrus muttered.
A troll in black robes wa
s storming across the sky, his sandaled feet slapping against invisible ground above the head of the crowd. The people below him were pointing and those that looked up directly beneath him were torn between shuddering and looking away and staring in awe, pointing up the troll’s robes in astonishment and—in one case, Cyrus noticed—distinct interest.
“Where is he?” the troll bellowed over the crowd, his spear-staff at his side, his face a step away from sheer panic. “Where is Cyrus Davidon?”
“Vaste!” Cyrus shouted, swiping a hand across his throat to amplify his voice before he spoke, “I’m over here, you daft bastard!”
“Where—oh, there. Of course. Black armor.” Vaste hurried over the crowd, causing some to flee from beneath his robes. Cyrus frowned as the troll descended, causing the crowd to part as he reached the earth once more and rushed up to Cyrus, breathing hard. “You’re a difficult one to find.”
“I’m the tallest man in the crowd and I’m wearing armor,” Cyrus said. “How does that make me difficult to find?”
“You’re covered with more mud than a troll after a swamp wrestling match, for one,” Vaste said, looking him over, “and also, there are more than humans present here.”
Cyrus looked around; it was true, there were some trolls in armor from Endeavor and Burnt Offerings, as well as Zarnn, who sat atop his savanna cat in the middle of the crowd, everyone but a group of awestruck children giving the troll knight a wide berth. Zarnn seemed very focused on keeping his cat well in hand, the reins tightly knotted around his fingers to keep the cat’s head up—and away from taking bites of the passersby.
“Anyway, I’ve found you and that’s all that matters,” Vaste said, then paused. “So …”
“So,” Cyrus said, glancing at his mother to see her watching him expectantly.
“I heard you got into trouble without me.” Vaste looked down on him with a faint look of disapproval.
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