Last First Snow (20 page)

“No,” she shouted, to convey all this at once, but Batac slipped beneath her, damn hopeless, couldn't even lie still. She turned back to him, cursing. Not that she could have stopped the King in Red, not that Kopil would have heard her over his own anger's roar.

Zoh charged into the crowd. The other Wardens circled around Elayne, Batac, Kopil. The red-arms did not give way fast enough and Zoh struck two men with wrecking-ball force. He swam against a human current. The crowd responded: some fell, but others pressed against Zoh, clawing, biting. Zoh raised his arms to ward off blows: “Out of my way!” With muscles reinforced by Craft he hurled protesters aside, carving a path step by step through thrashing bodies, searching for the shooter he'd seen, might have seen, hoped he'd seen.

“Cop!” “—fucking—” “What the hells are you—” “Temoc!” “—The hells you—” “—broke my godsdamn
arm
—”

Focus. Gut wound. Blood flowing. Find the slug, easy, but was he safe to move? Entry wound below the rib cage but slanted to one side, and back there he had kidneys to worry about, and liver and gall bladder. This would all be easier if he was dead. At least she could stop the bleeding—or contain it, by convincing his blood it ran through unperforated vessels.

Batac spoke. Skin blanched white, lips trembling, he found breath to whisper. “Not at all.”

“Not at all what,” she asked, faking calm. “Not at all what, Tan?”

His too-pink tongue flicked out, wet his lips, withdrew.

Rocks arced through the air at Zoh. Pebbles first, then larger stones thrown faster. Most bounced off—a fist-sized chunk of masonry hit the Warden's head, but his mask saved him. Made him angry, though—he shoved harder. “Make way” he bellowed with enhanced voice, but there was no room for the people to fall back, no way for them to make.

A chill spread across her skin. The King in Red held fire in his hand, and contemplated the crowd near Zoh. “No!” she cried, and he heard.

“Justice must be served.”

“You want to help? Help me. If you throw Craft into this crowd, people will die.”

“They will bow to us.”

“You'll kill them!”

Temoc shouted: “Be calm. Everyone be calm.” But even he could not drown out the roar, or stem the tide of bodies that surged against the red-arms. The King in Red snarled, but at least he let the fire die. “Can we move him?”

“If we're careful. I have the wound contained.”

“—At all. Not at all.”

They could recover. This was one nail in their coffin, just one, with many pry bars to hand. If they reached safety they could cool this down. Batac was stable, would be stable, had to be. He would survive.

The second nail sounded like a mother, crying.

Fear seized her, but that wasn't Mina's voice: she had drawn back toward the tent, behind Chel. No, the cry came from the crowd, near Zoh.

The King in Red swore in High Quechal, which she hadn't heard him speak since the Wars. His eyes blinked off, then on again.

“What is it?”

The mother screamed.

“Zoh. He—”

She stood, saw for herself the ripple spreading from Zoh, the space where there'd been no space before: a widening circle around the Warden and a kneeling woman. She held a child of maybe six, younger than Caleb. The child's eyes stared unblinking at the sun. Blood poured from his scalp. On the flagstones beside them lay a rock, stained red.

Later Zoh would claim he hadn't thrown the rock on purpose. Caught it by reflex, rather, and tossed it into the air with more strength than he should have used, a Warden's throw, Craftwork-enhanced, and what goes up most of the time comes down. Others said he'd aimed for one of the rock-throwers, to break a collarbone or shatter a rib, but someone jostled him and the stone went wild and by dumb bad luck the kid was in the way.

“Killer,” was the word the crowd spoke as the mother wailed. Zoh turned in a slow circle, and maybe he could have saved the peace even then with the superhuman compassion the Diamond Sage of Dhistra showed in tales of his billion incarnations, maybe he could have gone to the mother and knelt and removed his mask and let himself be torn apart. But Zoh was no saint. Masked, he did not even seem a man. He stepped back, arms raised, and if he said “I'm sorry” it was lost in the crowd's roar.

“Temoc!” Elayne shouted, turned, searching—the priest stood transfixed beyond the Wardens' circle, a sculpture of black and jade. “Talk to them.”

But the crowd closed in, and the red-arms didn't stop them. The vanguard of the charge was a big man with jowls and a thicket beard: he reached the Wardens and fell, almost too fast for Elayne to see the silver fist that struck him. Others jumped over their fallen comrade's body, only to bounce off a shield of solid air, while a second shield enclosed Zoh. Kopil's Craft cut off the sound of screams. Bodies wadded against the shield, cheeks and hands and stomachs flattened by its curve. Lightning cracked where they touched. Kopil's crown was a dark halo.

The King in Red drew his hands apart and the shield grew, sweeping protesters aside without apparent effort. His teeth ground together. Wardens, braced to resist the riot, stumbled into suddenly empty space. Temoc pressed to the front of the crowd, scars radiant. “Get back,” he shouted to his people, and some obeyed, but only some, and others rushed to fill their place.

With her glyphs awake and power chilling her blood, Elayne wanted to fight, to shatter the crowd, to open their road to safety. She was a spring, and did not want to hold herself compressed. The King in Red, too, was ready to fight—weapons formed around him, trembling on hair trigger.

“Give us that man.” Temoc pointed to Zoh. “The killer.”

Kopil laughed, the same laugh that almost brought the mob down upon them two days ago. Only two days. Then again, only minutes before, they had been about to finish this in pride and peace.

“No,” Kopil said. “He will be punished. But I will not give him to your mob. Find the assassin among you first.”

“Give him to me and we can stop this,” Temoc shouted through the screams.

“Do it,” Elayne said. “I'll stay with Zoh.”

Kopil shook his head. “Unacceptable. We all leave together.”

“I need a concession. Something to calm them down,” Temoc said.

“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.