Last First Snow (22 page)

She passed the barriers' anchor into the drop of blood. They flickered, strained, but held. Good enough for now. It had to be.

The blood boiled.

Shadow and light clothed her, gave her strength. She sprinted toward the barricade.

*   *   *

Atop the sandbags, Wardens took up arms again. Stun nets glittered. They raised other weapons too, long wicked rods and hooks of iron, killing tools. “What are you doing?” Temoc shouted. “We're here to talk.”

The King in Red burned atop his makeshift fortress, ten feet tall now and growing, his eyes nova-bright. Lightning gathered between his clawed finger bones. “To distract, you mean. I thought you had more self-respect, Temoc.”

“What do you mean?”

“You never wanted to talk.” Kopil's voice boomed. “Just to keep us busy while your friends snuck behind our lines.”

Friends? Temoc almost said aloud. Then he thought: the Major. “That's not true!” Around him the crowd cursed and cried and surged toward the wall. “This isn't over!”

“I think it is,” Kopil said, and raised his hand.

*   *   *

Elayne leapt the sandbag rampart in a single jump. “Kopil!”

The skull, three times the size now of any human head, revolved toward her. Comically large, monstrous. “I am busy smiting.”

She almost lost it then, chaos be damned. “They flanked us.” Pitched so Temoc could hear. “Smite later. First, save the camp.”

He shrugged, and swept one hand through the air in a dismissive gesture. Humans erupted from the barricade, thrown pinwheeling back into the crowd. “Hold the line,” he told Chimalli as, now fifteen feet tall, now ten, he floated to the street. She followed, wasting soulstuff on speed to keep pace.

“I should have expected this.” His feet touched ground an instant before hers.

“Kettle them with Craft. Stop them from moving north. Contain the riot.”

“Expensive. Cheaper to kill a few, terrify the rest.”

“Do that and you have a bigger problem.”

He stopped. “Who will stop me? You?”

“Do you want to go down in history as the first Deathless King in the New World to use deadly force against civilians?”

“What definition of ‘civilian' are you using that includes anarchists in uniform?”

They reached the intersection, and Elayne's glyphs. The drop of blood sparked and sputtered—too much power passing through at once. Her barrier would break any second now.

Wardens screamed orders as the barriers sagged. A narrow gap opened to the east; rioters clawed through.

“So easy to kill them,” he said. “If I do it now, fast, the whole movement will shatter like glass on the anvil. Blocking them in gives these madmen credit, and strength. More will die in the long run.”

“Kopil.”

He stared into her with eyes like needles. Anyone else might have broken. But Elayne knew him of old.

“Don't.”

His eyes blinked out. A serpent ate the sun. He snapped his fingers with a sound of thunder.

Her barriers broke like porcelain, and his replaced them. A hundred guillotine blades fell, east and west along Jackal, cutting the Skittersill off from the northern city. Diamond-shimmering walls, pregnant with nightmare: gaze upon them and go mad. Many did in that moment, and fell back writhing with visions of shining teeth and gnawing doom.

The King in Red stood in his own city, his place of power. What force could resist him?

Screams from the east. Rising barriers snapped arms and legs. A woman wept.

“It is done,” Kopil said. “We are at war.”

 

33

Temoc watched the peace fail.

He tried to stop it. Shouted until his throat was hoarse. They did not listen.

The King in Red left the barricade. Below, the people of Chakal Square rose, beaten, bruised, and angry, to throw themselves at the wall again. With the King in Red gone, the Wardens seemed less formidable than before. More stun nets cast, and men and women fell, but others helped them, or climbed over their bodies to press on.

“Stop,” he cried, but he had lost the people, and they were not easily regained. He had been their heart. Now he was a rock against their flood.

He ordered red-arms to fan out and break the rush. Cut off the supply of attackers, limit the damage. Those scaling the wall were lost already. Triage. He hated the word.

Minutes passed, or seconds, or hours, before he heard the screams. Terror, shock, pain. These were not the cries of men who faced weapons. A weapon you understood. These screams meant Craft.

Diamond blades cut Chakal Square off.

Demonic reflections danced in the translucent barriers, reaching out with arms of refracted sunlight. A woman had been charging the barricade atop a tall man's shoulders. The man stumbled, and she swayed too close to the wall. Spectral claws left white tracks on her skin. She fell, screaming. Temoc heard a loud crack as she struck pavement. Only an arm broken he hoped, or a leg.

“Help them!” he shouted to the red-arms. “Get people back. Give them room.” The red-arms saluted with fist across chest, the old way. Temoc realized seconds later that he'd replied in kind. He was a soldier again.

He heard more wails from farther east down Crow, and west down Jackal. Demon walls rose. Translucent insect nightmares within cast rainbows on the crowd.

They were being bottled off.

He charged through the crowd like a bull through surf, breaking waves and scattering foam. When he saw red-arms, he commanded them: “Go to the barriers. Help the wounded.” They obeyed and he ran past, guided by a glint of sunlight off steel, through surging flesh until he met the Major.

“What did you do?”

The Major knelt on his crate, back to Temoc, talking with his soldiers. At Temoc's words, the soldiers withdrew, and the Major stood. “Temoc. How was your meeting?” Black eyes glinted behind his helm.

“You ordered the attack while I was still talking.”

“I told my men to get into position. They must have misinterpreted.”

“They would have given us the Warden. You ruined it.”

“Any deal they made would only be a sop to us. The djinn's out of the bottle.”

“They're walling us in. Anyone in the square is an enemy of the city, now. They're declaring war.”

“Excellent!”

“Are you insane?”

“The King in Red has named us his enemies. We are soldiers now, together. Everyone who thought there was a peaceful path from Chakal Square will face the truth today.”

“There are families here. My family is here.”

“Then they will fight.” The voice behind the helmet echoed with the tinny noise of marching boots. “They will fight, and we will win.”

“Not like this. What will you do against Couatl? Against Craft?”

“What we can,” the Major said. “And more, with you at our head. Temoc, last of the Eagle Knights. You could drive them weeping before you.”

“The whole corps of Eagle Knights could not stop the Craftsmen in the last war, not with the gods behind us.”

“No army opposes you today, no legion of wizards and demons and dragons and undead. Only a few police and an uncertain king.”

“The gods are too weak to fight this war.”

“Then we will give our lives to their cause,” the Major said. “We will sacrifice. We will shed blood. They will feed, and you will lead us to glory.”

“Glory.” The word sounded good. Sleeping gods stretched in Temoc's heart. They knew these ancient words, and smiled fanged smiles as they dreamed. Rise and fight. Kill, in the old way, as a man. He searched the Major's eyes for some hint of duplicity or madness. He found none. “You really think we can win.”

“I know we can, with you at our head.”

The Major must have heard Temoc's knuckles pop as he balled his hand into a fist, but he didn't understand in time to duck.

Temoc's punch struck the Major's helm, lifted the man a few inches off the ground and threw him back into the watching red-arms. He fell, a clattering pile of metal, a fist-shaped dent in his mask.

Temoc walked away.

“Where are you going?” the Major called after him.

“To my family.”

 

34

Temoc marched toward the meeting tent. He stopped to heal a young man's broken leg, one hand steadying the knee, the other hand pulling from the ankle. A prayer to Healer Olam, a breath of divinity in his touch, and hunger. The gods smelled blood.

None here, he told them. The world has changed.

He just couldn't offer any proof of that at the moment.

He healed the boy's leg, and a woman's bleeding scalp wound, and fused cracks in a fat man's ribs. They followed. He saw Kapania Kemal gathering followers, with Bill by her side. He walked on. If anyone tried to stop him, he did not notice.

He found Chel guarding the tent. She saluted him. “They're safe.”

“Did anyone…” He trailed off, couldn't bear to say the words—they were too big to fit out his mouth.

“No.”

“We're blocked in. All the roads going north, at least.”

“What will you do?”

He frowned. “Take my wife and son home.”

“Will you come back?”

“I don't know,” he said, meaning “no.” And, when she did not answer, only stared at him unmoved: “You should go. Take as many as you can. This will get worse.”

“Before it gets better?”

“Before it gets worse.”

“My friends are here,” she said. “My people.” And he heard after that: yours, too.

“I know.” And I am sorry. “I need to take care of my family.”

“What should we do, Temoc?”

“I told you. Leave.”

“I can't.” Desperation. Fear. Controlled, before her men. She would have been a good commander in the Wars, if there had been woman commanders then. “Help me, even if you're going to take Mina and Caleb.” Your wife and son, again unsaid, who I have kept safe, your wife and son to whom I have done my duty as a soldier. Expecting you to do your duty to me in turn, as commander.

With the shreds of his god-power he pulled her followers' eyes to him. “Chaos will pose a greater threat than Wardens at first. Protect these people.” He set his hand on Chel's arm, felt her strength. “They will follow you.”

“Thank you,” she said. He saw her marshal the will to speak again without shaking. “Get out of here, sir.”

He entered the tent.

Mina sat inside, helping Caleb play solitaire. When the tent flap opened she spun toward the sudden light, one hand raised to ward off brilliance or a blow.

“We're going,” he said.

“Caleb, it's time.” The boy gathered his cards, wrapped them in silk, and slid them into their box.

“What's happened?” Caleb said.

She hugged him. Blood from his cheek marked hers.

“I didn't know this would happen. I swear. I thought—” What? There were words to use, if he could remember them, if the memory of Chel's eyes hadn't torn them all away. Lead us. “No,” was a start, but what came after? “We have to leave.”

“I'll carry Caleb.”

“I will,” he said. “I'm stronger.”

“Let me do something, dammit.”

“Help me get us out of here. That's enough.”

She wanted to know more: about Chel, or the Major, about what he would have done if she and Caleb did not exist. Unasked, unanswered questions fluttered about their heads like bats, terrifying and terrified at once.

Temoc lifted Caleb and led Mina from the tent. Chel saluted as they emerged, and Mina broke stride to salute her back. They pushed through the crowd to Bloodletter's, where a barrier blocked their path—but the barriers didn't run through buildings, only closed off streets. Temoc kicked down a shop's door and they fled through connecting rooms into an alley behind the nightmare wall. They ran down empty streets beneath circling Couatl—an anonymous family homeward bound. Wardens rolled past in black wagons toward the siege.

They reached home. Their courtyard seemed unchanged and alien at once, as if every surface and object had been repainted a subtly different color. The apartment still smelled of breakfast. Temoc set his son down and sat, and Mina sat, too. They breathed in the shadows across from one another, and were afraid.

 

35

The King in Red laughed avalanche laughs and directed the Wardens with the dramatic excess of a Schwarzwald nightclub impresario, movements swift and sweeping, orders delivered in thundering voice. Wardens ran where he bid.

“You'll be all right?” Elayne asked before she left.

“I haven't felt this good in years,” he said. “I should thank them.”

“Keep yourself under control.”

“I am always, perfectly, under control.”

“Listen to me.” She stared into the conflagrations of his eyes. “As your counsel, if not your friend. The Wars are over. Let the Wardens do their job.”

“The Wars are never over.”

“They are,” she said, with all the certainty she could muster. A few decades of death had not improved Kopil's emotional intelligence in other respects. She hoped he still had a hard time telling when she was stating a fact, as opposed to willing her statement true.

“Okay,” he said.

Apparently so.

The King in Red continued: “Tell me what you find. And keep that briefcase safe.”

“I'll file it after I check on Batac at the hospital.”

“Let me know what you learn.” Without further good-byes, he swept away to harangue more Wardens.

Captain Chimalli caught Elayne before she left. “Lady Kevarian,” he said—using the Quechal vocative of address to nobility. “You're going to Grace.”

She nodded.

“If you don't mind.” The captain took a sealed letter from his pocket. “Bring this to Dr. Venkat. We'll need more first-aid supplies here soon. Nurses, too.”