Last First Snow (43 page)

Minutes more, and it would all be over.

Elayne's senses filled the Skittersill, and she watched the dragon swoop toward Chakal Square, wings beating. She watched the battle on its back. The sparks, the angels, faded. With each death they slowed, reduced. Captain Chimalli fought three at once, while behind him his master and Temoc traded stroke for stroke. And Chel, where was Chel, lost already, fallen? No. Elayne saw the woman crawl along the dragon's back, light dimmed, keeping low. She remained herself, despite the gods.

And Elayne watched from the sidelines.

“She's still alive,” Tay said. “Save her.”

“I can't,” she said. “That was the deal.”

Around her, the King in Red's victims wept.

“Break the deal.”

“I can't.”

You're not a warrior anymore,
Temoc had said.

A peacemaker. A restorer of life. That was what she wanted to be. A counselor.

And so far she had failed.

Soon, at least, the fires would go out.

*   *   *

Temoc and the King in Red danced an old dance. Faster, faster they spun. Temoc lashed out with a kick, blocked by the staff, as was his second. Invited his adversary to attack, sidestepped the staff strike when it came, grabbed at the weapon which was gone already—it swept in a blurred circle to clip a temple that was not there because Temoc had already ducked back.

Fiercer they fought, power flowing into both from greater fonts. From their perspective the exchange contained long pauses, slow shifting moments in which each examined the other, considered options and rejected them, feinted and countered. Still they moved too fast for an outside observer to see anything but a blur.

Temoc had never fought like this, not even in the God Wars. Accelerating mass and perception to such heights cost Craftsmen dearly—more efficient to slay from a distance, to destroy targets that could not defend themselves. One might lose a fistfight.

As the King in Red would lose. Temoc's hands were so close to his neck. He would break those bones, piece by piece. Craftsmen were hard to kill, but he could manage. He was faster, stronger than he had ever been. A bringer of vengeance. The last true knight in the world.

*   *   *

The monsters slowed. When the next came for Chimalli, he caught it, lifted it, threw it off the dragon. The second, when killed, did not rise again. There was pain somewhere in his body, from cuts and scrapes, and blood everywhere. He would deal with that later. The third monster jumped him, and he flipped it to the ground, knelt on top of it, and hit it in the face, again and again. Bones cracked. He hit it a few more times, and stood, trembling.

The King in Red fought Temoc, so fast. He tried to track their bodies, to tell his boss from his enemy. Maybe. Somewhere. Suggestions of shape within the blur.

He reached for the holster at his thigh.

*   *   *

Chel felt the gods fade and herself reduced. No.
She
remained. The divine grip that held her, the wrath that pulsed through her veins like a second blood, that eased. She became herself again, on this dragon's back, a human being crawling toward the crimson-black cloud that was the King in Red, fighting Temoc.

Not good. Not bad, either, she decided.

At least she still had weapons.

She rose into a crouch, crossbow at the ready.

*   *   *

The last of the fuel consumed, the fires of Chakal Square began to die.

Elayne watched the dragon, and saw what was about to happen.

“Help her!”

Yes. To all the hells with the Craft and its rules, with word and bond. Just
help
.

She called her power to her, reached out—

But at the last her own promise bound her, held her. I will not save them.

Her Craft broke. The shield that warded them cracked, and oven-breath seeped through the gaps to sear their lungs.

She fell to the stone.

*   *   *

Temoc fought the King in Red. The gods' power was his. Immense strength, battering the Craftsman to a standstill. He drew his knife and it splintered the staff, chipped it, sheared it in half.

He kicked out the back of the skeleton's knee, caught its spine in the crook of his elbow, tightened. Bone creaked. Craftwork sparked and spasmed against him. Seconds more.

Temoc laughed, in the fullness of his power. “Why haven't we done this before?”

“Because,” Kopil said, “I never needed to get you into position.”

*   *   *

Blur and whirlwind, dust and smoke, shadow and light, all coalesced into two arrested forms, the King in Red in Temoc's grip.

And Chimalli had the shot.

His finger tightened on the trigger.

*   *   *

Elayne was too far away, but still she thought she heard the crossbow's string, a single note plucked on the bass of the world.

*   *   *

Chimalli fell. The crossbow slipped from his fingers.

Chel stared down at the weapon in her hand, still singing its one note. She looked up again. The King in Red roared, threw Temoc back, and turned toward her. His eyes burned bright as he raised his hand.

She did not tremble, though she was afraid.

*   *   *

Elayne saw the captain fall, crossbow bolt through his neck. She saw the Craft the King in Red invoked, which she could have stopped, so easily, the slightest flick of her will even at this distance. But she was bound.

And so she saw, too, the round hole appear in Chel's forehead, before she fell.

Tay screamed. She barely heard him.

Temoc tackled the King in Red, an instant too late.

He struck Kopil in the chest with a blow that would have shattered marble, and the skeleton staggered. Temoc hit him again, and again. The King in Red swept his arm around—the hand with which he'd killed Chel—and Temoc seized it and moved faster than even Elayne could see. Kopil's wrist bent at a sharp angle, and there was a sound like a shot, of wards giving way.

Then the King in Red swelled, and his teeth grew long and the sparks in his eyes sharp and fierce as any hell. He thrust out his staff, and Temoc flew back through the air. His scars burned to seize the edges of the Craft that held him, but this Craft had no edge, just an endless torrent of will. The King in Red could not last long with such power in him—his mind would shatter in ten seconds, but he needed less than ten.

Temoc was about to die.

As the people of Chakal Square had died. As their risen remnants died. As Chel died.

And now Temoc. Old soldier. Broken shell. Father. Fool.

While Elayne stood in her circle, immune, because she played the game. Because she kept her word. And because she played the game she would be allowed these few she'd saved, scorched and shattered, to live as testament to the futility of change. Scraps at the table. The King in Red might pay their hospital bills, if it amused him.

She closed her eyes. They stung from smoke and other things. Through the forest of contracts and bargains and powers the King in Red called down, she saw the Quechal gods, shrunken to angry shades and fading, power spent in their rush toward victory. Betrayers and last casualties of Chakal Square.

No, not last. They would die first, and then Temoc.

She could not do this. Not her place. Not her fight. Not now, after sixty years of a chosen side.

For the first and last time in her life, Elayne Kevarian prayed.

Not to the gods above, traitors and accursed. Not to the gods of her childhood, whose people had hunted her through wood and field. Not to the Lord of Alt Coulumb or the squid kings of Iskar or the Shining Empire Thearchs. She prayed up, and in, and out, in broken desperation, in case something might hear.

Save him
.

Please
.

The answer came at once, so sudden and swift she mistook it for wishful thinking: a cold rush that covered her skin. But there was a mind beneath and behind the answer: cold, vast and alien and personal at once, a voice she'd known since she first caught a falling star, a voice to which time was something other people did.

How?
it asked.

So little power left. The King in Red blocked Temoc's avenues of retreat. The Quechal gods' might was all but spent keeping him alive.

As, in Chakal Square and the Skittersill around, the last of the gripfire's fuel gave up. Flame danced on rooftops, on corpses—no longer the King in Red's fire, but anyone's for the claiming.

She felt the fire through the dream map she'd drawn. Gathered it into her hands: not much power but, she hoped, enough.

Here
, she said.
Use this.
Might have said more, set terms and conditions, proposed a bargain or a contract. She did not.

Was she mad? She heard no rage in that voice, no vengeance, no hunger. Had she merely committed the oldest error, called for aid in extremity and imagined a voice to answer her?

But with eyes closed she could stare into the horrorland the King in Red created, its grinding wheels and chains, its talons and its teeth, the million knives and its space warped in answer to malevolent will, and see Temoc. Then, impossibly, the darkness broke, and he was gone.

She opened her eyes. She knelt in and beyond Chakal Square, in a circle of Craft and of the living burned. Around her, the Skittersill stood beneath a blue sky—the same in every particular but for the dead.

Wardens and Couatl lay tangled with protesters. Charred meat clung to bones. Blood crusted on rock. The god melted atop his dry fountain in the center of the square.

Had they saved a hundred? Perhaps not even so many.

The dragon hung above them all. On the undead beast's back, Wardens moved. The King in Red stood, staring. Chel and the captain lay still.

The square and the whole city fell silent.

Elayne felt that silence press her down. She wiped sweat from her face and her eyes. Only sweat.

Thank you
.

No answer came.

Around her, the twelve wept, and Tay.

The people they'd saved moaned in their sleep.

The sun shone overhead, and she cast no shadow.

 

EPILOGUE

The King in Red descended from the sky to the still-warm stone. Far away, ambulance sirens wailed. The smell of death and fire lay heavy on the air. Elayne strode forward to meet him. She did not permit herself to waver. The King in Red leaned on his broken staff. His ribs rose and fell, as if in some long-buried corner of his mind he remembered that he should be breathing heavy.

Behind her, moans rose from the circle she had saved. Around them, the Skittersill remained. People lived in those buildings, worked there. They were safe. This was not a total defeat.

She almost believed that.

Fires danced in the pits of Kopil's eyes. “You defied me.”

“I did not,” she said, “to my shame. I should have, long ago. We were supposed to be better than this. Our rule was supposed to make people free, and safe. You led a revolution against bloody gods. But what god ever did for his people like you've done for yours?”

“You protected those within the square. They were mine.”

“I gave you my word and kept it, or else I would have broken. The men and women in that circle are not yours. They never were.”

“Stand aside.” Lightning slithered along his crooked bronze-shod staff. He'd bound it whole with Craft.

“No.”

“Elayne.”

“Look around.” The square was fire pit and charnel house in one. Bones jutted from scorched skin. Slagged tentpoles were skeletal arches above blackened stone. “You wanted the God Wars back. Is this the clarity you missed? Because I don't see it. Maybe you could show me.”

“Let me pass.”

She met his gaze. “Try it, and I will break you.”

Dry wind whipped the hem of her charred jacket. His crimson robes snapped like a sail. He was tall, and mighty. “You cannot fight me.”

“Let's see.”

He might have won. She had powers he had not guessed, and he was weary from battle with gods and their champion. But he saw her, and saw too the young woman he had known, who flew in the vanguard of his army and smote their enemies to rubble. And he saw her fury and scorn and smelled too, the cooked meat.

His own face stared up at him from the cobblestones.

Kopil's eyes guttered like a candle flame drowning in wax. He stepped back, and grew smaller. “The ambulances will be here soon,” he said, and left.

*   *   *

Later, Elayne found Temoc bleeding beside a trash can in an alley. His eyes were closed, his legs straight out. His hands lay limp by his sides.

She approached, one step at a time. No gods nearby, but sometimes gods were hard to see. She stopped a few feet away and waited for him to breathe.

He did, after a while.

“Just like old times,” she said.

“Just like.” His eyelids fluttered open. Behind them his eyes were black as ever. “How do I look?”

“Like hell.”

“You, too.”

He was right. Her suit was scorched and torn, her face caked with soot and the salt remains of dried sweat.

“Have you come to take me in?”

She shook her head.

“To kill me, then?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why would you deserve it?”

His chin touched his chest. “For Caleb and for Mina, at least. That was my fault. The rest—the rest I should have seen coming. Should have stopped it.”

“You're no more to blame than any of us.”

“No less, either.”

“No,” she said. “No less.” Neither of them spoke for a while. At last, she did. “What will you do next?”

“Someone has to make him pay.”

“The King in Red, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“That's not what I hoped to hear,” she said. “Wars beget wars.”

“Then kill me now. I will come for him one day. If it takes decades, if it takes centuries. Not all the armies of this earth will stop me.”