We’ll Have to Fix the Gate
WE’LL HAVE TO FIX THE GATE
Esme and Urias ducked in time to keep their eyes, and the warning arrows missed Bal’s party behind them. Esme held her hands up at her sides in surrender, not because she was unnerved, but because getting into a fight right now would mean ruining her new shirt.
“Do you know who we are?” Urias barked, throwing himself off his horse. He spun age into his voice, and the archers sitting atop the gate could barely keep their hands from shaking. “Put those down, now. And bring me the fucker in charge!”
Terrified of the vultures gathering overhead, footmen tripped down to meet Urias on land, arrows sheathed and cheeks flaming. Their elected speaker pushed up to the Wraiths.
“Do they have a house, my lord?” the man asked Urias, nodding to Bal and his band.
“What does that have to do with you opening the gate?” Urias demanded, frowning.
“Orders from the queen, my lord.”
Esme swung off her horse, taking her place beside Urias. The guard handed them a hastily signed decree. “Only those descended from a noble family may enter the city unless serving a lady or lord of such noble blood,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you in.”
Esme read the decree over twice, and found that it was just as simple as the knight had explained it. “When was this sent?” she asked.
“This morning.”
“Has the Prince of the Lake arrived?”
“Aye, this morning. Rushed to Valos’s Eye from the west gate.”
“The temple?”
The man nodded.
“Why?”
“Well…” The knight looked back and forth between Urias and Esme. “The funeral, sir.”
That bitch!
Esme opened her mouth to say something vile but the ground rioted below her.
A pinprick in her neck grew to the will’s searing grip around her throat and the pain kicked her to her knees.
Isobel was defying the will by locking Bal out of the city, so the Betrayer’s Serpent was throwing a fit.
The earthquake tossed soldiers from their posts on the wall.
Their bodies landed with sickening crunches.
Somewhere south, an explosion rocked the ground again. A blinding rush of smoke heavy with the metallic scent of blood soured the air. As fires leapt higher, the screams grew louder until some of them shredded them off into death.
Her Wraiths, Mina, Gia—
Esme tore up to her feet and stumbled to the locked iron gates. The slats were too thin for her to crawl between or even jam her fingers into to pry open.
This was going to hurt.
She wound heavy shadows around her hand and drew back a fist. She knew damn well that it was more likely that she’d shatter her arm than punch through metal, but fear for her family bolstered her strength.
Her fist swerved off course when Urias grabbed her waist and yanked her to the ground.
A hail of vultures ripped through the iron, so many of them that Esme couldn’t even see through the horde. It took just a second for the metal and stone to shatter against their might.
When they were through, all that remained was a gaping wound in the wall belching black feathers and smoke.
Urias panted beside her. He’d been the one to call the birds, but he still blanched at their clumped and ruined bodies skewered on the twisted metal. The second the gate was gone, the earthquake waned, but it would not end until the will’s orders were met. They had to get Bal to Isobel.
Esme and Urias rushed inside a city choking on ash and ruin.
Bal was smart enough, or stupidly brave enough, to follow.
Civilians shrieked into the blinding smog for their loved ones.
Esme’s stomach told her to go to her street, to find Mina and Gia first, but she had no clue if they were there. Mina was probably at work—
In the kitchens.
In the basement kitchens.
As if Urias knew what Esme planned to do, he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “This won’t stop until we get Balthazar to Valos’s Eye,” he growled. “That’s how we save them.”
Esme looked back to see the general leaping from his horse to help a woman trying in vain to heave her collapsed house off her family.
She flicked her wrist and the wreckage flipped, revealing a huddle of children washed black in soot.
Before Bal could react, Esme grabbed him by the collar and conjured Inra, throwing him onto the horse and leaping up on her back.
Valos’s Eye was a temple at the very northernmost part of the city, and Isobel had likely chosen it as a venue to ensure Esme and Urias would be late getting Bal there, no doubt part of some plan she’d concocted in the week they’d been gone. Now, all she was ensuring was death.
Esme kicked Inra into a breakneck sprint. Terror whizzed past her in a blur of screams and blood and black smog. Esme wanted to stop, to help, but that would damn them all. It would damn Mina and Gia.
Valos’s Eye sat on a monster of a hill, and Esme sped up the brutal incline.
Her powers shuddered as she wrung every drop of control from herself, every drop of strength from her shadows.
Her grip on both begged to give out, but she didn’t let it.
She hit the bottom of her well of power, and then she plunged her nails into her very soul and dug.
Inra hauled Esme and Bal up the rough terrain, her hooves slipping on the quivering rock. Close. They were so close. Inra leapt up onto a ledge, and then the ground pitched. One second, they were running—
The next, they were in the air.
Instead of watching her world flip upside down as she soared, Esme saw Mina, stuck in that hole as the castle caved in on her head, Gia huddled with the other girls at the Lap, mistresses praying over them in vain as the temple burned.
If Esme died here, she’d wake back up, but Mina and Gia would suffer her failure forever.
Tears gathered in Esme’s eyes only to be whipped dry when three strong talons braced around her middle and punched the air right out of her.
“Did you know there was Magic in the eagles?”
Esme looked up to see Urias, with Bal clutching his chest like a child, riding on an eagle bigger than a horse. He’d caught her in the bird’s massive claws.
On one hand, that was not good; Magic was so thick in Amaris that it had bloated the eagle into a beast. On the other hand, she wasn’t splattered on the hillside, and she wouldn’t look a gift bird in the beak.
“Why didn’t you find this one earlier?” she shouted up at Urias.
They soared up the hill so fast Esme couldn’t even see the ground. Urias steered his feathered fiend with his hands splayed on its head, his eyes blank white.
When they came to Valos’s Eye, Urias flew a wide circle around it. The temple was open air, but Esme watched as one of the pillars collapsed into the sanctuary. They couldn’t land there safely.
“Drop me in!” Esme shouted up. “Don’t land until my signal.”
Urias swooped the bird down and dropped Esme three stories from the ground. Any lower and they’d be crushed by one of those falling pillars.
Esme’s landing blew a crater in the temple floor.
The earthquake had weakened the seven pillars that constituted a wall around the temple, and two had already fallen.
Padrian and Samander were trying and failing to lift a column pinning the legs of a family.
Another group was trapped under the stampede of people fleeing the temple, curled up in balls to protect their heads.
The raven’s glass decanters carrying scents for the funeral had shattered, leaving a thicket of glass for people to cut their hands on as they scrambled on their palms and knees for safety.
Esme found Isobel thrown over Hallel, clutching the girl’s head of black hair to her chest and gasping a prayer.
It better be for forgiveness.
Esme flung out her arms and pulled a city of shadow over the hill.
Blackness swirled overhead like a rallying apocalypse.
Mourners stupidly tried to escape to lower ground, but Esme built a wall of shadow around the temple to lock everyone in before they threw themselves down a mile-long cliff.
Massive arms of storm dropped down to lift the fallen pillars.
Black hands righted overturned pews and altars.
“You started early, I see.” Esme’s voice cracked from the sky like lightning, with thunder marching in every word. It stopped the chaos in its tracks.
Isobel, petty and human, didn’t have the sense about her to speak.
Esme’s glamour flickered. One second, she was a woman; the next, a slash of cosmos—unknowable, even for a second. Her hair whipped around her face in a windstorm of Magic, and her eyes blazed white. Against her calves, shadows sloshed like tides.
Overhead, Urias flew his eagle close. Esme raised a hand and the bird spiraled for the ground before whipping out its gigantic wings to gentle the landing.
The bird splashed down in Esme’s black ocean, Bal stumbling from the beast’s back the second its feet touched the ground.
The general trembled on his knees, disoriented by the sheer force of a near century of magic.
He didn’t dare tear his eyes from Esme, his face sallow and a line of blood dribbling from his nose.
Esme stitched her glamour tight and sucked her frigid, starry magic back into her lungs before he got a headache.
“Your Highness,” she spat, turning to Isobel. “May I present to you General Balthazar Joh’el.”
The fire of the rioting will on Esme’s throat finally died, and the ground stood still. Bal had been delivered to the city to take part in the competition, and the will was sated.
Whistling twisted through the temple, and while the humans lurched in fear, Esme sighed.
Dust lifted from her shoulders, each speck finding its home back to the destroyed pillars until they were smooth again.
The singed ends of the carpet elongated, the ash un-burning to fabric again.
A huge golden statue of Valos standing at the head of the temple un-crumpled, glistening with renewed perfection.