12. Max
Max
Caspian swung Missy onto his back. My sister giggled, and the lion cub clung to her with all four sets of claws.
Nikolai took point. I took the rear, eyes on Caspian and the small shape riding him.
The mages were waiting on the stairs below the eleventh floor.
Nikolai hit them first. He took the lead mage’s spell full on his Coldiron armguard and killed her on the answering stroke, the ax going into her temple while the shock was still setting on her face.
Some people never believe it would be them.
Surprise. Nobody’s special.
Nikolai cracked their formation open. Caspian’s death cards arced over the vampire’s shoulder. Two elites dropped where they stood.
Missy twisted around to find me, eyes huge.
“We’ll be okay, little viper.” I let my Coldiron dagger flow into a fan of throwing stars. “Keep your head low.”
She nodded, jaw set, and pressed her face into Caspian’s neck.
The mages at the rear threw elementals at us. The ones in front came with spells and potions. We got the armguards up, ducked, and hit back. Nikolai was deep in their midst, swinging his ax to open a path.
Spells burst against the walls, the stairs, the floor. Sparks rained and bounced along the glass. The tower shook once, twice, groaned, and held.
I sent the stars spinning at the mages farthest back, the ones chanting something big. Three of them went down. The stars came home to my hands dripping and chirping.
We pushed through floor by floor, and on each one we kept our word to the captives.
I shattered cases and tanks and crates as we passed. We freed that angel first on the tenth floor. He dropped out of the broken glass and caught himself on half-spread wings, silver feathers shedding dust, and said nothing at all.
Then the ninth-floor legends and rebels. Then the rare creatures. Tanks and cages burst one after another until the Glass Tower rang like a bell.
Collars at their throats pinned their power down. I broke them with the stars, and the bands cracked apart in my grip. Magic came back into their owners like faint static.
Caspian put the freed captives between himself and Nikolai.
Nobody got between me and Caspian’s back.
My sister was riding it, legs clamped around his waist, arms locked around his throat harder than he would have liked.
He never said a word about it. The cub had wedged himself against her shoulder, growling at everything and shaking the whole time.
A few of the captives stooped over the guards we’d killed on the way up and came away armed. Most couldn’t fight at all. Years in a dead-zone case with a power-muting torc on your throat takes a while to come back from.
We fought our way out of the Glass Tower and into the night.
A company was already waiting for us on the grass. Every magical class was represented, and a lot of Forged, who take killing blows better than men do. More were coming, boots hammering the garden paths, spells lighting the hedges.
The freed supernaturals who could still fight came in alongside us with borrowed swords and years, decades, centuries of rage behind them. None of them fought clean.
Nikolai keyed his radio and spoke in clipped code, calling in our lookout groups.
We pushed past the gatehouse into a melee. Screaming, blades, spells going off in every direction.
A captive went down under a halberd and didn’t get up. I never found out which one. I was busy.
The angel went forward, wings opening into flame. Light shot out of his eyes and reduced a dozen guards to ash. Then he dropped, spent, and a squad ran at him with a net.
I let a dagger fly. It split into three stars and buried themselves in a dark witch and two of her coven before any of them got near his wings.
The angel’s gaze found me across the whole length of the chaos. Then he got to his feet and shot into the sky and was gone. I understood. He had nothing left, and the last thing he wanted was to go back on a shelf.
The radio crackled. Frost’s group had reached the tunnel door and found it swarming. Guards layered on guards. Traps layered under them. The back way was gone. Nikolai called everyone to us.
Josette reached us as we fought to the next block. She hadn’t gone far. Her cover was blown, and she had my sleeve in her fist.
“There’s only one way out now.” She dragged in air. “The bridge. You fight out of the castle, then you cross it. But the elite army’s on it.” She didn’t think we’d make it. It was all over her face. “I’m sorry. There’s no other door.”
Half the rescued beings broke away and ran into the dark, gambling that they’d live longer away from us. I didn’t blame them. I was what everyone on these grounds wanted, and standing near me was like standing in the bullseye.
“Discipline!” Caspian roared at the ones who’d never been soldiers. “Push through! Stay together and we all get the fuck out of here!”
Frost and Marco reached us first, cutting in from the left with a trail behind them.
Then Bryn, Holt, and Odalys. The eagle shifter came down out of the air with her blade in a warlock’s neck.
Odalys killed like a spy, from behind, every time.
Bryn whooped like this was the best night of her life and punched holes in the press with her spear.
Enna and Jace came in last, two Spartans picking off Forged one at a time.
The relief lasted as long as it took them to close the ring again. We had the best fighters on the field, but the enemy had the numbers.
Nikolai carved the point of our wedge, a pale blur leaving a seam of dead men behind him. Caspian fought with my sister on his back, every move chosen to keep his body between Missy and the blades, claws taking throats at full stretch. I fought at his shoulder and watched the pair of them.
Guards went down in front of us, and we bled too. A spear had gone through Jace’s thigh. A potion had burned Marco’s shoulder.
“Fuck, there’s too many!” Jace called.
And then I heard the call of Coldiron. Not from my weapon. All around me.
We’re here! We’re many!
I split my mind off from the melee and reached for them, hunting the way I’d once hunted veins of ore. The metal answered.
Coldiron laced this castle, bound into fittings and frames and the housings of the Stormglass that powered it. And half of that Stormglass had come out of Crimson Ridge.
Same as me. Same as Coldiron.
The metal noticed me. Delight rippled down the network like a chord struck across a hundred rooms.
She’s here!
She brought our brothers from the DarkVeil! She chose them!
Pick me! Pick me!
The chanting swelled inside my skull, hundreds of voices climbing over each other, almost too much to hold with the battle still going. I went into their matrix anyway, opened a Forged guard’s ribs on the way in, and never once lost the small shape on Caspian’s back.
Inside the metal, I stood at the center of a vast dark space, and Coldiron swam around me in schools, glittering, brushing past my arms.
Hello, hello, I purred. They ate it up every time.
Hello! Hello! they answered.
Want to do some damage?
Yes! Damage! Yes!
“Bring down the castle!” I roared in both worlds at once. “Fuck them up!”
Fuck them up! the metal echoed in delight, a thousandfold.
The ground shook.
The shockwave rolled over the field and slapped the air out of our chests.
Across the grounds, a quarter of the castle collapsed in the same moment. Support frames folded. Walls sheared. Houses and halls and shops dropped floor into floor, and the noise took everything else out of the world.
Dust boiled up white and rolled through the grounds like a tide. Fires bloomed in the wreckage. Screams threaded up out of the rubble, and alarm bells started and stopped and started again.
The air turned to grit.
Somewhere in those buildings there had been cooks and clerks and servants. Not soldiers. People from an enemy kingdom who’d never chosen any of it.
The thought went through me cold, but I didn’t let it slow my hands.
Caspian looked back at me over my sister’s head and read all of it off my face in one glance. He didn’t say anything. He just nodded.
This was war. I had one job. Get my sister and my people out.
Stormglass lamps burst one after another down the walls. For a second, every guard and mage on the ground turned to watch the skyline come down.
We didn’t.
We cut a hole through men who no longer knew which disaster to face, and we ran.
Nikolai took the lead again and kept the path open. Belmonte fell in beside him after breaking the last knot of Forged at the arch.
Josette screamed directions. Left. The low stair. Mind the portcullis chains.
Marco and Frost dragged the wounded through the gap while Jace and Enna held it open.
Bryn and I came through last, walking backward.
She’s leaving!
Wait for us!
We fucked them up! Good job!
Coldiron shouted in the matrix until I shut it down.
Ahead, pale in the smoke and fire, the bridge stretched out over black water.
On the far side of it, a legion was already forming.