45. FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-FIVE
NIKLAUS
Location: Steila
Niklaus watched the soldiers pounding on the door to Steila’s central spire. He retracted his head into the abandoned storefront across the dusty road and slid, back against the wall, to the floor.
He’d traveled ten days, only to be too late.
Getting to them now would be suicide.
Niklaus dug through his pack, hand clasping the Aetech lamp Calver had given him weeks before.
His glassy reflection stared back. A full beard covered his chin for the first time he could remember.
Sweat and dust caked his hair, now grown past his ears, flat against his head.
His eyes were older than they had any right to be, and he glared at them.
He was so tired of having no effect on the world but noise.
The lamp did not offer sympathy. In fact, it suddenly seemed very heavy.
He felt that the last ten years had led him to this very moment.
He could not accept it as failure. But pressing the activator?
Taking twenty lives to spare thousands? Watering the cycle of violence? Violence took less than one second.
Niklaus stood. He lifted the lamp, turned round the bend, and peered at the small crowd of Tera’thian soldiers at the tower’s base. He set his jaw.
No.
He’d lived a full life going against the grain. And that wouldn’t end now. It would never make sense to him to have enough love in his heart to bloody his hands. Violence was like moss: intoxicating at first taste, but then he’d never rid his tongue of it. There was no strength in that.
And he had no time for weakness.
Niklaus pressed the activator and tossed the lamp with all his might—not toward the enemy troops, but onto the roof of the neighboring building. As if a diversion had any likelihood of being useful.
Chaos, he was an idiot. But at least he was a pacific idiot.
Niklaus flinched as the lamp collided with the structure.
Its glass shattered. Nothing happened. For a hair-splitting moment, he cursed himself, wondering how much time it would take him to scale the building and retrieve the broken core.
What had he even been thinking? It was an Aetech lamp. What had he expected it to—
The thunder that cracked his eardrums was so forceful that he staggered.
Blinding light clung to the back of his eyelids and he hurled behind the wall, seeking shelter.
The ground rippled beneath him, chased by a whump of warm air.
Screams rang out against the lowsun. When Niklaus gained his senses enough to glance around the corner, the men battering the tower had abandoned it to investigate the site of the explosion.
The door had been knocked in… and left open.
He scratched his head in disbelief. Either this was an act of horrific negligence, or a miracle.
Niklaus looked down either side of the street and then dashed across to the tower. He was rounding the entryway onto the first floor, heart pounding, ears still ringing, when a body slammed into his. Arms clutched him. Dex.
“Damn you, Meyernes.”
Even if the embrace hadn’t been rib-crushing, it would have stolen his words for its unexpectedness. Niklaus returned the gesture, patting Dex’s back. “Easy, wouldn’t want you to get your hands dirty, eah?”
Dex slowly let go with a sniff. The boy wore a too-large uniform, per the usual, but this one was Tera’thian. “Took you long enough.”
“Blue is not a good color on you,” Niklaus replied.
Dex smiled weakly. He squeezed Niklaus’s shoulder, then darted toward the door to peer into the street.
Niklaus’s attention flickered to Calver, descending the final stairs from the tower, brown eyes unreadable. Sweat and sand slicked his hair and beard. He looked very much the way Niklaus felt—like a fig left too long in the sun—but with more muscle and menace.
Niklaus’s apology spilled from his lips. “Cal. I messed up. Let me—”
Beautiful words, if not for the coldness in his posture. Niklaus winced, and what he had intended to finish saying somehow went missing, replaced by the cringe-worthy, “You’re damn near the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Calver blinked. Something shook in his expression, but it seemed more a trick of the light than a phantom smile.
“We’re all going to be a lot more sorry if we don’t leave before they figure out we’re still here, not there,” Dex hissed.
A horn blared to the west, and they froze. A muster. The Red Wing had been sighted. Time’s well had run dry.
Dex peered around the entryway again, and immediately withdrew.
Calver and Niklaus slid against the wall beside Dex. First, they heard footsteps. Then two guards entered the tower’s ground chamber.
Calver moved before Niklaus fully understood what was happening.
Never before had Niklaus seen a soul depart a body with such efficiency.
There was no emotion: only motion and severance.
It was art, what Calver did with the ease of a brush stroke, and it turned Niklaus’s stomach.
The bloodied dowaga was already back in its holster like nothing had happened. Dex looked adamantly at the ground.
Calver was looking at Niklaus, who was doing his best not to fall over as his vision tunneled.
“The—the cliffs. Then a vacant storefront by the coast. I’ve been trying to get here for hours,” Niklaus stammered. There was too much to explain, but he couldn’t think past the bodies on the floor: two lives he’d attempted to spare a short minute ago.
“Y-yes. Yes. I’ll guide you there.”
Dex shook his head. “Fates, you’re a miracle. And to think that last week you were useless.”
Don’t look at the bodies. Don’t look at the bodies.
Niklaus chuckled weakly. Useless. He’d forgotten he’d joined the military: where utility meant keeping your people alive at all costs—even life itself.
He could either get over it quickly, or wind up in the dirt beside them.
“From the bottom of a bottle, a hero has been born.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, you might trip on that ego.” The boy seemed just as desensitized as Calver. What was wrong with Niklaus?
Calver’s face pinched. It seemed like he was straining to breathe, though Niklaus couldn’t see an injury.
“Yes. But first—I think you should know—it’s Steila. I mean, it’s the civilians. They’re being held under guard there.”
“Right.” Niklaus swallowed back bile. “This way.”
CALVEROUS
The streets were vacant. No patrol. No sound. Just the sultry heat of the lowsun, dispersed by gusts of wind off the sea. The Tera’thians were staging their attack on the eastern perimeter. The Red Wing was doomed. And Calver was fleeing in the opposite direction.
Calver and Dex followed Niklaus for long minutes, darting from one vacant building to the next, until they reached Steila’s southwestern most point, where the city butted up to the obsidian cliffs of Thaligan.
They ducked into a tucked-away storefront at the end of a row sided by cliff face.
The interior was dark. Shattered glass littered the entryway and pottery the kitchen.
A table had been overturned, scattering the remains of a meal gone sour.
The Tera’thians had come through two, perhaps three days ago. Long enough to corral or cull ten thousand citizens.
“Before we get too comfortable…” Niklaus nodded out the window at the building across from them: an adobe warehouse hunched atop a rise which threatened to spill into the sun-gilded Casowhatan.
A single shuttered window sat along its face, and a metal ladder ascended to the roof. “That’s where we’re headed.”
Calver’s signals were mechanical. He became subtly aware of the way Niklaus looked at him—the same way Fankalo used to look at him, like he was a cobra posing to strike.
“Because thousands of Nelfindar’s civilians have been taken hostage there. Civilians that can bear arms. Civilians that can help us win.”
“We can’t get them out,” Dex said. “Not just the three of us. Even with the Tera’thian forces moving for the eastern city line, the front of the warehouse must be defended.”
“What if there was another explosion?”
Dex shook his head. “There will be collateral damage. The Tera’thians are keeping them alive in custody. If they try to run, I doubt they’ll be so generous.”
Calver argued. Assuming anyone in the Red Wing survived to fight back.
“We need to get them out before that becomes a possibility,” Niklaus said.
Which, by tradition, was at lowsun on the first day of spring.
“What was going to be your plan until then?” Niklaus asked, as though martyring themselves to the nearly impossible chances of rescuing Steila’s civilians was the obvious thing to do.
“Find the Tera’thian’s universal activator. Prevent the detonation,” Dex replied.
The weather lines in Niklaus’s face deepened. “Didn’t you already dismantle whatever was in the tower to do that? Isn’t that why they were trying to barge in?”
They both looked to Calver.
His eyes squeezed shut. How to explain to them that the entire thing had been a carefully laid trap for him?
That the only reason they weren’t dead was because he had, fundamentally, a mental disorder absorbing the bulk of his sensory input that rendered him invisible?
That there was no hope left for their objective?
“How?”
Because he had been betrayed by the person he’d spent a lifetime wishing he could save.
Or perhaps not. Why would she have told him to come home? Why had she sent him to Thacklore? Nothing was certain.
Niklaus looked at Calver long and hard. Calver wished he wouldn’t.
“Do you know where the real one is?”
“Then what’s the plan?”