Chapter 42 #2
He let out a low scoff. His gaze dipped down my body in a way that, I sensed, was not entirely intentional. “I think I was plenty generous in return. But then, I suppose that was a bit selfish, too. If I’m being honest with both of us.”
A shiver up my spine, up the insides of my thighs.
If I’m being honest with both of us. He said it like it was some kind of flirty joke. But honesty this dangerous was never a joke. Not even for me. Septimus, from the very first time I met him, had been my playmate. We took turns being the cat or the mouse. But now, I was done with games.
“How much time do you have left?” I asked.
The smirk faded. I watched the threads of red in his irises lurch toward his pupil, then recede.
He said casually, “You don’t have to concern yourself—”
“I don’t want a bullshit answer. I want the truth. How much? A year? Or just months?”
At the look on his face, my heart fell.
“Weeks,” I said.
His throat bobbed. His expression remained still. And yet, I knew him well enough to read that it was really saying, Less.
“Enough,” he said. “The answer is, enough time.”
“What if it isn’t?”
He let out a small, wordless sound. If he meant it to be dismissive, he failed. All it did was confirm that he had thought about that question, and frequently. He gazed at the cigarillo between his fingers, and then at the storm raging through the cracked window.
I said quietly, “What would have happened if I didn’t let you drink from me?”
He watched the lightning for a long moment, silent. Then he turned to me.
“I have told you many times now that I’m no hero. All I am in this story is the person who set the stage for the real one to step through. I have made great sacrifices for it. If I make one more, I won’t pretend that’s some great injustice. Not after all I’ve done.”
He touched what remained of the glass, his fingers aligning to the beams of light bursting through the temple ruins.
“We’re at the end of the road I’ve walked for over a decade,” he said.
“I hope to cross its threshold with you. But I’ve already played every card in my hand.
I’ve rolled every set of dice. My usefulness is waning.
So to answer your question, if I hadn’t come back from that episode, you would have simply continued without me. ”
My throat was so tight that I couldn’t have spoken even if I wanted to.
I glanced at Zefiah, who lay against the wall, sheathed, barely glowing. I swallowed the visceral yearning to hear her voice scolding me. To ask her a question I couldn’t quite word, and that I knew would give me an answer I didn’t want to hear.
“Septimus, I—”
“I expect you to complete the job I hired you for, bounty hunter.” He gave me a wry wink. “Don’t worry. You’ll get your payment regardless.”
I felt vaguely sick. “I have every intention of killing that bitch,” I said.
His smirk bloomed to a smile. “Just what I like to hear, lyri.”
But unspoken words bubbled up under my skin. Words that seemed suddenly so urgent. Gods, I wished I was better at wielding them. It was so much easier to throw around steel than all the things I should say.
I started, carefully, “What if—”
A vicious crash rang out in the distance. The floor trembled. An arc of lightning illuminated the broken room. Somewhere below us, glass shattered.
We whipped around. I grabbed Zefiah and scanned the room, then turned to the window and surveyed the landscape below.
The soulless? Oraya, dragging herself after us?
Or something worse?
Between the darkness and the rain and my shit human eyesight, I could barely see.
My eyes leaped from movement to movement across the ruins—scraps of tapestries and flags whipping sadly in the gusts of wind, soulless roaming the forest below, bare branches straining and bowing with each roar of the storm.
Zefiah’s glow beat steadily. In her silence, I felt so terrifyingly weak.
We were quiet, waiting. The storm was so loud that it was difficult to hear much over it. Even the screams of the soulless were nearly drowned out.
Then Septimus’s eyes widened. He yanked me away from the windows before I could react.
I heard it right after he did:
Ticktick ticktick ticktick—
Faster and faster, more and more, a steady roar of mechanical clinks and clicks.
Tickticktickticktick—
Glass rained over us as an army of automatons burst through the remaining window. They crawled up the side of the ruined building, vaulting themselves through any opening with gleaming copper limbs that moved in all directions. Every one of those featureless metal faces stared straight at us.
I leaped into action, swinging Zefiah, metal clanging against metal.
Septimus and I retreated to the back corner of the room.
He seized a broken copper pipe, given that his magic was useless against machines, which he wielded with terrible form—the man really was no warrior.
I knew instantly that we were not going to get out of this with brute force.
“We need the leader,” I called to him, voice straining over the wave of metallic hums and a roll of thunder.
There had to be a general somewhere here, like there had been at the Salt Keep—someone to think for the thoughtless army.
But as my eyes scanned the encroaching wave, growing thicker and thicker, there was no soft flesh to be seen.
A blade opened a fresh wound on my right arm. An automaton seized Septimus, and when he smashed its arm, another simply took its place. Something sharp jabbed my side. Septimus and I were right up against each other, our ring of free space shrinking and shrinking.
And still no general. But they had to be somewhere—
And then, as a set of steel claws seized one of my arms, digging deep into my flesh and dragging me forward as I thrashed, I looked out the window.
At last, I saw it.
“Fuck,” Septimus breathed, pulled along beside me.
I began laughing, because what the hell else was I going to do?
Wisps of rainbow light hovered in the sky. The sign of a god’s presence.
There was no human general because the ultimate general was already here:
Srana herself.
Septimus and I thrashed against the tide.
In a desperate last effort, I grabbed a lit torch from the wall and whacked my nearest attacker over the head with it.
Metal bent with a clang, a stream of oil bursting a fountain from its neck, but the machine did not release me.
Now so many automatons crawled over the building that no matter where I looked, there was nothing but metal.
The stone began to groan beneath us. The next roar of thunder shook the floor.
I wondered if I was imagining that it was tilting.
No, I realized, as fire hungrily consumed what remained of the curtains. I was not imagining it.
My feet no longer touched the floor. The automatons dragged me toward the edge of the building. The rumble of collapsing stone mingled with the thrashing of the storm. Septimus had lost his makeshift weapon, the machines hoisting him like a rag doll.
He reached out for me. Our fingers brushed.
But a deafening roar burst from beneath as the ruined building at last gave out.
The last thing I felt was the sensation of falling, falling, falling.