He blamed the Library.
The plateau should have stopped her, as it had a thousand before. And if not the plateau then the ice bridge. She'd got past both, which was unknown, and survived the stamp of a butterfly when none but the reincarnated could do that and live.
All 2023 worlds knew this and so did Zaq, because he'd patched himself into a feed. So now he watched himself staring into space, talking to nothing and sitting on the step of a pagoda while the Dragon Throne sat empty behind him.
There was little need for her to burn the buildings of the Summer Gardens. All of the doors had been left unlocked and the shutters open. The guards who might have stopped her had been absent since Zaq dismissed them months before. But she had burnt the Changlang anyway, stalking the length of its corridor with her head high, a blade stuck in her makeshift belt and her face grim. The only incongruous thing about the figure who swept through in a storm of fire had been her hands. She'd dragged them across the walls and paintings like a child rattling her stick against a fence.
And everywhere Tris's fingers had touched flames sparked.
Zaq looked pitiful sitting on those steps. A tearful young man in a dirty blue cloak and tunic, his chin in his hands and his attention focused, when it focused at all, on the burning line of the Changlang.
He wanted to be braver. Most of all, he wanted to be born someone else, someone completely different. A person the girl didn't want to kill.
"I'm going to find her," said Zaq.
A hundred and forty-eight billion people wondered if this was a good idea.
"And turn off the feed," Zaq added, pushing himself to his feet.
Silence greeted this order.
"Do it."
"You'll cause chaos." The order had been shocking enough to make the Librarian reappear. So now he stared from a puddle. As unhappy to be talking to Zaq as Zaq was to listen.
Walking to the edge of his terrace, Zaq stared down the wooded slopes of Wanshou Shan to a flickering wall of flame that had once been the greatest collection of classical paintings ever gathered into a single building.
"It's chaos already," he said.
Zaq found her at one end of a wooden pavilion in the Summer Gardens, kneeling with her back to him. She seemed be trying to crack open a small wooden chest. On the wall in front of her was a carved and gilded phoenix.
Tris had changed into a yellow silk jacket with a dragon embroidered across the back in white-gold thread. On her head was balanced a simple black hat that looked like an upturned bowl with the bottom cut out.
The sword was stuck through her belt.
Flames licked against one window and the sky outside danced with embers that flickered and spun in the night wind. The Changlang had burnt easily, being old, fragile and made mostly from cedar, and sparks from that fire had danced and then fallen onto a nearby roof.
A thousand golden butterflies rose in the night sky and threatened the roofs on which they landed. Zaq half expected the Library to fill the sky with clouds and batter the fires into submission but the night stayed almost clear and almost dark, with that silver tinge which came from the sun reflecting on distant worlds.
The room in which Tris knelt stank of smoke, charring shutters and a petrochemical reek which was oil-based paint bubbling beneath early tongues of flame. It was a complex smell, heavy with hydrocarbon. And though Zaq would have liked to stay to savour its richness, he realized this was probably unwise.
"So," Zaq said, "what are you looking for?"
"You..."
Tris scrambled to her feet so fast she almost tripped. Only to realize that a dozen paces still separated her from the Emperor and anyway he was unarmed. So she drew her own blade and stepped away from the sandalwood box.
"Nothing," said Tris.
You must be searching for something, Zaq almost said, then shrugged his reply away. Why would she tell him anyway?
"So what now?" he said, hoping it sounded nonchalant.
"Fuck," Tris said. "I don't know." She tossed her blade from hand to hand. "What do you think?"
"I think the world's going to end."
"Only for you," she said.
Her juggling with the blade was very impressive. Unfortunately for the 148 billion waiting to be impressed, the Librarian had taken Zaq at his word and the feed was gone. Zaq's head was empty and the single mirror on one wall showed only a burning room.
It was a wonderful feeling.
"Let's dance," he said.
And Tris looked at Zaq then, seeing him for the first time. A man who looked not much older than she was but must be twice her age.
"Dance?"
Zaq indicated the embers swirling beyond the window. "You got anything better to do?"
Tris was still working on an answer to this when the phoenix so lovingly carved into the panel behind her proved unable to live up to its own legend and crumbled onto a bed of embers.
Through the open door ahead she could see the Changlang burnt down to a smouldering line. A dozen small pavilions between the wooden corridor and her also smouldered, ceramic roof tiles exploding in the flames into which they'd fallen.
All around them bonfires lit the Yihe Yuan, until the Summer Gardens glowed with a richness they'd never possessed before and gilded pavilions grew ever more golden as they were varnished with flame.
She should leave now, before it was--
"Too late," said Zaq.
A huge shutter crumbled as its lacquered wood broke apart and the sudden inrush of air fed the blaze. More oxygen was all the pavilion needed to explode into flame, fire flowing across the floor like running water. Wooden panels on the ceiling began to char and the last unvarnished wall grew fat with flame as smoke fought to escape through doors and windows.
The heat was beyond anything Tris had experienced. Almost beyond anything she could imagine. This had to be dying, Tris realized. And all the while the Emperor just stood opposite her, seemingly unmoved and unharmed, the flames now so close that his cloak had started to char at the edges.
"You did this," she said, each word tearing at her throat.
He shook his head.
"Yes," said Tris, "you." Stepping forward, she drew her blade to finish what she'd travelled the worlds to accomplish. She expected him to twist sideways or block the blow, to turn and run.
Instead Zaq stepped forward, put out one arm to steady Tris as she began to fall and barely grunted when she used all that remained of her strength to ram the blade under his ribs and into his heart.
Time froze?
This was not strictly accurate. What actually happened was subjective in the way everything is when one gets down to that level. Time slowed to a crawl as the Library rewrote reality inside the skulls of Zaq and Tris, the handful of seconds separating Zaq from cardiac failure and the alveoli in Tris's lungs from rupturing suddenly extending before both of them like a slow glide to infinity.
And as the speed at which their thoughts began to operate ripped apart their neural nets, the flames which had been roiling around them slowed and slowed again until they barely crawled up the walls.
"Why?" Zaq said. But then he knew.
Because what Tris thought was what he thought and there were no boundaries between them. They looked at the world through the same eyes. And that world was fucked, seriously screwed, far weirder than either had imagined.
Zaq saw...
Well, he imagined that he saw himself. It looked like him only he couldn't remember any such incident. He was in a bath, marble and old. The room was painted in flat greens, golds and reds but then his rooms were always painted in those colours.