Mohammed stood at the northern end of the slab, his hand on a column that still towered above him, reaching into the inky darkness of the roof. Something about the line of his shoulders alarmed Zoe and she vaulted over the barricade. Atop the stone, climbing toward him, she heard a sound. It was a ragged moan and a bubbling gasp in one. She halted, hands on the rough surface of the rock, feeling something fill the air around her. A power was moving in the hidden world.
A knocking sound startled the air. Under her hands, the stone quivered.
Without thinking, she summoned a ward and a shield and then gasped aloud herself.
The Quryash lashed out with a fist, striking at the empty air. The man shouted, his voice ringing with defiance. In her other sight, Zoe could see darkness boiling from the smooth surface of the pillars and curling through the air around her. Heat flushed from the slab and from the marble tiles. The wavering thin blue orb of her ward buckled as the black clouds washed over her. Anger and fear and hatred in the tile and marble yielded up enormous strength to the cloud and Zoe fell to her knees, chanting a calming meditation.
The tendrils curled around Mohammed's arms and limbs like grotesque vines digging into rock. Zoe saw him crushed down against the slab and saw the stone crack and flake under the impact. Darkness curdled at his feet, dragging at his legs. The tendrils thickened and grew a forest of thin black tongues tipped with a red glow. One tongue snapped through the air, lashing Mohammed's cheek. A burning red welt appeared and the Quryash screamed again, this time in horrible pain.
The black cloud eddied around the fringe of Zoe's sphere, flowing past toward the man struggling at the peak of the slab. The power brushed her aside and she fell to the marble floor, sending the wooden barricade clattering down. She gripped the tile with both hands, her back hunched, trying to leach power from the old flooring. It was barren and dry, long ago drained of the vitality of living rock. She wept, feeling the pitiful weakness of her ward.
Mohammed grappled with the darkness, wrestling tentacles away from his body. Now they had grown as thick as tree trunks and they coiled close, crushing his ribcage. Even through the shimmer of her ward, Zoe could hear the grinding of bones breaking under the pressure. Fear boiled up in her, threatening to close her throat. It was hard to breathe. The black tide lapped up around her. In the inky depths, she could see visions and torments. Fires burned in the depths of the earth, where emaciated figures writhed in torment. With an enormous effort, she forced herself to stand. Her ward flexed pearlescent, straining against the lake of ink, and matched her movement. The power that chuckled and hissed inside her demanded release, but it was hot with anger and hate. It yearned to join with the spinning black lake that surrounded her.
With a heave, Mohammed rose to his feet, though he still crouched on the tip of the slab. The initial fear had passed and his eyes cleared. Suddenly, as Zoee watched, he stopped struggling and fell back into the black embrace. The red-tipped tongues slid over his flesh, pressing at his eyelids and slithering into his mouth and nostrils. Zoe tried to cry out to him, but no sound came.
The black tide rushed up, covering her ward and sight of the desert chieftain.
In the ocean of night, Zoe saw visions unfold:
Siege towers loomed over the wall of a city, spitting flame. Men ran in the streets, thin and starved, with mad eyes. The earth shook and a gate tower cracked lengthwise. Hundreds of tons of stone and brick cascaded down into the street. The gate itself toppled, falling to one side. Its exposed limestone face was already burning fiercely. Men in bronze helmets stormed through the breach, scattering the few defenders before them. Eagle-headed standards moved through the smoke at the heads of columns of grim-faced men.
The Palmyrene girl blinked furiously, her hand out in front of her face. The phantasm dissolved, though she could still feel the heat of the burning buildings on her hands and face. Smoke curled in her nostrils.
A glorious temple filled with fat-bellied pillars shuddered, its tiled roof rippling with flame. On broad white steps, hundreds of men were struggling. Most of them wore horse-tail helmets and iron armor. The others were bearded, clad in mismatched armor, fighting with a hopeless ferocity. Clouds of arrows filled the sky, raking the ranks of the defenders. Again, eagle-headed standards advanced and the men of the city fell under hobnailed boots. Lightning snaked through the sky, lighting black clouds of smoke and ash. At the heart of the temple, priests waged a furious defense, their backs to an inner building of stone. Scintillating wards crumpled under the rage that fell from the sky. Amid the iron-armored soldiers, thaumaturges strode forward, spiking fire from their hands.
Zoe felt cold stone under her back and realized that she had fallen. Everything around her was black as pitch, yet filled with a sensation of writhing movement. She closed her eyes, feeling the pain and loss of her aunt's death swell in her chest. It was hard to breathe again.
A man stood on a barren hill, a bloody knife in his hand, his face raised to a storm-tossed sky. Lightning rippled, fierce and azure, between the clouds. Beneath his feet, a dark stone dripped with blood. The body of a boy lay sprawled on the cracked and riven slab. The man screamed at the sky and the sky answered. That sound cracked like a whip, breaking stone and setting trees alight, driving the man to his feet. Tears smoked from his face. He wept, seeing the body of his son.
The man had the face of Mohammed.
Blue-white light stabbed through the murk and the enormous pressure against her battle ward suddenly slackened. A single point of incredibly bright white light blossomed in the darkness and the black tide rushed back. The tendrils and waving forest of tongues shuddered and slowly withdrew, though to Zoee they seemed to resist mightily. Mohammed was revealed, lying at the base of the column. The red-andblack vines that had wormed into every orifice of his body were shaking as if in a high breeze.
The sky, enraged, rippled like a sea in full storm. Rain fell, lashing the man. Rivers of water ran, carrying away the blood and the tears in a slurry of mud. In the rain, in the stuttering flare of the lightning, the hand of the dead boy twitched.
Something was standing over the fallen body of the Quryash. Zoee turned away, blinded, with the streaked afterimage of something with coruscating wings bestride him and rising colossally above the building. Blinded, she pressed her face against the cold tesserae of the floor. The world was silent and still, but she felt the tremble of the darkness in the air around her. The hidden world was in chaos, with mighty powers striving back and forth. Mohammed's left boot beat a sharp tattoo on the rooftop.
Vision returned and Zoee stared down at her hands, seeing them outlined in a soft white glow. She looked up, and for an instant she saw the temple around her as it had stood on the day it had been completed. It was vast with a two-story central hall. Ranks of roundbellied pillars lined the sides of the great open space. The walls gleamed in pale white outline and domes arched toward the heavens. Hundreds of windows pierced the upper walls. She stood, reaching out her hand to the nearest column, which rose up perfect and whole toward the distant, vaulted ceiling.
It faded, slowly growing fainter and fainter. The roof went first, replaced by winking stars, and then the soaring walls dissolved. In only moments the looming shape of the Roman temple returned. Zoee felt tears seep from her eyes and loss churned in her stomach. She looked out upon the city, seeing the white roofs and winding narrow streets for the first time. The white radiance was flowing away from her, touching the windowsills and vine arbors as it passed. Zoee held her breath, seeing the soft white light pass over the land, illuminating everything with the refulgence of day. Olive trees, stockyards, temples, hilltops, tents were all thrown in sharp relief and then shadow came along behind as night closed in.