Then I took Deka’s hand, looking up at him. His expression had gone bleak; he knew I was right. But I would not press him. He’d spent ten years trying to get back to his sister, and she’d undone that in ten minutes. Such things were not easy for any mortal to bear. Or any god, for that matter.
Deka’s hand squeezed mine, and he nodded. We turned to leave the audience chamber. Shahar stood behind us. “Wait,” she said, but we ignored her.
When I opened the door, however, everything changed.
We stopped in surprise at the noise of many voices, raised and angry. Beyond the main corridor, I glimpsed soldiers running and heard shouts. Immediately before us was Morad, her face red with fury. She was shouting at the guards, who’d crossed pikes in front of the chamber’s entrance. When the door opened, the guards started, and Morad grabbed at one of the pikes, half yanking it away before the guard cursed and tightened his grip.
“Where is Shahar?” she demanded. “I will see her.”
Shahar came up behind us. It was a measure of Morad’s agitation that she did not blink at the sight of the heir’s bloody face. “What has happened, Morad?” I heard the thinness of the calm veneer on Shahar’s voice. She had composed herself, just.
“Maskers have attacked Shadow,” Morad said.
We stood there, stunned into silence. Behind her, a troop of soldiers came tearing around the corner, running toward us. Wrath was behind them, walking with the ominous deliberation of a general preparing for war. All around us I could feel a hollow thrum as whatever protective magics Deka’s scriveners had put into place came alive. Seals for the gates, invisible walls to keep out foreign magics, who knew what else.
“How many maskers?” asked Shahar. She spoke more briskly now, all business.
After the worst had passed, I would remember this moment. I would see the false calm on Morad’s face, and hear the real anguish in her voice, and pity her all the more. A servant and a queen were as doomed as a mortal and a god. Some things could not be helped.
“All of them,” Morad said.
20
Ashes, ashes, we all fall DOWN!
It was the stillness that made them so frightening.
It was not easy to view city streets and crowds via a seeing sphere. The spheres were made to display nearby faces, not vast scenes. And what Wrath’s lieutenant in Shadow had to show us, by slowly panning his sphere in a circle, was vast.
There were dozens of maskers.
Hundreds.
They filled the streets. In the Promenade, where normally pilgrims jostled with street performers and artists for space, there were only maskers. Along the Avenue of Nobles, right up to the steps of the Salon: maskers. Just visible amid the trees and flowers of Gateway Park: maskers. Approaching from South Root, their shoes stained by street muck: maskers.
We could see many fleeting forms that were not maskers, most of them hurrying in the opposite direction, some of them carrying whatever they could on horses or wheelbarrows or their own hunched backs. The people of Shadow were no strangers to magic, having lived among godlings for decades and in the shadow of Sky for centuries. They knew trouble when they smelled it, and they knew the appropriate response: run.
The maskers did not molest the unmasked. They moved in silence and unison, when they moved. Most of them stopped moving when they reached the center of Shadow, then just stood there, utterly still. Men and women, a few children—not many, thank me—a few elders. No two masks were alike: they came in white and black; some were marbled like Echo’s substance; some were red and cobalt blue and stony gray. Some were painted porcelain, some clay and straw. Many were in the High Northern style, but quite a few displayed the aesthetics and archetypes of other lands. The variation was astonishing.
And they were all looking up at Sky.
We—Shahar and Dekarta and I, and a good number of the highbloods and servants—stood in what would doubtless come to be called the Marble Hall, given the usual Amn naming conventions. For some reason known only to Yeine, the walls of the chamber were streaked with a deep rust color, interspersing white and gray, which made the whole room look washed in blood. There was some wry symbolism in this, I suspected; some element of Yeine’s morbid sense of humor. I was apparently too mortal to get the joke.
Wrath was gone, though his soldiers were present, guarding the doors and the balcony. It had been his suggestion to gather all the highbloods together; easier to guard. While we waited for him to say when we could leave—no time soon, I gathered—some servant had brought the large seeing sphere from the scriveners’ storage, setting it up on the room’s single long table. Through this, we were able to behold the ominous stillness in the streets of Shadow.
“Are they waiting for something?” asked a woman who bore a halfblood mark. She stood near Ramina. He put a comforting hand on her back while she stared at the hovering image.
“Some signal, perhaps,” he replied. For once, he was not smiling. But long minutes passed, and there was no movement on the part of the maskers. The person panning the sphere stood atop the Salon’s steps. On either end of the arc swing we could glimpse Arameri soldiers, clad in the white armor of the Hundred Thousand Legions, hastily setting up barricades and preparing for a defensive battle. Even in such brief glimpses, however, we saw enough to despair. The bulk of the Arameri army was outside the city, in a vast complex of permanent barracks and bases stationed a half day’s ride away. Everyone had assumed that the attack, when it came, would be from beyond the city. The army was no doubt marching and riding and gating into the city as fast as it could now, but those of us who had seen the maskers in action knew that it would take more than soldiers to stop them.
I turned to Shahar, who stood on one of the elevated tiers around the chamber’s edge. She had wrapped her arms around herself as if cold; her expression was too blank to be intentional. In the whole room, where her relatives clustered in twos and threes and comforted each other, she stood alone.
I considered for a moment, then stepped away from Deka and went to her. Her head turned sharply toward me as I approached. She was not at all in shock. A subtle shift transformed her posture from the lost girl of a moment before to the cold queen who had tried to enslave her brother. But I saw the wariness in her. She had lost that battle.
Deka watched me go to her but did not join us.
“Shouldn’t you contact Remath?” I asked. I kept my tone neutral.
She relaxed fractionally, acknowledging my unspoken offer of truce. “I’ve tried. Mother hasn’t answered.” She looked away, through the translucent walls, at the lowering sun. West, toward Sky. “There’s no point, in any case. The army is there and under Mother’s command as it should be, along with the bulk of the scrivener and assassin corps and the nobles’ private forces. Echo is barely functional and understaffed as it is. We have no help to offer.”
“Not all support must be material, Shahar.” It still felt strange to remember that Remath and Shahar loved each other. I would never get used to Arameri behaving like normal people.
She glanced at me again, not so sharply this time. Considering. Then Ramina said, “Something’s happening,” and we all grew tense.
There was a blur in the air, a few feet above and to one side of the image we’d been watching. The soldiers reached for their weapons. The highbloods gasped and one cried out. Deka and the other scriveners tensed, some pulling out premade, partially drawn sigils.