As Quick Jak hauled the bird out of the stoop, Gwenna looked over. Annick stood on the far talon, her bowstring singing like a harp in the wind, tears streaming from her cheeks.
* * *
It happened almost too fast for Adare to understand. One moment the bird had seemed ready to attack, the next, it disappeared abruptly into the cloud above. Adare had almost turned back to stare at the blazing immensity of the Spear once more when Nira hauled her around.
“There,” was the only syllable the old woman managed before the bird, which had plunged back through the cloud, leveled out over the Urghul horsemen, wheeling around to the east. When Adare raised the long lens to her eye, it took her a long time to find the corpse of the leach sprawled out across the mud. His prisoners, some mutilated, some dying, were already swarming over him, tearing him apart. Adare couldn’t hear their cries, but their faces weren’t human. They were the faces of beasts.
“They killed him,” Adare breathed, setting the long lens down.
Nira nodded. “It was the Spear. Everyone was looking at it. Gutted that bastard’s well.”
Adare blew out a long, unsteady breath, understanding it at last, then raised the long lens again, studying the land to the north. “Now what?”
The Urghul were milling around, some riding away from the site of the recent violence, others forcing their horses toward it. One thing was clear-without the leach, they had no way to shove past the wreckage of Annur’s northern quarters, no way that didn’t involve days of hauling timber and clearing a path.
“Now we wait for your general and my brother to die,” Nira replied quietly. She was staring at the Spear, eyes distant, hard.
Adare turned. “They’re dead already, Nira.” She laid a hand on the old woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, but nothing can survive that.”
“Roshin isn’t dead,” Nira replied. “I can feel him. Feel my well. This close, I would know if he had died. I would feel him … gone.” She gestured toward the Spear with her cane. “The bottom floors are burning, but the fire doesn’t reach the top. That’s just the light in the walls.”
Adare nodded slowly, then gritted her teeth. “If Oshi’s still alive…”
“Then il Tornja is, too.”
Adare closed her eyes, studied the afterimage of flame scrawled across her lids for a long time, then finally opened them. “Can you kill him?”
“Il Tornja? Or my brother?”
“Both,” Adare said.
Nira sucked a long, unsteady breath between her yellowed teeth. She might have been watching her thousand years slide past, a thousand years watching Oshi, the last of the mad Atmani, guarding him, loving him, always searching for a cure.
“I can kill them,” she said, “if I get close enough. My brother is strong, but his power is mine.” She shook her head. Her sudden, unexpected laugher was sharp as something breaking apart. “And he’s fucking crazy.”
“The bird,” Adare said, stomach lurching inside her as she spoke the words. The huge kettral soared back over the city wall and settled in the courtyard below. Gwenna and the others had just dismounted from the talons. “The bird can take us to the top of the Spear.”
“There’s no us,” Nira growled. “Your place is here, on the walls defending the city. Did you forget il Tornja’s warning?”
“No,” Adare said quietly. “I did not forget it.”
Nira locked gazes with her. “He does not play games, girl. He will kill your boy if you defy him.”
Adare watched the woman helplessly. “He might have killed him already. He might kill him even if I do exactly what he says.” She felt as though someone had opened her up, stitched her organs together, yanked the thread too tight, then tied it off. Every moment hurt. Breathing hurt. Thinking about Sanlitun, about his grasping hands, his bright, baffled eyes-it all hurt. “My son is not the only child in this city,” she forced herself to say. The words were like blades. “Maybe I could save Sanlitun, maybe not. Il Tornja is the foe of everything we are. How could I look at my son, how could I look at anyone, knowing that I let him go.”
“You’re not letting him go,” Nira growled. “You’re sending me.”
“We are both going,” Adare said, surprised by the iron in her own voice. “The creature who murdered my father, blinded my brother, and stole my son is inside that tower. I am going.”
Nira spat. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“I can see him die.”
“Or die yourself.”
Adare nodded. When she spoke again, the words felt right. “Or die myself.”
* * *
The steel of the prison blocked the fire. Blocked it, at least, for a brief time. As the prisoners screamed in their cages, Valyn slammed shut the huge metal doors, wrapped them with chain, trapping il Tornja’s soldiers in the horrible furnace below. Strangely, of the prison guards there was no sign, as though they had abandoned their post long before the fire came to the Spear. Kaden could think of no reason why, but there was no time to ponder the question. Even as they climbed, he could hear the protestations of the wooden beams and metal plates supporting the floor, screeching, snapping, warped by the vicious heat. Finally, the whole thing twisted, screamed, cracked, and then collapsed.
Kaden seized the railing of the stairwell as it bucked and shuddered, waiting to be dragged down with the rest of the structure into the inferno boiling below. The wave of heat hit him a moment later, knocking him back into the shadow of the stairs. It was like standing inside the huge stone hearth back in Ashk’lan, and though the flames were too far below to reach them, the air seared his throat, scalded his lungs. He squeezed shut his eyes against the heat blasting up from beneath. Triste wrapped her arms around him, seeking solace and giving it in the same gesture.
The Kettral were talking in low, urgent tones. There was no fear in their voices, only weariness mixed with determination. A few moments later, the staircase stopped shuddering. Valyn leaned out over the edge, stared down for a moment, then pulled back.
“It’s gone. Broke off about five hundred feet below us. Takes care of the soldiers.”
“Beats having to fight them,” the Flea said.
Triste stared up at the stairs twisting away out of sight. “Why haven’t we fallen?”
“Cables,” Valyn said, gesturing up without looking. “The lower stairs were built from the ground up, the next section hung from the prison level. Both of those are gone. We’re on the last part. It’s suspended from the ceiling, not built up from the floor, but we need to keep climbing, get clear of this heat.”
The climb was an agony of burning lungs and legs pushed past all exhaustion. Kaden counted a hundred stairs, then a thousand, but instead of flagging, the fire below burned higher, brighter, gnawing through the wreckage, rendering all human instruments inside the Spear to ash and char, as though the goddess herself had come down to purify the monument, to consecrate what was divine in a bath of perfect flame. It seemed, for a while, that the fire would overtake them, claim them, too, but there was nothing to do but climb, and so, soaked with sweat and blood, the stairs swaying ominously beneath them, they climbed.
Finally, after another thousand stairs, the air began to cool. Kaden dragged a breath into his lungs, savored the relief, then another, then another, pausing to haul in great deep gulps of it. He tried calling out to Valyn, who was plunging up the steps above, blood burned onto both axes. His voice came out a desiccated husk. He licked his lips, swallowed, then tried again.
“We have to stop,” he managed. “We have to stop.”
Valyn paused, turned. He looked lost, as though he’d forgotten where they were or why they had come. Those ravaged eyes roamed across Kaden’s face for what seemed a long time. Finally he nodded.