* * *
Hanging in the harness from the kettral’s talons as the bird rose up above the city was the most terrifying and exhilarating thing Adare had ever experienced. She stared, heart in her throat, as Annur fell away beneath her, the streets, and squares, and avenues, everything she’d been trying so hard to protect suddenly small, then tiny, then miniscule. There was the Temple of Intarra, small as a gem and flashing in the sun. There was the wide avenue of the Godsway plunging through the city’s heart, the statues of the gods smaller than bugs. There were the green-brown canals, winding from the Basin out to the sea, and the boats bobbing at anchor in that Basin. There were the crooked alleys of the Perfumed Quarter, and the long docks lined up along the harborside. There were the red walls of the palace, the leafy, flowering pavilions. Her city, so slight at this altitude it seemed impossible it could be the home to a million souls, so fragile that a single blow might break it. Adare would have stared at it forever, had Gwenna not pulled her around, a rough hand on her arm.
“They’ve taken the top of the Spear,” she shouted, pointing.
Adare squinted. The bird had climbed so high so fast that even the top of Intarra’s Spear was below them, flashing with trapped fire. She could barely make out anything at that distance-how Gwenna could see, she had no idea-but as the kettral drew closer, she saw them, dozens of tiny figures spread out on the tower’s top. One of them had to be il Tornja. Even with the fire, he’d escaped somehow, escaped again. Not anymore, she swore silently, turning her attention back to Gwenna.
“Can you…”
“Kill them?” she asked.
Adare nodded.
The Kettral woman’s smile was feral. “What the fuck do you think they teach us to do on the Islands? Write love letters?”
“What should I…”
“You stay out of the way, right here on the bird. You and the old woman. We’ll drop on the first pass, Jak’ll circle, then bring you in when we’ve cleared the space.”
Adare wanted to protest, to object, to insist on joining the others, but that was just pride and idiocy. Besides, there was no time. The bird had dropped a thousand feet, level with the tower’s top. Adare stared as the Spear approached. Now that she had a way to gauge the speed, it seemed like madness. They were going to die, all of them, dashed against the tower’s top. No one could survive that approach. Then, as they swept overhead, just a pace above the tower’s top, Gwenna was gone, and the sniper, and the leach, the three of them leaping from the talon into the mass of men. There was a flash of steel, a sudden chorus of shouts and screams, and the bird was past the tower’s top, dropping down the other side.
Stomach lodged in her chest, Adare looked over at Nira.
“Did you see Oshi?”
The old woman’s face was grim. She held on to the strap above her head with one clawlike hand, but unlike Adare, she didn’t seem frightened by the flight. “No. Not him or the Csestriim.”
“They must be below,” Adare said. “In the Spear itself.”
“Those three idiots we just dropped on the roof better hope they stay there. I don’t care how handy they are with those blades. Oshi’ll leave them splattered across the wall.”
When the bird came back for the second pass, however, the Kettral were most definitely not spattered. They stood in a rough triangle near the center of the tower, blades bare and dripping blood. The soldiers around them were dead-dead or dying-frozen in the awful postures of their slaughter. Annick and Talal began stalking the platform, cutting throats, working with all the bleak efficiency of laborers in the field, trying to get the last of the grain in before the rain.
“Sweet Intarra’s light,” Adare whispered.
“That glittery bitch of a goddess already did her work,” Nira snapped, gesturing to the glowing Spear below them. “It’s our turn now.”
This time, the flier put the bird down right on the roof, ignoring the corpses altogether. The whole space stank of blood and urine. When Adare tried to walk, to cross the empty tower’s top, she slipped in the spilled viscera.
“They’re down there,” Gwenna said, stabbing a finger at the door leading into the Spear. “And there’s ’Shael’s own fucking fight going on, by the sound of it.”
Adare took a slow breath through her nose, tried not to vomit. They were doing what they’d come to do, kill il Tornja’s men, find the kenarang himself, and yet she found her eyes drifting away from the dead. Grimly, she forced herself to look at the bodies, to witness, even if for just a moment, the carnage she herself had ordered. The Kettral might have held the blades, but Adare had helped to make these men dead. And they weren’t finished yet. She glanced at the trapdoor, the woman’s words registering for the first time.
“Fighting?” Adare asked. “Il Tornja’s supposed to be in here alone. Who is he fighting?”
“How the fuck do I know?” Gwenna spat. “You want to stand up here with our thumbs up our cunts while we talk about it?”
Adare found herself grinning viciously in response. “No,” she said. “I don’t. I want to go down there.”
Her grin vanished as soon as she stepped into the tower. The wind outside was cool, sharp. Inside, there was nothing but flame and screaming and heat like a brick to the face. Most worshippers thought of Intarra as the Lady of Light, but there was another truth to the goddess, a harder truth, one Uinian had learned as he burned inside his own temple, one Adare herself had had seared into her flesh at the Everburning Welclass="underline" Intarra was a goddess of heat as well as light, the awful mistress of all conflagration and the annihilation it brought.
“He’s here,” Nira said, following the Kettral down the winding staircase, breaking into Adare’s thoughts. “Oshi. He’s close.”
“Can he feel you the same way?” Adare demanded, pulling up short.
Nira shook her head. “He’s my well. I’m not his.”
When they reached the first landing, the old woman shouldered her way past the Kettral, then paused, gazing down the stairs into the inferno.
“This is my fight now,” she said. The words were quiet, as though meant for no human ears.
“Hold on…,” Gwenna began.
“No,” Nira said, rounding on the younger woman. “I will not. I am going down there to kill my brother, and then to kill the creature who made us what we are, and I am going alone.” Her voice softened. “You’re a vicious, feisty bitch, kid. I like that. But believe me when I tell you there’s nothing you can do down there but die.”
Gwenna opened her mouth to reply-to argue, no doubt-but Adare laid a hand on her arm.
“Let her go,” she said. “There’s more to this than you know.”
Gwenna gritted her teeth, then nodded. “You have two hundred heartbeats,” she said, “and then we’re coming down.”
Adare searched for the words. It seemed a lifetime ago that Nira had pulled her out of the crowd on the Godsway, seeing a truth that no one else had seen. After all the months fighting and marching, what Adare remembered was the woman’s swearing, her mockery and recriminations. A hundred times she’d thought of sending Nira away, of being free of her constant abrasion. But she wouldn’t have gone, Adare realized, staring at the old woman’s seamed face. She never left Oshi, and she didn’t leave me.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Oh, fuck off with your thanks…,” Nira began. Then she broke off, shook her head abruptly, closed her eyes, straightened her back. When she opened them again, that gray gaze was level, regal. When she spoke, there was nothing of the gutter slang, no hint of the profanity that had marked her every utterance since they first met. She was a queen, once a leader of millions, and the weight of her years was in her words.
“You are a fine emperor, Adare hui’Malkeenian,” she said. “A truer sovereign than I ever was, and mark this well, because these are the last words I will speak to you: if you survive this day, you will be a light to your people. Whatever you believe of your goddess, it is your own fire that blazes in your eyes.”