“I cry,” said Amber.

Iziz cocked his head and put one foot forward. He waited.

Amber bent over, palms up to either side of his scuffed boot, and the very instant that her sweaty brow touched leather, Scott’s ship in the garage exploded.

She was not immediately conscious of the noise—it hit her ears like a ton of cotton, deafening her before she knew what it meant—but only of an intense heat lashing up her back, so that her first thought, when she could think, was that someone in the crowd had whipped her.

She cried out and fell flat, twisting around to see her unwhipped back, and when that finished making no sense to her, she finally raised her eyes and saw three raiders lying dead in the mud. And not just dead, she realized, not just that, but decapitated. She saw the smoke next, the smoke that was not only pouring out through the open doorway of the garage in a greasy, black fog, but also sprouting straight up in the air through the much bigger hole in the roof and sort of…folding under. Roaring. She could hear almost nothing, but the smoke was roaring.

Amber looked up at Iziz. He did not look down at her. All his attention seemed fixed on his hand, which he had apparently been holding up, perhaps in some sign to his men that she hadn’t seen because she’d been bent over his boot, but anyway, he was looking at that hand with a deep, frowning confusion because it was now missing all its fingers. The strip of blackened, shiny-burnt metal that had sheared through three necks to cut them off was now lodged in another raider’s chest. That man was still standing. Except for the thing jutting out of his tunic, he didn’t even seem all that hurt.

She had enough time to see all this, not quite enough to know what it all meant, and then the ship blew up again. The ground heaved up beneath her, as impossible as that should be, actually seeming to smack her in the chest even as she had both hands in the mud. Then she and Iziz and Meoraq were all sprawled together and the ship just kept exploding, ripping the garage apart from the top down. In the curious quiet, she could see chunks of metal and broken bricks hurtling through the smoke, see them soundlessly punch through fleeing men, taking them apart piece by piece until there was nothing left to keep running. Through it all, the fire kept rising, vomiting up through the smoke, pushing a flat, burnt panel on the very top, tumbling it playfully over and over, like a paper sailboat caught in a fountain.

It couldn’t have lasted long and when it was over, the courtyard was empty except for the mud and the mess and the bodies, and there was a quiet like nothing Amber had ever known.

Then that piece of paneling which had ridden the explosion so high came down out of the black, blown into a shape something like a flower, a daisy, so that it spun as it fell, chopping at the air, whup-whup-whup…

‘Like a helicopter,’ thought Amber, watching it cut right through two legs of that long-suffering transmission tower before crashing into the outer doors of the shrine of Xi’Matezh.

Amber pushed herself up on her hands. Beneath her, Iziz also stirred and sat up on his elbows. They looked at each other. He opened his mouth and emitted a godawful yowling that seemed to shake at her very bones— but no, he did not do that at all. He opened his mouth and the yowling was all she could hear of the scream of tortured metal as the tower that had sent out uncounted years of unheard hope for Nuu Sukaga buckled slowly over and smashed down into the dome of the shrine. It collapsed and then the building beside it collapsed, along with a large chunk of the wall, and suddenly, the whole courtyard of Matezh shuddered and dropped about twenty centimeters.

Amber and Iziz looked at each other again. Then he grabbed for the sword on his belt and she grabbed for Meoraq’s knife tucked into his waist and he was still so much faster but he grabbed with the hand that had no fingers and while he was staring at that in astonishment, Amber’s fist closed tight around the bone hilt of Meoraq’s ancestral knife and yanked it free.

They stared at each other a third time, motionless, as mud began ominously to flow toward the fast-crumbling wall. Then Iziz closed his eyes.

“Do it right this time, you murdering cunt,” he said dully.

She stabbed him in the neck and cut, stopped to spit out his blood and rest her watery arms, then cut twice more just to be sure. He jerked under her a few times, but that was all. He was dead at the end of it, nothing but weight she had to shift to get at Meoraq, who had not moved once in all this time.

He groaned when she rolled him over, but it was hard to hear him. He may have told her to leave him. He may have told her to run. Amber paid him absolutely no attention. She sheathed his bone-handled knife, stuck it down the back of her breeches, and got a good grip on his harness. She pulled. She did not allow his screams or the limp silence that eventually followed them to slow her down. All that mattered right now was that they had to go. God had sent a boat and a helicopter; the rest was up to her, so Amber pulled. When she bumped into one of the sleds, she put him on it and kept going. The runners moved through the mud much easier than the drag of a body, and even with the extra weight, Amber was able to run the last length and out through the gateless archway just before the ground heaved up for the second time and threw her down. Her ears, still numbed, gave her nothing—it would be three days before she could hear anything that didn’t sound like it came from underwater and a room away—but she didn’t need them.

Matezh fell.

But when Amber raised her head in the stillness and looked, the sled was there and Meoraq was on it. She lifted her head a little higher and there was the archway, with just a few broken bricks on either side of it to prove there had ever been walls, framing a small portrait of a monstrous, green sea.

Meoraq’s hand brushed her arm. His mouth opened when she looked at him, but if he was talking, she couldn’t hear it. He made a few weak gestures, then groped until he got a hand behind her neck and pulled her close. His rough mouth scraped against hers and in that moment, she thought she could have carried him all the way back to the mountains and over them.

She didn’t, of course. But she made it as far as the underlodge where she had spent fifty-three days shut up in a cupboard to recuperate. She couldn’t lift Meoraq up into it, and he, weakened by days of fever, could do nothing to help her, so they were there on the floor—he, gasping and raving; she, rubbing palmfuls of water over him in a desperate effort to cool him down—when Uyane Jazuun, lord-steward of the bloodline in Chalh, stopped in on his yearly pilgrimage to escape the ever-ringing bells of the Festival of Fifth Light and found them.

14

They camped only once on a four-day journey, in another underlodge very much like the one they’d just left. They ran whenever they had strength to run. They walked the rest of the time, passing flasks between them and sharing cuuvash on their feet. Meoraq took nothing. Every few hours, Jazuun would stop and bend Meoraq forward, pounding on his back until Meoraq woke enough to cough. It helped, but not enough. His breath had taken on the soggy, snotty sound of someone trying to breathe through a bowl of soup. He was delirious by the end of the first night, silent by dawn on the third day.

Dying. He was dying.

She cried once, just once, the night they camped. Lying in the cupboard, trying not to touch the man Amber still sometimes feared might be the ghost of Meoraq’s dead father, listening to the gasp and burble of creeping death, she put both hands on her belly—on the only part of Meoraq she could reach—and cried. Jazuun didn’t budge until she was done, but as she drowsed unhappily toward sleep, he said, “He rests in God’s sight, woman, and if he sees our Father’s face tonight, know that he sees it with joy.”