Nor is there any hesitation from below. Everything that had almost happened in the Kirin caves happens now, unchecked and with whip-crack quickness. Swords: unsheathed; palms: upraised. The effect of the hamsas is instantaneous. Like grass rippled by a wind, the attacking ranks sway away, and in the moment’s reprieve this gains the rebels, they surge to greet the ambush, roaring. They don’t wait to be pinned between fire and stone but leap—launch—and meet the emperor’s troops in the air with a sound like fists smashing on fists.
Many fists against fewer, perhaps, but the fewer have magic.
At the first touch of shadow, Akiva reaches for sirithar—
—and is thrown to his knees as though clapped by thunder—thunder as a weapon, thunder in his head—and he’s ringing with it, and tilting, and someone catches him. It’s the Dashnag who isn’t a boy anymore. Rath. His hand is huge on Akiva’s shoulder. The same shoulder once savaged by a chimaera, another chimaera now steadies, and there is no sirithar, only the clash of blades, and then the boy Rath lunges into battle and Akiva surges to his feet and draws his swords, and he can’t see Karou…
… and Karou can’t see him, and she can’t stop to look. There’s Zuzana and Mik and an angel is coming at them and she won’t be able to get there in time. She’s opening her mouth to scream when she sees Virko. He pounces.
Rends.
The angel becomes pieces and Karou has her crescent-moon blades in her hands and it’s dance, cutting her way through the enemy to reach her friends.
Akiva tries for sirithar again, and again thunder invades his head and drives him to his knees.
For the merest instant, he has the impression of a cool hand pressed to his brow, soothing and then gone. All around him is glitter and clash and snarl and stab and teeth and grunt and stagger. Magic is denied him. All he can do is get to his feet and fight.
Zuzana has closed her eyes. Reflexive reaction to dismemberment. You could go your whole life without finding out how you’d react to seeing limbs torn off in front of you, but now Zuzana knows, and she knows the coursing terror of “all this war stuff,” and she decides at once that not seeing what’s happening is worse than seeing it and so she opens her eyes again. Mik is right at her side, and he’s beautiful, and Virko is crouched before her, planted there, and he’s terrible, and he’s beautiful, too. The spikes at his neck have flared wide. She didn’t know they did that. They’d lain sleek, almost, like porcupine quills at rest but bigger, sharper, and with serrated edges, but now they’re all fanned out and bristling and he looks twice his size. It’s like a lion’s mane made out of knives.
And then Karou is there with blood on her blades and Virko is folding his spikes back down—they interweave, Zuzana sees, and the elegance of it… the symmetry almost overwhelms her with its perfection, and that’s the thing that she’ll remember most, not the dismemberment, her mind is already pulling a curtain on that, but the symmetry—and Virko’s spikes aren’t padded now with a smelly blanket, and there’s no harness to hold on to when when Mik boosts her up, but Zuzana’s not afraid, not of this. In the middle of this very bad dream, she’s glad to have a friend with a lion’s mane made of knives. Mik mounts behind her and Virko’s muscles bunch beneath them. He gives a great, labored heave and they leave the ground and then… vanish.
Ziri sees Virko wink out—gone—and Karou is turning, searching. Not for him; Ziri knows that, and he minds less than he did before. A great gust that can only be the draft of Virko’s invisible wingbeats blows her hair back like a battle standard, silken blue and streaming, and in the screaming maelstrom of battle, she is surrounded by a curious cushion of stillness.
Because she’s being protected, Ziri sees, by both chimaera and Misbegotten. Because she’s the resurrectionist, and because she has another, more immediate job to attend to. The realization kicks him forward. Whatever happens here, Karou’s plan must go ahead. Jael must be stopped.
Ziri looks for Liraz and she’s there, and so is Akiva. They’re fighting back-to-back, lethal. Akiva wields a pair of matched swords, Liraz a sword and an ax, and her smile seems a third weapon, almost. It’s the same smile from the war council, where she’d scoffed at the odds of the fight. “Three Dominion to one Misbegotten?” she’d said, with eagerness. And Ziri sees that before him: three to one and more. And more, and more, but something’s happening. There’s Nisk and Lisseth. Astonishingly, they’re backing Akiva and Liraz up. Each has a blade drawn but a hamsa outheld, too, and against the pulse of weakness, the Dominion can’t match the speed and force of the pair of Misbegotten.
Ziri feels a lift of hope. It’s a hope he knows well and despises: the ugly, black hope that one might, by killing, stay alive awhile longer.
Kill or die, no other choice.
Bodies litter the crater and more are falling. Ziri has a flash image of how it will be filled with corpses as though the mountains have cupped their hands to offer up the dead to Nitid, goddess of tears and life, and to the godstars, and to the void.
The bodies are chimaera, too, and Misbegotten, and then—
—a second darkness falls.
Overhead, a second sky of fire is falling, wing to wing to wing, and even the ugly, black hope can’t outlast this. Another wave of Dominion as great as the first, and today Nitid is the goddess of nothing but tears.
“Karou!” Ziri calls, and it doesn’t surprise him anymore to hear the Wolf’s tenor come from his own lips—a voice to cut through battle clangor and rally tired soldiers to keep on, and keep on, as though life is a prize to be won by bloodletting. Kill and kill and kill to live. How many, and for how long? It’s just a calculus in the end, and though the real Thiago had surmounted impossible odds in battle, none of them had been this impossible.
And besides, he isn’t Thiago.
He calls out orders; chimaera and Misbegotten alike take heed. By the time he reaches Karou, there’s a buffer of soldiers forming with Karou, Akiva, Liraz, and Thiago at its center.
“You two need to go,” the Wolf says. His voice is raised above the chaos, and his eyes are intent but not cold, not mad. This White Wolf will tear out no throats with his teeth today. “Get clear of this. Use the glamour. You have a job to do.”
Karou objects first. “We can’t leave you now—”
“You have to. For Eretz.” For Eretz. It’s understood that this means: If not for us.