Good girl.
Rivers of flame cascade across the face of the vertical city, spreading through a delta of absolute darkness. And fire licks back up the channels as well, climbing, converging into a giant burning arrow.
Pointing exactly at where I stand.
BUT I AM
A MERCIFUL GOD
I tip over the final barrel of oil and skip back away from the point as the flames claw through the gap and the whole point becomes a pillar of fire fifty feet tall.
I WON’T MAKE YOU
EAT IT
RAW
I’m still chuckling as I get the first of the bottles out of the chest and ignite the wicks at the burning trickle where I tipped the first oil barrel. Even there it’s hot enough that I have to shield my face with my arm and I can smell my hair starting to crisp, but I don’t care, I’m chuckling anyway. It sounds like God playing dice with planets.
Didn’t think that was funny? Watch this.
I heave a burning bottle high out off the parapet and follow it with another, little specks of whippy flame snapping through long arcs down into the fading night, and turn back to the chest for a couple more before those two hit the ground. I don’t need to watch them land. I know where they’re going to hit.
I may be a crappy shot, but I throw really, really well.
At the retaining wall with two more lit in my hands, I wind up-
Caine-what are you doing?
Not really a Whisper. Is there a spell called Snarl?
I launch the bottle anyway before I look down at her red-lit form a level below.
WHY THE FUCK
ARE YOU STILL THERE?
The Shout makes my head ring. She flinches and covers her ears, but a second later she’s back at the wall down there waving an arm down at the Black Knife camp. Down at the flames spreading from where my oil bombs landed. Down at the crowded creche. Crowded with screaming cubs.
Screaming burning cubs. Burning juvie bucks. Burning juvie bitches.
The pregnant ones.
That’s not the plan! Those are-those are children-!
GET MOVING
GODDAMMIT
But they’re only children-babies-they never did anything-
I fling the other bottle. It shatters against stone ten feet from where she’s standing.
She has to skip back along her parapet to avoid the splash of flame, and in the brighter light down there now, I can see the horror and loathing on her face, and I don’t give half a squirt of runny fucking shit.
MOVE
OR YOU GET THE NEXT ONE
IN THE FACE
With one last look of pure outraged betrayal, she turns and runs.
Down below, somebody’s already unbarring the gate of the creche, and the whole camp is alive. Arrows clatter around me. Everybody who’s not scrambling to save the cubs is either shooting at me or sprinting up into the vertical city.
Works for me.
I turn back to the chest of bottles. If I really want to roast the little shits, I better get busy.
››scanning fwd››
“Tizarre, goddammit-!” How many times have I said that today?
I whip into a spin-kick that slams my right heel into the Shield hard enough to rattle my own damn teeth, but beyond the shimmering curve, the rose-pale glow of the Tear shows nothing but a tightening in the white pinch around her eyes. This is a hell of a time for her to discover she’s got real power.
Not to mention a conscience.
Standing among the shreds of bone and armor beyond the Tear of Panchasell, arms wrapped around her narrow chest to squeeze down her shivers, she looks like she’s ready to just stand there and watch. “You never said anything about killing their cubs.”
She has completely bone-my-ass cracked. “I’m sorry, all right? I promise I’ll fucking suffer for it the rest of my life if you’ll just fucking let me in-”
“Those were children, Caine-you never said you were-”
“If I had,” I snarl at her, “would you have helped?”
“Of course not!”
“There’s your fucking answer, then.”
Here they come on my trail now. Hear those howls echoing along the empty cavernways? Hear that blind ravening rage? Hear that pain? Sounds to me like they want to rip open their own guts with their bare hands and claw the pain out so they can stuff it down my throat till I strangle.
I probably shouldn’t let her see my grin.
Tizarre can hear their pain too: I can see it on her face, in her pinching-down eyes and the white smears where her lips should be.
“What are you gonna do? Leave me out here? With them?”
“I should-”
I slide a hand around to the back of my belt, onto the butt of the blade-wand. “The only thing you should do is make up your fucking mind before they make it up for you.”
“What am I going to tell Marade?”
Oh, for shit’s sake. “Tell her? She’s watching it right now-don’t be such a fucking baby-”
“Don’t say that to me-you don’t get to say that to me-”
Yeah, fair enough, not the best image, I’ll apologize if I live through this but right now those howls are close enough that they’re raising hairs on the back of my neck, and I’m starting to hear feet on stone and screw this anyway.
I pull out the bladewand and jam its business end against her Shield and necessity triggers a surge of intention that sends shearing force out from the tip. The Shield collapses in a cascade of sparks and she staggers and I spring into the chamber and just barely stop myself from stabbing her in the eye for being a whining weak-ass cunt.
Instead I keep on going past her toward the Tear. “Get that fucking Shield back up!”
“Caine-”
“No time for your shit. Do it!”
The Tear of Panchasell shimmers at me from its pedestal of solid gold, a private sunset the size of my head. Runic cirrus-ripples curve and twist across its surface and sink beneath as well, sucking my gaze into its rose-diamond depths.
I lift my own slice of sky: the electric sizzle of the bladewand’s edge.
“Caine-”
A thousand years ago, if the stories are true: Panchasell Mithondionne, near-immortal High King of the First Folk, weeping as he labored over his masterwork, an aeon of Primal lore guiding the hand of the greatest adept in the history of the race-the history of the world-to create a Thing of Power that is also a thing of beauty, a song in crystal, a dream of peace made solid to defend his people and this world. .
And here I am, a vicious little ghetto punk whose whole life wouldn’t be an eyeblink to the least of the First Folk, about to cut the fucking thing in half. Because somebody they never heard of pissed me off.
That, my friends, is a deep lesson about how the world works.
Which is when Tizarre finally does get my attention, not by calling my name but with an ear-shattering blast that sucks all the air in the chamber into a whirl that follows the sideways column of flame roaring from her hands out into the cavernway I just came from, and she’s got the black iron head of an ogrillo arrow sticking a span out from her left kidney and that is exactly the down payment on what we might both have to pay for me being too fucking sentimental to pull the trigger, because a flight of arrows they got off just in time comes bursting through the ass end of her Firebolt trailing flames of their own, and one’s coming straight for my face and I’m already falling into a shoulder roll and it just clips my forehead and I take the roll backward over something on the cavern floor that rams into my own kidney hard enough that I can’t even make it all the way back to my feet because my knees have gone to cloth-