Invidia stood motionless. The many fires blew a hot wind over the rooftop. Somewhere, there was a roar of collapsing masonry as a building succumbed. Distant thumps of firecrafting pulsed irregularly through the night. The distant desperation of the trumpets and drums of the embattled Legions remained a constant, hardly noticed music.
“So be it,” Invidia hissed.
And then the rooftop exploded into motion.
Amara called upon Cirrus, and the wounded fury flooded into her, lending speed and agony alike as time seemed to slow down. Amara surged forward, bobbing down, and ducked under the quick cut that Invidia flicked at her neck. Given the fury-born strength of the former High Lady, had the blow landed, Amara had no doubt that it would have killed her. She coiled her knee up against her chest as she moved, then, one hand coming down to rest lightly on the rooftop, she drove her leg out, all the strength of her hips and legs behind it, the power driven with brutally concentrated force through her heel and into Invidia’s hip.
Invidia’s armor absorbed much of the bone-breaking power of the blow, but it struck her with such speed that its force drove her back through the air. The incredible strength conveyed by furycraft did nothing to add to her body’s mass, after all, and Amara’s kick had moved with such raw speed that even had she possessed the superior strength of an earthcrafter, it would have been all but redundant.
Amara felt her ankle snap, and the pain, added to Cirrus’s own agony, was enough to wash away her concentration on her windcrafting. The world returned to its usual pace, and Invidia crashed backward into the low stone rim that lined the edge of the roof. She hit with brutal force, and a cry was driven from her lungs. She shook her head and lifted a hand, her eyes blazing with sudden fury.
Then fire exploded directly upon her, the white-hot fury of a Knight Ignus’s fire-sphere, intensified by an order of magnitude. The bloom of scalding heat washed back over Amara in a flood that flung her ragged-cut hair straight back from her head, and she threw herself to the ground to shield the unmoving Bernard’s face from the scalding heat of that blast.
She looked back a moment later, her eyes still dazzled from the intensity, and found that half of the building’s rooftop, the part where Invidia had stood, was simply gone. There was no rubble, no fires, no dust—the building simply ceased to be in the area of a sphere the diameter of a couple of carriages. The places where the building had been devoured were cut as neatly as if with a knife, the very edge of the original material burned black and otherwise perfectly in shape. A terrible smell filled the air.
There was no sign of Invidia.
There was the sound of a very light impact on the rooftop nearby. Amara looked up to see another veiled, nearly invisible shape, standing ten feet away, facing the sterile destruction on the rooftop. “I do hope,” Gaius Attis murmured, “that you were not burned. I tried to contain the spread of the heat.”
“You used us,” Amara snarled. She jerked her furious gaze away from Attis’s veiled form. Sheer pain had all but blinded her with tears, but she found Bernard’s throat with her fingers. His pulse beat steady and strong, though he still wasn’t moving. His own fury-born strength had enabled him to survive Invidia’s blow to the jaw. Had such a strike landed on Amara, it would have broken her neck.
“It was necessary,” Attis replied evenly. He turned, scanning the smoke-and-fire skies over Riva. “Invidia would never have exposed herself to me if she did not think she could kill me easily, such as when I was distracted with those furies. And if she hadn’t found someone watching over me, she would have assumed my guard to be too well concealed, and not shown herself for fear of being taken by surprise. You and your Count are both capable enough that it was feasible you might have been entrusted with warning me of danger but vulnerable enough to be quickly overwhelmed by someone of Invidia’s caliber.”
“She might have killed us both,” Amara said.
“Quite,” Attis answered. “But not without revealing her presence.”
Amara stared at him hard for a moment, blinking tears from her eyes. “Those weren’t feral furies,” she said. “They were yours, disguised.”
“Obviously, Cursor. Honestly, do you think I would stand about completely unprotected when the slightest disturbance would result in my death? When a person with a great deal of dangerous personal knowledge about me is running about with the vord during an assault?” He paused reflectively. “I regret that I couldn’t tell you or your Count what I was doing, but it would rather have defeated the point.”
“You risked our lives,” Amara said. “Wounded some of your own bodyguards. And you didn’t even know that she would show herself.”
“Incorrect,” he replied. He knelt to begin picking up the unconscious Bernard. “Invidia has an acute talent for sensing weakness and exploiting it.”
There was a hissing sound, and a slender sword, its blade a shaft of vord green fire, abruptly emerged from the stone beneath Attis’s feet and thrust up into his groin. Attis screamed and flung himself away from the blade, which cut its way free of his body with a sizzling, hissing wail. He only barely managed to stumble aside as a three-foot circle of stone roof exploded upward and outward.
A figure emerged from below, all black chitin and scorched flesh, holding the blazing green blade in its hand. It was bald, its scalp burned black. Amara could scarcely have recognized Invidia if not for the quivering, pulsing, agonized movements of the badly scorched creature that clung to her over her heart. “I do know how to exploit weakness,” she hissed, her voice a rasping croak, “such as your insufferable tendency to gloat after a victory, Attis.”
Attis lay on the rooftop, white as a sheet. His right hand twitched in what seemed a complete lack of controlled movement. Both legs were limp. He wasn’t bleeding, but the white-hot blades the high Citizenry employed almost always cauterized wounds. Only the fact that he was propped up against the roof ’s stone rim prevented him from simply lying supine.
His left hand moved jerkily to his jacket, then emerged with a paper envelope. He flicked it weakly across the distance to Invidia, and it landed touching her feet. “For you. Love what you’ve done with your hair.”
Invidia bared her teeth in a smile. Blood ran from her burned lips. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes were eerie against the unbroken black scorching of her face. “And what is this?”
“Your copy of the divorce papers.”
“How thoughtful.”
“Necessary. I couldn’t legally be rid of you until I had served them.”
Invidia’s smile didn’t waver as she walked forward, sword hissing as its flames caressed the cool air. “You’re rid of me now.”
He inclined his head in a mocking bow, his face a mask of calm disdain. “And that not soon enough.”
“For either of us,” she purred.
There was a raptor’s cry and a small falcon of white-hot fire hammered into the rooftop at Invidia’s feet, spreading in an instant into a blazing wall between her and Attis.
Amara’s exhausted gaze rose to the skies, where half a dozen fliers, the weapons of each and every one of them ablaze with fire, were already stooping into a dive that would carry them down to the embattled rooftop. They dived in an irregular wedge, and Placidus Aria led the way, burning sword in hand, the hems of her skirts snapping and tearing in the speed of her flight.
Attis began to let out weak, choking, scornful laughter.
“Bloody crows,” Invidia snarled. She spun and flung herself off the back side of the building, vanishing from sight even as wind began to howl, carrying her into a heavy smoke cloud.