Sonder and Lumen whirled.
Green light flickered. Sonder and Lumen froze in place, every muscle locked and still. Footsteps sounded, and a figure walked out in front of the camera.
It was Anne, but it wasn’t. The first time I’d met Dark Anne, I’d felt as though I was meeting another person who just happened to be sharing Anne’s body and voice. This was the same, but worse. She had Anne’s long dark hair and slender grace; she wore the black skater dress that Arachne had given her at our last meeting together, and her bare arms and way of moving and the soft green light glowing around her hands were all those of the woman I loved. But then she glanced towards the camera, and it felt like a knife through the heart. The creature looking out from behind those reddish-brown eyes wasn’t her. I’d known that Anne had to be fully possessed, I’d had a long time to prepare for it, but I hadn’t been ready for how badly it would hurt. Actually seeing it was like being stabbed and then having the blade twist in the wound.
‘You,’ the marid told me. ‘I should have known.’ It turned towards Sonder and reached out, pale fingers resting delicately against his armour. Sonder was trembling, eyes wide with panic, struggling to move against the paralysis spell. ‘Worth keeping?’ the marid mused.
I tried to think of what to do. All I could think of was that last-resort idea I’d had about Arachne’s dress, but I was on the other side of a camera and—
The marid killed Sonder then killed Lumen. Their bodies dropped, dead before they hit the ground.
I stood frozen, trying to process what I’d seen. It had been so fast that it was over before I’d realised what was happening. There had been a flash of green light, something flickering into Anne from the bodies, and that was it.
‘No,’ the marid decided, and turned back to me. ‘I dislike being distracted from my work. Abandoning the nexus in this manner will delay the alignment. More importantly, I have been forced to perform with my own hands that which should properly have been attended to by my servants. This irritates me.’
I stared at the marid, then down at Sonder’s body.
‘I know who you are and what you desire,’ the marid told me. ‘Should you wish to save this human, seek me at the heart. Until you do, we will not meet again. Now.’ It reached down, picking up the focus from Lumen’s lifeless hand before studying it. ‘Human weapons have changed, but are apparently no less inferior. Ah, I see. This is linked to the device behind you. You intended to draw my retaliation towards your location, rather than here.’ The marid looked towards me. ‘I presume this is primed to project energy. I wonder what would happen if I aimed it back at that device itself?’
I looked down at the focus in Anne’s hand and saw Lumen’s magic still radiating from it, ready to be unleashed. My eyes went wide.
The marid pointed the focus at the portal.
I turned and ran.
I burst out of the windmill, sprinting with everything I had. I could see the futures converging ahead of me, narrowing in on a single event with a terrible finality. Three seconds. Two seconds. No time to get clear.
I dived for the millpond.
A beam of incandescent light flashed past, streaming away over the cliffs towards the horizon. I could sense the magic within it, the most powerful attack I’d ever seen, pure light and radiance. I’d already turned my face away to avoid being blinded, but I felt the heat burn the back of my arms and head.
But terrible as that beam was, it lasted only an instant. It hadn’t been targeted at me but at the accumulator, and as the accumulator was destroyed, all the energy it had gathered in the past fifteen minutes was released at once.
The windmill exploded behind me.
I dived into the pond, cold water engulfing my body. An instant later, I felt the water shudder as the shockwave hit. Through my divination I caught a confused glimpse of the windmill expanding outwards, the explosion rising up through its stories to burst upwards past the castle walls. A mushroom cloud of dust and white fire rose into the sky.
I floundered underwater, my clothes and armour making my movements heavy and slow. I heard muffled thuds as debris hit the grass, then missiles were raining into the pond. I twisted clumsily; a chunk of grey-yellow brick the size of a beachball crashed through the water’s surface and sank past my head. Then the sunlight was blotted out as something far bigger came flipping down and hit the pond with a boom, leaving me in shadow.
The thunder of falling debris stopped, and all I could hear was the rush of water. My lungs were burning; I hadn’t had the chance to take a breath, and I pushed off the bottom of the pond, swimming heavily upwards. My fingers scraped something and I broke the surface only to bang my head painfully against a wooden strut and go under again. Only after two more tries was I able to get my mouth above water and gasp in air.
The object lying flat on the surface of the pond was one of the windmill’s sails. The wooden struts made it hard to get my head up but there were a few inches of air and I got a grip on the struts and tilted my face so that I could keep pulling in breaths. Once I’d recovered, I kicked towards the edge of the pond, pulling myself hand over hand until I came out from under the sail and could see.
The windmill was gone. Only its foundations were left, and even they were hollowed out into a wide melted crater. Grass had been burned black all the way to the edge of the millpond. The castle wall had withstood the blast, but you could see damage all along its length where pieces of the windmill had been driven into the stone. Rubble and charred timbers were scattered everywhere, and a dozen small fires were burning.
I hauled myself from the water, clambering out onto the far side, where there was still some flattened grass. The shaft of the sovnya was sticking out from the shallows where the explosion had driven it into the mud; I pulled it loose and tossed it to the ground. Water ran from my hair and clothes as I crawled on hands and knees until I could twist around into a sitting position. All of my body ached.
I realised there was a voice shouting into my ear. Nimbus was speaking through the comm. ‘—gamma team, report! Mage Sonder, Mage Lumen, report! Accumulator team, what was that blast? Verus! I want to know what’s going on out there! Are you receiving me! Report immediately! This is a direct—’
I pulled the focus out of my ear and shut it off. The shouting fell silent, replaced with the soft hiss and pop of fires, and the whine of the wind. I stared at the smoking crater while in my mind’s eye I saw Anne killing Sonder, over and over again.
Sonder was dead, Lumen was dead, and the accumulator was destroyed. The Council’s attack had failed utterly.
Water dripped from my hair and ran down my face. I sat by the pond, cold and alone.
14
Time passed.
Men filtered through the smoke, guns sweeping left and right. One saw me and called; after a minute, Little walked up. ‘Mage Verus?’
I nodded.
‘You all right, sir?’
‘I’m not hurt,’ I said. It was an effort to talk.
‘I’m pulling the squad together,’ Little said. ‘No one’s dead, but we’ve got some injuries and Lisowski was thrown from the wall. We’re going to need medevac.’
I nodded again.
Little paused. He looked as though he wanted to say more, but then the moment passed and he signalled to the men beside him, then turned and left.
I sat alone for a while.
Something nudged my left hand and I looked down to see a vulpine head and amber eyes. Hermes poked his nose into my hand, then looked up at me.
‘Hey, you,’ I said tiredly. ‘You’re good at getting out of trouble, aren’t you?’