We’re still outnumbered nine to three, penned in with a malign demigod whom Фshima surely cannot occupy for much longer. Holly crouches by the wall. I don’t have time to guess what she’s thinking. Unalaq shudders as the enemy’s red shield slams into hers with the force of a freight train and the shriek of an angle-grinder. The Deep Stream blue turns a leprous purple at the point of contact, and Unalaq is shoved back a pace, and another, another, another, reducing our little triangle of territory to a few square meters. I don’t have time to check that Holly has shuffled back with us to stay on Horology’s side of the shield, because two more Anchorites now raise their palm-chakras and, through a rattle of psychobullets, I hear Constantin’s cry: “Crush them like ants!”
Arkady now pours his voltage into Unalaq’s shield, which bolsters it temporarily, but the Anchorites’ cascade of fire doubles, trebles, quadruples in intensity. The psychoduel becomes too magnesium-bright to look at, so it is through my chakra-eye that I see the long table rise ten feet into the air, hang there for a second like a bird of prey, then hurtle straight at Arkady and Unalaq. On reflex, I handsign the fastest countermand of my life, and stop it a fist’s width from Arkady’s clenched face, the two ends of the table on either side of the jammed-together shields. Now begins not a tug-of-war but a push-of-war, in which Pfenninger tries to bludgeon Unalaq or Arkady and so knock out the shield, while I try to stop him. We wrestle for control of the table for a long, slippery moment, but fresh Anchorites join Pfenninger, and suddenly I’m overpowered and the table smashes into the head of Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby. Luckily, the table has fallen on our side of the shield so it can no longer be used as a weapon, but my body’s skull is half staved in so I egress before my brain shuts down. Cause of death: flying table. That’s a first and, after I die-die in the Dusk, a last.
Through an ever-redder shade of purple I see Pfenninger, Constantin, and other outlines just a few paces away directing their fire at Unalaq until a puncture rips our shield wide open. Baptiste Pfenninger smiles like a proud father, raises his palm at Unalaq, and a pinprick of brilliant light scorches a line in the air between his hand and Unalaq’s heart. The psychodumdum semi-inverts my colleague’s body, my dead colleague’s ex-body, until it deflates in a withered mess of bones and viscera. Pfenninger and Constantin’s eyes shine with delight. Arkady is trying desperately to repair our pale blue barrier and all the while Фshima is locked into a losing one-to-one duel with the Blind Cathar’s shining icon.
Seeing my dead body against the wall, the Anchorites reason that no psychosoteric can now attack them, and their red shield flickers out. They’ll pay for this mistake. Incorporeally, I pour psychovoltage into a neurobolas and kinetic it at our assailants. It smacks into Imhoff and Westhuizen, the Fifth and Seventh Anchorites, respectively, and down they go. Three against seven. I ingress into Arkady to help him repair the shield, which turns a stronger blue and pushes back the remaining Anchorites. When Arkady glances back at Фshima, however, I see his fight is lost. His body is evaporating as we look. Go to Holly, suborders Arkady. I obey without even thinking to bid him goodbye, an omission I regret even as I transverse to Holly, ingress, evoke an Act of Total Suasion, and … Now what?
Infuriated by the loss of Imhoff and Westhuizen, the seven remaining Anchorites cannon Arkady with everything they have, and the blue shield dies. Arkady’s spent. He straightens up and gives Baptiste Pfenninger the finger. The Blind Cathar evaporates him from behind with a short, sharp psychobolt. The battle’s over. They’ll kill Holly or try to decant her, perhaps. I can neither see nor communicate with Esther, but in seconds the Blind Cathar will psycholocate her soul, annihilate it, and Horology will have lost its hundred-year War with the Anchorites who—
THE LIGHT FILLS the Chapel, passing through hands pressed over eyes, through the eyelids behind those eyes, through corneas and vitreous humors, through bodies, through souls … The white is so white it’s black. Esther did it. Esther won. I wait for the bonesnapping crack as the Chapel splits down the middle. I wait for the screams of the Anchorites as their immortality machine disintegrates about them.
Seconds unspool … Many seconds.
The black beyond white fades back to white.
The white slips off its layers, back to milky flint-gray.
Vision returns. I open Holly’s eyelids and look up from where her body lies, up at the Chapel roof. It hasn’t fallen in.
I think, Esther’s Last Act wasn’t powerful enough.
I think, The Blind Cathar took countermeasures.
It hardly matters why Esther failed. The Second Mission was the last chance. Horology is now just L’Ohkna, a hacker, and Roho, a bodyguard. Horology lost and the Anchorites won.
Holly’s body wants to groan and retch, but I keep it in a state of deathlike stillness while I work out … What? I don’t have enough voltage left for a single psychoprojectile. Try to save my soul? Egress Holly, try to cloak myself, and hover nearby as she is slain or decanted, until the Blind Cathar notices the frightened little piggy, hiding in the corner? I almost envy Esther. At least she died in the false belief she had won Horology its ultimate victory.
The surviving Anchorites take stock. Pfenninger’s still standing at the center of the rhombus nave. Constantin, D’Arnoq, Hugo Lamb, Rivas-Godoy, Du Nord, and O’Dowd remain. One or two of the other fallen may wake in a while, or may not. The Anchorites will be knocked back, but they’ll have lists of possible Carnivores, and in a decade or two they’ll be operating, and abducting, at full strength. The Chapel of the Dusk is unscratched. Beyond the upended table and benches, and a lesser icon hanging at the wrong angle, there is no sign of the battle that raged here only a minute ago. I don’t know what to do, so I just stay inside Holly’s head, paralyzed by indecision.
Elijah D’Arnoq asks, “What was that light?”
“A Last Act,” says Pfenninger. “A powerful one. The question is, who invoked it?”
“Esther Little,” says Constantin, “in incorporeal form. The Counterscript never acknowledged her death, as you know. I sensed her. She attacked the Chapel’s doubt-line, in hopes of splitting it open and making the sky fall in. Who else but her could have engineered this attack? We’re lucky her last big bang wasn’t quite as explosive as she hoped.”
“So we’ve won the War?” asks Rivas-Godoy.
Pfenninger looks at Constantin. As one, they announce, “Yes.”
“Oh,” admits Pfenninger, “there’ll be a few mopping-up operations. We have a few wounds to lick, but Horology is dead. My one regret? That Marinus didn’t live long enough to learn how utterly, how miserably, she had failed. The Blind Cathar must have slain her at some point between killing Фshima and Arkady.”
“Let’s tip the Sykes woman after Sadaqat,” says Constantin, stepping over towards us. She asks D’Arnoq, “Why didMarinus bring her along? I don’t … Wait a minute.” She peers at me with not-quite-human eyes. “Mr. Pfenninger. I do believe we have an afterdinner mint.” Constantin takes a few cautious steps closer. She smiles. “My my my, Holly Sykes is—what’s the term?—playing possum. How—”
A ROARING, PERCUSSIVE KA– BOOOOOOOOOMMM … fills the Chapel. Constantin falls to the floor, as do the others. I-in-Holly stare up at the crack, terror transmuting into hope, then a savage joy as an uprooting, tearing, steel-hull-on-a-reef noise howls louder, and the hairline crack becomes a black line zigzagging down the north roof to the back of the icon. Slowly, the sickening sound dies away, but it leaves behind a heavily pregnant threat of more … From where I-in-Holly am crouching I see the halo-shaped gnostic serpent swing, then drop. It smashes like a thousand dinner plates, fragments dashing and smattering across the stone floor, like ten thousand little living fleeing beings. A chunk as big as a cricket ball just misses Holly’s head. I hear Baptiste Pfenninger declaim a histrionic “Shit! Did you see that, Ms. Constantin?” It occurs to me to test Holly’s own psychovoltage, and I find a deeper reserve than I expected.