Book II. Chapter 143. Puppeteer’s Sacrifice

Ardan raced down what, only half an hour earlier, had looked like a typical street in a steppe town. Now a jagged gap had been torn through its middle, as if by a careless hand.

His heart pounded faster and faster.

On his right, the remains of a grocery store smoldered. On his left, the bare skeleton of a dry-goods store jutted up, stripped of both its roof and its entire front wall. The shelves were in plain view from outside, with melted bolts of cloth dangling from them. Fragments of brick, broken glass, and wood splinters crunched underfoot, and the air reeked of burned wood and gunpowder, along with that awful, sweetish stench rising from the shapeless puddles where the bandits had melted.

Ard held the rifle he’d picked up from the roadway tight against his chest. Compared with his staff’s familiar balance, it felt maddeningly wrong in his hands. An army-issue five-shot bolt-action with a wooden stock worn pale. Four rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. His staff, now utterly useless, swayed in its case on his back. The emptiness in his own Stars pressed on his mind with a dull, aching hum, making Ardan feel as though his teeth had been yanked out and he’d been asked to crack nuts with his gums.

“Skof—gah, Ard! Left!” Taisia gasped behind him.

She hadn’t shot him in the back after all. She had run after him without a word. Apparently, even Miss Shpritz had enough sense to realize that in the middle of a besieged city, with no allies and no idea what was happening, a lone reporter with a scorched revolver would make it exactly as far as the first intersection.

Ard threw himself to the left. A blast thundered from behind a wall as someone thrust a smoking sawed-off around the corner. The load of buckshot tore a furrow through the roadway precisely where Ardan had stood an instant earlier. He snapped the rifle up and fired back from the hip without even trying to aim. In his case, aiming probably wouldn’t have done any good.

The bullet buried itself in the brickwork a good half meter to the bandit’s left, blasting a cloud of rust-colored grit from the wall. Apparently, the bandit hadn’t even realized he was being shot at, because he calmly reloaded the sawed-off and leaned out again. Ard fired once more, but his bullet went wide to the right this time and struck the doorframe.

“Eternal Angels, Ard, have you ever fired a weapon in your life?” Taisia hissed. She pushed herself up on one elbow and fired twice with her scorched revolver. The first bullet also knocked grit from the wall, but the second struck the bandit in the shoulder. He dropped the sawed-off and ducked back behind the corner.

“A staff!” Ardan shot back as he worked the bolt, though his reply sounded a little ridiculous. The spent casing clinked against the cobblestones and rolled into the gutter. Only two rounds remained in the magazine.

“I can tell!”

At the far end of the street, toward the steppe, grenades went off one after another, each crack like a fist striking a tabletop. Then a large-caliber rifle began firing rapidly, and Ard recognized Rita’s style from the rhythm of the shots. She always fired short, dry, two-shot bursts, pausing between them to aim. Zalessky and the Hunters were drawing closer, but from the sound of it, they were still about two hundred meters away. A whole block of wrecked, burning houses lay between Ard and the warehouse where the ingredients were stored.

Somewhere behind him and to the left, footsteps and heavy, ragged breathing echoed through the darkness of a side street. Ardan turned and saw Rogov, gray-faced, dragging Melin one-handed. Melin hung limp, his red beard fallen against his chest. Captain Rogov favored his right leg. His bent staff, tucked into his belt, scraped across the cobblestones and threw off sparks. Despite the tourniquet, dark, thick blood still seeped from Melin’s stump.

“Rogov!” Ard shouted. He waved toward one of the buildings. “Head for the bathhouse! It’s two buildings down! There’s a first-aid kit and hot water!”

Rogov only nodded and turned that way, not wasting precious breath on words. Ardan watched him go, then turned back to the road.

“Run,” he said. He grabbed Taisia’s hand and pulled her along behind him.

Why? Honestly, given the situation, Ardan was barely thinking about anything at all.

They ran about thirty paces, hugging the scorched brickwork, and burst into an intersection. At that same moment, four men in long jackets emerged from the archway opposite them. The man in front brought up a shotgun and fired without aiming. The buckshot tore over Ardan’s head, showering his shoulders with wooden splinters from a signboard blasted clean away. Taisia fired without breaking stride. Her bullet struck the lead bandit in the thigh, and he toppled sideways, blocking the way for the others.

Ard seized the opening, snapped the rifle to his shoulder, and aimed at the bandit standing behind the wounded man.

His shot knocked a splinter from the doorjamb a handspan from the bandit’s head. He crouched in fright, then dove back into the archway.

“Ard, that was a door,” Taisia said wearily.

“I can see it was a door, Taisia!”

“A door five and a half meters away. And you missed.”

“I hit the door!”

“You were aiming at a man!”

Emboldened, the two remaining bandits leaned out from either side of the archway, and their revolvers thundered again. Ardan shoved Taisia aside and, still running, fired his last round toward the muzzle flashes. The bullet sailed off into the sky. Taisia looked back at him without breaking stride. One glance at her face was enough: Ard tossed aside the useless piece of metal and drew his father’s knife from its sheath.

“Shali wouldn’t exactly have praised you,” he muttered under his breath.

They rounded the bakery, and Ardan immediately checked his pace. About fifty meters ahead, a hastily thrown-together barricade of overturned carts and coal sacks stood across the street. Behind it, six or seven gunmen bobbed in and out of sight, and white muzzle flashes were already flickering as bullets snapped toward them.

“The second alley!” Taisia shouted, pointing her gun barrel toward the narrow passage between the bakery and the fence around the neighboring yard.

Ard plunged into the alley first. It was dark. Their boots squelched in some kind of muck, and the air reeked of slop and sour cabbage. The walls pressed so close together that Ardan could stretch out his arms and touch both at once. Taisia swore as she nearly slipped. The Eternal Angels must have been especially fond of her: at that very instant, she stumbled low enough for a bandit’s bullet to tear clean through the collar of her dress.

They ran the length of the alley and spilled out onto a parallel street. A building burning at the end of the block gave off a little more light. Thirty paces ahead, near a toppled gas lamp, Ardan spotted Zalessky, Bors, and Rita advancing in short rushes. Zalessky, the hunters’ leader, reloaded his shotgun on the move, feeding shells one at a time into the magazine, while Bors fired both revolvers at once, cocking the hammers so fast that the spent casings struck one another in midair before they had time to hit the ground.

“Zalessky!” Ard shouted as he ran.

Zalessky turned, spotted them, and gave a curt nod.

“Ard! You alive?”

“So far! We could use some ammo!”

“Bors, toss him some!”

Still firing the revolver in his left hand, Bors ripped a fistful of rounds from his cartridge pouch with his right and sent them scattering toward Ard. Not the best option, but with enemy bullets flying, there was no time to find a better one.

Ardan caught several; the others landed in the dust with hollow thuds. Taisia nearly sprawled on her stomach as she scrambled to gather them up.

“Those are revolver rounds!” Bors shouted. “They won’t fit your rifle!”

“I don’t have a rifle!”

“What do you have?”

“A knife!”

Bors stared at him with the look of someone who’d heard something so absurd his brain simply refused to process it. Then, without a word, he pulled a third revolver, a spare, from his belt and tossed it to Ard.

Ardan caught the weapon and checked the cylinder: six rounds. He shoved a handful of spare rounds into his pocket. The revolver was a short-barreled army model with a worn wooden grip and a heavy, stiff trigger. Ard extended his arm, aimed at a barrel standing by the roadside ten paces away, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet sang past the target and buried itself in the wall of the house across the street.

No, this was utterly pointless…

“I saw it all,” Taisia announced from behind him.

“Shut up, Taisia.”

“Ten paces, Ard. A barrel. Not moving.”

“Will you just shut your mouth!”

Zalessky clearly had no intention of going into detail. He gestured toward the Square with his shotgun.

“We’ll cover you! Come on, run!”

They split up at the intersection. Zalessky, Bors, and Rita veered left toward the Square, keeping the rooftop shooters focused on them, while Ardan and Taisia ducked into a side street that led through the adjoining yards to the warehouse.

They made it through the first yard without incident, and the second as well. In the third, Ard smelled the ambush before he saw the shooter. He caught a whiff of that same sour, metallic sweat, along with naked fear. Ardan shoved Taisia hard behind a woodpile, and at that instant a shotgun boomed from behind the shed. A charge of buckshot plowed through the air exactly where Taisia’s head had been a second earlier.

Let the Black House deal with her later.

Ard didn’t wait for a second shot. He tore forward, ducking so low his palms nearly grazed the ground, and crossed the yard in three short bounds. That was exactly how Shali had taught him: if the hunt turned into a fight, attack low, skimming over the ground like a snake poised for one precise strike. The shooter jerked the fore-end of his shotgun to reload and saw a dark, blurred shadow in front of him, but he never got the shot off.

Ardan slipped under the man’s arm from the right and drove the knife upward under the ribs and straight into his liver. The bandit let out a sob; his legs buckled, and Ard ripped the blade free, then smashed the butt of his revolver into the man’s head.

Ardan heard something move in the shed behind the dead man. He froze with one shoulder against the doorframe and listened. He made out two hearts beating in ragged rhythms, both thudding dully: one by the far wall, the other closer, about three paces from the door. Both men were breathing hard and fast and literally reeked of sweet, tempting fear.

Their copper blood flowed through soft, yielding veins, protected by neither thick hide nor dense muscle. Such easy prey, so slow and clumsy. And besides…

Ard drove the memories of Alcade from his mind.

He dropped onto all fours, pressed his belly to the earth, and slipped into the shed through the narrow gap at the bottom of the door, near the lower hinge. The shed smelled of hay, horse sweat, and gun oil.

The nearer bandit stood with his back to the door, his rifle braced against his shoulder, aiming at the opening he expected the stranger to use. But Ard had come in another way entirely, and now he was right behind the bandit’s heels.

Ardan’s hand shot upward, seized the bandit’s ankle, and yanked it toward him. The bandit crashed onto his back and hit the back of his head on the dirt floor. Ard straddled his chest and drove the knife into his throat with one short thrust. Blood, hot and thick and so sweet, gushed onto his hands. Ardan ripped the blade free, then rolled aside just before the second bandit fired.

The bullet tore through the chest of the mortally wounded bandit, who was choking on scarlet bubbles, and sent him on to the Eternal Angels’ judgment.

Ardan pushed off the ground with both feet and leaped forward. In midflight, he blurred into a long, low silhouette, like a pouncing lynx glimpsed for a single instant by a partridge that had hesitated too long. Ard sailed three meters or so. The bandit was frantically reloading his revolver, his hands trembling. When he raised his head, Ard was already in front of him.

Ardan’s left hand caught the barrel and wrenched it aside. His right swept the knife upward in an arc and ripped open the bandit’s belly from groin to sternum. The man screamed and dropped his weapon, clutching at the wound as it gaped wider, but Ardan grabbed the back of the bandit’s head and slammed the man’s face into Ardan’s knee. The crunch as the bridge of the bandit’s nose broke was swallowed by a soft gurgle, and the bandit went still.

Ard straightened, wiped his knife on the dead man’s pant leg, and listened. Outside, shots still rang out, but not as steadily as they had five minutes earlier.

“Taisia,” he called softly.

“Here.” Taisia peered out from behind the woodpile, pale and terrified, but holding a revolver in her outstretched hand. “Can I keep this?”

“Yes. Let’s go.”

They climbed over a fence (Taisia really was in excellent shape), crossed another yard, and burst onto a wide street leading to Square. The gunfire here sounded both closer and meaner. About a hundred meters away, at the intersection in front of the pharmacy, Ardan spotted Zalessky, Bors, and Rita taking cover behind an overturned cart and firing in three directions at once.

Just then, a familiar figure emerged from the alley into the street between the bank and the burning warehouse. The alley was shrouded in rolling clouds of gunpowder smoke and settling brick dust. He came out calmly, unhurriedly, as though setting off on a morning stroll. The moment Ard made out the silhouette and the two holsters on his hips, he knew who they had run into, even before Rita could open her tattooed mouth.

“He’s mine!” Rita snarled, working the bolt of her rifle to chamber a round.

“Rita, stop!” Zalessky shouted, but it was already too late.

Rita sprang out from behind the cart and charged straight at Husk, bringing the rifle stock to her shoulder as she ran. At the sight of her, Husk raised the revolver in his right hand and squeezed the trigger, but the firing pin clicked on an empty chamber. He cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger again. After another empty click, he casually tossed the revolver aside. With his left hand he reached for the second holster on his hip. It was empty too. Husk spread his arms and stopped right in the middle of the smoke-filled street.

Rita bore down on him, bayonet leveled. Ten meters, eight, five.

Ardan sensed something was wrong a fraction of a second before it happened. He had already opened his mouth to shout, already snapped up his revolver, but Zalessky, who had also lunged forward, cut between him and Rita and blocked his line of fire. And to be honest, Ard would have missed even without Zalessky. A hundred-meter shot from a short-barreled revolver, in the dark, at a moving target with two friends in his line of fire: even Ursky would have hesitated. Though not for long. Granted, Alexander would absolutely have hit the target, no question, and perhaps changed the outcome.

But Ardan wasn’t Ursky.

Husk bent down as if to adjust the top of his boot. His right hand slipped beneath his pant leg and came right back out. The bastard bared his teeth in a predatory grin, a small pocket revolver clutched in his palm. Its barrel had been sawed off, and its grip was mother-of-pearl. Until then, he had kept it hidden in a holster strapped to his shin. He brought it up before Rita could take her final step and squeezed the trigger.

The shot wasn’t loud at all. It sounded strangely harmless, almost like a cork popping from a bottle. Rita’s head snapped back, and she fell flat on her back before taking the final step that would have driven her bayonet into Husk’s chest. Her rifle flew aside and rolled through the dust. Rita lay sprawled across the stones, her arms flung wide in a broken, absurd pose.

“No-o-o-o-o!” Bors burst into view on Ard’s left and charged Husk, both revolvers leveled.

Ardan saw none of what happened next. Two men on the roof of the neighboring house opened fire on him at once. Ard dropped to the cobblestones and rolled behind a toppled gas lamppost. Bullets clanged off its cast-iron post, throwing sparks and leaving fresh dents in the metal. Ardan raised his revolver and fired at a silhouette on the roof. Missed. Fired again, and missed once more. The bullet pinged off the roof tiles about a meter from the gunman.

“Ard.” Taisia lay beside him behind the lamppost, reloading her revolver. Even now, she could still manage that insufferable sarcasm of hers. “Has no one ever told you that you’re supposed to aim at the man, not the building he’s standing on?”

“Taisia, if you don’t shut up right now, I’ll use you as a shield myself.”

“Give me that.” She snatched the revolver from his hand and, without waiting for a response, leaned around the lamppost and fired twice. The first gunman jerked and fell on his side. The second ducked behind a chimney. “There.” Taisia gave a snort and tossed the iron back to Ard. “Now let’s run.”

Three men ran out of the alley to the right. One of them was huge and bearded, and he swung his rifle butt without breaking stride. Ardan ducked beneath the blow, letting the butt pass over his head, and stepped inside the bandit’s reach. Guta taught that once a bear closes with an opponent, it never lets go again. Ard grabbed the bearded man by the collar with his left hand, yanked him closer, and at the same time drove his knife in beneath the ribs and twisted the blade. The bandit gave a hoarse rattle and went limp. Using the body as cover, Ardan shoved it into the second man.

His opponent tried to jump back, but tripped over his comrade’s corpse and lost his balance. Then Taisia’s bullet punched through him, and he fell. Ard vaulted over both bodies in a single bound and landed directly in front of the third man, who stood with one arm extended, revolver in hand.

He even managed to get a shot off.

The bullet seared Ard’s left forearm, tearing away a long strip of skin, but Ardan was already within striking distance. He seized the shooter’s wrist with his left hand and twisted so hard that the bones tore through muscle and skin, snapping like slender matchsticks. The revolver fell to the pavement. Ard smashed his forehead into the bridge of the bandit’s nose. The cartilage gave with a crunch. The bandit reeled backward, and Ardan immediately drove his father’s blade into the bandit’s solar plexus. Then, just as he had the last time, he twisted the blade and yanked it free.

The second bandit was wounded but apparently still alive. He had crawled out from beneath his comrade’s corpse and was dragging himself toward his shotgun, his leg twisted at the knee and trailing behind him. Blood pumped from his belly in spurts. Ard stepped up to the dying man and drove his knife down into the base of his skull. Ergar called that spot the last trail, because a strike there instantly sent prey to the Sleeping Spirits.

Ardan searched the three men and found a handful of cartridges and one fragmentation grenade with a wooden handle. He stuffed the cartridges into his pockets and tucked the grenade into his belt.

“Ard.” Taisia stood three steps away, staring at his arms, drenched up to the elbows in someone else’s blood. “You just finished off three bastards with a knife in five seconds. With a gun, all you can hit is a door, but with a knife... three. In five seconds. Oh, Eternal Angels.”

“Firearms and I have a complicated relationship, Taisia.”

“Is there anything in your life that isn’t complicated, Ard? Anyone?”

They ran on. They were about two hundred meters from the warehouse when someone fired a shotgun at them again from one of the pharmacy’s second-floor windows. Ardan was about to shove Taisia behind a drainpipe, the way he had before. But she darted aside on her own, and by then Ard had already flattened himself against the wall. A blast of buckshot tore up the street at his feet, kicking up a plume of dirt and dust.

“We won’t get through!” Taisia shouted as she fired toward the window, though she was clearly missing; her position was too awkward. “We have to double back and go around!”

Ard looked around.

If there was any way up to the second floor from outside the building, it was along the cornice and drainpipe. Shali would have approved.

Ardan clamped the knife between his teeth, jumped, and grabbed a drainpipe bracket. He hauled himself up, braced his toes against the brickwork, and climbed, his fingers finding purchase on protrusions and in hollows. The wall looked perfectly smooth to the eye; under Ardan’s fingers, its hidden holds felt as broad and sure as stair treads. In a few seconds, he reached the second-floor window across from the one Taisia was firing at, shifted his left hand to the sill, and peered inside.

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The shooter stood with his back to Ard, reloading the shotgun. What was it with bandits and their love of shotguns, a weapon already all but outlawed by the international community?

Ard swung his legs over the sill and landed soundlessly on the balls of his feet, just as Shali had taught him, then crossed the distance between them in two steps. He stepped in behind the shooter, locked his left hand over his forehead, and drew the knife across his throat with his right in one long, deep stroke from ear to ear. Blood gushed onto the floor, sprayed the walls, and spilled across the reloaded shotgun. Ardan calmly shoved the limp body onto the floorboards.

Hurried footsteps came from the next room.

“Ahgrat.”

Ducking low, Ard slipped to the doorway and pressed himself against the wall on the hinge side, exactly as he had half an hour earlier in the hotel cellar. The door flew open, and a hand gripping a revolver appeared in the doorway. Ardan seized the wrist and yanked it toward him as he drove his elbow into the man’s face. Bone crunched, and the bandit let out a short cry. Before the bandit could even collect himself, Ard spun him around, pinned him chest-first to the wall, and drove the knife into his spine. The bandit jerked, wheezed, and slumped to the floor.

Ardan picked up the bandit’s revolver, checked the cylinder and found four rounds, then jumped back out the window into the street. He landed lightly on the balls of his feet, rolled, and came up at once beside Taisia, holding out the revolver he’d taken.

“Thirty seconds,” Taisia said, glancing at her miniature watch as she took the revolver.

“And?”

“Thirty seconds, two men dead without your firing a single shot, but you missed a barrel from two meters away. Oh, sorry. I seem to be repeating myself. But, you know, an evening this hectic doesn’t leave much room for fresh material.”

“Taisia, I promise you, when this is all over...”

“What? Curse me? You already promised to cut my ears off. How am I supposed to wear my earrings then?”

“No big deal. I’ll help. I’ll sew them back on backward.”

They raced across the intersection, and then Ardan saw people burst from the houses on both sides of the street. Men in shirts and suspenders: one with a revolver, another with an old hunting rifle, and another with some rusty old contraption no one could identify, probably old enough to remember the previous Emperor’s reign.

Three burly cowboys in dusty hats and leather vests came running out of a side alley. One of them, a gray-haired man with a sawed-off shotgun at the ready, shouted something about “driving them toward the steppe!” as he ran. About ten more men raced after the cowboys, every one of them firing at anyone who wasn’t running with them.

The locals had finally realized that the bandits no longer controlled the town and began crawling out of their hiding places. Everything was just as Ardan had expected. He hadn’t spent nearly six years among the cowboys for nothing.

A portly man in an apron leaned out of a second-floor window of the hardware store and began methodically firing at the rooftops, where gunmen were still firing back. His wife sheltered behind his broad back, passing him cartridges from a tin box.

Someone hurled a grenade from the pharmacy roof. Ard glimpsed it at the edge of his vision: a dark, ribbed cylinder on a long stick, its fuse hissing as it tumbled lazily toward a group of cowboys. The reflexes Ergar, Shali, and Guta had hammered and clawed into him took over. Ardan’s body moved on its own. He sprang off the pavement, snatched the grenade out of the air, and hurled it back before his feet hit the ground, sending it in a high arc straight toward the burning building.

The grenade vanished over the roof ridge, and a moment later a muffled, hollow boom came from the other side. Then something came crashing down.

“Ard,” Taisia drawled. “You just caught a grenade in midair.”

“Yep.”

“With your bare hands.”

“Yep.”

“And yet a barrel from ten paces...”

“Taisia, damn it, run!”

They raced on past burning buildings, past wrecked carts and overturned barrels, past bodies lying on the cobblestones just as the clash with the Eternal Angels had left them. Bullets whistled somewhere overhead, but the shots came less and less often. The locals were pressing the bandits toward the Outskirts. The bandits were giving up their rooftop positions and falling back into the steppe.

He had already begun to feel a flicker of hope that...

At the next intersection, two bandits burst from an archway right in front of them. Ardan, running in the lead, reacted before he even understood what was happening. Guta had taught him that when you meet an enemy face-to-face on the trail, you don’t stop and you don’t back away, because a man charging straight at you is always more frightening than one trying to dodge out of your way.

Ard lunged forward and ducked beneath the nearer bandit’s raised gun barrel. From his crouch, he snapped upright, driving the crown of his own head into the man’s chin. The bandit’s teeth shattered into a spray of tiny fragments, and his head snapped back. Ardan seized him by the belt and hurled him at the second man.

How many times that evening had he already used someone else’s body as a projectile? In any case, it was far more reliable than a bullet.

Both men crashed down in a tangle of limbs and weapons. Ard leaped on top of them, drove his knife into the first man’s temple, then rammed his knee into the second man’s chest so hard that his breastbone touched his back.

He rose, breathing hard, just as two men fired at once from the intersection ahead, one from a window and the other from around a corner. Taisia, as if parodying Ursky yet again, fired both revolvers in different directions. Amazingly, she hit the man at the window, but the second man’s bullet grazed her forearm.

The bullet tore through Taisia’s jacket sleeve and opened a long, deep wound. Hot blood welled at once. Taisia cried out and pressed her elbow to her side, but her legs held, and she managed to fire back with her left hand before the second bandit ducked back around the corner.

The second bandit dropped, too.

Sometimes Taisia really was frightening.

“Ard, I’m hit!” she gasped. For the first time since they’d met, her voice held real, undisguised fear.

“I see! We have to keep moving! We can’t stay here!”

“I can’t!”

“Then push through it!”

Ardan slipped his arm under her good arm and hauled her after him, firing back with the revolver he’d picked up from beside the bandit’s body. He fired four shots. No one could have said where a single one went. But the blasts and flashes forced the gunmen to duck for a second or two, and that gave them enough time to run another thirty paces.

“You didn’t hit anyone. Again,” Taisia groaned, and Ardan never figured out whether she was still needling him or delirious with pain.

The Hunters’ Guild building was just around the final corner, a two-story stone structure with a massive porch and ornately molded cornices. Its door had been broken down, and the doorman lay on the steps, shot through the chest. Inside, however, the spacious lobby was surprisingly empty and quiet, with the Guild’s bronze crest on the wall. Only about forty meters of open ground stood between them and the safety of the porch.

A rifle cracked from the roof of the house across the way. The bullet bit into the earth at Ard’s feet. He ducked and shielded Taisia with his body. Then he ran, dragging Taisia after him as he wove between bodies and debris. A second bullet whistled past his ear; a third grazed the stone urn beside the porch, knocking a sharp fragment from it. A fourth bullet never came. From somewhere near the hardware store, the same heavyset man in the apron shot the bandit on the roof, and the rifle fell silent.

Ard bounded up the front steps, vaulted over the doorman’s body, and hauled Taisia inside. His footsteps echoed hollowly through the lobby. It looked impossibly empty and smelled of sealing wax, old paper, and that peculiar institutional odor common to government buildings throughout the Empire. Ardan seated her on a bench along the wall.

Taisia slumped against the brick wall and let her eyes fall shut. Blood from the wound in her forearm was already seeping through the tatters of her sleeve and dripping onto the plank floor.

Ard tore a strip from his own shirt, bound her arm tightly with it, then crouched beside her and allowed himself exactly three seconds of silence. Outside the lobby windows, the shooting continued, but the thunder of the cannonade was receding farther and farther toward the Outskirts. In the pauses between shots, he could suddenly hear a rooster somewhere shrieking at the top of its lungs, driven completely mad by everything going on and plainly crowing off schedule.

“Did you see Zalessky and Bors?” Ardan asked.

Taisia opened her eyes.

“No.” Her voice was hoarse and a little hollow.

Ard nodded, wiped the knife on his pants leg, and slid the blade back into its sheath.

“Can you walk?” he asked without looking at her.

“Do I... have a choice?” Taisia replied, a cough splitting the question in two.

Ardan looked toward the street once more.

“The chances of bandits turning up here...”

“Greater than zero,” Taisia rasped. Leaning on his shoulder, she got to her feet. “Let’s go, Mr. Crack Shot.”

Ardan sighed and shook his head. If there was one thing that never changed, it was Miss Shpritz’s way of putting things. They crossed the spacious lobby, littered with blood-spattered papers. Long scarlet streaks threaded between the papers like the strands of a spiderweb.

“Damn it,” Taisia whispered. Her eyes had clearly followed the bloody streaks to their end.

Beyond the bullet-riddled information desk, some fifteen bodies lay heaped one atop another. Among them, Ardan spotted a familiar face.

Senior Magister Zvonkov, the Pink mage, lay there, his head split in two from the crown to the lower jaw. Beside him lay another body. A pair of severed arms, cut off at the shoulders, had been folded across its chest: arms sheathed in chitinous armor, with elongated, clawlike fingers. They had simply been laid crosswise over the dead mutant’s body and left there.

Maybe it was the ingredients themselves. Or maybe it was because the lobby sat high above the ground. Either way, the bodies were in no hurry to decay. They didn’t even smell. No worms, no bloating, no stench, just glassy eyes and faces twisted with terror. Among the dead were a few young women and men who had only recently earned their credentials and had probably been thrilled to land such a prestigious job.

“I’m about to throw up...” Taisia turned away. “Eternal Angels, Ard! Who could have killed a Pink mage and a Black House mutant?”

It made no difference whatsoever to Ard whether Taisia had already heard about Lieutenant Shosa or had simply guessed the answer from a few obvious facts.

“Apparently not me, Miss Shpritz, since I was in the Park the whole time.” Ardan hoped he’d managed to sound sarcastic. Probably not.

Even so, Taisia frowned at him, then averted her gaze, trying to hide what was plainly... regret.

“I’m sorry, Ard.” Taisia’s apology was unexpected, and once again her voice was careful, almost formal. By then, they had already reached the warped doors leading to the central staircase. “It’s just... it’s just that everything fit together so neatly... Then there was the Airship, too... I do remember what happened there. But no, now that I think about it, it didn’t fit together at all... So many inconsistencies. So many obvious gaps in my theory, but... I wanted so badly to believe in it. And I did believe in it. Blindly and without question.”

Ard understood exactly what Miss Shpritz meant. In Star circles, there was even a special term for scholars who built a theory out of whatever supported it and ignored anything that proved it wrong.

And why single out scholars when the same thing was everywhere you looked in everyday life? Look at the Conclave and the Tavsers. At heart, they were making the same argument from opposite sides. Neither side was willing to see anything that might refute its own position, much less acknowledge such evidence.

Milar chalked it up to typical human behavior. He had even been trained to exploit a person’s subconscious reluctance to admit they were wrong in order to further an investigation.

“And I’m sorry I pointed a gun at you...” Taisia continued, looking as though she might slide to the floor and split her forehead open at any moment. “When my father was killed, you were probably still making your way through the mountains... but if there was even a chance, the slightest chance, that you knew something... From the very beginning, I didn’t even want to ask you anything... I only wanted to make sure you were the mole, then use you to get to the people at the top... and that was it. The whole plan... But suddenly I was so scared... so terrified that I’d die without ever finding out anything.”

“Taisia, are you seriously trying to tell me what a nervous breakdown feels like?” Ard tried to sound ironic. “Do you really have that little faith in my intelligence?”

“Your life experience, more like,” Taisia shot back. Then she hurried to add, “And anyway, go to hell... Ard. And for your information... my shameful breakdown... has absolutely nothing to do with my... being a woman.”

Ardan helped Taisia up the stairs without a word, though by then nearly every part of his body hurt. Why? Maybe... maybe because he hoped having her there would give him the strength to do what had to be done.

And, oh, Sleeping Spirits, how he hoped he’d made a mistake.

“Is that why you met me near Mr. Brolid’s Arena?”

“You already know,” Taisia said instead of answering him directly. But yes, Ardan had already figured it all out.

They climbed one flight of stairs after another as the firefight below faded behind them.

“What’s going to happen to me when we get back to Metropolis?”

“I don’t kn—”

“Then again,” Miss Shpritz said with a short laugh, her bitterness undisguised. “I doubt we’ll make it back, Ard. I’m sorry. I really am sorry I dragged you out here for nothing. Stupid... Oh, Light, how bad this is going to look to your wife when they bury us on the same day. Thank goodness they won’t bury us in the same grave. I couldn’t have stood watching you fail to dress yourself even after death.”

“Why do you think we’ll be buried on the same day, Miss Shpritz?” Ardan tried to sound cutting. “You’re human, while I’m half matabar. I’ll live a full century longer than you. And when you’ve grown decrepit and helpless, with sagging breasts and a toothless mouth, I’ll still look quite young. And, by the way, I’ll still dress just as tastelessly!”

“Save that sort of thing for your wife, Ard,” Taisia shot back with effortless precision. Even wounded, tired, and frightened, she was still far better with words than Ardan. Which, on the whole, was hardly surprising. “But thank you for joking. I’m not sure, though, that we’ll survive whoever finished off Zvonkov with—”

Taisia broke off. She looked at Ardan, a bright, almost blinding hope in her eyes.

“You... you know something...” she said as realization dawned.

Yes, Ardan knew. He made his way to the far end of the corridor. Taisia moaned now and then. He adjusted his hold, lifting her higher in his arms. By then, he already knew it all. He needed only one last, irrefutable piece of evidence, and he saw it the moment he opened the door to the ingredient storeroom.

In the center of the room, amid wooden and steel crates, a man was bent over something that resembled a blank, only vastly enlarged and distorted. Ardan recognized him at once.

“Magister Tikhonov?” Taisia was so astonished she nearly stumbled and fell flat on her face.

And that would have been the last thing she ever did. A black veil shimmered across the storeroom threshold. Ard’s Stars had gone out, leaving him unable to sense Star Magic, yet the barrier was as palpable to him as Miss Shpritz’s astonishment.

The art of Aean’Hane barred their path. Its dark, forbidden branch. The branch ruled by demons and the Dark Ones.

“Useless ape-spawn!” A black shadow writhed around Magister Tikhonov, who had wasted away until he was almost a skeleton. “Come on! Fight!”

The Magister had always been kind and helpful, dreamy and somehow a little otherworldly. Now he was fighting in earnest. He strained to tear apart the shimmering silver nets entangling him. They unspooled from the inner pocket of his jacket, right where the letter Ard had handed him was tucked.

“You... enchanted... that paper... when... you were showing me... the constellations?” Evlampiy could barely get his tongue to move. The Speaker’s spell should have bound the Magister tight, but apparently his connection to the demon, whose shadow seeped from Tikhonov’s chest, was giving him extra strength.

Ardan helped Taisia sit down by the opposite wall, then positioned himself in front of the passage.

“Yes,” he answered honestly.

The Magister closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again, the closest thing to a nod he could manage.

“You saw... me in Sidogib’s memories... didn’t you? The disguise... failed.”

“One of the Blue mages got to his feet. In the dim light, Sidogib couldn’t make out his face. All he could see was the mage’s outline and a prosthetic where his left leg should have been.”

That was how Ardan had told it to the other Hunters. But what had really happened was this:

“Ardan waved his hand and froze the memory. He stepped closer to the silhouette hidden in the shadows. The figure was too bulky to be real. Why? Because with that much excess weight, no prosthetic would make sense: the person wouldn’t be able to walk anyway. That meant the mage had to be using either a highly sophisticated illusion or a costume.

“Why? To hide his face.

“So no one would recognize him, which meant...”

“You didn’t... tell us... what you saw... besides the prosthetic,” Magister Tikhonov continued.

“Yes,” Ardan repeated.

He had indeed kept that information to himself. Even so, it hadn’t been difficult to guess. Why were there only two mages in the town? Because they didn’t need a third. Why had a military engineer been left at the camp? To configure the equipment hidden in the Park.

“How... long... have you... suspected me?”

“Since before I invited you to dinner,” Ardan answered. “As soon as I heard you talking with Ostrozhskaya.”

“What... gave me... away?”

“You were trying very hard to pretend you were frightened, Evlampiy, and yet you truly were frightened. At the time, I thought you were afraid of the Anomalies and the Park. That wasn’t it.”

“How... ah... yes... the matabar...”

The Magister kept reaching and reaching for the toggle on the side of the device.

“Come on! Come on, mortal! Finish what you started!” The demonic shadow screamed and raged, apparently not even understanding what exactly was happening. It seemed unable to touch anything real, or...

Or you could dream up a hundred other reasons why the demon failed to notice the conversation between Evlampiy and Ardan. But one thing was becoming clear: the Puppeteers really were involved after all.

And that meant something else entirely.

“The fucking Colonel,” Taisia swore, undisguised respect in her voice. “He used both of us, Ard. Both of us...”

That was something to think about tomorrow, Ardan reminded himself. Then he returned to the conversation. “And then you started losing weight fast, even before you drank any of my brews. After that, you sabotaged the expedition into the ninth sector and, in the process, did everything you could to make Miss Ostrozhskaya look unreliable. I was going only on what I’d seen for myself. And there was still that same fear... I thought you were afraid of the bandits, but no. You weren’t worried about them at all. Too bad it took me far too long to understand what you were really afraid of. You weren’t afraid of someone. You were afraid of something. You were afraid your plan would fail.”

Ardan was stalling. Brazenly. As he spoke to the Magister masked by the demon’s magic, Ard was trying to come up with anything... anything that might turn things around.

“You were with us the whole time, but...” Ardan turned toward the shadow, which continued to scream in the Fae tongue. “How long have you been living with this passenger of yours?”

“A passenger? That sounds… poetic…” Magister Tikhonov smiled sadly, the pain on his face undisguised. “Since… the moment… I agreed…”

“Who made you the offer? Onton?”

“Onton… is only… a pawn… but I can’t tell you… you know…”

“I know.” Ardan nodded. “If you tell me, you’ll die. But think how many people would survi—”

Ardan broke off. At last, he had found the final element of the equation. The missing detail that, all this time, had allowed him to keep hoping he was wrong and Magister Tikhonov had nothing to do with any of it. After all, he really had been with them the whole time.

Then how could he have killed Zvonkov and Lieutenant Shosa? Of course, Magister Tikhonov himself had done nothing. Nothing except give some of his strength, both physical and magical, to the demon still clinging to its vessel. A vessel that had turned out to be Evlampiy himself.

All this time, Ardan had been right next to a possessed man, yet, just as with the Striga, he had sensed nothing. So whatever the Puppeteers were doing, whatever research they were conducting, their efforts were clearly producing very real results.

Or perhaps Onton, whoever he was, had done it all. Maybe he was a powerful Speaker, or even an Aean’Hane.

Dozens of possible explanations for what had happened flared and faded in Ard’s mind.

But the last detail had nothing at all to do with how the conspiracy had worked. It concerned something else entirely.

The last unresolved piece, the one that had kept Ard from fully understanding the situation, was Magister Tikhonov’s lack of motive. He didn’t care about money; he wasn’t interested in power; and Evlampiy himself held no particular grudge against the Crown.

No.

The real issue was something else entirely.

And only now did Ardi realize he had overlooked what had been right in front of him all along.

“So let my dream remain a dream, Ard. A photograph would be enough for me, you know. Even one taken from far away. Not a fake of the sort they love to peddle on Sleepless Street, but a genuine one. Sometimes it’s enough just to know that magic exists, even if you can’t touch it yourself. Just to know. And somehow, life gets a little easier.”

“People… will ruin everything… Ardi…” Magister Tikhonov whispered. Bright, clear tears rolled down his cheeks. “One day… maybe not now… maybe later… but they’ll destroy everything… everything around us… we’ll destroy it all ourselves. There’ll be… no more magic… no more fairy tales… only greed. And stupidity. They’ll doom… this planet… and this galaxy… and this universe… and it won’t matter… whether there’s Ley on other planets or not… human ambition and the desire… for power… will destroy everything.”

Ardan stared silently at what was little more than a skeleton with skin stretched over its bones.

“Hurry, mortal! Do it!” the demon shouted, drawing the last of Evlampiy’s strength to sustain its magic.

Evlampiy Tikhonov. A man with such a big, kind heart that the Puppeteers had no trouble taking Magister Tikhonov’s beliefs and twisting them. Or perhaps they hadn’t even twisted them. Perhaps they had merely nudged him toward the one conclusion he saw as both right and possible.

They had given him a way to arrive at an answer. A terrible one, unimaginably cruel, yet logical through and through.

“No, Ard, I was definitely born too late. Back then, long ago, the world must have been so vast. Beyond every new hill, every river, and every patch of woods, something wondrous lay hidden. Dangerous, perhaps. But wondrous. And now… now all we do is wait for someone to come up with some new, ingenious way to kill every last one of us. And yes, you’d be right to remind me of the History of Star Magic lecture series and tell me that things have always been this way. But I desperately want to romanticize the distant past. And dragons, of course.”

“That’s no answer, Magister.” Ardan didn’t understand why he kept the conversation going. “What you’re proposing is terrible.”

“Why?” Evlampiy asked abruptly. “Just… because… people are going to suffer? And all the things… people themselves… have destroyed… all that we’ve… ruined… isn’t that… terrible? Isn’t what happened… to your people… terrible, Ard?”

Ardan clenched his fists and ground his teeth. Then he relaxed and shook his head.

“Half my people, Evlampiy,” Ardan replied. “And yes, it was terrible. Just as terrible as what the matabar did during the Dark Lord’s uprising.”

“Sophistry...” The Magister seemed to wave the argument aside. “They... the ones who called me... they’ll save... this world... the real world... the one that... never belonged to humans...”

“Magister? What are you talking about?”

“They’ll... cleanse the world... of our filth... and I’ll help...”

Ardan’s heart skipped a beat. After all this time, had he finally managed to catch a glimpse of the Puppeteers’ true motive?

But that, too, was a thought for tomorrow.

For now, something else mattered more.

“Evlampiy.” Ardan nearly stepped toward Evlampiy, who was weeping, but if he so much as touched the barrier, it would be the last thing he ever did. “Think of your children. Think of your wife. You’re talking about them too. Have they done anything wrong? Do they deserve the fate you’re describing?”

“I wish so badly... so badly, Ardi... that I could see them again...” His tears pattered softly on the wet floor, and Evlampiy’s finger went still, if only for a moment.

“What are you doing, mortal?!” the otherworldly creature raged.

“...to play with them... to hear their laughter... Oh, how I’d love... to hold her... my beloved... I’d love to wrap my arms around her from behind... rest my head on top of hers... and simply stand there beside her... oh, the Light... I love her so much, Ardi... sometimes I think... I loved her even before... I ever met her... I miss them so much... every one of them... but I can’t allow them... to grow up in a world... where there’s nothing... but pain and... humiliation.”

“Evlampiy...”

“No!” Magister Tikhonov shouted. “Listen... Ard... I’ll do it... no matter what you say... your magic... yes... I’ll die... but the barrier will break... it’s about to break... you’ll be caught in the blast... take... Miss Shpritz... and run... and then... please... take care of Tess... it’s such a shame... I never made it... to the play.”

“Evlampiy, please.”

“Run... Ardi... run...” Evlampiy’s whole body went rigid. His skin began to mottle, and his hair started falling out before Ardan’s very eyes. “I’m so sorry... Ardi... I wanted... to save you... but you’re so... brave... forgive me... I was... happy... to have you... as a friend. Like something... out of a fairy tale. An ordinary... man and... a fairy-tale... hero. From that... other world... the one I was... born too late for.”

“Evlampiy, come to your senses!” Ardan shouted.

Magister Tikhonov jerked once more, and the silver bonds dissolved into the air in a soundless shimmer. The demon’s shadow let out a cackle and slipped through the window.

Sleeping Spirits... They’d never needed to synchronize the devices in the first place. What did hundreds of kilometers mean to a demon? No more than a single step to a human.

A withered old man hovered beside the device, with little of Evlampiy Tikhonov left in him. Perhaps only his soft, kindly gaze.

Ard heard Atta’nha’s Voice in his head:

“The greatest evil, Ardi, is always committed by the kindest of hearts.”

“I never did tell them,” Magister Tikhonov rasped, resting a finger on the toggle switch. “Your watch will tell you where to look for them. Forgive me for damaging government property. And now it’s up to you to decide what to do with this knowledge. Now it is your burden, Mr. Fairy-Tale Hero.”

“Magister!”

“Goodbye, my friend. I’ll see you in the next life.”

Ardan spun on his heel, scooped up the stunned Taisia Shpritz, and leaped out the window. He would never know whether he had made it out a fraction of a second before the blast, or whether Magister Evlampiy Tikhonov had summoned the last of his strength to linger for a few more moments in a world so foreign to him.

Shards of glass scratched Ardan’s shoulders and arms, and then the blast wave caught him and Miss Shpritz and swept them both up.

***

“Get up, Ard... get up...”

Ardan came to for the second time in an hour. Leaning on Captain Rogov’s shoulder, he rose to his feet amid the rubble, all that remained of what had once been the Hunters’ Guild building.

A rainbow-hued flower of wild, beastlike Ley bloomed in the sky above them. Another exactly like it rose over the endless forest.

“Oh, Light, oh, Light...” Taisia wailed from the rubble nearby, smeared with ash and soot. Apparently, they’d dug her out first and had already filled her in on the details. “What are we going to do... what are we going to do now...”

“That’s the question, Ard,” Melin rumbled, his bleak gaze shifting from one ghostly flower to the other. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to make it to shelter.”

“Ard,” Rogov added, “I’m not sure there’ll be anywhere at all to take shelter on this side of the Alcade Mountains anytime soon.”

Ardan made sure his staff and grimoire had survived, then exhaled in relief. The case Tess had sewn was torn to shreds, of course, but the staff itself had survived with only a few chips in the lacquer; the finish would need redoing anyway. His grimoire was intact too.

“There’s a way out,” Ardan said quietly, brushing off the ash.

“And what would that be?” Rogov narrowed his eyes.

Ardan could already hear the Colonel’s annoyed voice in his head.

“We’ll blow up the First Station,” he answered.

“What do you mean?” Rogov asked.

“Blow up... the whole city?” Melin asked, cradling his bandaged stump. “All of it?”

“Yes,” was all Ard said.

A strange, almost feverish silence settled over the ruins.