Book II. Chapter 144. Ashfall

Ardi watched as people dragged bodies through streets awash in blood. They loaded the dead onto carts that had been brought in and hitched to horses. The steppe horses snorted again and again, tossed their heads in irritation, and kept trying to break into a gallop. Their owners tried to calm them, but again and again the horses turned north and peered into the darkness hiding beyond the city.

The Ley Flower had already vanished, leaving behind the black velvet of the sky, slashed by a bright band of stars. Far off in the darkness, the constellations hung motionless, casting incurious glances at the bustle of the mortal world.

“Easy, easy,” the old cowboy coaxed a bay horse every bit as old as he was, but the horse only went on snorting irritably.

The younger, stronger people hauled the bodies up makeshift ramps made from plain wooden planks and onto the carts. Now and then a body slipped free and fell into the scarlet dust, drawing moans and screams from the dead person’s loved ones.

Above the city, weeping and wailing curled together with acrid gray smoke, at times black and choking. Women clutched at the men’s clothes as if hoping that if they held on, if they kept the men there beside them and stopped them from being lifted onto the carts, something might change. Maybe the one they loved would open his eyes again, rasp something like, “Darling… I’m all right…” and the world would return to the way it had been.

Children awkwardly clasped the fingers of the dead. Sometimes they merely touched their skin. Some cried. Some didn’t. But their gazes were all the same. Empty and wandering. No longer childlike, but not yet remotely adult. Simply broken.

Ardi had seen something like this before. Two years ago, when the Shanti’Ra attacked a caravan of settlers from the north. And now Ardan himself had ended up here. In the north. Once again surrounded by weeping and grief.

"I will not ask what end you found

along your road through hostile ground…"

“See you in hell, Mr. Zalessky,” Ardan whispered, patting the dead leader of the expedition’s hunters on the chest. Only four members of the expedition remained now.

Zalessky, with his misshapen body and glass eye, lay on the planks as thick, dark blood dripped off them and onto the ground. They had found him with Bors and Rita, beside Husk and Brick. Zalessky had been shot in the stomach and twice in the chest. The fatal wound came from a knife driven straight into his navel.

But Zalessky hadn’t gone without a fight. Three men had to strain to pry open his hands, which were locked around Brick’s enormous neck, nearly as thick as a bull’s. They lay there together amid the wreckage of some barrels and pieces of railing from the nearest building, a shop that sold cowboy hats.

Bors lay on his back, marked by a dozen deep knife cuts. He gazed at the sky with a very strange, almost dreamy smile. In his final moments, with the Eternal Angels waiting, he had used the last of his strength to reach Rita. He had reached for her, his fingers furrowing the earth, trying to touch his… what?

After all, Ardi had never figured out what Bors and Rita were to each other. They were always bickering, each one cruel to the other in a different way, and yet there was so much warmth between them.

“…And if the answer is positive, that means you’re a… positive person too.”

“A positive person…”

“Just don’t confuse a positive person with a good one…”

“Is there a difference?”

“A huge one! Calling someone good is tricky. It depends on who you ask. What’s good for one person is bad for another. Anyway, it’s just a label.”

Case by case, month by month in the Black House, the words Katerina had spoken to him in that ridiculous dining car on the way to the Metropolis made more and more sense to Ardan. Could Zalessky be called a good person? Bors? Rita? Magister Tikhonov? Senior Magister Nalensky?

Ardan didn’t know the answer to that question. He doubted even the sages of the City on the Hill could answer it. He doubted a question like that had any answer at all.

No answer.

No answer. Only silence.

Silence, and the bodies heaped onto a cart: mangled, covered not in some “immortal glory,” as his great-grandfather’s stories would have it, but in blood.

The cowboy jumped up onto the driver’s seat. “Said your goodbyes?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ardan said. He stepped back.

The cowboy nodded and sent a gentle ripple down the reins. The cart started forward.

The bodies were carried off toward the nearly completed funeral pyres, built from the city’s wreckage. Perhaps someone would have seen something poetic in it. The city lay half in ruins. People had moved here in search of a better life and had even managed to build something, to create something. Now, amid the shattered remnants of those dreams and aspirations, they were burning the bodies of people who had nevertheless dared to take up arms.

Whether it was too late or not, whether they’d done it merely to take advantage of the situation or had truly mustered the courage, no one would ever know. For one simple reason: to know, you’d have to stand where they stood and feel what they felt. You would have to stand beside a shattered window, with your family and loved ones at your back and the unknown before you: rifles and shotguns thundering, cutthroats shouting in anger.

Ardan watched in silence as the hunters’ bodies drew farther away. Maybe it was a good thing they rarely established cemeteries on the northern steppes. Here, tradition held that the first “house of the dead” was established only after a settlement had stood for a century (apparently, First Station would not survive as a city into its seventh decade). All for the same reason as always. With so few settlers, there would simply be no one to visit the graves, so they kept to the old Galessian tradition instead. They burned the bodies, believing the wind would carry the ashes back to their homelands.

“Ard,” Rogov called softly.

Ardan turned and looked Captain Alton Rogov over. The captain was exhausted, wounded, and bandaged, but still steady on his feet.

“How’s Mr Melin?” Ardi asked.

Rogov shrugged.

“I didn’t have the strength to do anything, so we missed our chance,” the captain replied quite calmly. “Ley immunity has already taken hold. Unmir will have to learn to live with a prosthetic. But that, Mr Egobar, is the lot of war mages. Every last one of us is racing against time. Some are lucky enough to retire before they leave a couple of kilos of themselves behind in the line of duty; some aren’t.”

Rogov snorted at his own rather callous, all-too-true joke. Lord Aversky, may the Eternal Angels receive him, and Major Mshisty were striking examples of that. If even Grand Magisters often sported prosthetics...

Ardan shook his head.

“What about Mrs Ostrozhskaya?”

“We didn’t find her,” Rogov said, his tone a little heavier now. “Nor did we find anyone matching your description of a man named Onton. But something tells me, Mr Cloak, that you never held out much hope we’d succeed in the first place.”

Ardi didn’t answer the question. He merely turned to the north once more and gazed at the distant treetops of the ancient forest. A remnant of the age Magister Tikhonov dreamed of.

He touched the broken watch face.

People... why were they always so complicated?

As for Ostrozhskaya, the Puppeteers never moved the pieces on the board of their twisted game unless they saw that a move would serve several purposes at once. And even if Ard’s plan succeeded and the onslaught of the beast herds could be stopped, Senior Magister Varvara Ostrozhskaya could no longer be brought back. Nor was there any way to learn why the Puppeteers had needed her. Had she served them from the beginning? Or had they taken her captive? Or perhaps they had simply offered her, as they had Professor Leah Morimer, the chance to continue her research, free of the inconvenient shackles of morality and the law?

So had Ard lost this latest clash with the conspirators? Probably not. Had he won? As always, no.

“How much time do we have, Ard?” Rogov had realized he would get no answer to his previous question, so he moved on to the next.

Ardan started to raise his wrist to check the government-issued watch he’d taken for the assignment in place of his father’s, then immediately drew his hand back and covered the watch with his sleeve.

“Until dawn, perhaps a little longer,” he said, judging the time by the moon’s position.

“Then we’re in trouble.”

“Not enough wiring survived?” Ardan turned to Rogov at once. “Or has something happened to the Town Hall’s generators?”

The last generation section that would work for their plan was in the Town Hall. And if anything had happened to it, then... they wouldn’t even have a chance to escape. The horses could never outrun the enraged anomalous predators once they decided that outsiders were threatening their mates and unborn young. The Hunters would defend their trails, sparing no one in the process, not even themselves.

Those are the laws of the forest. They may be merciless, may be far removed from human notions of morality, but they remain absolute.

“You know,” Rogov said, smiling to reveal several broken teeth, “Mr Cloak, there was something I could never quite make sense of. Taisia told us beforehand how many rays you had in your Stars. A full senior triad, with a nine in the Blue: that’s a monstrous number of rays, Ard. Simply unimaginable. In the entire country, out of twelve thousand Blue mages, there probably aren’t even seven dozen with nine rays in the Blue. And I could never understand why you don’t strike me as a war mage at all. Yes, you’re fairly good at military tactics, and you know a wide range of manifestation techniques, but...” Rogov snapped his fingers a few times, searching for the right words. “You lack something, Ard. Something very important for a war mage. So it all seemed like some kind of nonsense to me. But now I understand: this is probably the first time I’ve ever seen an engineer with more rays than some Healers.”

“Captain, you...”

“Sorry, Ard.” Rogov sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Just tired. I wanted to make a joke about how only an engineer would think to ask about the generators and the wiring before anything else. But I took so long setting it up that I forgot the joke.”

Ardan frowned.

“Then what’s the problem?”

Rogov laughed. The sound rang out, though it held a trace of bitterness.

“People, Ard. People,” he replied. He came over and clapped Ard on the shoulder. “Come along, Mr Cloak. I’ll show you.”

And they walked on. Past houses crumbling before their eyes, their walls streaked with scarlet. Past an endless succession of carts bearing bodies, with weeping people walking beside them. The mourners were growing fewer and fewer, though. As each cart rolled on, the living were pulled back into the daily grind, where one problem piled on top of the next.

Ardi stole a furtive glance south, as if he could hide it even from himself. There, bathed in starlight, the Alcade of his childhood rose at the very edge of the horizon, a silver band of shimmering lights. A small plateau on the hillside, thick with grass and woods. At times, a swift stream spilling over its banks and swelling into a river; at others, a barely visible trickle of water gently winding around the sagging planks where his mother washed clothes.

Their home. As big as it was old.

And there, beyond the stream, several graves. It had been two years since Ardan had visited his father. Just as long since he had visited his great-grandfather.

And now...

Ardi wondered: if he failed, if the plan didn’t work, would anything be left of him after the beasts’ invasion, anything that could be burned? And if there was, then... where exactly would the wind carry his ashes? To the snow-covered peaks of the mountains he had come from, or to the apartment on the Markov Canal that was just as much home, where the air smelled of spring flowers blooming beside the stream?

“I miss them... so much... all of them...”

To his surprise, Ardi realized that Magister Tikhonov’s words had touched something raw in his heart.

A vision of fiery hair and emerald eyes flashed through his mind.

Ardan stopped and leaned against the nearest post. For one brief moment, he felt the same wave he had felt a year and a half earlier, when the realization that he might not make it in time came crashing down on him. That because of him and his decisions, the people he loved might suffer. Now, all at once, he understood all too clearly that any journey could prove his last, this one or any other. Just as any dance they shared might be their last, any teasing conversation, any moment when they simply sat side by side in silence and quietly basked in each other’s company.

He might never see her again. Never hold her close again. Never again breathe in the scent of her hair, lose himself in the familiar warmth of her eyes, or sit in the small kitchen at a table covered with a much-mended tablecloth, watching her twirl in a dress and perform her new songs with a mop for a microphone stand.

“Ard?” Rogov’s voice brought him back to reality. “Everything all right?”

Ardan rubbed a hand over his chest and gave a measured nod. Ergar had taught him there was no shame in fearing death; the feeling, though stronger than all the others, was still, at heart, only fear. So there was no shame in being afraid. The shame lay in yielding to the icy fingers that followed you relentlessly, always trying to force you back and make you flee.

“My head started spinning,” he answered, drawing on the art of Skusty.

The chapter was copied from the author's NovelPhoenix publication without approval; reading the genuine posting supports their work.

At last they reached the main square. Dozens of people, if not hundreds, had gathered there near the still-smoking wreckage of the former hotel, where bright, almost cheerful flames still flickered here and there.

They shouted. Shook their fists. Some even waved revolvers.

“Why should we leave?!”

“This is ridiculous!”

“Go fuck yourself, Governor, you piece of shit! I’ve got my shop to fix! My whole stock is gone! What the fuck do you mean, evacuation?!”

“And where are we even supposed to run to?! Look around! Nothing but steppe for kilometers in every direction!”

“There aren’t enough wheels or hooves to get all of us to Yellik! Are we supposed to slog across the steppe on foot during the rut?! If the other bandits don’t get us, the beasts will tear us apart!”

The crowd thundered, brandishing torches and oil lamps and screaming themselves hoarse without letup.

“There’s our problem,” Rogov breathed.

“Please, everyone!” The town’s de jure administrator had clambered onto a cart and was waving his arms.

He was a typical, utterly unremarkable bureaucrat in a suit faded from too many trips through the wash and dress shoes that somehow looked downright absurd in such surroundings.

And it was “de jure” because Senior Magister Zvonkov had in fact run First Station and dealt with its troubles while he was alive. To begin with, it was not a city at all; on paper, it was still listed as a temporary settlement under the patronage of the Hunters’ Guild.

“Everyone!” The official bent down, took the tin megaphone held out to him, and raised it to his mouth. “Predatory Anomalies are closing in from the Park! It’s not safe to stay in the city!”

“What nonsense!”

“We’ll drive them off with guns! Beasts aren’t bandits! They won’t return fire!”

“Yeah! We’ve got enough ammunition!”

“Our whole lives are here, Governor! Where are we supposed to go?! What about our homes? Our belongings?! Are you out of your mind?!”

The official’s warning did nothing to sway the crowd. They fought the very idea of leaving the place they had made their home and setting out with no idea where they were going or what they could take with them. Clearly, that last question remained the greatest problem. They would have to leave behind all their hard-earned possessions, take only the bare minimum with them, and start their lives over somewhere new. Few of them wanted that, and fewer still had the strength for it.

Ardi understood that, too, thanks to the time he’d spent in the settlers’ caravan.

“They’ll sooner run Garinov through with their pitchforks than leave the Station,” Rogov summed up.

“Garinov?” Ardan repeated.

Rather than answer, the captain nodded toward the official, who still stood on the cart, bellowing into the megaphone:

“This is a direct order from the Second Chancery, everyone! You must leave the city! As quickly as possible! Take everything of value and…”

The crowd answered with a fresh roar of protest.

“What do you mean, leave the city?! We haven’t even said goodbye to the dead!”

“We don’t give a shit about the Black House!”

“Yeah! The Cloaks are far away! In the Metropolis!”

“If the Crown wants our homes, then it can pay us for them!”

“I’ve got little kids! Where do you expect me to go with them? Out into the steppe?! To Yellik?! That’s suicide!”

Grim-faced, Rogov ran a hand over his forehead.

“People are on edge,” he said bleakly. “They simply won’t let us do what you’re suggesting with the wiring, Ard. Either they’ll gun us down, shoot one another, or—”

The captain trailed off and merely shrugged. No one needed him to say more. The rest was obvious. Ardan studied the faces of the Station’s residents and listened to their words, and, more than that, to their hearts. He breathed in the smell of their fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of what had just happened. Fear for themselves, for their loved ones, and, really, for everything. The city was saturated with the acrid, sharp, clinging smell of other people’s emotions.

“Ard, where are you going?!” Rogov shouted.

Ardan made his way through the crowd. Now and then, someone didn’t see him coming, but a sharper-eyed neighbor quickly tugged them out of his way. Before long, Ardi reached the cart. He clambered onto it with some difficulty and swept his gaze over the hushed townspeople.

People at First Station saw mages in the flesh far more often than most elsewhere in the Empire. Even in the capital and the largest cities, mages appeared far less often than they did here. Even so, to an ordinary person, the Star community still seemed like something out of a fairy tale. That made it all the more mysterious and therefore dangerous.

“You won’t be able to shoot your way out. You won’t be able to dig in. You won’t be able to do a single thing to keep the Hunters away.” Ardan wasn’t even shouting; the square had grown quiet enough for everyone to hear his words. “They’ll come here and tear every one of you apart. They’ll tear into the men and gnaw out their guts. They’ll trample the women and old people into a bloody pulp. And they’ll feed your children to their own young simply because your children’s meat is softer and their bones more brittle.”

“Hey . . . mage . . . don’t scare us . . .”

“Yeah . . . how do you know that’s how it’ll go? Maybe the beasts will pass us by.”

A few hesitant voices came from the crowd, but everyone else remained silent.

How did Ardan know everything would unfold exactly that way? Because that was exactly what Ergar and Shali had taught him. Never pity another pack of hunters. Turn your back on them, show them mercy, and next season you’ll have to fight them all over again. Beasts know nothing of morality or of the fine distinctions reason makes possible. Hunger and flesh alone govern them. Hunting, mating, rest. Nothing else. Sometimes they played, too, but even play served one of those three instincts.

Ard’s father’s people lived exactly the same way. Hector’s people. If the matabar came here from Alcade, not a trace of First Station would remain. Nor of its people.

Because that is the Law of the Hunt.

Tear them all apart before they tear you apart.

Ardan let the lessons of the hunt echo through him, then blew on the finial of his staff. Snow-white fog shot out over the crowd’s heads, and they gasped. It became an enormous snow leopard, ripping a grown man apart with one paw and biting clear through a screaming woman.

Then the form changed into a colossal bear and brought its full weight crashing down on a wooden house, suddenly tiny beneath it.

And after that... after that, the image of one predatory Anomaly gave way to another. Each was a deadly beast that weighed several tons: plated in armor, shaggy with dense fur, knotted with muscle, or even sheathed in scales. They smashed everything their fangs and claws could reach. And they could reach almost anything.

“Enough...” Garinov whispered. “Please, mage, that’s enough.”

Ardan released the Shard and dispelled the vision. Sleeping Spirits, he was so exhausted it took everything he had just to keep from sliding off the cart. He still hadn’t had time to get any of his strength back.

“Pack your things,” Ard said curtly. “Take whatever you value most. When you’re ready, gather on the southern outskirts. Because no matter what happens, nothing will be left of the city by dawn. And you alone can choose whether you die with it or not.”

In the deathly silence, Ardan hopped carefully down from the cart. He barely managed to stay on his feet, then headed toward the town hall. He had little time left to try anything that might...

The broken watch seared Ardi’s wrist.

***

Ardan sat on the floor of the empty town hall. As far as the stone floor was concerned, Ardan was a stranger from a distant city. It kept trying to bite him, but each time it met a barrier both gentle and strong: a Shard of the Name of the Ice and Snow that lived in his heart.

A small fragment of steel plate gave a soft squeak as Ardi used it to trace the lines of seals on other identical plates, working as carefully as he could to avoid cutting himself. Beside him lay fragments of the Ley-generators from the hotel and the Hunters’ Guild building, waiting their turn.

There was no one else in the town hall. Just Ardi and his staff, with the emptiness broken only by the occasional rustle of scorched paper whenever another gust of night wind burst in through the window. It ruffled his hair and seemed to call him away. Not even out to run and play through the steppe grass, with summer so close. Simply away.

The wind carried stories with it. A scourge was bearing down from the north, one that people no longer even remembered. The Firstborn had fought the Anomalies long before the first people set out from eastern lands and wandered west, clad in animal skins and carrying stones tied to sticks. Those ancient ages had vanished from human memory, the ages when the Firstborn and magical beasts fought for the right to exist beneath the eye of the Spirit of Day.

As people gradually encased the world in steel and covered it with asphalt, building cities with skyscrapers, Anomalies became so rare that a person was far more likely to be struck by lightning than to encounter a living magical beast. And yet…

Ardi felt the stiffness in his fingers and set the plate aside. He set his palm on the floor and bent his fingers slightly at the knuckles, listening to the joints crack. He’d never known fingers could stiffen up at all, but over the past six months he had discovered all kinds of strange new sensations.

Ardan rubbed his neck. Oh, Sleeping Spirits, it was stiff too. Not to mention that his thighs had nearly turned to stone. It was hard to imagine how scholars of Star Magic endured spending ten hours at a time at their desks.

Ardan studied the scorched walls of the lone stone building. Even after the bodies had been cleared away, traces of blood and gunpowder remained on the floor. His thoughts did not linger on the town hall or on the future it would never see: first rebuilt as a massive building, then perhaps as a small palace, and finally as a tower that scraped the sky.

They did not even linger on whether his homemade device, assembled quite literally in his lap, would work at all.

Instead, he wondered whether he ought to pay more attention to Professor Kovertsky’s field. Not all of alchemy, of course. Just its practical applications. If he combined that with what he knew of Aean’Hane brews, perhaps Ard could create a Ley remedy that could ease the terrible ache and tightness in his muscles.

With a small grunt, Ardan stretched his legs out in front of him, spread his arms, and sprawled on the floor. His limbs tingled, and his eyelids kept sinking closed. He’d never imagined a person could be this tired. That made him respect Tess, Milar, Elena, Boris, and everyone from John Brolid’s Arena even more.

“How’s it coming, Ard?” Mr. Rogov’s tone was as controlled and sly as ever.

“Little by little,” Ardan answered honestly, pulling himself halfway upright and pointing at the homemade blanks.

Rogov walked over to one of them, a box pieced together from generator wreckage. Instead of welding the seams, Ardi had sealed them with a simple pig-fat glue and lashed the whole thing with rope to keep it from coming apart. Ardi had improvised Ley-cable connectors from Ley-lamp bases. A circle drawn on paper and a needle had replaced the single sensor; to provide resistance, Ardan had connected chips from household accumulators to the needle through a few simple seals.

Fortunately, no one paid any attention to the storeroom in the town hall’s generation section, and it turned out to hold enough supplies.

“You actually built several engineering boxes out of junk, Ard?” Rogov examined the finished boxes with undisguised astonishment. “What did you make the plates from… Wait… are you making them out of… leaf springs?”

“Yeah.” That was all Ardan said. “There’s nothing else to make them from. The generator wreckage is needed for the blanks themselves, since the metal used to make the housings and all the parts has to contain Ertalain. But the plates with the seals… we don’t need them to stay operational. All they need to do is take a Ley-charge, process it, and pass it on. A couple dozen times. Even ordinary metal is enough for that.”

Rogov whistled and stepped back a few paces.

“You know, Ard, when Taisia told me about you, I flatly refused to believe what I was hearing.” Rogov shook his head. “A nineteen-year-old Black House Investigator. A second-year at the Grand, with several seals sold and a patent to his name. A pharmacy in the Firstborn quarter. And just shy of three Stars. I won’t even mention that you…” Rogov glanced at Ard’s right hand, at the bare ring finger. “But never mind. Either way, I thought Taisia was exaggerating, or I’d wandered into some wild tabloid story, maybe a cheap little pulp novel from a grimy kiosk.”

Ardan stayed silent. He had no idea how to respond. It probably wasn’t even a question but a full-blown monologue. How could he explain to anyone that staying alive meant constant, painstaking work? Every bit of it was meant to keep life from killing him outright or landing him in one grim consequence after another the moment he stopped moving.

At times, Ardi pictured himself as a little forest creature stuck in a bog, fighting desperately to keep the mire from swallowing him. In the vision, he floundered; more and more twigs and reeds caught in his fur, and now and then clumps of mud stuck to him. Somehow, he was still breathing.

There was one difference: unlike that trapped creature, Ard could sometimes, by will alone, draw something out of the Sleeping Spirits’ slumber.

The scent of spring flowers. Ink on paper taking the form of blueprints, and cheerful shouts in a bar on the Markov Canal. It was amazing how little a person needed for a happy life, even one who was half matabar.

“But what kind of design is this, Ard?” Rogov turned the plate this way and that in his hands, the seal inscribed on it crude but reliable. “I may not know much about engineering, but I’ve been practicing Star Magic for almost as long as you’ve been alive, and I still can’t make sense of it. Some kind of recursion. Something about constantly retransmitting free parameters, looping them through… some sort of functions? I can’t make heads or tails of it. Are you sure it’ll work? Even the way the seal is laid out is… strange somehow. Not intuitive at all. Honestly, it looks more like a jumble of nonsense.”

Ardan studied the assembly with a critical eye.

“It should,” he answered.

“It should,” Rogov echoed as he lowered the plate back into the homemade blank. “Even so, Ard, what is it?”

The government-issue watch scorched Ardan’s wrist again, its minute and second hands showing the coordinates of the presumed habitat of the Winged-Horned. In less than two weeks, he was certain, the brightest minds in the Empire—those the Crown had gathered to investigate Ard’s hypothesis that the practical barriers to Methods of Long-Range Communication could be overcome—would see the by-product of his research.

The same flash as in the Stables, when disturbances in the Paarlax Field had looped endlessly back on themselves. That same cascade effect of colliding waves, the one the late Grand Magister Uynov had warned of. Ard already understood how, in theory, he might use transmutational runic links and Multidimensional Seals to bend an effect like that in the Paarlax Field to his will.

Would the researchers understand? Grand Magister Emergold might not be the only one of them past two hundred. Surely they would. At the very least, they would grasp the simple fact that a force so destructive could be harnessed. Yes, they would need the keys to unlock the mystery, and perhaps they wouldn’t be able to split their efforts between developing Long-Range Communication and building... a Ley-bomb? But sooner or later, the secret would get out.

Atta’nha had always taught that no knowledge could remain locked away for too long. Perhaps she’d meant secrets and that sort of thing. Ardi had never understood what she meant back then, but...

Perhaps, though, he did understand Magister Tikhonov. Sometimes, certain knowledge was better left untouched.

“Did you run the Ley-cables the way I asked?”

Rogov glanced sidelong at Ard, as though he still expected an answer, but Ardan said nothing.

“Yes, Ard. We ran the cables in as wide a circle as possible and marked the points you indicated for the engineering boxes.” Rogov nodded.

“What about the townspeople?”

The captain looked at his watch.

“Every last one of them should’ve left their homes fifteen minutes ago.”

“The cowboys—”

“They’re going from building to building, checking whether any idiots decided to stay,” Rogov answered before Ard could finish. “And those fifteen minutes are exactly what I mean. You’ve been sitting here for going on five hours.”

Ardan glanced at his wrist again. The work was routine, but it was also a deeply soothing part of the craft he loved. With the watch no longer telling time, he had almost no way to keep track of the hours. He might have judged the time by the moonlight outside the window, but Ardi rarely turned to look.

“Then wait a couple of minutes, Captain,” Ardi said, picking up the plate and his makeshift stylus again. “I’ll finish this, and then we’ll go hook everything up.”

“And it won’t blow up in our hands?” Rogov asked, his eyes still narrowed.

“It shouldn’t.”

“It shouldn’t,” the captain echoed, and the words seemed to settle into the town hall itself. Unlike the little creature, the building waited meekly for its appointed moment to sink to the bottom.

***

“How’s your leg, Taisia?” Ardan asked, watching Miss Shpritz where she sat on the hill. She kept trying to pull her camera, which had miraculously survived, from her bag, only to meet Ardi’s disapproving stare each time. “And your arm, too.”

He’d already warned Taisia not even to think about photographing anything. Yes, people would start talking about what they’d seen anyway. But a few muddled accounts from witnesses who knew nothing of Star craft were one thing; a photograph was something else entirely.

“That’s what you’re worried about right now, Ard?” Miss Shpritz said through clenched teeth, cradling her bandaged arm in its sling. “What makes you think this scheme of yours has any chance at all of succeeding? Because, let me remind you, if it doesn’t work, then in just a few hours we’ll be trampled at best. And eaten at worst. For the record, Ard, I’ve been nibbled on more than once—but not like that! And only in places where I like it!”

Ardan smiled. He’d already realized that Miss Shpritz hid her inner turmoil behind deliberately filthy remarks. If she’d returned to her old way of talking, that meant her strength was returning as well.

“Just look over there, Ard!” she exclaimed, gesturing north with an open hand. “Like a flood, only... made of dust.”

Out on the steppe, a vast cloud of dust was rising into the sky, stretching for many kilometers. The Hunters and the herds they drove, all maddened by terror, were approaching the First Station.

“And the third rule: never hunt those who are stronger than you.”

“If the structure holds, then yes.” Ardan nodded. “Hunters won’t attack those stronger than themselves unless they’re driven into a corner. So when they sense danger, the predators will turn back to the Park to defend their trails and dens. The herds will do the same: once they sense danger ahead and realize nothing is driving them from behind anymore, they’ll hurry back home. Unfamiliar lands scare them just as much as strange fangs.”

“If it doesn’t let us down,” Miss Shpritz snorted, sounding oddly like Rogov. “Then why are you hesitating, Ard?”

Thousands of people stood behind Ardan, laden with bundles. They had gathered everything they could load onto the coaches and carts or carry on their own backs. Ahead, in the middle of the bare steppe, an entire city awaited its fate.

His hands gripped the staff. Ard didn’t have an extra three kilometers of Ley-cable to run from the system to a remote toggle switch. That meant he would have to close the circuit in a rather unconventional way.

“Oh, Eternal Angels, Ard! What are you waiting for? They’re nearly at the city already!” Taisia cried.

“I never did tell them...”

Ardan wouldn’t tell them, either. No matter what Atta’nha said, he would keep this secret for as long as he could. Let it become yet another twig tangled in his fur.

Ardan gripped the staff in both hands and braced it against the ground. He closed his eyes and listened closely to the distant rumble rolling in from the horizon. He soared up toward the heavy, dark clouds, so wise in their ponderous stillness. He wrapped himself in the Sparks wandering among them and breathed in air steeped at once in flame and ice.

“Listen, listen, distant sky, and hear tales of your cousin,” Ardan whispered in words no human tongue could form.

A deafening peal of thunder rang out, breaking the laws of the universe. Then a snow-white bolt of lightning shot down from the heavens straight into First Station Town Hall. Inside the bolt, a four-winged mountain eagle plunged swiftly after its prey, wings folded.

And then... and then the world sank into the heart of a rainbow flower bud as it burst into bloom. Its petals covered the entire city, which vanished in an instant amid a conflagration of Ley.

The government-issued watch seared Ard’s wrist one last time.