Sadly, the same could be said of any competitor in this run.
Speed didn’t matter here. Commander Sivari had said this time and again—but it was impossible to believe it when the starting line moved so abruptly, surging into the streets as if the finish line were already well within sight. His competition knew what he knew: you surged ahead, found your place near the front—but not necessarily at it—and paced yourself until the end.
The end was hours off, half a day.
The sky was clear. Bad, that; the sun would make itself felt as the day progressed, and not a few of the hundred would collapse along the route in the holdings. He only prayed—to Kalliaris, and this caught him almost by surprise—that he wasn’t one of that handful. Too much at stake. Too much to lose.
The streets opened up; he caught sight of the man ahead of him and pulled forward along the stretch of cobbled stone, his lips turning up in a smile of recognition. The runner spared a backward glance—obviously not one of Sivari’s trainees—and returned the smile. He even moved over a bit to give Valedan some room.
Eneric of Darbanne was shorter of leg than Valedan, but not by much; he was also, of the two, sun-darkened, his skin was near brown and his hair almost white. They didn’t waste breath with speech, although Valedan spoke Eneric’s name in greeting, and Eneric lifted a hand, the motion rippling his stride slightly.
Valedan kai di’Leonne had grown up in the North. The Empire had sheltered him. He had been taught that it spanned the length of the coast from the edge of Averda to the frozen Northern wastes, that it stretched in breadth from the isle of Averalaan Aramarelas to the amorphous and little-understood buffer that the free towns formed. That, with political will and strength, it could grow to encompass the little cluster of Western Kingdoms.
Everything about the Empire was big.
But knowing it—and he had learned from the tutors appointed by Mirialyn ACormaris—was a distant experience to this: the hundred run, as the citizens of the Averalaan called it.
Riding through the streets from the West Gate to the isle had not given him the intimate sense of the city’s spread, although in many ways that ride and this run would mirror the same route. There, he was mounted, he was part of a pageantry of sight and sound, of banner, of heraldry and display. Here, he was on foot, and the height of buildings, the nearness of the men against whom he had competed shorn of anything but simple, light cloth, made the task enormous.
The city of Averalaan became, for the moment, the Empire: larger than life, larger than a single glimpse, or a hundred glimpses, could contain. There, along the barriers, the rich and the poor alike pressed against wall and road, seeking a glimpse of the contestants. Skin, dark and light, smooth and wrinkled, hidden and exposed, melted into a distinct pageantry of color and life that was the Empire.
He took energy from it, somehow. He, the Southerner, running at the side of the Northern giant, running behind a man he vaguely recognized as a young free towner. He forgot that there was anything but this: the run itself. He found his stride. He kept it.
The two swords thundered like summer storm where they met, and a single fork of lightning, edged in red, shot up from the ground. They were driven back, mage and demon—Meralonne into the open street, and the Kialli into the building which had shadowed the merchant’s stall.
The merchant himself was gone, his guards scattered as if they were commoners with no means of protection, no training to prevent them from fleeing in blind panic. The magisterial guards scattered as well, but deliberately, drawing and hefting their flat, lifeless swords as they took up distant positions at the magi’s back. As if the circle had been drawn, and they did not—not yet—dare to interfere in the battle.
All of this, he saw in a glance; he had that time; the Kialli lord had, after all, disappeared through the wall at his back.
He did not choose, however, to reemerge from that hole.
Magic, when it came, came down in a rain from above.
Two of the magisterial guards caught fire, their voices raised in twin screams of pain.
That would be Allaros, Meralonne thought. He bit back the urge to curse and lifted a hand in response—but not more than that; the fires guttered before the spell—and the power, desperately needed for the fight, for he had no shield—came into focus.
It was not his way to thank gods; he did not thank them now.
But he rose upon the currents of the heavy air, forcing it into a breeze, shaping it to his will. The Kialli, it was said, favored fire, and in most cases, that was true.
Fire and air were often cunning allies, poor enemies.
But he had air, and it howled as he rose, wrapping himself in its splendor.
Jewel ATerafin swore.
She swore loudly and rudely in a box exactly four feet from the Kings’ box, into a silence that had fallen as the last of the runners disappeared from her view.
The Kings did not deign to notice. Of course not. But two men did: the Lord of the Compact and her companion, Devon ATerafin. He caught her arm—the arm that faced away from the Crowns—in a grip that was a bit too tight to be friendly. “Jewel?” he said, accenting the first syllable, the question multilayered.
She pointed skyward, into the distance that had swallowed the runners, a distance littered with treetops and buildings. “You’ll see it soon enough for yourself,” she said, pulled her arm free. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”
“Jewel—”
Lightning, in a clear sky, tinged red and blue as it streaked into emptiness from the ground.
Devon ATerafin, curse him, didn’t swear. Oh, well. That was what breeding did for you—put you at a loss for words.
He didn’t argue either.
They appeared from out of the crowds as she hit the ground and signaled, Angel—out from under the watchful eye of Alowan, and probably unwisely—and Carver. These were her den-mates of choice in a fight like this: they knew the value of running, they weren’t stupid when they chose to be brave, and they followed her orders. Not Devon’s, not The Terafin’s for all that Carver had chosen to take the House name, but hers. She didn’t need the stress of worrying about the politics of giving a command at a time like this.
Devon raised a brow as they fell in behind Jewel like shadows cast by twin lamps. Her lips compressed in a thin line but she said nothing.
“We can’t outrun the runners,” Carver said.
“We’re not following their route,” Jewel replied. “They aren’t exactly going in a straight line.” Thank Kalliaris for small mercies.
Angel whacked Carver in the shoulder. “He knew that,” he said. “He was just trying to look stupid.”
“Tell him to try something that’ll actually take effort.”
They were in high spirits. They shouldn’t have been. She should’ve stepped on them. But there was a freedom here, on these packed and crowded streets, that they didn’t have in Terafin. And in the end, the danger didn’t seem any less; they risked their lives. But it was to a known enemy, not the act of a treacherous hand in their own midst; it was to darkness—and they’d fought that before, they’d fight it again—not people who all converged on the nexus of power that was Terafin. Clean fights were always the best fights, but you got them so rarely.
“Over there!”
Devon’s voice. She looked—they all did—in the direction he pointed.
Fire tufts decorated the air in an aurora of angry color; the winds at the tops of buildings were obviously a lot stronger than the tepid breeze they could garner at ground level.
That meant something to Devon. He relaxed—although exactly what difference that made she would have been hard-pressed to say.
“What?”
“Meralonne,” he said. “Meralonne APhaniel.”
The moment he said the name, she knew he wa
s right. “One of these days, you’ll have to tell me how you knew that.”
“One of these days.” He picked up speed, and then slowed again. “ATerafin,” he said at last, “I believe you’ve got a better idea of where we’re going than I do.”
She nodded. Took the lead. Was happy to take it. The sun was hot, the air was still, and the fire that burned in the distance had nothing to do with the weather. But she knew where it burned—or close enough—and she began to circle the city that had once been her home like a bird of prey might circle the air above its intended kill.
Only one thing broke that mood, but as often happened, when it was broken it was shattered.
As she crossed the brewer’s road, as she stepped through the cart-empty streets—and cart-empty streets at this time of year were a blessing that only occurred during the hundred run itself—she heard it: screaming.
She cursed herself, because she remembered then that no fight is clean.
They knew it, too. Angel and Carver came to rest on either side of her, daggers drawn, faces and sudden silence completely somber.
“Split up,” she said.
“Signal?”
She nodded; whistled something short and sharp.
Angel whistled back; three tones, quick succession. She shook her head; changed the middle tone to something that her lips could get around. They melted into shadows, right and left; went their own way.
“Next corner,” she said to Devon.
He stared at her a long time; she pulled her hair up under his scrutiny, twisted it into a knot, and pinned it back almost in a single motion. Then she drew her weapon as well.
“Fancy dagger,” he said.
“Probably not much different than what you’re carrying.”
“Me? I’ve decided to try something slightly different.” He shrugged his shoulder, and the straps that crossed his chest grew slack. From over his back he pulled something heavy and almost clumsy. Crossbow.
“Is that why you’re wearing that stupid cape in this weather?”
“No.” His smile was brief, lean, a thing that glimmered around the corner of his mouth and was gone. “See you there.”
Beneath his feet the people were like the cobbled stones; so much a part of the landscape they could be forgotten. The air was more important, and to step on it, to be granted firmament in its eddies, was a giddiness and a joy of its own. If the element reproached him at all, it would wait until after the battle.
They were alike, in that: death first.
But so, too, was his enemy.
The fire fell, and where it fell, it burned; the screams of its victims bore witness to that. He had not the time—and barely the inclination, to stop it; there was Allaros, there was himself, either caught in their chosen battlefield.
But he was aware that the fires were guttered; aware of the use of magic below him. The power was noteworthy enough to draw his attention from blade and wind.
Sigurne.
Unfortunately, she was noteworthy enough to draw his enemy’s attention from blade and fire as well.
“You choose human allies, Illaraphaniel? How pathetic.” He lifted a smooth, obsidian hand. Fire fell from it casually, like an afterthought or a statement of careless fashion.
And just as carelessly, wind buffeted it, pared it to nothing. “You have been away a long time,” Meralonne said, lifting his sword. “Your command of the element is . . . almost theoretical. And we’re taught that fire is the element of the Hells.”
Allaros darkened; anger twisted his features. “You say that,” he said, “who stand before me shieldless?”
Meralonne shrugged. “I do not face a Kialli Lord. I need no shield.”
Sword struck sword in an instant; attack and defense, although who struck first and who parried, it would have been hard to say.
She hadn’t known they’d be fighting in air, and she took the lack of foreknowledge personally; she was probably the only person in the Empire who could. Of her den, only Finch and Teller had less experience with a sword than she did, but they were all equal in the ranged weapons department: None, if you didn’t count daggers. At this distance, she didn’t.
The problem with mages and demons—well, one of the problems—was that they didn’t need a weapon to be able to attack in safety at a distance. The air was a perfect place to be for a short and bloody fight.
A longer fight on a day like this, and, well, the mages that informed the adjudicatory body would be all over the site like locusts to harvest in a bad season. But it would take them more time than it would take either Jewel or her den; they took longer to prepare for a fight.
Fire flared in an aurora of white-orange light. She felt the heat; sucked her breath in and stopped moving a moment as if, by freezing, she could avoid it. Idiot.
The people around her screamed.
The streets weren’t deserted—they’d been far, far too crowded for that—and Jewel used the ring that gilded her hand to grant herself authority. That authority played itself out in short, sharp barks as she directed people who were—almost—capable of fleeing without crushing the slower or the smaller beneath their thousands of heels.
The magisterians were all over the streets, and she used her authority—although it was purely theoretical at this point, as no one had authority over a magisterial guard by leave of title or Family save the Crowns themselves—to put them to useful work dealing with the press of people who slowed and calmed the farther they got from the fight itself.
She pushed on.
Devon ATerafin found shelter in the shadows of the ruined building. He found bodies there as well; the creature’s ascent through the building had been fast and brutal. It had also, he thought, caused death as a side effect, not an end in and of itself. The people whose bodies had fallen with the rubble and blackened joists were indistinguishable from the ruins to the demon.
Devon thought—although he could not be certain—that there were survivors.
And he would find them, in a minute or two.
Less.
He raised his bow; raised it, grateful the sun was at his back and not his brow. In the clarity of sky there was only fire and lightning to complicate the shot—and they weren’t enough to obscure friend from enemy. Meralonne APhaniel was silver and white, steel-gray and pale-blue; his foe was obsidian and shadow, white and red. Where their swords clashed, they spoke with the voice of the storm.
The storm was not his concern.
Two.
One.
Fire.
He moved. Reflexes that had not been as sorely tested as this in years propelled him the length of a hall exposed to sun and sky; he rolled head over heels, coming up with his hands on the body of the empty bow.
Where he had stood, the rock and the dirt had been fused into a glowing patch of red liquid.
He had no time to speak. The fire followed; he leaped out of its reach.
She stood in the empty street, casting a shadow that inched west as the sun progressed. Of all the gathered men and women—and there were few, very few, who had stayed to witness this combat—she was the woman most versed in the study of magic. Most versed in its practice, and in the consequence of its practice.
She stood as stiff as a corpse, and indeed, when Jewel ATerafin first saw her, she thought, somehow, some spell had either killed her and left her standing or had immobilized her completely—for she recognized Sigurne Mellifas, the soft-spoken leader of the Order of the Magi, if such a disparate and chaotic group could be said to have a leader.
But as she approached, the sweat across the older woman’s brow, the creases in forehead, the quick blink of lid across eye, told a different truth; her gaze, her silver-blue eyes, were turned up, to watch the glory of Meralonne APhaniel embattled.
Almost against
her will, Jewel joined her.
She lost fifteen years; more. The white-haired mage was death and glory; he had walked through fire and lightning, earth and air, to reach the combat of his choice, and having reached it, he had given himself over to it with a wildness not unlike the forces of nature that had been called upon to stop his progress.
He was magi, mage and scholar, but he fought in the air with a sword, like a common soldier. No, of course not that, not common—but not like a man of magic. And he looked, to her un-jaded, practical eye, unaged. Unaging.
He also looked as if he were giving ground.
The creature that he fought was as unlike Sor na Shannen—the creature that she had first seen him fight so openly—as night from day, but he had about him the same beauty, the same darkness, the same command of shadow; if power could be defined by appearance, it was defined by his, by Meralonne’s. She stood transfixed by them, by the crescents their swords carved in air, by the visible trail their weapons left in their wake.
It seemed inconceivable that either should falter, but she knew the color of blood when she saw it. First blood.
It fell in silence.
It fell across Meralonne’s brow.
First blood. She could not remember, in that earlier fight, if she had seen the color of his blood or not. In fact she felt the shock of seeing it fall, this time, as if it were a first, or as if it were something that he could not shed.
And why not? Power did not deprive the man of mortality. If he lived, he bled. If he could bleed, he could die. Could die there, at the height of the buildings, below the bowers of the trees that lined the Commons in the distance.
She started to cry out, to promise him aid if his feet touched the ground—but the words fell far short of her lips. She had seen the fire fall, and although she didn’t understand why, it had not fallen on Sigurne. She would not willingly call attention to what had not yet been considered worthy of it.
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