The square was silent now but for the falling rain. Athène ordered the naasyoon to pile up the Sophian bodies while she cut a strip of cloth from a corpse’s shirt to wrap her finger. The cracks between the cobblestones were full of blood. The pile reached halfway up the garden wall.
“Andromède,” Nephra said, “we’ve just seen more people coming out of the Library. Not Sophians this time. They’ll be here any moment.”
“How many sisters did we lose?”
“Forty, forty-five. Maybe more.”
“Then we can still fight. Order everyone back into position.”
The naasyoon once again made itself invisible. Athène remained at street level this time, watching from behind a carriage at the side of the road as the gates slowly swung open.
Frizzy black hair, dark skin coated with a thin layer of ash, brown eyes cracked with red and heavy with sadness. The smartest person I’ve ever known, Gemma used to say. But Clover Hamill didn’t look so smart today; he looked devastated, defeated. Athène hadn’t seen him since the day she’d first met Gemma, but she felt as if she was about to reunite with an old friend; Gemma had loved him like a brother. Behind him came a young woman and a dozen men in blue robes, all of them singed to a greater or lesser degree. They didn’t appear to have a single weapon between them, unless one counted the titanic volumes that a few of them held to their chests like talismans.
“Hold!” Athène shouted, stepping out of cover.
Clover blinked hard, as if he couldn’t believe his own eyes. “It’s you, isn’t it? Athène?” He spoke in a surprisingly fluent and unaccented Wesah.
“In the flesh,” she replied, also in Wesah. She felt the strange urge to embrace him, as you would anything so long-lost, yet she demurred. “Tell your friends from the Library to flee the city now, or they’ll end up like these Sophians.”
Clover relayed the message and the attendants quickly scurried off along the Ring Road. The young woman stayed at Clover’s side—a romantic partner of some sort, if the baleful expression she cast at Athène was anything to go by: you’ll have to go through me first.
Clover gestured toward the pile of bodies. “I guess you killed them?”
“Yes.”
She could see his mind working, trying to make sense of things. “You’re helping Chang?”
“Not anymore.”
“But you did.”
“I did what I had to, so that the two sides would be evenly matched.”
“Why?”
“Have you ever seen two wolves fight?”
“No.”
“When two wolves fight, it doesn’t mean either one will win. Sometimes it is only a question of which dies first. Then it is the crow and the vulture who win.”
Clover nodded his understanding. “So where are you going now?”
“To the church at the center of the city. I think it is where all of this will end. Would you like to come?”
Clover looked surprised. “You’d have us?”
Athène shrugged. “How do you say it”—and switching to English, tried on the platitude—“the more the merrier?”
Clover started to smile, then abruptly stopped. “Do you hear that?” He looked up at the sky, and Athène realized that many of her warriors were already doing the same. There was a humming sound, obscured by the patter of raindrops on brick and stone but growing a little more distinct every second. A beam of light cut through the clouds. Then another. And another.
“She has more planes!” Clover said. “Find cover!”
The bombs began to drop through the rain-streaked sky. Athène ran.
4. Clive
A SHOCK OF COLD LIKE SOMEONE slapping every inch of your skin at the same time. The afterimage of a man torn apart by bullets, contorting as if enacting some morbid, primitive dance. Clive swallowed what felt like an icicle, daggering down from his throat to his belly. The water ran fast here, channeled by the aqueduct and amplified by the downpour, and it wasn’t long before they emerged into the light, dumped into the Tiber at the northern edge of Portland Park. Clive caught sight of Paz’s head bobbing a dozen feet in front of him. He could hear gunfire ricocheting across the city like so many cracks of lightning, and beneath it, something new but familiar. A hum, like someone bowing a single note on the double bass: Zeno’s airplane had somehow returned from the dead.
Entranced by this martial music, he drifted into the wall of the aqueduct, smashing his knee hard enough to jolt him back to reality. From the angle of the light, he could tell it was a few hours past noon. Usually the park would be busy around this time, but not today. No proud new parents strolled along the river pushing a carriage. No furtive lovers tiptoed down the bowered paths of the Maple Garden. Clive swam with the current and caught up with Paz. Together they made their way over to the grassy bank and hauled themselves out of the water. The cold, which adrenaline had kept at bay until now, set Clive’s whole body to shaking. Paz’s teeth were chattering so hard he thought they might just shiver to pieces.
“We gotta get warm,” he said. “Come on.”
They stood up and started walking. A bridge painted white and gold leapfrogged to a small island in the middle of the river, then another carried them over to the eastern side, where they passed a family carrying their belongings in tied-off sheets flung over their shoulders. Clive guessed a lot of people had abandoned the city since Zeno’s forces had arrived.
“Where did you live?” Clive called out after them, and was surprised when anyone bothered to answer.
“Thirteen Quernmore Road!” cried a girl no older than Flora.
She was roundly shushed by her pretty older sister, but too late. Quernmore was close. They left the park and reentered the city proper, immediately passing a barricade that told an efficient and tragic story without words: the slow advance of the enemy, the heroic last stand, the corpses with their empty holsters and glazed eyes. The door of 13 Quernmore was locked but gave way with a couple of kicks, revealing a leatherworker’s shop on the ground floor and an apartment above it. The hearth fire upstairs had only just been extinguished, and the few small, sordid rooms were blissfully warm. Clive tore some pages from the Filia on the mantle and used them to get the fire going again. Then he and Paz stripped down and laid their sopping clothes just in front of the grate.
Naked, they searched the apartment. The closets and dressers in the bedrooms had been emptied out but for a pair of socks in need of darning and a scrap of black silk. In the kitchen larder, however, they found a huge jar of pickles and a pot of strawberry preserves. They brought this bounty back to the fire and set to it.
“It’s funny,” Clive said, though it was anything but. “I thought he was dead for so long—I don’t even know how to feel now that he’s really gone.”
“He did the right thing, in the end,” Paz said. “I mean, what a father ought to.”
“Yeah.”
They were silent for a moment, and in that silence Clive heard the rat-a-tat of Chang’s guns atop Notre Fille. “Zeno has another plane. Or maybe more than one.”
“Chang was ready for it, though,” Paz said. “Why else would he have moved all his soldiers underground?” She crunched into a pickle. “So what do we do now? How do we find Flora?”
“I don’t know. I guess we just have to hope she’s still with Chang.”
“And where is he?”
“I don’t know that, either. He could be anywhere.”
Paz ran her index finger along the bottom of the jam jar, sucking the last globule from her empurpled knuckle. “We’re coming up on the end here. Chang’s gonna have to be where the action is.”
“And just where is that?”
Paz pointed out the window, toward the gnarled finger of Notre Fille. “Where else?”
* * *
Their clothes weren’t entirely dry when they put them on again, but they’d delayed long enough. Back on the streets, they passed at least a dozen families packed for travel, including one riding
in a wagon being pulled by two desperate-looking milk cows. He and Paz didn’t speak much, as it was nearly impossible to hear anything over the whine of the plane engines, the occasional deafening reports of their payloads, the vicious tattoo of Chang’s antiaircraft guns, the clash and cry of soldier-to-soldier combat, and the crackle of innumerable fires pulling buildings down all around their ears. Here was the second coming of the Daughter, the Flame Deluge, the apocalypse. Here were the fruits of war.
They made it to Annunciation Square. At least five thousand people were congregated in front of Notre Fille—the bulk, if not the entirety, of the Sophian army. Clive imagined they’d been ordered to gather here so the planes would be free to bomb the rest of the city with impunity—and to try to take the church, of course, which would be an enormous symbolic victory for Zeno. The Sophians, however, were having some difficulty getting in: the doors appeared to have been reinforced somehow from the inside.
“Chang has to be in there,” Clive said.
“Great,” Paz replied. “So how do we get to him?”
Clive had spent a fair portion of his childhood coming and going from Notre Fille; his secondary school education had been carried out on the building’s third floor—a kind of pre-seminary that privileged Filial study above every other sphere of knowledge; he rued all that wasted time now. “A lot of the buildings around the square are offices of the Descendant Church. There are passages connecting them to Notre Fille, so all those old men don’t have to trudge through the snow in the winter.”
“How civilized.”
“The closest entrance is over there.” Clive pointed at one of the four-story townhouses on the west side of the square. It was known as the SLO, or Sudamiran Liaison Office—the organization that arranged the Church’s official missionary ventures to the dark continent. Clive’s father had considered spending a year down there spreading the word of the Daughter, before his wife had unilaterally quashed the notion.
The sun was beginning to set, but the storm was only growing stronger. Behind the scaffold laddering up Notre Fille’s eastern facade, the canvas flapped loudly, briefly exposing fragments of the church’s innards. Clive felt equally exposed walking around the edge of Annunciation Square, but no one seemed to notice them.
“Look,” Paz said, gesturing toward the southern entrance to the square. One of the big guns that Zeno had used to keep the Anchorites trapped in the city was being rolled slowly down the Green Road on a flatbed wagon. Maybe the Sophians were hoping to blow their way through the front doors of Notre Fille, or else they planned to use it on Chang’s army—if said army ever showed up. Clive felt strangely disconnected from all of it, as if the battle had already been decided and this was merely a reconstruction. All that really mattered to him now was finding Flora and getting her out of the city.
The door to the SLO was locked, and though the windows on the ground floor were all covered with elaborate bronze grates, Clive was able to use them to climb up to a second-floor balcony, where the windows were unprotected. Just as he’d done at the Delancey warehouse, he took off his jacket and wrapped it around his fist so he could punch through the glass and unlatch the window from the inside. Pulling Paz up onto the balcony after him, he noticed a group of Sophians coming toward them from across the square, guns drawn.
“And I thought we were being so subtle,” Paz said.
“Nothing we can do about it now. Come on.”
The sounds of war diminished as they took the stairs back down to the ground floor of the SLO, dying out completely as they descended to the basement, which was packed to the ceiling with crates of Sudamiran wine. The entrance to the underground passageway was half-hidden behind a rack of dusty green bottles. As they were pushing it aside, the whole thing collapsed; a good fifty magnums shattered on the concrete floor, causing a minor flood and filling the air with the heady scent of fruit and ferment. The wine poured down the steps and along the passageway, keeping pace beside them like a pet snake. There was less and less light as they went, until it became so dark that Clive had to test each step with a little kick into the void. The smell of the wine faded and was replaced with the usual subterranean dankness—at least it was easier on the nostrils than the sewers had been. After a few minutes, his kick met resistance: a door. He cast about for the handle and breathed a sigh of relief when it turned.
They found themselves on one of the floors of Notre Fille where the Honors kept their offices. There was a bit more light here, directed through narrow shafts artfully built into the ceiling, but it would be gone when the sun finished setting.
“Which way are the stairs?” Paz said.
But Clive was already moving in the opposite direction; his father’s office was just down the hall. Unfamiliar at first glance—it took him a moment to realize that some other Honor must have moved in months ago. More surprising, however, was the fact that this interloper had chosen to keep some of the preexisting decoration, including the sword mounted behind the desk. It had been a gift from the mayor of an outerlands town called Tyreal just after its incorporation, which Daniel Hamill had overseen.
Clive slid the sword out of its scabbard. It had never been used, and though the blade was blunt, the point was keen enough—it was better than nothing, anyway. He looped the scabbard through his belt and re-sheathed the weapon.
They took the western stairway, hoping to climb it all the way to the top of Notre Fille, where Chang was most likely to have set up shop. But the stairwell had been purposely blocked off with an impassable barricade just a few steps past the ground floor, and the only available door led directly into the nave of Notre Fille. The chamber lay empty, eerily lit by a dozen braziers making wavering shadows on the stone walls. There was an enormous hole in the ceiling where the bell tower must have fallen through. It had been roughly patched with wooden planks and canvas, but not well enough to stop a steady stalactitic stream of rainwater from drumming on the marble floor. The tower itself had long since been cleared away, the crushed pews replaced with new ones; if not for the great dripping fissure overhead and the shattered tiles underfoot, one might not even know the church had ever been bombed.
Clive glanced at the Dubium, its curtains pulled tight.
“If I had to recite my sins now,” Paz whispered, “I’d be in there for a week.”
“You and me both.”
They passed out of the nave and into the church’s massive narthex. The ceilings here were just as high as in the nave itself, a good hundred feet to the frescoed dome, but Clive’s attention was immediately drawn to the front doors. A grid of iron bars had been driven deep into the stonework all around the frame; even if their guns ripped the doors themselves to pieces, the Sophians wouldn’t be getting in here anytime soon. Paz immediately made for the grand main staircase, which led up to the church’s balcony seating and on to the offices and meeting halls on the higher floors, but Clive grabbed her wrist and held her back.
“It’s too exposed.”
“Is there another staircase?”
“Yeah, on the other side of the building. Unless it was destroyed in the bombing.”
They jogged across the narthex, but all the doors leading into the east wing were bolted.
“I guess that’s that,” Clive said.
“What if we tried—”
But Paz’s question was interrupted by a far more pressing one: what to do about the five Sophians who’d followed them through the tunnel and had just now emerged from the nave.
“Don’t move!” shouted an older man holding an oversize pistol. “Hands up and walk slowly over to me!”
“Don’t do it,” Paz said under her breath. “Make them come to us.”
“Why?” Clive said.
“Just trust me.”
“Hello?” the Sophian man said. “Are you two deaf or something?”
When it was clear neither Clive nor Paz had any intention of obeying his order, the man conferred briefly with his companions. They began a wary crossin
g of the cavernous chamber, guns drawn. When they were perfectly centered in front of the doors, Paz called out.
“You should stop there,” she said.
“Why would we do that?” one of the Sophians replied.
“Because some of the tiles are traps. You come any closer and you’re like to lose a leg.”
A few of the Sophians began looking around nervously, but the older man only laughed. “You expect us to believe that? This is marble.” He stomped on the floor for emphasis. “Probably a foot thick. There’s nothing you could put in here…” He trailed off, some part of his consciousness registering a shift in the ambient sound that bled through the front doors from Annunciation Square—a subtle presage of something extremely unsubtle. The first bullets ripped into the wood a moment later, sending splinters flying through the spaces between the bars. Plaster dust exploded from the stairs and walls. A sculpture of Noach lost an arm. Most of the Sophians made the mistake of trying to run instead of ducking; they immediately took a dozen bullets between them. Only the older man, standing a few steps ahead of the others, had the good sense to dive forward. The fusillade lasted for about thirty seconds, and when it was done, the last rays of sunlight shone through a thousand ragged gaps in the doors. The sole surviving Sophian, spattered with the blood of his compatriots, had his gun trained on Paz’s forehead.
“I knew you were fucking with me,” he said. “And now I’m gonna fuck with—”
A deafening crack opened a hole just above the man’s nose, something obscenely intimate leaking down around his lips and pooling on the marble. Clive traced the angle of the shot backward to find the Grand Marshal Ruzo Chang standing on the landing of the stairway. Beside him, holding the smoking gun, was Flora.
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