All That Glitters

by Auston Habershaw

  Gethrey charged into the street, totally ignoring the Defenders in favor of hunting down Tyvian and Artus. The two of them dodged one heavy footfall and then scrambled into the nearest building—­a four-­story tenement just recently set alight by a volley of firepike blasts. Tyvian didn’t pause to talk to Artus until they were in a corridor on the second floor. It was then that they actually had time to remove the manacles from their wrists, too.

  “How do we stop that thing?” Artus gasped, his eyes wide. “Fire melts mageglass—­can we set him on fire?”

  “Does he look especially flammable to you?” Tyvian growled.

  The building shook as Gethrey plunged a huge mageglass hand into the tenement structure and swept it across in a lateral direction, destroying whole apartments and probably killing or injuring a dozen ­people. Tyvian caught a glimpse of the colossus peering through the gaps in the wall. “Tyvian, this grows very tiresome. Where are you?”

  The screams of ­people hurt or just terrified caused the ring to give Tyvian such a wrench that he gasped. “Artus, we split up—­he’s after me, not you. Find Hool, find Myreon—­help her if you can.”

  “Myreon?” Artus blinked, “You mean you actually rescued her?”

  Tyvian scowled, “This is not the time, Artus!”

  Artus nodded. “I sent Brana to grab us a boat—­we can escape that way when you’re done!”

  Tyvian blinked. “That’s . . . that’s actually an excellent idea.”

  Artus broke into a wide grin. “Really?”

  ­People’s heads popped out of their front doors and into the filthy second-­floor hallway. More screaming. Tyvian waved Artus away. “Yes really! Just go, dammit!”

  Artus gave him a firm nod and went. Tyvian turned back toward Gethrey. Did he have a plan? Was there a plan here? The ring burned, not caring—­he had to deal with this.

  Tyvian went up to the third floor, fighting a panicked flow of humanity rushing downstairs, shoeless, with their children tucked under their arms. A mageglass fist thrust through the wall and into the central corridor, its fingers fumbling around for something to hold onto. It grabbed a pantless man around the waist and squeezed. The sound was like a large beetle ground beneath a wagon wheel. Blood splashed the ceiling. “Was that you, Tyv?”

  The fist pulled out, causing even more destruction on its exit, so that Gethrey could examine his grisly acquisition. A whole room fell off into space to Tyvian’s right. He kept running upstairs, his wounded leg’s fiery pain masked by the throbbing of the ring urging him on.

  “Hmmm . . .” Gethrey remarked absently. “Probably wasn’t you, was it? You’d have pants on.”

  Tyvian tore past the third floor and went straight to the fourth, pushing past even more fleeing ­people. For the first time, he realized just how many of the poor made their homes here. It had to be near to hundreds. Gods.

  Gethrey struck the building again and again, this time seeking to knock the place down more than finding Tyvian. It was working. The whole building swayed, threatening to fall against its neighbors. Tyvian found himself standing in the half-­ruined attic, a hole torn open by a hurtling block of stone cast carelessly by Gethrey’s rampage. Beneath him, he could see Gethrey punching and striking at various stubborn stone chimneys that supported much of the building. If they went, the whole structure would go. The ring throbbed with worry, but Tyvian didn’t need its reminder. “I have to draw him away,” he said aloud.

  Around Gethrey, a cordon of Defenders blazed away, worrying the back and sides of his armor like a swarm of bees. The colossus’s armor was strong, but it couldn’t take that indefinitely. Sooner or later that much Fey energy would make certain plates destabilize and vanish. Perhaps they already had—­just not enough to get at Gethrey inside.

  Tyvian had an idea. A really, really stupid idea, he thought. Nevertheless, he took two steps back from the opening in the wall and got ready to run. Looking at his ring, he said, “Wish me luck, better self,” and took off.

  He leapt out of the fourth story of the half-­ruined building to wrestle a fifteen-­foot war colossus without so much as a paring knife for a weapon. He knew it was, to date, the craziest thing he had ever done. He was forced to reflect on the way down, however, that the night was still young.

  He hit the top of the colossus with a bone-­jarring thump. The mageglass plating was like a wall of solid steel; he was surprised to still be alive.

  Gethrey, ensconced within his war-­construct, looked up at him through translucent crystal plating, his mouth agape. “Are you out of your mind?”

  Tyvian would have said something pithy, but his mouth was full of blood—­must have bit his tongue or lip or something when he hit. He was clinging by his fingertips to the small cracks between the moving plates of mageglass, spread-­eagled atop the colossus like a cat atop a galloping horse. It occurred to him, much later than it really should have, that he ought to be devising a plan to survive this. Nothing immediately came to mind.

  Gethrey was laughing. “Fine—­this just makes things easier.” He shook the colossus’s torso back and forth. Tyvian’s feet came loose from their precarious toeholds and slid back and forth with the force of momentum. He put his head down and clung for dear life. The world spun as Gethrey spun, blurring into a collage of fire and smoke and darkness.

  Tyvian knew he should have fallen—­he should have flown into space by now—­but he hadn’t. Come to think of it, the fall should have at least knocked him unconscious. The ring!

  It pulsed with a kind of power Tyvian hadn’t ever experienced before—­well, perhaps once before, deep in the tunnels of Daer Trondor, when he brought Myreon back to life. When he had sacrificed himself for the lives of countless innocents, just as he was doing right now.

  There were shouts—­sorcerously amplified shouts—­coming from below. “Surrender or be destroyed, by order of the Defenders!”

  Gethrey stopped shaking and faced the firing-­line of Defenders, all of them set and ready to shoot. Tyvian, head still spinning, could see the sergeant with his sword raised, shouting orders to his men.

  Tyvian suddenly realized where they were going to fire and where, exactly, he was clinging. “Oh . . . Kroth!” Adrenaline surging, the ring practically shining with power, he managed to scramble off Gethrey’s “head” and onto his back just in time for the firepikes to spit their blazing bolts of energy into the colossus’s chest. They hit with a great blaze of heat and flame, causing Gethrey to stumble back a pace, but the mageglass armor of the colossus still held back the onslaught.

  With a roar of frustration, Gethrey snatched up a massive timber that had fallen from the Cauldron and hurled it at the mirror men. They had prudently activated some guards incorporated into their armor, so they weren’t all crushed, but instead knocked sprawling as the sorcerous defense flashed with energy. It was the opening Gethrey was seeking—­he charged their position, kicking or crushing any Defender that stood in his way, and ran through another four-­story building as though he was pushing his way through undergrowth.

  The masonry of the home crumbled around the colossus like it was made from hollow plaster—­wood and stone were crushed or pushed aside by the war-­construct, and with the roar of its destruction were joined the screams of the ­people living inside. Tyvian clung to the colossus’s back, again only able to stay on by dint of the ring’s power, and saw a little girl, no older than eight, fall from her crushed bedroom to the street below. The sight of her, the sound of her scream, shook his heart. His mind cleared; he knew what had to happen now.

  They emerged onto a parallel street in a puff of dust. Gethrey was still chuckling. “Now, time to settle you, Tyv. Hold still now.”

  Gethrey fumbled for Tyvian, but the colossus moved much like a person did, and it didn’t have the ability to grab the middle of its own back. Tyvian stayed put, trying to figure out how to pry the construct
open while Gethrey struggled like a man with an itch he couldn’t scratch.

  Mageglass was impenetrable, yes. Enough fire and enough heat would melt it, true—­the firepike blasts had probably weakened the armor a fair amount. He knew he just had to find the gaps in that armor and somehow exploit them.

  Gethrey threw himself backward into the wall of another building. Tyvian, anticipating, scrambled back onto the colossus’s shoulders, this time standing on his own two feet. From the side of the building extended an iron bar meant for throwing a rope over to hoist furniture to the upper floors, rather than bother with the narrow spiral staircases these places had. Tyvian grabbed it with both hands and pulled, snapping it off the side of the house like a tree branch.

  Gethrey stood and, seeing Tyvian’s new weapon, laughed. “Gods, you don’t quit, do you? All this to protect some pointless commoners? You really are mad.”

  The colossus’s open palm slapped down where Tyvian was standing, but Tyvian nimbly danced to one side and Gethrey only managed to slap himself in the face rather than crush him. The force of the blow knocked Gethrey off-­balance and he stumbled backward again, smashing into another building. Tyvian held on.

  Selecting the widest of the gaps between the mageglass plates—­the fissure between the breastplates and back plates that ran along the top of the construct—­Tyvian raised his iron bar and drove the end of it into the opening as far as it would go. He managed a ­couple inches of depth, which he hoped would be enough.

  “What in blazes are you doing? Stop that!” Gethrey shook his torso around, running farther down the street as he did.

  Tyvian clung to his bar for dear life, staring daggers through the mageglass at his former friend. “I used to like you, Gethrey.”

  “You’re the one who changed, Tyvian.” Gethrey dropped a shoulder and charged through a low-­hanging footbridge, hoping to smash Tyvian flat, but Tyvian was too quick and adjusted his handholds to shift position and hang from the crystal-­plated back again. Stone and mortar exploded, showering the street below. Tyvian could hear ­people screaming. Bells were ringing. He smelled smoke.

  Gethrey looked back and forth until he spotted Tyvian again, crawling back to his shoulders. “You used to understand the relationship we had with these commoners—­reveled in it, even. We didn’t slum it at the Cauldron all those years because we liked the ­people, we slummed it because we had power over these ­people—­we were free of all the restrictions of polite society because nobody could stop us!”

  Tyvian grimaced at the words—­Gethrey was right, in a sense. It had started that way. He honestly couldn’t say when that had changed. He gripped the iron bar and began to pull, trying to pry the plates apart. Even with his ring-­altered strength, nothing budged.

  Gethrey laughed. “Who do you think you are? Landar the Holy? Saint Handras? Don’t be ridiculous.” He put both shoulders down and this time charged headfirst into a slender Hannite chapel. The stone belltower shuddered from the impact, and the force of it caused Tyvian to lose his grip. He flew off the colossus’s shoulders and wound up skidding across the chapel’s steeply angled roof. His head spun as he flailed around for some purchase on the lead shingles. He managed to grab a gargoyle before he plummeted into the alley below.

  “I really don’t understand why you turned down my offer, you know.” Gethrey moved into the alley so he was just beneath Tyvian and rolled his shoulders, preparing for the kill. “Who cares what happens to these pointless little ­people? I’m sure they’ll survive somehow. Gods, Tyvian—­the only thing they do is survive. They survive to leech off of the rich, and we pay them to amuse us.”

  Tyvian climbed to his feet on the roof of the chapel, looking down at his former friend. He broke a heavy stone gargoyle off from its perch and hefted it like he meant to throw. “You make them all sound like whores.”

  Gethrey smiled and nodded. “They are whores, Tyv. Every commoner who takes a copper for my custom is my whore, to do with as I please. It’s the way of the world. You, of all ­people, should understand.” He shook his head. “But seeing as you don’t . . .”

  Gethrey raised both colossal mageglass hands above his head and formed a huge fist, intending to drop it and crush Tyvian in one titanic blow. Tyvian waited for it to fall and, at the last moment, put all the power the ring had into one last leap. He sailed over and past the colossus’s fists and came hurtling down on Gethrey’s head.

  Or, more accurately, on the iron bar he had placed as a wedge. The gargoyle—­which had to weigh at least a hundred pounds—­hit the bar square, with all the momentum of gravity and Tyvian’s own bodyweight behind it. The mageglass plates themselves might have been impenetrable, but the telekinetic force holding them all together couldn’t be—­not if the thing was able to move. All it took was the right amount of force in the right spot.

  Tyvian split open the top of Gethrey’s colossus like an oyster. Another pry, and Gethrey—­wide-­eyed, caught in mid-­laugh—­was clearly visible in the flesh. Another second and Tyvian knew that Gethrey would beg for his life, weep for forgiveness, and the rest of it—­and the ring wouldn’t let him kill him. With Hendrieux, he had waited and lived to regret it. Some ­people deserved to die, no matter what the ring thought about it. He pulled the iron bar loose from the opened colossus and raised it over his head.

  “Tyv, I—­” Gethrey began.

  Tyvian plunged the blunt end of the weapon down with all his strength, crushing Gethrey’s skull in a grisly demonstration of mass and inertia. The colossus stumbled forward with Gethrey’s last convulsions, throwing Tyvian atop the church hard and knocking his head against a stone buttress. Then the colossus faded from existence, vanishing into the alley below along with the murder weapon and the body of Tyvian’s former friend.

  The ring’s power abandoned him then, leaving Tyvian weak and injured, on his back. He stared up at the stars and wondered by what destiny had he been born that forced him to kill so many of his friends.

  There was a white glow from somewhere. Myreon was standing over him, light pouring from a tattler at her shoulder. He smiled at her, “M-­Myreon? Thank the gods . . . I . . . I thought I was dead!”

  Myreon’s eyes were hard as stone. “You’re going to wish you were, you son of a bitch.”

  CHAPTER 29

  ARROWS WELL-­AIMED

  Hool reached the outskirts of Saldor well after dark, but she did not slow her pace. She blazed down the cobbled streets, making no effort to disguise her passing. Those who got in her way were bowled over—­it wasn’t her fault that the humans were too slow and too stupid to move, and she wasn’t about to let up just to spare them some bruises.

  She had counted the moments from when Lyrelle told her Artus was going to die but had no idea if she was too late or not. She had never quite gotten the hang of human timekeeping, especially at night, where the moon was a traitor and did not tell you how late in the evening it was. Her every heartbeat was a wish for her feet to go faster, for her journey to end, for her to be in time.

  Artus did not think so, but Hool knew she was responsible for him. He thought he was very grown up, of course—­human pups all did at that age, just like gnoll pups when they reached six or seven and were almost full grown—­but Artus had a lot to learn about the world. Like most males, Tyvian was useless for this kind of task. Artus needed a mother, and Hool was it.

  And she would not lose another pup. Never again. Not even if she needed to kill every single human between here and the Taqar to prevent it. In the front of her mind, visions of Api’s tanned hide mingled with the sight of Artus’s blood in the Reldamar witch’s premonition. They were so horrifying they nearly made her blind with anguish, and she howled into the night to release the pain. The pain, though, would not go. It stayed with her, a knot just above her heart that only having Artus and Brana safe in her arms could untie.

  She reached the first squad of Def
enders along the banks of the Narrow Mouth as she was about to cross the bridge into Crosstown. They had heard her coming and they thought her a monster. They bustled themselves into rows, their magic spears pointing out at her, squinting into the gloom of the summer evening.

  Hool paused atop a roof, looking down at them. They blocked the bridge—­there was no other way across without going another mile down the river. She could not jump over—­their spears were long and she might be stabbed. Fine then. She would go through.

  She drew the mace that Lyrelle Reldamar had called the Fist of Veroth. The iron head was fashioned in a complex, swirling pattern, like that of flames frozen in black metal. She could feel its weight as a kind of destiny, ready to fall. It wanted to be struck; it craved battle. The smell of sorcery made her nostrils flare—­this weapon had an evil feel. But then, she supposed all weapons did. This one would do.

  The Defenders stood, waiting, eyeing every shadow. Their leader—­their sergeant—­stood at the edge of the column, holding his sword aloft, ready to give the signal. Hool resolved to kill him first.

  She charged them from their left, leaping from a rooftop, the Fist of Veroth above her head, roaring for all her worth. From beneath, she imagined they could see the outline of her body and the glitter of her eyes in the dim light but nothing more. The effect was as she had hoped—­they froze, if only for an instant.

  An instant was all it took to kill the sergeant. She brought the Fist of Veroth down on his head, crushing him all at once, as though he had been hit by a boulder. There was a flash of orange light—­like flame, only angrier—­and the ground shuddered beneath her feet. Many of the Defenders fell down, the others staggered back. Hool raised the enchanted mace again, and a fiery light bloomed from its heavy head—­the iron was no longer iron, but molten fire, burning and stirring like a piece of the sun itself. The Defenders, their eyes wide, fled before her weapon and her wrath. This suited her fine—­she darted over the bridge.