11:00 — THE TERRACE
Across the canyon, on a cold terrace facing north, Adam had been counting for two hours and eleven minutes, his mind drifting back to the conversation at the entrance.
Who named you?.
It bothered Adam, that he didn’t know the answer to that question
I hope Lian Mei and everyone are okay.
Noah must have become much stronger, after all this time training with Selena.
He wondered whether Noah was eating. It was a stupid thing to wonder but he did so anyway.
Evelyn, Lilly, Solomon’s remnant, Kaiser’s book, the two new stories, everything was circling in his mind yet answers didn’t show up
Why, did two stories, show up at the same time, a beggar who devoured gods, and someone who thought he was a god, what are those stories for? If the first one was meant to guide me on what my power is, then these must have been there for a reason, but appearing right after I confront Thaumiel? What does it have to do with anything.
Adam suddenly stood up.
It was a noise he could not make sense of at first. Footsteps. Thousands of them, from every direction at once.
The auction house was under attack, and the people who had come for it were the citizens of Nauz, weapons and torches in their hands, and along the road below him the guards were already forming up.
What the hell is happening?
10:00 — MALTHANE'S CASTLE, ONE HOUR EARLIER
They came up through the floor.
By the time she understood that there were people in her home, it was already finished. There had been shouting on the lower floor for perhaps ninety seconds and then there had not been, and the difference between a house being taken and a house being quiet turned out to be very small.
The door came off its latch and eleven of them came in at once.
Amara got as far as the window.
A hand took her arm above the elbow and turned her round and put her into the chair hard enough that the chair moved on the floor, and she heard herself make a sound she had never made before, and then she was screaming, and she did not stop for some time.
Nobody told her to stop or looked particularly interested.
They went through her rooms while she screamed. Drawers out and turned over, the bed stripped, a man on his knees at the hearth putting his arm up the chimney to the shoulder. One of them found her jewelery box, looked at it, and did not take it, and put it down on the floor instead of the table.
The man who came in last was about fifty and did not take his cap off.
"Sit still," he said.
"Get out of my—"
"Sit still or I'll have you held."
She sat still. Her hands had gone to the front of her without her deciding it and they stayed there.
"Your husband's at the auction house," he said. "He'll have a letter within the hour. That's the whole of it. Nothing else is going to be explained to you today."
"What do you want—"
"Nothing from you." He looked at her with disdain, "You could be a chair for all the fuck I ought to give."
One of them brought a maid out of the back rooms and dropped her on the floorboards. Amara froze where she sat.
"Hask," Lino said. "What's that."
"She's Nauzian." Hask had her by the hair and did not let go of it. "Born under it. Grew up under it. And she's up here wiping this one's floors like a dog."
"And what do you want me to do with that."
"Nauz has no mercy for traitors. Anyone who makes themselves a slave to the topsiders' king should have their head taken off, and everyone who ever knew them should hear how it went."
"No."
"No?"
"Thaumiel's orders were clear. No killing."
Hask laughed at that, once, with nothing in it. "Thaumiel. You're saying it like a prayer now."
"As you should."
"He's a man, Lino. He got us here, this is a one in a life chance, the palace was not guarded, not a single eldritch holder in here protecting it, they sent everything to the auction house, we should take everything, this is our only chance, fuck Thaumiel and his orders."
"If you insult his orders in front of me again," Lino said, and did not raise his voice to say it, "I will strip your lungs out of your body and have the dogs eat your balls while you watch."
"Try it, you—"
A woman came up the stairs fast.
"Move aside," she said to everyone in front of her, a burn scar coming up out of her collar and finishing under her jaw.
She held a butcher's knife. She stood face to face with the man.
"Lino. Are you protecting their lives?"
"Marda," Lino responded. "Go back down."
"What if I don't."
"Go back down, he said no."
"He isn't here—"
"He said no."
Before another word could be said, blood spilled.
Hask put his knife into the maid's chest instead, because it was faster than arguing, and drew it back and did it again, and again, and again.
And the room went into chaos.
Amara started screaming her lungs out, her chair falling as she stood in total fear and shock.
Marda went after Amara, the knife in her hand aimed to take her life.
Lino caught her at the wrist and the elbow, and put her into the wall.
From Amara's perspective, this was a nightmare unfolding.
Hask was coming for her with a kinfe in one hand and a cleaver in the other, when one of Lino's own stepped into his way and took it through the shoulder and the neck, and the blood came over Amara's face from the wound.
Two other men came in his place to stand in the way, and the chaos kept escalating.
Marda came off the wall with her knife still in her fist and got close to Amara who saw her face from perhaps eighteen inches away. She was crying. She was crying and she had the knife up and she was looking at Amara's hands and not her face at all.
Lino took her wrist and broke it against the chair back.
The knife went on the floor. Marda went on the floor after it, with a knee in her spine, and she screamed for a long time, and none of it was at the men holding her.
"Three!" she was screaming. "I had three! Nobody wrote them anywhere! And her baby is worth more than our lives, in a few years he will be ruling over us like the disposable livestock we are! My child—"
She did not finish it. Lino drove her own knife into the back of her head.
Lino got up. His forearm was open from the elbow down. He put his hand on the back of a chair to steady himself.
He looked at her for a while.
"Stop that," he said.
She could not.
"They were yours," she got out. It came in pieces, as she was crying.
"They were."
"You killed your own people."
"For him." Lino wrapped the arm in something off the bed and pulled it tight with his teeth. "Not for you. Don't ever think it was for you." He tested the arm and it held. "He said you weren't to be touched. I said it back to him, and then I said it to every man who came up here with me. A man's word doesn't mean anything at all until the day it costs him."
He nodded at the door, and they started carrying the bodies out. One of them left a wide mark on the floorboards all the way to the landing.
"You'll be looked after," Lino said. "Rooms, women, food, whatever you ask for that we can find in this house. Nobody will lay a finger on you or on it."
He stopped in the doorway.
"And if your husband loves you," he said, "he'll come home, and none of this will have been necessary."
He shut the door on the way out.
The auction house — the twentieth floor
Tariq Thagirion sat two seats from the end of his own house's row and did the arithmetic for the fourth time.
He had asked for one thing. He remembered the shape of his own mouth making it.
"I will give you what you want, but under one condition. You don't touch Amara."
"Of course not," Thaumiel had said, and he had said it so quickly and so warmly that Tariq had felt, for a moment, that he had insulted him by asking.
11:00 — OUTSIDE THE AUCTION HOUSE
The first horn went at the north end of the terrace road. The second answered it from the canyon side. After that there were too many to count.
Leonard was already running.
"TURN! Outer ring, turn and hold! Nobody advances, nobody chases, you hold the road!"
They came up out of the district in three columns and they did not look like an army. They looked like a city. Coal hooks and butcher's knives and fence iron and mining picks, and torches in daylight, which meant they had come up out of the dark and had not thought to put them out. There were women in it. There were boys in it.
Between them and the line stood four thousand people who had come to look at a building.
The crowd broke before the mob reached it. It went all at once, and four thousand of them came at the rope from the far side with nothing behind them but the thing they were running from.
"THE ROPE!" Leonard had both arms up. "Get it down! Get it down and let the topsiders through! LET THEM THROUGH!"
The crown men on the near ring cut the rope in four places and opened their own formation and the district came through it. Old men. Children on shoulders. They poured through the gaps in the line and out down the canyon road and behind them the line closed up again badly, in the wrong places, with holes in it.
"Spears down! Shields to the front rank, house men on the flanks —" Leonard caught a lent fighter in Verdan green by the shoulder and turned him bodily. "Not there. There. Halloran, take the east face and close it. Idris, the ramp. Nobody gets to that ramp."
Eleven hours standing, four hundred men, not one of them tired.
Pell, one of the elite guards who took the test with Evelyn and was assigned outside, stood forty paces back from the outer ring with her arms folded and watched the columns come up the road, as the citizens got inside the ring, while the nauz horde was still approaching, and did not move to the line, and did not draw anything.
These stupid rats, do they realize that they cant get inside the ring, we will kill anyone who dares to go past it easily. She thought.
A crown man named Rusk called over from the line and asked if she was all right.
"Fine," Pell said, around whatever was in her mouth. "Long day."
"You look like hell."
"Thank you."
Rusk laughed and went back to his post.
He had taken four steps when the light came, and the sound arrived after it, a lightning bolt, struck him from above.
Rusk was still up.
He was still standing, with his shoulders square and his spear in his hand, and steam was coming off him in a column, and both his boots were gone. There was nothing left of the front of his helmet. The metal at the throat and the pauldron had run and set again in a bright bead down the side of him, and where his gorget had been there was a hole through into him, and up out of his collar and across the whole of his neck and jaw ran fine red branching lines, spreading out like something growing, and going all the way up into his hair.
He stood there for about a second and a half.
Then he came apart at the knees and went down, and the smell arrived.
Pell had not moved. She was standing exactly where she had been standing, forty paces back.
She did not get to move.
A man was already towering over her, and it was Reed, going wild.