"HUH—"
Evelyn's eyes came open. Wide. Round. Blank.
Adam pushed through.
One of them broke the ring and reached her first, with a knife. She did nothing about it. He was well outside Corin's reach.
Tick.
The man went into the road. Knees first. Then his face, then his stomach, flat against the stone.
But something was wrong.
Evelyn did not look down at him while he screamed. Neither did Adam. But Adam did not let the gravity go away once the man was pinned. He held it. Then he put more on.
The man was pressed into the road, screaming in agony for two seconds, the scream growing more twisted as the pressure went into his lungs. Then he came apart. What was left went out across the stone in every direction, spilled like a broken watermelon.
It stopped the whole street. Corin, the ones who had come through the ring, the ring behind them — all of them looking at the road, none of them with anything to say.
Adam did not look. Neither did Evelyn.
He reached her and put his arms around her.
One hand went to the back of her head, into her hair. He pressed her face into his chest and held it there so she could not turn it away. His other arm came round her back and closed. He pulled her the last inch in, hard — the way you hold something you have already lost once.
Her hands stayed at her sides.
"I'm sorry," Adam said into her hair. "I'm sorry I took so long."
He was crying. He did not seem to know it.
Who is this. Did he just crush a man into the ground? Corin thought.
The shock lasted about five seconds.
Then somebody near the front of the inner ring screamed it.
"HE KILLED HIM. HE KILLED ONE OF US."
He came off the line running. Four or five followed him. Within those same few seconds there were more of them coming in from three other angles, and Adam was still holding on to her.
They did not get there.
The first man, the one they were all running behind, stopped.
His head came off.
A black fish came out of nothing beside him, took it in one bite, rose away, as his body went down into the road without him, falling sideways.
Then the screaming started properly. The crowd began going backward.
And as the black fish hovered above the headless body, the second white fish came out of the air near the centre. After it, the golden ram.
The ones who had been running forward were running the other way now. Some of them did not move at all. They stood where they were, still deciding.
The two fish came round in a circle four metres across.
Inside it: Adam, Evelyn, the golden ram, the crushed body, the headless man at its edge.
Everything else in the world was outside.
Adam turned his head toward the crowd.
His eyes had gone almost black. The veins stood up in his forehead and down one side of his face. The street had gone so quiet that he did not have to raise his voice at all.
"Any one of you comes inside this circle, I'll kill you where you stand."
He did not need to say it twice. It was already in his face.
And everyone immediately stood still.
Evelyn lifted her arms.
She put them round him. She held on.
"Can— can you go," she whispered, her forehead against his chest.
Adam looked down at her.
"Evelyn. What do you mean?"
"Go. Leave me alone. Go away."
She said it while she pulled him in harder.
Adam took her by the shoulders. He pushed her back to arm's length and held her there.
Then he lifted both palms. He crossed two fingers.
It was the language they had made at the orphanage, the same one she had used from the back of a cart with soldiers around her.
This one meant: NO.
Evelyn's eyes changed.
The blankness went out of them. They came down to their ordinary size. Her pupils were there again.
What came up into her face after that was calm. Hers. So long unworn that she had forgotten she owned it.
She smiled. A real one.
"You still smell like the forest, you know," she said, and hugged him again.
Adam smiled back. He put a hand on the top of her head and moved it, the way you would with a dog, and after a few seconds of silence Corin finally spoke.
"Hey. You should both get out of here. I don't know who you are, but you should get her out of this place. The crowd won't stay silent for long," he told Adam.
Adam walked one step back and turned his back to Evelyn. He bent forward, signalling her to hop on.
She hesitated.
"Don't worry. This will make it faster."
Evelyn walked forward and hopped onto Adam's back, and surprisingly enough, she relaxed.
The ram walked out in front of Adam, and abruptly it started running forward, towards the crowd, fully disregarding it.
And naturally the crowd split itself apart to make way. Adam ran flat out behind it, and they were fast enough that he crossed the whole of it in seconds. The fish followed him from above. The ram stayed in front.
"Let's get out of here."
Four hundred metres away. The building where Malthane crashed.
There was no sound for a while. Then there was one sound, very high, and it was inside his own head.
Malthane came up out of it a piece at a time. Stone off his shoulders. Stone off his back. He got one knee under him, then a hand, then the other knee, and the floor he was pushing against turned out to be a wall.
Three buildings.
Nothing was burning. That was the first useful thing. No scorch on the stone, no heat in the air, nothing melted. So not fire, not lightning, not anything of the kind. Malthane recognized the attack as a wind projectile.
The second useful thing was that he had not heard it.
It arrived before the sound did.
The roots were already going back into him — grey, thick as his forearm, coming in off the broken masonry and folding away under his coat.
My True Defense really saved me. I would have taken great damage if not for it.
Rubble came off the pile behind him. He did not turn around.
"Lord Malthane." Ysolde Amanai came down over the broken frontage with her hands loose at her sides. "Are you standing?"
"I am."
"You went through three—"
"I know how many. What are you doing here."
She stopped a few paces off.
"You went down as you jumped from the roof of the auction house. Somebody had to come."
"Who is on the gate."
"Kleido."
"Alone."
"Yes. Alone," she said.
Malthane straightened the rest of the way and put his hands behind his back, and there was blood down one side of his face and it did not change anything about the way he stood.
"Then you have made a mistake, and I don't have time to explain it to you." He was already looking past her, up. "Go to the roof of the auction house. My daughter is on it. So is Alphonse Graves. So is the man who did this, and two others."
"And you?"
"I have somewhere to be."
"My lord, with respect, if I leave you here—"
"Maximum output."
It came from nowhere. From the air, from a long way off, flat and unhurried, a woman's voice with a smile somewhere in it.
Ysolde's head snapped round toward it in less time than most people take to blink.
It made no difference at all.
The impact came first. Malthane went off his feet sideways and did not travel like a man — he travelled like something thrown, and where he touched the ground he did not bounce. He ploughed. A line opened up across the yard behind him, forty feet of it, stone lifting away on both sides, and he went into the next wall and through it and out of sight.
Then the sound arrived and took the rest of the windows on that street.
Half a mile off, Wendy was on her knees with her right hand held out in front of her at arm's length, as though it belonged to somebody else.
The middle finger had gone the same way the index had. Twisted back on itself, black-blue from the second knuckle down.
"AAAAAGH—"
She bit down on her lip until it split and made a noise like a kettle through her teeth, rocking forward and back over her own hand.
Then she laughed once, wetly, and looked out through the frame.
"MALTHANE!"
Ysolde turned. Her pupils blew wide and locked, and she held them on one distant point on the far side of the canyon and did not move them.
There. I know where they are.
She had it. She had it exactly.
She hesitated — one second, no more — then broke the other way, toward the wall Malthane had gone through.
She got two paces.
The hair came up on her arms.
Ysolde was somewhere else before she had finished deciding to be, forty feet left, still on her feet, coat still settling.
The bolt came down where she had been standing. The stone under it went white.
"Wow."
Reed came out of the smoke with his hands in his pockets.
"That's phenomenal speed. Really." He looked genuinely pleased about it. "You're the first person to dodge that in about a year, you know."
Lightning. So he isn't the one who fired. Two of them, then. Are they working together?
How many of them are there? Ysolde Amanai thought.
"A year," Ysolde said. "The epoch started less than ten months ago, you stupid boar."
Reed's face did something for about a quarter of a second.
"Ah. My bad."
He kept walking.
"Either way. I've got no interest in you right now."
Then he stopped, and put his head back.
It came up out of him all at once. The lightning went out of his shoulders and his arms and the crown of his head in branches, forking and re-forking into the air around him until he was standing inside a moving cage of it, and the road under his boots went pale.
He bent his knees and left the ground.
He went up in an arc toward the wall Malthane had gone through, and he lit the whole street from above as he crossed it.
The ground came up to meet him.
They came out of the rubble in a wave — grey, and enormous, thicker than a man, and they did not strike so much as arrive, swelling up into the space he was falling through until there was no space left in it. The first one took him across the body and put him into the road hard enough to open it.
Then the rest.
They came down on him one after another, six, eight, and each one was slower than the last thing that hit him and heavier.
"Lightning bolt."
He called it down on himself.
It went through the roots from the inside and they came apart grey and dry and fell off him in lengths, and Reed got up out of the middle of it.
He was not fine. There was blood coming out of his nose and over his mouth, and he did not wipe it.
He started forward again, smiling.
Something came out of the smoke at him low.
This one was different. It was thinner than the others, and there was something in it going in and out like a pulse.
He got both forearms up and it took him anyway, and it dragged him back twelve feet with his heels ploughing.
Then it wrapped.
It went round both his hands and closed, and the spines came out through the inside of it and through the meat of his right forearm and out the other side.
Reed looked down at that with real curiosity.
He charged his arms with lightning. The root died and let go and dropped away in pieces.
Everything had come from the smoke. He had not seen the man once.
Now he did.
Malthane walked out of it, his silhouette slowly taking shape.
"Brock the Root," he said. "That is my Eldritch heart."
He stopped, the way he stopped when a sum was finished.
"Depending on your mass and your resistance, that will kill you shortly."
Then he crouched and put both palms flat on the ground.
The whole yard came up.
It came up in a ring and kept coming, and it was not aimed at Reed so much as it was aimed at the place Reed was standing and everything within sixty feet of it. Ysolde went backward twice and was still not clear of it.
Reed did not go backward.
He took them as they came. He broke the first one at the base and went through it. He put his fist through the second one. The third he took across the shoulder and kept walking, and the fourth and the fifth came together and he brought both arms up and blew them apart from the inside, and he went on doing that, one at a time, all the way across the yard.
Somewhere in the middle of it he noticed his right arm.
There was a vine coming out of the puncture. Not growing on it — coming out of it. The veins from his wrist to his elbow stood up dark under the skin, and the whole forearm had begun to swell against the sleeve.
He got to the far side, looking for Malthane.
Malthane was gone.
"…Oh, come on."
Reed stood in the wreckage of it and looked at the empty street for a moment. Then he crouched, took hold of one of the dead roots, and stripped a length off it about as thick as a bootlace. He wound it three times round his own bicep and pulled it tight with his teeth.
I need to find Samuelle. He can deal with this poison.
He looked up.
Ysolde had not moved. She was low, weight forward, hands open.
Reed looked at her for a second and smiled.
Then he turned his back on her and jumped, and was gone over the rooftops.
Ysolde stayed exactly where she was until she could no longer hear him.
Then she turned her head, all the way round, to a rooftop on the far side of the canyon.
"I'll be having that one."
And started heading to where Wendy was.