Dust Soldiers would have to judge our sacrifice outside the city walls, giving us time to fight back. The horses were already outside, a mass of spectral glowing eyes, skeletal metal frames, waiting to be spurred into battle. Olivia and I watched as the guards shoved the doors shut behind the Sacrifice. The place where it had been sat as bald and empty as an abandoned nest.
“Come on!” Olivia said. We sprinted across the square to the church. All the windows were dark. Even the round, spying-eye window in Mother Morevna’s room. We looked at each other and nodded, prepared to pick the lock or bust the door down. But when we turned the knob, the church door opened without resistance.
We crossed the sanctuary, nearly soundless on the wooden floor, then another earthquake sent us stumbling and brought dust floating down on us like snow. From above us, stained-glass Jesus paid us no mind, eternally sweating His blood in the Garden. But there was no sign of Mother Morevna.
“The stairway!” I said, moving as quietly as possible.
We went up the stairs, to the sliver of light beneath Mother Morevna’s door. We halted before it, for a moment, thinking of her fiery spells, the power that emanated from her at all times. Then Olivia took a deep breath and turned the knob.
“?Ah, mierda! It’s locked! And I don’t have anything to pick it with!”
“Don’t worry,” I said. This time I was prepared. I pulled a hairpin from my hair and inserted it into the keyhole. A wiggle here, a push there. Click.
Then, with a final glance at each other, Olivia and I plunged through the doorway and felt the door close behind us.
When the clock struck, Asa and the girls left for their places at the walls and hoped that Sal and Olivia would catch up to them. From his spot on the wall above the doors, Asa could see the whole desert, what was left of it, anyway. It looked strange out of two different eyes.
The human eye perceived the dark, jagged, puzzle-like expanse of the desert, all shadows and spots of foxfire glowing here and there between the nothingness.
His daemon eye saw what the desert really was, the magic that flowed through every stone and twig and grain of dust and disappeared at the places that had disappeared. With his daemon tongue, he could taste the mercury and petrichor in the air. And far out in the desert, he could feel the rumble of Their coming.
They were very close now. And above it all, he could feel Her watching, the Mother, the one who had chosen him in the beginning. She would be the arbitrator. He tried not to think of having also failed Her, the highest power in the universe. That was all over now. All that mattered was drawing this battle out as long as he could, no matter the cost.
Asa took a deep breath and looked out. The cavalry had begun to assemble now, rows of glowing-eyed metal horses, and men and girls and pimpled teenage boys astride them. Susanah and Mowse were on Susanah’s horse, standing in front of the others, painted with black Dust Soldier ash, ready to lead the cavalry into battle. Judith was on another nearby, her big hands lingering above the spear that glowed in her horse’s spine. Neither she nor Mowse had had another problem with the marks on their hands, but Asa could feel something sinister coming from the marks, feel it like a fever spreading, and he kept his eye on them, hoping that whatever it was, it could wait until the battle was over to rear its ugly head.
All around them, along the tops of the walls, between the humps of drying graves, were sharpshooters, waiting with their enchanted rifles. Zo was among them, her expression calm and serious, her holsters glowing.
Cassandra was on the wall to his right, on the other side of the great doors. She looked at him and nodded gravely, her airy-fairyness replaced by steely resolution. They each knew their roles: projectiles and offensive spells from him, illusions from her.
But Sal. Olivia… Their absence felt like a hole in their defenses, a chink in their armor. Asa had a sudden thought. It didn’t take all of them to cast the final defensive spell that the girls had created. All it took was one person. And if that person had to be him, Asa was all right with that. That person, he thought with