faint sound of cracking brick, tumbling stone. Rillen leaned in, his face a finger’s breadth from Van Gast’s.
“Sir! They’re firing on the palace.”
“Of course they are,” Rillen murmured. His dark eyes never left Van Gast’s. Looking to see the defeat in them.
Bugger that. Van Gast slid his hand from his pocket, ready to throw the bones, and then laughed, a jagged, painful drag of breath that brought a snarl from Rillen.
Van Gast caught his breath. “You realize that you’re fucked, right?”
A cold gust of wind whispered through his hair and soothed his hot brow, cooled the sweat that greased his skin. The wind had a tang to it, a faint hint of… If Van Gast closed his eyes, he could almost swear he heard a far-off muttering, with the occasional “um.” A mini-roll of thunder echoed round the Godsquare, and a tiny tongue of lightning earthed itself on the helm of a guard, felling the man as surely as an axe in the back.
Rillen turned as the wind picked up and swirled around the steps like a thief. Despite a sky bluer than sapphires, fat drops of rain made craters in the dust of the square. More fell on the mages, made them squawk in quick terror as the water slid down their crystals, taking away a layer of shimmering rainbow magic as they dripped to the flagstones.
Not for long—the air was filled with rain and the acrid stench of Remorian magic, of crystals burning as they used their stored power. Raindrops disappeared in puffs of steam above the mages’ heads, and Rillen laughed.
“See, they’re more powerful than your mage ever could be.”
Maybe only Van Gast saw the flicker, the gleam of sun on metal, the flash of a fair braid in the window of Kyr’s temple, up in the bell tower where it shared a wall with Oku’s starker monument. “He doesn’t need to be powerful. He just needs to get their attention. Told you. You’re fucked.”
The bullet took the middle mage in the back of the neck, neat as you like. His body seemed to move as though in a dream, slow as treacle. He slid from his chair like a mountain landslide, starting slow then falling in a rush of flying crystals and shattered magic.
Van Gast twisted with the release from the bond. Pain arced through him, lightning in his bones from the bond outwards. Rillen lost his grip as he thrashed, blind with it, deaf to everything, slave to the pain.
Rillen’s voice was the only sound that penetrated, soft and smug. “No, this was just what I wanted her to do, and you’re fucked.”
* * *
Holden stopped his mad dash after Ansen. No guards were looking at them anymore, but instead turned to the mages, to their thin screams and the stench of sudden magic. To the awful, glorious sight of a mage sliding dead from his chair. Distraction, always distraction. Van Gast had drummed it into him, and now he saw it for the beauteous thing it was. Three days they’d waited, holed up in the delta, waiting for Van Gast to come out of the cells, out to where they might rescue him.
No one was looking at Holden, and here he was, in perfect position with his gun ready. Up on the stairs, Van Gast fell, his face twisted when the bond left its final mark of pain on him and dissolved with the mage’s last breath. Rillen stood over him, his face a smug snarl as he took in what was happening.
Guards and bonded slaves ran to shield the other mages from any more bullets. But Holden wasn’t going for them. Ilsa stood at the bottom of the steps, and she wasn’t his wife, her face not one he knew. She was a stranger, and closer to him than anyone. A chance though. He’d give her a chance, a choice, because of what she’d once meant to him.
He slid through the crowd, gun tight in his sweating hand, keeping his face blank amid the sudden chaos. Ilsa turned away toward Rillen, calling something Holden couldn’t catch in the noise. No one noticed him or paid him any attention.
“Ilsa.” That one word seemed to fall into the square, into his head, like a dead weight.
She stopped but didn’t turn. “Kill him,” she called to Rillen, and now Holden could hear her, hear the bile and hate in her voice. “Then we can kill her too.” Finally she slid her gaze sideways to Holden, and