to easily overwhelm the paltry force here. Numbers. Let even Akiva strive against such numbers. Jael couldn’t fall into the same trap as last time, and let himself be taken as leverage. He eyed the sphinxes. One of them winked at him, and he shuddered.
“A bravura strategy,” he said, stalling. “Enemies unite.”
“It’s your own gift to Eretz,” Liraz replied, “and I’ll make sure you’re remembered for it. ‘The Several Days’ Emperor,’ you’ll be called, because that was all the time you had, and yet, in it, you not only dissolved the Empire, you accomplished the extraordinary feat of uniting mortal enemies in a lasting peace.”
“Lasting,” he scoffed. “As soon as I’m dead, you’ll fall right back at each other’s throats.”
Bad choice of words.
“Dead?” Liraz regarded him with surprise. “Why, uncle. Are you unwell? Planning to die soon?” She had changed. This wasn’t the hissing, spitting cat he’d tried to take for his own in the Tower of Conquest. “There’s no ride in the world,” he’d said then, taunting, “like a storm in fury.” Here was no storm, no fury. There was some new quiet in her, but it didn’t shrink or wilt her. Rather, it seemed to enlarge her. She was no mere weapon as she was trained to be, but a woman in full command of her power, unbowed and unbroken, and that was a dangerous thing.
Jael strained, listening for some sign that his army was drawing near. She must have noticed. She shook her head ruefully, as though she were sorry for him, then looked a question at the smirker, who nodded.
“Good.” She turned back to Jael. “Come. There’s something you should see.”
Jael didn’t wish to see anything she wanted to show him. He thought to draw his sword then, but the sphinx who had winked at him came at him in a blur half-cat, half-smoke, and wreathed around him. A daze overtook him—a sweet, soft stupor—and he missed his chance. Liraz disarmed him as though he were a child or a drunk, tossed his sword aside, and shoved him toward the door and out into the camp.
Before anything else, he saw Beast’s Bane dead ahead. Instinctively, he flinched. Come to kill him as he said he would, and Jael’s guards were scattered and gone?
But Beast’s Bane wasn’t even looking at him. “Liraz!” he cried, and there was joy in his voice that should have burned Jael, but he scarcely noticed it, fixing instead on what Liraz had brought him out to see.
Like a storm cloud overhead came the shadow of an army. It was tremendous, spanning the visible sky.
And it wasn’t his.
He stared up, head craned back and all else forgotten, trying furiously to calculate the number those ranks represented. They should have had no more than three hundred Misbegotten, even if they had all survived the attack in the Adelphas. Even if…
The smirking soldier. “They put up a valiant defense,” he had said, and so it would seem. Of the troops hovering overhead, a fair swath were clad in Misbegotten black. And the rest? Chimaera were among them, yes. They didn’t keep the same steady formation as seraphim, but were just what could be expected of them: wild beasts, no uniformity in shape or size or dress. They were a bestiary shaken open, and godstars help the angels who allied with them.
Godstars help the Second Legion, then, for Jael saw, through a haze of fury, that they made up the bulk of this sky-borne force, steel-clad and plain in their standard-issue armor, no colors, no standards, no crests or coats of arms. Only swords and shields. Oh so many swords and shields.
And there, from up the mountains, came his own white-clad Dominion, overmatched, and caught off guard, and Jael had no choice but to stand on the ground and watch as the two forces faced each other across a gulf of sky. Emissaries ventured out from both sides to meet in the middle and Jael spat in the grass, laughing in the faces of bastards and beasts, and declared, “Dominion never surrender! It is our creed! I wrote it myself!”
Let them fight, he willed now with a fervor that verged on prayer. Let them die, and whether they win or not, take traitors and rebels with them to their graves.
They were too distant for him to see who spoke for them, let alone guess what was said, but the result became clear when the Dominion dropped low in the sky—beyond a rise in the swaying grass