out as they were jostled about within the wine cask. The lexicon, which had been expertly prepared for such a disturbance, didn’t seem to move much, but Orso shrieked in pain, and she heard Claudia and Gio crying out, and the carriage slowly rolled to a stop.
“Snapped a wheel…” panted Sancia. “Snapped a…a goddamn wheel…”
She stood up and looked over the top of the wine cask. Foundryside was just a few hundred yards away, but it wasn’t like that mattered. Not now.
She felt a thrumming nausea in her belly, and she slowly turned her head to look behind them.
“No,” she whispered.
He floated around the corner so calmly, so casually, like a boat being piloted on a smooth, gentle river. He turned to face them, hands on his crossed legs, not a fleck of dust or stone on his person—despite having just personally destroyed the Mountain of the Candianos, and a half dozen Commons rookeries on top of that.
“Well,” Crasedes said in his deep, rumbling voice. “I had not really wished for things to come to this, you know.”
The ground beneath him trembled, and a dozen large stones emerged from the muddy fairway like tadpoles hatching from a riverbank. They rose and began to orbit him as if they were little dripping planets.
“Claudia, Gio!” screamed Sancia. “Get out of here, get out of here!”
“But…” he said contemplatively. “Now I just feel obliged to…”
The stones whipped around him, and flew straight for their carriage. Sancia dove forward into the wine cask and hugged Berenice tight, her face buried in the base of her neck, one hand on Orso’s chest.
Not like this, she thought. Not like this…
She braced herself for the impact, for the sound of stone on wood and bone, for the bleary madness as her damaged brain tried to interpret the world it was seeing as it failed in her skull, for the sight of Berenice’s empty eyes as she died just a few paces from their home…
And yet—it did not come.
Sancia slowly released Berenice. Both still sobbing, they looked at each other, confused. Then they looked over the top of the wine cask.
The dozen stones were hovering in the air about twenty feet from the carriage. They were trembling with some kind of pent-up energy, like a fish trying to escape a line. For a moment Sancia wondered if Crasedes had been overcome with second thoughts—but she saw he had balled his fists and was leaning forward slightly, as if concentrating very hard, and the air was pulsing with a discomfiting energy, one that made her ears and eyes ache queerly.
“No…” he whispered. “No!”
The stones slid forward very slightly—just a few inches more—but stopped again.
Then Sancia heard her voice in her mind: a curious, fluting, artificial voice, like pipes being used to mimic human speech.
said Valeria’s voice.
And then Sancia saw her, very briefly, just a flicker—a huge, hulking golden figure standing about twenty feet away from their cart, facing Crasedes.
“I will not permit you,” said Crasedes. His fists were trembling. “I will not.”
said Valeria’s voice.
Then the stones stopped trembling—and all of them shot backward with blinding speed, all trained on Crasedes.
They struck him with a tremendous crash, and the end of the street filled with dust. Sancia and Berenice both recoiled and sank down into the wine cask, then slowly stood back up as the dust cleared.
Crasedes still sat in midair at the end of the street, one palm extended to them, the mud below him covered with rubble, the buildings about him shredded to pieces. The stones did not appear to have marked him any—but he did not seem terribly pleased.
whispered Valeria’s voice.
He slowly cocked his head. “I see,” he said finally. “That it does. But…it will come again, will it not?”
And with that, he turned and slowly drifted away, back into the dusty, smoky skies above Tevanne.
III
THE LAST PROBLEM
20