City of Miracles

14. The Twilight of the Divine

Olvos opens her eyes. “There,” she whispers. “It’s done.”

“What’s done?” says Sigrud.

“The last stages of the end,” says Olvos hoarsely. “You and I, Sigrud, you and I and Shara, we all have a part to play in this. In what began when the Kaj first crossed the South Seas and made war upon these lands. Saypur thought that was the end, but it was just the beginning of the end. The first hour, perhaps, of our twilight.”

“What do you mean?” asks Sigrud, now anxious. “What…What has happened?”

“Your sword,” she says. “Flame. Can you still find it?”

Sigrud fumbles for it, focuses, then grabs it in the air. It’s there still, waiting in the space before him, and though it feels firm in his fingers he notes the blade is now queerly insubstantial, as if it were but a piece of golden tulle.

“What’s wrong with it?” he says.

“Most of the people who made it are now gone,” says Olvos. “It is just a shadow of what it once was.”

He stares at the blade. Then he slowly puts it away and turns to look at her. “Gone? What do you mean?”

Olvos bows her head.

“What…What are you saying?” he asks, horrified.

“That’s the problem with a power vacuum,” she says, smiling sadly. “Something must swell to fill the gap. It’s…It’s just nature, I suppose. But though one may weep, one can’t fight nature.”

“They’re gone?” he asks. “The children? They’re really gone? He’s…He’s won?”

She does not answer.

“And this…This is how you justify your cowardice?” he says. “With talk of nature? This is how you rationalize allowing children to be lost to the most dangerous thing walking this earth, the thing that wishes to devour the world?”

“Nokov is not the most dangerous thing walking this earth,” says Olvos. “He never was. None of the six Divinities ever were. That title is reserved for a player who has yet to make their appearance. Though you will come to know them in due time.” She stands and looks down at him, and once again her eyes are like distant flames. “Listen to me, Sigrud. Do you hear me?”

“I wish I did not,” says Sigrud bitterly. “Such is my disgust for you.”

“Your disgust is well earned,” says Olvos. “And I share it. But listen—this was born in blood. It always was. It was born in conquest, born in power, born in righteous vengeance. And that is how it means to end. This is a cycle, repeating itself over and over again, just as your life repeats itself over and over again. We must break that cycle. We must. Or else we doom future generations to follow in our footsteps.” She stabs a finger out at him. “You have a choice, a choice I never did. You have a choice to be different. You, who have defeated many by strength of arms, you will have a moment when you can choose to do as you have always done, or you can choose to do something new. You, a man who has never forgiven himself, who believes he deserves all his ills, you will have a moment to reconsider. And in that moment, the world will teeter upon a blade of grass, and all will be decided thereafter. Walk it carefully.”

“What are you talking ab—”

She cocks her head as if she hears something, though Sigrud’s ears catch nothing but the crackle of the fire and the sigh of the snowflakes.

“He comes,” she says, her voice low and full of dread. “He comes to me now, my prodigal son.” She smiles slightly. “What is reaped is what is sown. And what is sown is what is reaped. You must go, Sigrud. Soon he will be here, and he cannot find you. Soon the walls will grow and the dawn will be threatened. And time, as always, will remain our deadliest foe.”

Sigrud stands. He sees her jaw is trembling. To see a god so anxious fills him with terror. She notices his glance, and smiles and reaches out to touch his face, a strangely reassuring gesture. “Quiet now, child. All things end. Just as the stars fade and mountains fall, all things end. But that does not mean there is no hope.”

“What is it you wish me to do?” asks Sigrud. “What is there to do?”

“Fight, of course. And, if we have luck, live.” Her smile fades, and hot tears spill out to hiss upon the ground below. “When it comes to it, when you have that chance…please don’t hurt her. She didn’t deserve what we did to her. And she loves you so. Please be there for her when she needs you to be, as I never was.”

“Who do you mean?” asks Sigrud. “Why must you speak in riddles?”

Olvos points over his shoulder. “There,” she says. “Your auto.”

He turns to look. He sees she’s right: his automobile is just behind him, parked next to the road—but wasn’t the wall there just a bit ago?

He turns back only to find she’s gone: he’s standing on the grass beneath the trees, facing the dark forest below the polis governor’s quarters. There is no bonfire, no walls, no sight of Olvos.

Sigrud looks around, seeking any sight of the Divine, anything that could possibly suggest this last interaction really happened. But there is nothing. He is alone.

Nearly all the children are gone? Can she be right? He feels a Divinity is probably a reliable source, but…What about Malwina? Tavaan? And Shara? Could he have lost her again?

He climbs into his auto, starts it up, and begins the short journey back to Bulikov.

He comes to her like a thunderstorm, like a pack of wolves charging through the forest, like a great, dark wave pouring up onto the shore. Her barriers and protections are nothing to him, mere spiderwebs he can bat aside with but a flick of his hand. He is drawn to her, he finds, drawn to her light, drawn to the shadows dancing around the bonfire.

How he despises those who have the light, who enjoy the warmth. How he despises her.

He leaps forth from the shadows and stands at the edge of the bonfire, tall and proud and regal. A child no longer, certainly not. He stares down at her, smiling, waiting for her glance to fall upon his form—her eyes will widen, surely, and she will be overcome with awe and terror, and beg forgiveness…

But Olvos does not do this. She just sits at the edge of the fire, lights her pipe, and puffs at it.

“Hello, Nokov,” she says absently, as if he just walked in. “I see you’re still struggling with the idea of doors.”

Nokov’s smile turns into a scowl. He walks closer to his mother, his footfalls heavy on the earth. He walks over to the fire to show her what he can do, to show her how the light means nothing to him anymore—but she still doesn’t look at him, doesn’t behold the wonder of his presence. She just keeps fiddling with her pipe.

“Look at me,” he says.

She glances up at him. She meets his dark gaze for but a second, her fiery eye blazing bright.

“Look at me!” he snarls.

She sighs slightly, then sits up straight and faces him. Her face does not fill with awe and horror as he wished; instead there is only a contemptuous resignation.

“Do you see me?” he asks. He tries to smile. “Do you see?”

“I see you full well, Nokov,” says Olvos.

“Do you see how strong I am? Do you see how I have conquered? Do you see how I have grown mighty?”

Olvos says nothing.

“I did this without you,” he says. “Just as I have lived my whole life—without you. I found a way to survive, to grow strong, to prosper, all without you.”

“It seems sad to live one’s life,” says Olvos, “defined by the absence of another.”

Nokov is speechless for a moment. “Sad?” he says, furious. “Sad?”

“Yes,” says Olvos. “I think so.”

“How sad it was when they captured me,” he snarls. “How sad it was when they tortured me! For days, for months, for years! I don’t even know how long it was. And you, a Divinity, a god who could hold the whole of the world in her hand if she wished—you did nothing to help me. Nothing. If I were to choose a word for this, it would not be ‘sad,’ oh, no.”

“If I said I was sorry,” says Olvos softly, “would that mean anything?”

Nokov pauses. “W-What?”

“If I said I was sorry. Would that mean anything?”

“Sorry? Could…Could that mean anything to what?”

She shrugs. “To you. To everything, I suppose.”

Something hisses on the ground at her feet. It takes Nokov a moment to realize they’re tears.

Olvos, to his disbelief, is weeping.

The sight of his mother crying fills him with confusion. He wished for his mother to be haughty and proud, or perhaps cowardly and quailing, but…but, perversely, he did not wish her to weep so.

“Your…Your tears mean nothing to me,” he says. His voice shakes. “You were gone from my life well before the Kaj. You were gone from all our lives, long before then. You left us.”

“I had to,” says Olvos. “I knew how this would end.”

“You could have taken us with you!”

“Could I have?” she says. The pipe is trembling in her hands. “Could I? I wasn’t sure…”

“You should have tried!” says Nokov. “You could have at least tried.”

“Do you know what I was trying to avoid, Nokov?” asks Olvos. “Do you know what I feared most, my child?”

“The Kaj,” says Nokov. “The purge. The Blink.”

“No. I feared what power would do to me. I feared it would change me. I feared it would make me dangerous.” She looks up at him. “I feared, my son, that I would become what you are now.”

Nokov hesitates, confused. “Mighty,” he says. “You feared strength.”

“No,” says Olvos. “I feared being alone. To be the one Divine thing, with all the beliefs of all mortals leaning upon me…I knew that would be unbalanced, and unwise. A lone celestial body, spinning out of its orbit…The damage would be catastrophic. But I know a way out. For you. And for me.”

“Do you.”

“Yes. So now I ask you, Nokov—will you let me give you what you’ve wanted most of all for these long years?”

He is silent.

“I will give you myself,” says Olvos. “I will be here with you, mother and son, forever. We will be together forever. But you must stay here with me. You and I, the two strongest Divine creatures in this world, we must stay here, alone, isolated. We must not allow ourselves to spill into the world. We must not.”

She looks at him, her eyes wet with tears. But her words echo in his ears, and he begins trembling with fury.

“You…” he whispers. “You want to trap me.”

“No!” she says, alarmed.

“You want to put me in a box,” he says. “To stuff me in a box out here, all alone!”

“No, I don’t! Nokov, Nokov, I don’t!”

His face twists in anguish. “You’re just like her….Why are you people like this? What did I do to you?”

“I am trying to help you!”

“That’s what she said!” He rises up, a vast, dark spike shooting into the sky. “That’s what she said to me before she trapped me! And look at me now, look at me now!”

Olvos pauses, stunned, then bows her head in defeat.

Nokov looks down at her. “To be alone,” he says. “That is a thing I have always known. Whatever madness this world could do to me, Mother—it won’t be anything I haven’t already seen.”

“It breaks my heart,” says Olvos, “to see what all this has come to.”

“A chance to begin again,” says Nokov. “A chance to start over bright and fresh and anew.”

“No,” says Olvos. “No, it will not be that. You are doing nothing new here, my child.”

He cranes his head down to look at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I think this is not the first time this has happened,” she says. “Not by far. Imagine this, child—a world is born, and mortals and Divinities are born into it. Some mortals get access to the gods, others don’t. Conquest begins, enslavement, until there is a great war, and someone finds a way to slay the gods. The old Divinities are overthrown, and their children inherit the world—and rewrite it. They erase reality and rewrite it, birthing a new world, with new mortals, new gods, new origins, new conquests, and new wars. The old ways and the old gods are forgotten, as if they’d never happened. The world doesn’t even remember they were ever alive. And it all starts all over again.”

Nokov is grave and silent for a moment. “I don’t believe you.”

She shrugs. “It is what I believe. Believe what you like.”

“You’re saying you…That you had…”

“Do you know what they say of Olvos?” she says softly. “They say she was born when all the dark of the world became too heavy, and scraped against itself, and made a spark—and that spark was she. She was here from the beginning of this world.” She shuts her eyes. “She and her siblings, perhaps. And then the mortals changed what they believed, and she listened and overwrote her own reality, and forgot it.” She looks up at Nokov. “You are here to do, my son, what I suspect I myself once did long, long ago. To overthrow your parents. To take power from them and make your own world. You and I are just separate incarnations of this long dance, child. There have always been Divinities. Always been mortals. Always been slavery and war and revolution. There is blood upon your hands, just as there is on mine—the only difference is that you will remember it.”

Nokov strides forward through the fire, the flames licking his black skin. “I will be different.”

“How many tragedies follow those words,” says Olvos quietly.

“Shut up. Shut up! Shut up! You’re using me, you’re just tricking me, just like she did! You’re just like her. Just like her.”

Olvos takes a deep breath and sets her pipe down beside her on the log. “Perhaps you’re right, dear,” she says wearily. “But now you must ask yourself the hardest question.”

Nokov is breathing hard. “And what is that?” he says.

She smiles at him, tears upon her cheeks. “Will that make what you’re about to do any easier?”

Nokov shuts his eyes, twists up his face. He doesn’t want to cry now, not during his greatest triumph.

He desperately shouts, “Yes!” and springs on her.

When he’s finished, when she’s still and cold and he’s dragged her into the first night, he realizes that though she looked like a small woman by her campfire, she was much, much, much more powerful than he ever realized. More powerful than he could have ever understood.

She could have struck him down where he stood. She could have killed him in an instant. Yet she didn’t.

He wonders why she didn’t. He can’t understand why she didn’t.

Ivanya Restroyka feels a little ridiculous as she makes four pots of tea for her guests. It’s not that she’s unused to making a lot of tea for company. It’s just that she never expected to be entertaining a bunch of godly children and a dead woman—or at least, not all at once.

The Divine children sit in stunned and despairing silence, especially Malwina. The consequences of what’s just happened haven’t truly sunken in, Ivanya can tell. She’s been through this before, after the Battle of Bulikov, when people sat dumb and dreamlike in the streets, babbling about inconsequential things. If they live to see tomorrow, she knows, the morning will bring countless horrors as they try to force a normal life on the shattered remnants around them.

But that day is tomorrow. And right now, today, there is at least a hot cup of tea.

She sets the first tray down before them. “Drink up,” she says gently. “Get something warm in you.”

The only people who don’t seem to be crushed with despair are Taty and Shara. And though Ivanya feels it’s Taty who has a right to have countless questions, it’s Shara who’s doing the interrogation, asking about her daughter’s travels, how she’s been sleeping, any rashes or cuts or bruises, and so on, and so on, and so on. Taty gives her answers in a tone that seems both bored and familiar to her, and Ivanya can’t help but feel a little heartened to see that mother and daughter have, impossibly, resumed their relationship with barely a hiccup.

Though one thing has changed: Shara’s eyes, which seemed so tired at first, are drinking in her daughter’s every movement, every word, every gesture, every sound. It’s as if she’s trying to record all of this, to capture everything, and keep it locked somewhere safe deep within her.

“Now what?” asks one of the Divine children.

“What do you mean, now what?” asks Malwina.

“Now…what do we do?” a boy asks. “Do we run? Regroup?”

“Regroup?” asks Malwina. She laughs caustically. “And if we were to regroup—let’s see here—the Divine spirits of glassblowing, clocks, hearths, elderly maiden aunts, the Ahanashtani spring, and the rest of us—exactly what could we then do?”

There’s a long silence.

“I don’t know,” one of the girls says. “Something.”

“Something,” grumbles Malwina. “But not enough.”

Ivanya’s bringing the third tea tray over when Taty glances at Malwina, and whispers to Shara, “Is…Is that my…sister? Could it be?”

Shara thinks for a long time. “Yes,” she says finally. “She is.”

“And she’s…she’s…”

“Divine,” says Shara. “Yes.”

“And I…I…”

Shara looks at her daughter levelly. “You are.”

Taty’s face flushes bright. “I’m D-D…”

“You are lucky, Tatyana,” says Shara. “The main difference between you and that girl across the room is a great deal of sorrow.”

“That’s not an answer!” says Taty, frustrated. “And you know it!”

“Isn’t it?”

“No! You…You should have told me, you should have helped me understand this, about…about what I am, or what I’m going to be!”

“Are you so sure,” says Shara, quietly sipping tea, “that I didn’t, my love?”

Then the sound hits them. It’s a deep, terrible, reverberating sound like someone has just struck an impossibly large bell, a bell the size of the moon. It’s so loud that, despite her efforts, Ivanya can’t help but drop the tea tray, sending it clattering to the floor.

“What in the hells is that?” says Ivanya.

Shara sits forward. “Could someone help me over to a window?”

Ivanya obliges her, helping her to the big bay windows that look out the east side of the mansion.

“Ah,” says Shara, peering out the window. “Then it’s as I thought.”

“What is it?” asks Ivanya.

Shara nods ahead. “The walls. They’re there. Don’t you see them?”

Ivanya looks and does a double-take. As a former citizen of Bulikov she’s often forgotten that the walls are even there, since they’re invisible from the inside. But now they most certainly are there—and they’ve changed color. They aren’t the slate-gray color that the outside walls so commonly are.

Rather, these walls are black as jet.

There’s another deep gong. It’s so loud it sends curls of dust swirling up in the streets. As the gong keeps going, the walls seem to get darker and darker, until they’re a shade of black so deep they almost hurt the eye.

“What in the world is going on?” gasps Ivanya.

“It’s him,” says a voice behind them.

They turn to look. Malwina is standing there, her face pale and her eyes bloodshot from tears.

“It’s the enemy,” she says. “He’s taking over the miracles in the walls.”

“What?” says Ivanya, shocked. “But…But that means…”

“Yes,” says Malwina. “She’s dead.” She goes back to her seat and sits staring into space. “It means Olvos is dead.”

Nokov stands in the forest outside Bulikov.

Dawn is near. He can feel it. Ordinarily he would shrink from the world, his power waning as light floods the countryside. But not now. Not with so much Divine power thrumming inside him.

He feels Olvos’s countless miracles, all the ones she built thousands of years ago, the ones still working away in the background of reality…and the thousands of potent, churning creations working mere miles away from him, in the walls of Bulikov.

Old miracles, real miracles. The stuff of legends. The sorts of things he ordinarily wouldn’t ever be able to make. Yet now they are his.

Nokov breathes and takes a step.

In an instant he’s inside Bulikov, standing at the gate before the sheer black walls, which curve around him in a huge embrace. Silence is there with him, standing at his side, staring around in total confusion, unable to comprehend how she got here. The few mortals awake at this hour stare at the two of them for a moment before running away, screaming incoherently.

He gazes up at the walls. “The gates of Bulikov,” he says quietly. His voice is like the voice of the stars in the sky and all the bones of the earth were whispering at once. “Once the gates were so tall, so mighty, so glorious…A monument to the old Divinities, to their power, to their ordering of the world. Yet I shall dash it all aside shortly.” He looks at Silence. “I’m going to start it now.”

Silence is about to speak, but she doesn’t need to: he can see into her mind, see what she’s about to ask.

“Dawn is coming,” says Nokov. “But I will not let it come. I will ascend to the skies and kill them, kill the heavens above. I will slay the light before it falls. This is what I will, this is what I wish. And then the whole of reality will be but a blackboard for you and I to write upon.”

Silence nods, awed and dazed.

“I will be vulnerable during this,” says Nokov. “I will work behind reality, under it, over it. This is a vast act that will take all of my concentration. Do you understand?”

She nods again.

“Good.”

Nokov focuses, narrowing his eyes slightly. The black walls of Bulikov tremble, shift, groan. They tremble more and more until they should fall apart, yet they do not.

And then they begin to…unwind.

It’s as if the walls had been just the tip of a circular, hollow tower all along, and now the tower begins to sprout up and around the city, slowly, slowly extending into the sky, adding layer upon layer upon layer. The ground quakes and rattles and rumbles, but the tower keeps growing into the sky with a powerfully dispiriting silence. Running along the inside of the growing tower is a tremendous black staircase, curling around and around its interior in a helix. The end of the staircase just happens to fall just before Nokov’s feet.

Nokov looks up, watching as his tower keeps climbing into the sky. “Do not allow anyone upon the staircase,” he says to Silence. “I will ascend, and no one must follow.”

Silence bows low and watches as her god departs, starting up the stairs that will soon end at the sky itself, the firmament above—which Nokov will destroy with but a touch.

As he climbs the stairs, looking down on the vast city below, he can’t help but laugh.

And they thought it was the City of Stairs before….

Sigrud stomps on the brakes as the earth begins to shake. The sky is lit with faint predawn light, but he can see that something is definitely wrong with the sight ahead of him: for one thing, the walls of Bulikov have just turned black, which isn’t normal. And also they are…

“Moving?” he says.

The walls of Bulikov shake and tremble…and then start growing into the sky, forming a vast, black tower that shows no signs of slowing down. It’s half a mile tall now, and getting taller by the second.

“Okay,” says Sigrud. “That is probably bad.”

He steps on the gas pedal. The wheels of the old auto shriek, and he speeds off toward the gates of Bulikov—which, he can’t help but notice, don’t seem to exist anymore. The entry is now just a solid black wall, leaving him no way into the city.

I will figure that out, he thinks, when I get there.

“What in hells?” says Ivanya, staring out the window at the growing walls. “What in hells?”

Shara looks over at Malwina. “Malwina? What’s happening? Can you tell us?”

Malwina, still pale and red-eyed, screws up her mouth like she’s doing math in her head. “If I had to guess,” she says in a hollow voice, “he’s remaking all the miracles that hold up the walls into one big staircase. Which he’ll then climb. Up to the sky.”

There’s a long, loud silence. The other Divine children slowly look at one another in horror.

“And then what?” says Ivanya. “Then what happens?”

Malwina tosses back a cup of tea. “Then he poisons the sky with darkness. And the endless night begins.”

“Endless night?” says Taty. “What does that mean?”

Malwina laughs. “Who the hells are you, girl? You look like me, but I don’t remember you, I don’t smell a whiff of the Divine about you—or, not yet at least—and you obviously can’t tell the Divine from a hole in the ground….”

“She is the least of your problems,” says Shara sternly.

Malwina looks at Shara. “She isn’t awake yet, is she?”

“Malwina.”

“But you know what it’s going to take to do that.”

“Malwina.”

Malwina smirks. “Endless night means that he dilates completely,” she says. “Nokov—I mean, let’s go ahead and say his name, since it’s obvious he’s won—once the world falls under endless night, he controls everything. All of reality becomes a plaything in his hands.”

“How do we stop him?” asks Ivanya.

“We don’t,” says Malwina. “He’s devoured so many of the children, and Olvos. He’s unstoppable now, or close enough that it doesn’t matter.”

“Unstoppable?” says Taty, horrified. “Is he really?”

“Not…Not necessarily,” says Shara. “This thing he’s doing, this grand act…He’s exposed himself. He’s bent on doing this one, massive thing. He won’t have the attention for anything else. He’s like a surgeon in the middle of an operation.”

“We could attack him,” says one of the other children. “Gang up on him. Slow him or even stop him.”

“Slow or even stop the most powerful Divine being in all of history?” says Malwina. She laughs again. “Sure.”

“We have Sigrud’s guns, don’t we?” says Taty.

Ivanya nods. “We do. Three pistols, two riflings, and a scatter-gun.”

“And I can see the foot of the stairway from here,” says Shara. She points toward the gates in the walls, or where the gates used to be, at least. “That’s got to be the way up.”

“Are you hearing yourselves?” asks Malwina. “Go after what’s now a Divinity with, what, some fucking guns? Chase him up the stairs? That’s madness!”

The room goes quiet as they try to think.

“Sigrud would try it,” says Taty quietly.

There’s a long silence.

“Sigrud,” says Malwina, “is just a man.”

“He’s never let that stop him,” says Taty.

“He’s just a man, and he failed,” says Malwina. “He was supposed to get Olvos on our side! And now she’s dead. There’s nothing left, nothing left!”

“There was nothing left for him either,” says Taty softly. “He lost everything. Everyone. But he still traveled across the world to help me. I know. He told me so.”

“So what?” snaps Malwina. “Are we supposed to launch an attack on Nokov himself with nothing more than sheer, bloody-minded stupidity in our pockets?”

“The alternative, Malwina,” says Shara, “is doing nothing. And I know your heart is broken, my dear. I know you feel bruised and lost. But you and I have been comrades in this fight for a long time now. Tavaan fought and died to make this fight last a little longer. Will you abandon it now?”

Malwina falls silent. The snarl fades from her face. She bows her head. “I…I didn’t ever think it’d be like this, Shara. I really didn’t.”

“I know,” says Shara. “But it is.”

Malwina takes a breath, then grabs another cup of tea, and tosses it back just like the first. “All right. Let’s gear up and get ready to go get ourselves killed.” She smiles a grin full of mad despair. “Maybe we’ll give him a split lip doing it.”

Sigrud slows the auto as he approaches the solid black wall surrounding Bulikov. He has no doubt that this has something to do with Nokov: this is the same color black as he saw in Khadse’s jacket, the same black as that odd sub-reality he tumbled through after he nearly broke Nokov’s hand. An extraordinarily dark blackness, a color that has never known light.

He steps out of the auto, leaving it running. He looks the wall up and down. It looks solid, but…

He stoops, picks up a rock, and throws it at the wall. It bounces off with a clack, but leaves no mark.

He thinks, then places his bare left palm on the black wall. The wall is cool and hard, as if made of obsidian, but despite everything Olvos said, his touch appears to do nothing. But then, she said the thing living in his palm exists mostly just to beat the hells out of him and make sure he survives.

Then he stops, and remembers.

It’s a tool. It won’t harm the enemy, but it can destroy his works and machinations.

Sigrud focuses and reaches into the air, concentrating….

Suddenly Flame is in his hand. And though its blade is but a dim flicker now, he can’t help but notice that it seems to project a radiance that makes the wall look very…thin.

Sigrud holds the sword out at the wall. As he does so the wall seems to recede, like shadow before light.

“Hm,” he says.

He walks toward the wall. It falls back, as if the sword is projecting a perfect bubble of light around him—much like Malwina did back at the slaughterhouse.

“Hm,” he says again. He looks at the bubble of light around him. It looks to be ten or fifteen feet across in diameter. Large enough for his small, ramshackle auto, in other words—and who knows where he’ll need to get once he’s inside?

Sigrud climbs back into the auto and sticks his left arm out the window, holding the sword forward like he’s leading a cavalry charge. He presses the gas pedal very, very slightly, sending it puttering forward into the wall, which draws back like a curtain, allowing the auto through.

Sigrud smiles, delighted that at least one thing has gone right tonight, and speeds up.

Ivanya and the others trot through the streets of Bulikov, with she and Taty supporting Shara between them. Ivanya’s happy she did so much walking about and stayed fit when she was a shepherd, because between Shara’s weight and the scatter-gun and rifling on her back, she’s sure she’d be dead otherwise.

The city, unsurprisingly, is in complete uproar. Flashbacks of the Battle, no doubt, thinks Ivanya as they trot through the remains of a street market, its tents and booths overturned, the cobblestones covered in smashed potatoes and shards of porcelain. The city is lit with a queer gray light as the rising walls block out all hint of the dawn. The atmosphere feels so close and thick it nearly chokes the air from her lungs. Someone has turned on a few of the streetlights, but they don’t do much to fight back the pervading darkness.

“You and I,” says Ivanya to Shara as they help her over a curb, “are going to have a chat once we’re done here.”

“Oh, are we,” says Shara.

“Oh, yes,” says Ivanya, panting. “I fund all your war games for years, and you don’t even tell me what you’re up to? And now you’ve cheated death? And I’m carrying you all the way across Bulikov?”

Shara groans, cringes, and pales a little. “I can guarantee, Ivanya…I have not cheated death.”

“Well then, how in hells am I carrying you right now?”

Shara swallows and takes a shallow breath. “Think of it,” she says, “like a loan I’ve had taken out against it. Which is being paid back with great interest.”

Ivanya shakes her head. “I fucking hate this Divine nonsense.”

“I sympathize heartily,” says Shara.

They turn the corner. The black staircase is only a few blocks ahead. It’s enormous, jutting at least a hundred feet out from the walls.

“We need a plan of attack,” says Malwina quietly.

“We’ll have to think of one,” says Ivanya, “once we know what we’re attacking.”

Shara looks up, and Ivanya does the same. The giant black cylinder is still rising above them, curling around and around at the top. It’s several times taller than the tallest skyscraper Ivanya’s ever seen, and she swears she can see wisps of cloud near the top, like it’s about to breach the bottom of the overcast skies.

“There he is,” says Shara. She points up.

Ivanya squints. It takes a while for her to see what she’s pointing at, but then she spots it: a dark figure quietly walking up the stairs curling around the interior of the walls, its movements slow and ceremonial, like a monarch approaching their throne. He looks like he’s nearly a quarter of a mile up by now—which means that the black figure must be very, very, very big.

“Why doesn’t he just fly up and do it?” asks Ivanya. “I mean—he’s basically a god now, right?”

“This is heady stuff he’s getting into,” says Malwina. “He’s got to form a connection point with the skies themselves. This is a vast, symbolic act, overlaid on the countless miracles, dead or living, that still function behind the firmaments above.”

“If you say so,” says Ivanya. “How are you going to get up there?”

“Using that,” says Malwina. She points to the bottom of the stairs. “The gates of Bulikov used to have towers on either side of them, before the Blink. The towers were Divinely made, so they were incredibly, incredibly tall. They had a chamber inside them that could zip you up to the top in a split second, faster than any elevator in Ghaladesh.”

“How could that help?” asks Taty.

“Because it’s in the past,” says Malwina, glaring at her.

“What?” says Ivanya.

“Malwina is the Divine spirit of the past,” says Shara. She coughs, her face twisted in pain. “She knows many things that have happened, if not all of them. And she can access the past, and utilize things there to our advantage.”

“Which I can do now,” says Malwina.

“So…you take your war party into the past,” says Taty, “put them in that tower, zip them up to the top, then bring everyone back to the present—hopefully on top of the stairs. Is that it?”

“Yes,” says Malwina. She looks reluctantly impressed with Taty’s deductions. “If I’m in luck, we might actually wind up in front of him, blocking his path.” She looks toward the gates, and her eyes seem to shimmer a little, like they’re filling up with smoke. “Yes, I think so…I can see what the tower was like. It was about halfway up the walls—or at least as tall as the walls are now.”

“That must have been some tower,” says Ivanya.

“It was,” says Malwina. They start moving ahead again. “But the problem is that I have to get my people to the base of the stairs, where the tower existed in the past.”

Ivanya pants as she and Taty haul Shara around an overturned sausage stand. “And what’s the problem with that?”

They come to a wall alongside a street corner. Malwina holds up a hand, peers around the corner, and quickly draws back. “The problem is,” she whispers, “as I thought, that the base of the stairs is guarded.”

“Guarded?” says Ivanya. “Guarded by who?”

Malwina opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. It’s not that she can’t talk—she is talking, her lips moving, but all the sound is gone.

Ivanya frowns. Now that she notices it, the sound seems to be gone from…everywhere. As if the whole city has gone silent.

Ivanya turns to Shara. She tries to say, “What’s going on now?” but the words make no sound.

Nothing makes sound. Not the wind or the screaming people or the automobiles hurtling in panic down the street.

Nor the huge black spear that comes plunging through the stone wall behind them.

The spear punches right through the chest of one of the older Divine children, who goes as limp as a rag doll, blood pouring from his mouth. Ivanya blinks in shock as the warmth patters her face and side. The spear passes right behind her head, so close she can see its oily, shifting surface.

She screams. She can see Taty screaming next to her, but there’s no sound. Everyone turns and begins to run in all directions, with Malwina and her Divine children falling back down the street.

The spear slides back through the wall. The corpse of the Divine child silently falls to the ground. Something huge and dark steps around the corner.

It is…feminine, somewhat. Seven feet tall, black as coal, with long, distorted limbs and a totally featureless face. It carries a black spear in one hand, which drips with the blood of its victim. And as they scatter, the thing lifts its head, and appears to scream….

There is no noise. Just a pulsing silence. Yet in that silence is a message:

The next thing she knows, Ivanya’s in motion. She’s reaching over her back, pulling the scatter-gun from over her shoulder, and lifting it up. Time seems both stupendously slow—slow enough for her to think, Am I really doing this?—and stupendously fast, so fast she can’t stop herself.

All the years spent training in the ranges come back to her in an instant. She opens fire at the creature, falling back. The shots seem to stun it and irritate it, but little else than that.

“Shit,” she snarls, though she can’t hear the word. She can see Shara and Taty cowering just to the creature’s right, and realizes it could spear them in a second if it but wished.

Without even comprehending what she’s doing, Ivanya runs forward, right in front of the creature, trying to draw it away from the corner and across the main road. The creature gives chase, picking its way across the streets like a stork among the reeds, its long, delicate spear slashing through the air.

As she reloads and runs, Ivanya understands right away that she is not up to this task. Despite all her paranoia, despite all her training, all her worrying and preparations, she is still little more than a farmer with a firearm. She’s shot a few foxes and wolves in her day, but she’s never done anything like this.

She darts among a parking lot of autos, screaming in silent terror as the creature tears through the vehicles behind her, thinking, Why did I ever come back to Bulikov? Why did I ever, ever come back to Bulikov?

She turns right, trying to cut around the creature. Yet then the black thing lifts up an auto and overturns it, blocking her exit and trapping her in the middle of the street.

Ivanya whirls, raises the scatter-gun, and unloads it into the creature, but it’s clear it’s hopeless. The thing raises its spear, preparing to run Ivanya through…

Which is when something very strange happens to the black walls at the end of the street.

Something bursts through—an old, rattling auto, with what appears to be a shining flame atop its canopy. And below it, behind the windshield, is Sigrud’s face.

When Sigrud’s auto finally makes it through the black walls, he’s struck by how different the city now feels: the black tower blocks out the dawn, so the light within has a queer, flimsy quality to it, like an evening storm threatening to turn into a tornado.

Then he notices his right shoulder hurts, a strange ache just like he had in the aero-tram, when the point of the seneschal’s spear penetrated his skin.

Then he sees why: the seneschal is in front of him, right now. And unless he’s mistaken, it looks like it’s about to spear Ivanya like a snail on a platter.

I do not really know what’s going on, he thinks. He stomps the gas pedal and buckles his safety belt. But I hope I live to find out.

The seneschal turns to look at him, surprised. Sigrud points the auto at its knees.

Then the world leaps, and he’s hurtling into the steering wheel of his auto, and glass is flying around him. He catches sight of the seneschal tumbling backward, smashing into a lamppost, but he’s snapped around too fast to really see.

Finally, things stop moving. The world seems to have reorganized itself: the auto is now lying on its passenger side, Flame is gone from his hand, and his chest aches like he took a fierce punch to the solar plexus. Sigrud blinks, coughs, unbuckles himself, and kicks the driver’s-side door open. He tumbles out to see the seneschal lying sideways in the street, slowly gathering itself.

Ivanya sprints over to him and helps drag him away from the scene. “What in hells!” she says. “What in all the hells! Did you plan that?”

“No,” says Sigrud. “What is happening?”

“The end of the world,” says Ivanya. “As far as I understand i—”

All sound fades before she can finish her sentence. Sigrud shoves her aside just as the black spear comes hurtling down, effortlessly piercing the road where she stood. The black seneschal leaps over them, pulls the spear out, and turns to face Sigrud, twirling its weapon like a baton.

Sigrud rolls over, then stands, Flame leaping to his hand. He grins at the seneschal. “Hello again,” he says, though the words make no sound.

The seneschal shudders in rage and slashes the spear out at him. Sigrud dodges it and flicks the sword up at the shaft, batting it away. The sword doesn’t destroy the spear, as he hoped it would, but it does seem to have an outsized impact on it, striking it with a force several times greater than he intended, almost knocking the spear from the seneschal’s grasp.

He looks at the faint, golden blade in his hand. So it still has some bite left, he thinks.

The seneschal looks surprised by this, but quickly recovers, whirling around and sending its spear shooting at Sigrud’s right shoulder with a strange speed, as if the point is magnetically attracted to him. Sigrud just barely dodges the attack, bats the spear aside again, and darts inward, into the seneschal’s stance, where he flicks the blade up.

The creature tries to move back, but the blade slashes its right forearm. The silence shudders and quakes, and he knows the thing is screaming in pain. It falls back as Sigrud advances—but he sees that the thing’s arm is healing right before his eyes, the black wound fusing shut. Whatever damage Flame can do to the seneschal, it doesn’t seem to last.

This is bad, thinks Sigrud.

Yet the seneschal is learning, and it doesn’t want to be hit again. It assumes a defensive stance, crouched low with its spear point extended a few feet from its body, preventing Sigrud from getting close. He feints left, right, back and forth, but the seneschal isn’t buying it: it wants him to gamble and try something stupid, at which point it’ll run him through. They’re stuck in a stalemate there in the street, two combatants crouched low, shuffling back and forth.

Ivanya runs around behind the seneschal, waving her hands to get Sigrud’s attention. She’s shouting something, though he can’t hear her. He focuses, trying to read her lips, then understands:

Get it close to the auto.

The seneschal takes advantage of the distraction and strikes at him again. He falls backward, barely evading its thrust, then rises and swings Flame—a miss, not even close. The seneschal leaps back and resumes a defensive stance.

Sigrud glances at his auto, which is still lying on its side. He slowly begins to strafe around the seneschal, positioning himself so he can back it up toward the overturned vehicle.

He takes a risk, flicks his blade at its spear. It deftly dodges the attack and nearly guts him, but he leaps out of the way and brings his sword down hard on the shaft of the spear. The seneschal roars silently in frustration and backs up. Sigrud feints forward once, then again, until the thing’s back is mere feet from the auto….

Sigrud drops to the ground.

The seneschal pauses, confused.

Then Ivanya—who has been hunched down across the street with a rifling trained on the auto’s exposed petrol tank this entire time—finally pulls the trigger.

There’s a blast of wild heat. The silent spell vanishes just as a loud whump batters Sigrud’s ears. The seneschal is blown sideways into a shop front, its writhing black form smashing through the wood and glass.

The heat scalds Sigrud’s feet and legs, which were closest to the car. He sits up and sees his pants are on fire, and dumbly swats at them. Then someone grabs him by the underarms. He looks up to see Ivanya straining to lift him up.

“Come on, dumbass!” she shouts. “Run!”

He flips over and staggers to his feet. He looks over his shoulder as they run away and sees the seneschal stirring in the blown-in shop front.

It isn’t dead, he thinks. Not by a long shot.

Once they’re around a corner—where, he notes, the bloody body of a young boy lies with a hole through its chest—Sigrud hears the screaming. He wonders who else is under attack when he realizes it’s the entire city: the citizens of Bulikov are screaming in naked terror of what’s going on around them, and Sigrud can’t really blame them.

Someone stands and waves a hand from a building front ahead. They sprint over to find Taty crouched in the doorway. “In here!” she whispers.

They run inside. On the first floor, Shara, Malwina, and some young people Sigrud doesn’t recognize are all crouched below the windows, out of sight.

Sigrud lets out a long breath. “Okay,” he says. “Thank goodness. You are all alive.”

“All? Not all,” says Malwina grimly. “Only a fraction of us. I take it your meeting with Olvos didn’t work out?”

“I am not quite sure,” says Sigrud. “She told me many things. But it’s…it’s true what she said, then? The children? Are they…”

“I don’t know what she told you,” says Malwina. “But…yes. We’re all that’s left.”

“I…I did not think she was lying,” he says, shocked. “But to hear it’s true…She would not help, and she spoke in riddles. She seemed to suggest we would still have some way to triumph, though.” He looks out the window at the walls of the black tower that surround the city. “But…I am not sure exactly what the battle is.”

Malwina looks at Shara and sighs. “Do you want to try and explain this, or should I?”

“Let Shara do it,” says Sigrud. “She knows how to explain things to me.”

Shara coughs. “We have to get Malwina’s team to the gates,” she says, gesturing to the children behind her, “or where the gates used to be. That thing, the seneschal, is guarding the area. We need to penetrate the enemy’s position, eliminate it, or draw it away. Then it’s in Malwina’s hands.”

“I see,” says Sigrud, nodding. “Then it is very simple.”

“What!” says Malwina. “You didn’t say anything about Nokov killing the skies, or the tower, or the world ending, or anything else!”

“That is because I do not give a shit about that,” says Sigrud. “And we don’t have time for it anyway. Not with that tower getting taller and taller by the second. So—what to do?”

“Bullets didn’t seem to work on it,” says Shara. “Not from what I saw.”

“No,” says Ivanya, “but Sigrud’s sword sure seems to make a dent in it.”

Taty looks at him, bewildered. “Sword? What sword?”

Sigrud sheepishly reaches into the air and produces Flame, which lights up the room with its golden luminescence.

“How did you learn to do that?” says Taty, bug-eyed.

“Never mind that,” says Sigrud. He looks at Malwina. “The sword isn’t as strong as it was, is it? But can it kill the seneschal?”

Malwina grimaces. “It’d have to be a lethal blow. To the heart, to the head. Nothing else will do it. Lop off a limb and it’ll hurt it, sure, but it’ll just grow back.”

Sigrud scratches his chin. He dearly wishes he had his pipe with him, but he seems to have lost it somewhere. “And she does not like me at all…Since I’m the one who originally killed her and everything…” He looks at Taty. “I taught you how to shoot.”

“What?” says Taty, startled.

“I taught you how to shoot,” he says. “And back aboard the aero-tram, you wished to fight. Now is that time. Do you think you can?”

“Sigrud…” says Shara. “She is my daughter, after all. Are you sure that you should b—”

“With all due respect, Shara,” says Sigrud firmly, “I did not ask you.”

Shara blinks. Then she sits back and looks at her daughter with a slightly shocked expression, as if to say—Well. Never mind, then.

“Can you shoot now,” Sigrud asks Taty, “as I taught you?”

“I-I think so,” says Taty.

“Good,” says Sigrud. “I will draw the seneschal away from the stairs and lead it on a chase. Shara, I will need you and Taty to take up a position in the window on the third floor in the building across from the gates. Taty, once it starts chasing me, I need you to shoot it and keep shooting it. It is much faster than I am. I will need you to slow it down as much as you can.”

“Hold on,” asks Ivanya. “Shouldn’t I be the one doing the shooting? I’ve already tangled with the thing.”

“Which brings me to my next question,” says Sigrud, turning to her. “It is not your skill with firearms that I’m thinking about.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said fencing was a time-honored ladies’ sport in Bulikov,” he says. “You said your mother drilled you mercilessly. Do you think you remember what she taught you?”

After checking their gear, they all troop back out into the street in single file, with Sigrud and Ivanya in the lead. Their procession is silent and solemn, warriors young and old trying to come to grips with their situation. Sigrud has seen it before. True fights, real fights, are rarely calculated, choreographed things: they are chaotic, ugly, unpredictable, and quick—lives saved and spent in a handful of screaming seconds. The inexperienced fall first, unprepared for the flurry of action. Today, he knows, will be no different.

Battle never changes, he thinks. Always about territory and terrain. And now, if we are lucky, to take some from our enemy.

Taty and Shara split off from them as they approach the apartment building on the corner. Taty pauses in the empty street, looking back at Sigrud uncertainly.

“Remember to breathe,” says Sigrud. “Remember it is a machine. Remember it does but one thing.”

She nods. Shara, wheezing, locks eyes with Sigrud. “Did you really teach my daughter to shoot, Sigrud?”

“It seemed the right thing to do. I knew nothing else worth teaching.”

Shara smiles. “I don’t think that’s true.” Then she turns and limps toward the apartment building. Sigrud watches as Taty helps her mother into the door and up the stairs.

How much she’s grown up already, he thinks, in what feels like but a handful of days.

Sigrud, Ivanya, and the Divine children wait as they get into position. “Have you had much success fighting that thing before?” asks Malwina.

“Some,” says Sigrud. “But mostly luck.” He glances down at his left hand, looking at the scars there. I wonder, he thinks, will you save me again? Yet he remembers what Olvos said—he is not immortal. If he takes that spear through the throat, no miracle in the world can keep all his blood inside him.

“That thing has the most powerful Divinity in existence behind it,” says Malwina. “Do you know what that means for you?”

Neither Sigrud nor Ivanya say anything.

Malwina looks up, narrowing her eyes as she tries to find Nokov climbing the stairs. “It means the same thing for you as it does for us,” she says softly. “It means we’re dying here today, friends.”

Sigrud shrugs.

“Do you know what I thought when I first met you at the slaughterhouse?” asks Malwina. “I thought you looked like a suicidal person. Throwing yourself into danger with a mad gleam in your eye. I guess you’re getting what you want today.”

“No,” he says. “That day I was fighting because that was all I knew to do. But now I have a reason to fight.”

“Oh, do you?”

Sigrud looks up and sees Taty set up the rifling in the window above, her small, pale face serious and grave. “I have failed so many in my life,” he says. “So many people I was not there for, so many missed opportunities, and so much lost because of it…I will not miss another chance. Not now. Not today.”

“Even if it kills you?” says Malwina.

“We are not dead yet,” says Sigrud. He holds out a hand, concentrates, and finds Flame, its yellow-gold light leaping forth in his hands. “We spend every second fighting, until we have none left.”

He looks at Malwina. She looks back, her eyes fierce. Then she nods. “Okay,” she says quietly. “Okay.”

He squints back up at the windows above. A hand waves out the third-floor window. “Let’s get in position,” he says.

Tatyana Komayd fights a brief thrill of guilt as she clears the floor around the window in the empty apartment on the third floor, shoving aside a desk and knocking over a vase. She opens the window and peers out on the group assembling in the street below, gray and tiny in the queer, faint light. Then she looks at her mother. “I need something to kneel on.”

“I’ll get some pillows,” Shara says.

They set up her nest silently and carefully, like maids arranging the table before everyone comes down to breakfast.

“Is this normal for you, Mother?” asks Taty.

“Normal?” says Shara. “How could it be?”

“Urban warfare,” says Taty, inserting a clip into the rifling. “Fighting street by street from people’s homes. You never did this?”

“I…would say I did this very, very rarely, my dear,” says Shara.

“Very rarely,” says Taty bitterly. She shakes her head as she loads the rifling. “You hid all this from me. You lied to me.”

“You are right to be angry with me,” says her mother, loading an extra clip. “But I would hardly be the first parent to present themselves to their children as they wished themselves to be, rather than as they are.”

“But why?” says Taty. “Why not tell me the truth? Why not be honest with me?”

“Because…” Shara hesitates.

“Tell me now,” says Taty, “because soon we won’t have another chance.”

“Because I grew up in the shadow of hard truths,” says Shara. “I was a child who was raised for war and governing. And I did not like it much. And even though I knew the stakes, I thought…Is it so much to ask that my daughter have a normal life? I just…I just wanted a moment alone, a moment apart for you. A moment when we didn’t have to worry about the outside world, all that history and sorrow waiting for us.” She looks at her daughter, and her eyes are full of tears. “I just wanted you to be what you are now.”

“What’s that?”

“You,” says Shara. “You. A thousand times you. I’m prouder of you than anything I’ve ever done before, Taty. I’m so, so happy that I’ve had the opportunity to say so.”

“I…What?” Taty frowns in confusion. “But…But you killed gods.”

“I am aware of that.”

“And saved the world.”

“That is debatable.”

“And…And opened the Solda River.”

“That was the effort of many,” says Shara. “But it was all as forgettable as teatime to me, in comparison to having you in my life.”

Tatyana Komayd looks at her mother, frail and old and injured. Then, feeling slightly absurd, she places the rifling on the dusty bed beside her. “I’m…I’m sorry for being angry at you.”

“You don’t need to say you’re sorry,” says Shara. “Not ever.”

The two embrace, Taty squeezing her mother very, very lightly.

“Oh, Mother,” says Taty. “What are we going to do?”

“Well,” says Shara. “You’re going to shoot. And I’m going to reload. All right?”

In the street below, Sigrud begins to move.

He sprints across one lane, pistol in his hand, then leaps behind a short brick wall. He waits, rises carefully, peeks over the top, and surveys the scene.

The foot of the black staircase is about three hundred feet away. The seneschal crouches before it like a huge, black beetle laying eggs. Just before the seneschal is a short complex of tenement apartments, low and rambling and disorganized, lots of alleys and passageways. Decent cover, then, and it seems to be evacuated, which is good but expected—waking up and seeing the seneschal out your window would make anyone abandon their property.

He looks back in the direction he came from. Malwina and the other Divine children are slipping through a back alley, sneaking toward the black wall. Once he’s drawn the seneschal away—if he draws the seneschal away, as that thing isn’t stupid—Malwina should be able to get to the gates, and do whatever Divine trickery they need to transport themselves several thousand feet up the wall to face Nokov.

He looks up and sees Taty hunkered down in the window of the apartment building. She’s got the rifling aimed at the seneschal and ready, with Shara crouched beside her with a fresh clip.

He watches her, thinking. Taty, he knows, is an unknown variable. If Malwina dies—which sounds extremely likely, considering what she’s about to do—then she won’t support Shara anymore, and Shara will, as far as he understands it, blink out of existence. And then Taty might “elevate,” ascending to her Divine state—and he has no idea what in the hells that could mean for everyone. Nothing good, probably.

He focuses back on the job. He can’t see Ivanya anymore, which is good. She seemed to accept his task without hesitation. Hopefully she’s ready.

Hopefully they all are.

Sigrud watches the streets. Everything is silent. Everything is still.

He raises a hand. Then he drops it.

Taty opens fire, letting off six quick shots at the seneschal, emptying the rifling. She does a good job, with three shots striking the creature in the chest and shoulders, and one in the head. The seneschal recoils, surprised and irritated: he suspects that, for the seneschal, being hit with rifling rounds is a bit like being stung by a wasp.

As she fires, Sigrud sprints up the street, firing his pistol up at the seneschal, which infuriates it further—but he makes a point of running around it, toward the stairs, as if trying to take advantage of its confusion.

The seneschal, however, is having none of it: it shakes off its pain and frustration, dives to block his path, and lashes out at Sigrud, forcing him to leap back and roll away.

The creature then does what he expected it to do: it hesitates, assuming he’ll summon Flame to force it into a duel again.

But he doesn’t. He keeps rolling, then stands up, fires a haphazard shot at the seneschal, and runs.

Now to see, he thinks, if it will do what I hope it will do.

He tries not to look over his shoulder to check—to do so would give the game away—but he can’t help but sense that the seneschal is keeping its position by the stairs, not at all willing to pursue this irritating man who’s just attacked it even though the man doesn’t appear to have his sword with him anymore….

Then the world goes silent.

I knew you couldn’t resist, he thinks, smiling. You hate me so….

He feels the reverberations in the soil behind him as the creature pursues him, and turns into the warren of tenements just as the seneschal’s spear licks out at him, its point slashing through the wooden walls behind him.

The chase is on, he thinks, sprinting down the alley. Now for Malwina to make it count.

Malwina waits, watching the seneschal. At first she’s sure it won’t take the bait—it’s fairly obvious bait, in her opinion—but the thing apparently hates Sigrud that much, because it springs after him with a silent roar.

Its aura of silence fades as it gives chase. Malwina waves a hand to the other children. “Come on! Now!”

They run down the black walls toward the staircase. It’s a motley crew, that she knows. Malwina doesn’t understand exactly what these Divine children could hope to do against Nokov, but they have to do something—don’t they?

Her eyes cloud over as she reviews the past. She can see the huge towers that once stood at the gates in the old days, and the giant, moving chamber set in the interior of the closest one—a splendid, gorgeous, white-and-gold structure that makes her think of swans in winter.

“Stand right here,” she says to the other children, pointing at the ground. “Are we ready?”

No one says yes, but no one says no either.

“Hold tight,” she says.

She builds a bubble of the past around them, and pushes them back….

Suddenly they’re standing in the chamber, surrounded by tall, broad men in flowing, golden robes, their faces hale and hearty, their teeth white and clean—not at all the Bulikovians Malwina grew up seeing. They talk amongst themselves in hushed tones, debating the will of the Divine, the wend and weft of creation. They are creatures of optimism, and ignorance: ignorance of what is happening in Saypur in their era, all the misery and slaughter their luxury breeds, and ignorance of the destruction it will bring down on their heads.

The men ignore Malwina and the other Divine children, creatures of the past blind to the chaos of the present. The white chamber begins hurtling up, up, up through the tall spire.

The Divine days of old, she thinks. Would I wish to go back to this, and live only here, living the past over and over again?

One thousand feet. Two thousand feet. More.

No, she thinks. She shuts her eyes. Because then I would have never met Tavaan.

She opens her eyes. Now. Now!

She pops the bubble of the past around them. For a moment they all keep continuing up, just a few feet—but then they begin falling, crashing into the broad, black staircase that’s suddenly appeared below them. As they recover, Malwina looks up and takes stock of their circumstances.

They seem to be about a mile or two above the city, whose buildings are a clutch of gray architectural anarchy below. It’s freezing cold up here—she can see ice forming on the walls.

Then she sees Nokov.

It’s hard not to see him. Tall as a tree, eyes like holes in space, a broad, swaying, shadow-flecked figure slowly advancing up the stairs toward them, his every movement thrumming with power.

“Oh, man,” whispers one of the children next to Malwina.

“Quiet,” she snaps. “Stand up. And get ready for him.”

“What are we supposed to do?” asks another.

“He’s distracted by building the tower,” says Malwina. “He won’t be as strong as he could be, in other words. Knock his ass off these stairs. Anything we can do to keep him from taking another step is a victory.”

A nervous silence falls over them as they take their positions. Malwina’s hands won’t stop making fists, her knuckles white with strain.

Nokov slows as he sees them, his black, glittering brow wrinkled in puzzlement. “Oh,” he says quietly. His voice doesn’t seem to come from his mouth, Malwina notes, but rather from the walls, as if the entire tower is speaking.

“We’re not going to let you do this, Nokov!” says Malwina.

He takes another step. “There’s little you can do against me.”

“Little it may be,” says Malwina. “But we’re going to do it anyway.”

“Do you wish it to end this way?”

“If it has to, yes.”

He cocks his head. “Were your lives just? Content? Happy? I will remake reality now. I will make it better. I will fix it. All the wrongs we lived under will be righted. I promise you this.” He extends a hand. “You can join me, you know. Be a part of me. Come into the night, and I will show you greatness.”

“You’re not some savior, Nokov,” says Malwina. “And you’re not some justified rebel, avenging past wrongs.”

“No?” says Nokov.

“No. You’re just some fucking selfish kid who thinks his misfortunes are bigger than everyone else’s, and you’re taking it out on everyone around you. You’re not special. If I lined all the people like you up, you’d go around the world twice. We’re just unlucky enough that you happened to be able to actually do something about it, and unluckier still that you were stupid enough to try!”

Nokov blinks, outraged. Then he begins to tremble. “I’ll kill you last,” he hisses. “I’ll kill you last.”

Malwina smiles. “Try it.”

He leaps at them.

As Sigrud sprints through the alleys the sky above erupts with thunder, or something a lot like thunder—it sounds a little louder and sharper than the thunder he’s used to hearing, and it doesn’t seem to echo as much. But the really odd thing is that with the seneschal chasing him, everything should be silent—yet that particular sound breaks through.

He knows he should be focused on trying to avoid the seneschal, but he takes a moment to glance up….

The space at the top of the tower is flashing with light. Light of many colors—reds, blues, greens, and some other colors that his eye can’t quite interpret correctly.

So that’s what a Divine battle looks like, he thinks. He’s glad he’s several thousand feet below it—though he does hope nothing comes raining down on them.

He can feel the seneschal behind him, feel its feet pounding the concrete alleys. Sigrud takes a gamble and dives through a window in one of the tenement homes, breaking through the glass and the frame. He crouches next to the wall, waiting. He can feel the seneschal’s footsteps; he knows it’s close. His right shoulder starts hurting again, aching powerfully….

The spear smashes through the wall of the home. Sigrud drops to the floor, but it’s not fast enough: the spear comes hurtling at his chest, and stops only a few feet away. He sees that the seneschal happened to break through a tenement wall with a lot of plumbing in it, and has been slowed down by the pipes. If it had completely broken through, it would have managed to extend its thrust a handful of feet farther, and probably run him through.

Sigrud doesn’t wait to see more. He rolls over, scrambles through the bedroom door, and flies out the front window, turning east down the street toward the trap they laid.

But this is bad. It’s bad because it seems like the seneschal can track him, somehow, like it can sense where he is, which means eluding it will be impossible. And he’s starting to think that he knows how it’s tracking him: the spear point was speeding toward a certain spot on his right breast, the spot that aches terribly whenever the seneschal is near….

The distant skies echo with crashes, bangs, cries, and shouts.

Whatever Malwina is doing up there, he thinks, I hope she wins, and soon. He turns down the next alley, hopefully leading the seneschal onto the final leg of their trap. Because I am less and less certain this will work.

Taty narrows her eyes, watching the tops of the tenements down the sights of her rifling. Her right shoulder aches from the recoil, but then she sees the seneschal pop up, and forgets all her pain.

She puts the sights on it and fires. She hits it in the shoulder and it seems to stumble very slightly for a fraction of a second—but hopefully a fraction of a second that Sigrud can use.

“He’s headed toward Ivanya,” says Shara. “I think.”

“Yes.” Taty fires again, this one a miss. “Will he make it?”

“I don’t know,” says Shara.

Taty fires again—the last round in the clip. The empty clip comes shooting out with a ping. “Next one,” she says, extending a hand.

Her mother passes a full clip over. Taty pushes it in until the bolt smoothly slides into place, chambering the top round. She raises the rifling to her shoulder, but then pauses, noticing her mother’s gaze and her broad smile.

“What are you looking at?” Taty asks.

“Nothing,” says Shara. “I just…I just want to remember this. To keep this. We lose so much. I hope I keep this.”

“Keep it until what?” asks Taty.

Shara looks away, face now clouded. “Nothing. Nothing.”

Sigrud makes another corner, now sprinting down the main street that runs along the black wall, back toward the foot of the staircase. He needs to get into position before the yellow brick tenement on the corner, and soon—but the seneschal isn’t running the route he needs it to. He was hoping it’d take the alley running through the tenements, but because it seems to know how to track him, it’s not bothering with this complication, and is instead making for the main road, looking to cut around and through.

He eyes the brick tenement on the corner, its sides painted bright yellow, and the window on the second floor. The seneschal rounds the corner, its spear low, its silence thrumming.

Sigrud considers his options—maybe lead it back down into the warren of tenements?—but he knows there’s no time. He sprints toward the yellow brick building, knowing full well he won’t make it.

Not even with Taty shooting will he make it.

Taty sits up straight. “Something’s wrong.” She aims and fires, hits the seneschal in the belly, but it keeps coming.

“I know,” says Shara.

“He’s too exposed!” says Taty.

“I know!” says Shara.

Taty pulls the trigger, and there’s a click. She blinks and looks down at the rifling. “Misfire!” she cries. “Shit!” She watches in horror as Sigrud sprints down the street, small and tiny before the black form of the seneschal.

“Oh, no,” she says. “Oh, no…”

Shara sits up and looks out the window, her face calm and watchful.

A hundred feet from the tenement. Fifty. He feels the ground shaking with the steps of the seneschal behind him.

Please, Ivanya, he thinks. Please be ready….

Impossibly, he makes it to the yellow brick wall, but he can see from the shadows over his shoulder that the seneschal is going to cut him off, keeping him from escaping down the next alley.

He whirls around, hoping he can perhaps leap aside and dodge under the seneschal’s stance, but…

A flash of darkness.

It’s close, he sees. Too close.

The spear flies at him.

There’s a crunch sound. His right side goes numb.

Sigrud tries to stumble back, but finds he can’t. He can’t move.

He stupidly looks around for the source of the sound, and sees that it came from behind him, where the spear has penetrated the brick wall.

He looks down.

He sees that the spear hit the wall after passing cleanly through his right breast, beside his shoulder. Right where it left that dark little spot just a few days ago.

Sigrud tries to breathe and finds he can’t. His chest is bright with pain.

The seneschal crouches low, its featureless face staring into his own. He can’t help but get the sense that it is wickedly gleeful in its victory.

And it is victory, he knows. Sigrud je Harkvaldsson has seen enough mortal blows to know that this is one.

“No!” screams Taty from the window. “No, no, no!” She drops the rifling, going white as the seneschal impales Sigrud, pinning him to the wall.

Beside her, Shara Komayd silently stands and begins walking downstairs.

The seneschal leans close to him, its silence now an odd purr he can feel in his bones.

He coughs and manages to laugh. He grins at the thing. He hopes she can read his lips as he says, “Don’t get too close. I don’t want to get nicked when she guts you.”

The seneschal cocks its head and looks up…

Just in time to see Ivanya leap from the second-floor window of the tenement, Flame in her hands.

The strike is strong and true. The edge bites through the seneschal’s neck as if it were but a switch of straw.

The head of the seneschal strikes the ground with a loud thump—which means, he dimly realizes, that sound has returned.

The seneschal’s tall, spindly body follows, collapsing before him like a suspension bridge. Ivanya falls beside the carcass, rolling as she lands, but he can tell the fall was rough, maybe spraining or breaking an ankle. She turns to look at him, sees him impaled on the wall, and her mouth opens in horror.

Sigrud tastes blood in his mouth. He tries to smile. “You…You did a very good job,” he says. His voice is a whisper.

“Oh, no,” says Ivanya.

Malwina lies on the black staircase, beaten and bloody and faint. She knew it would be hard. But not this hard.

She looks up to see Nokov run through one of the Divine children with nothing more than a finger, as if his digit were a rapier, then turn and snatch another Divine child out of the air and stuff it into his huge, black maw. Malwina slowly realizes that she is now the only one left—Nokov has proven too strong, too shifting, too mutable, too powerful for them to even make a mark on him.

“I thought I would enjoy this more,” says Nokov. He lifts his finger, the Divine child hanging limp from his knuckle, and stuffs her into his mouth. “But none of you are even much of a challen—”

Then Nokov sits up straight like he’s just heard a terrible sound. He whirls and stares down at the city below. “No,” he whispers. “No, no! Not Mishra, not Mishra!”

It’s at this moment that Malwina summons up all her strength and uses the trick that she’s been sitting on for a while. She’d wished to do it before, but Nokov was too slippery, too fast—yet now he sits stock-still, peering over the side of the staircase in dismay.

Lightning is a curious thing. Most lightning is cloud-to-cloud lightning, dancing through the air. If one were to look back through history, picking a random spot in the skies, and wonder how many times, say, one cubic foot of atmosphere had lightning course through it, the number of instances would be quite extraordinarily high—and the cumulative amount of electricity would be nothing short of inconceivable.

Malwina focuses, and tracks down all the lightning that has ever passed through the spot of air that currently happens to be occupied by Nokov’s head.

She focuses more, and makes past and present twist, just slightly.

Nokov’s skull lights up with a luminescence brighter than a million suns. The force is so great that it blows him forward, shooting him down off of the staircase like he’s been fired out of a cannon, leaving a trail of black smoke in his wake.

Malwina leans over the edge and screams, “That was for Tavaan, you piece of shit!”

Nokov hurtles down toward the city, but his black form slows after about three or four hundred feet. She can see him righting himself, floating above the city, and he turns to look up at her, his face still smoking.

When he speaks, the walls and stairs vibrate with each word. “That,” he says, “was quite tricky.”

Sigrud tugs at the spear lodged in his right breast, but it doesn’t move. He knows this is the wrong thing to do anyway, since removing the spear will likely cause him to bleed out, but he can’t stop himself from trying. It’s as if he has a piece of food stuck in his teeth and he can’t stop tonguing it.

Ivanya rises and comes to him. “No, no…Don’t. Don’t, Sigrud, you’ll just make it worse.”

“It…It doesn’t hurt that much,” he says to her, his words thick and slow.

“You’re in shock. You don’t know what’s happening.” She looks at his back, where the spear protrudes and enters the brick wall. “Oh, by the seas…Oh, no, Sigrud, oh, no.”

He tries to say, “I saw a man get impaled with a tree when I worked as a logger, and he survived for six hours with the trunk lodged in him,” but he briefly blacks out, and the words are lost to him.

There’s a tremendous boom from above and the world fills up with bright, white light. Sigrud blinks in confusion, wondering if this is what dying feels like. But then the light recedes, and the world coalesces into sense again, though it bursts and warps with blue-black bubbles as his eyes adjust.

Though something has changed: he sees there is someone standing across the street from him. It’s Shara, watching him with solemn eyes.

She limps across the street to him. “I’m so sorry, Sigrud,” she says.

“What was that?” he asks her. He coughs. “Shara, what was that noise? Did we win?”

She shakes her head. “No. I…I thought maybe they’d find a way. But no, we have not won. Not yet.” Her face crumples as she gets close. “Oh, Sigrud…Oh, Sigrud. Look at you.”

“It’s…It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says, trying to smile. He feels his face trembling. His legs are giving out, which means he’s leaning more and more on the spear, causing terrible pain.

Shara is standing before him now. How old her face looks, how weary. Yet there’s a resolve there he never saw before.

“It’s time to do my part. The last step in this long dance. But the most dangerous one by far.” Shara reaches forward and takes his black knife from his holster on his thigh. Ivanya moves forward to say something, but stops herself, hesitant.

Sigrud coughs. Blood comes spilling from his lips. “What do you mean?”

“I let Vohannes sacrifice himself to a god for me once here, long ago,” says Shara, “and now I stand before yet more sacrifices. It’s not right, is it?” Shara looks up, the lenses of her glasses reflecting the light of a nearby lamppost. “No. It’s not. Now it’s time for me to give.” Her head moves very slightly as she looks at the window above, where Tatyana watches them. “To give the last thing I have left.”

“What are you doing, Shara?” he whispers.

She kisses him on his brow. “She’ll need guidance,” she says. “She’ll need help. Don’t let her do anything too rash—if you can, Sigrud. If you can.” Then she walks to the foot of the black staircase.

She stands there for a moment, gathering herself.

She says, “We are all but moments.”

Then she raises his knife and screams, “Nokov! Nokov, son of Jukov! I demand you come to me!”

Nokov, smoking and furious, begins to fly up to Malwina, surely to crush her like a bug. Yet then he freezes, head cocked. He turns around and looks back down at Bulikov.

“No,” he whispers. “No, no, it can’t be….I had you killed, I know I had you killed!”

He whirls and streaks back down the city in a bolt of darkness.

Taty goes sheet-white as her mother begins screaming to the sky. “What is she doing?” she asks faintly. “What is she doing?”

She turns and dashes down the stairs.

His coming is like black lightning, like all of the wrath of a thunderstorm channeled into one being. The streetlights of Bulikov flicker and blink, struggling against the sea of darkness brought by his coming. The shadows tremble, quake, and shiver—and then he is there.

Nokov, great and terrible, standing in the streets of the city with a confused look on his face as he stares down at the small woman with snow-white hair, knife in her hand.

Shara Komayd looks up at him, her gaze fierce and steady. “Nokov,” she says. “How long I have wished to meet you face-to-face. After all these years, I find you don’t look much like the picture I found in Vinya’s files. Not too much, at least.”

“This…This isn’t possible,” says Nokov faintly. “I had you killed. I-I had you killed just like I did your aunt….”

“I’ve been learning,” says Shara. She steps closer to him. Nokov glances at her black blade and steps back a little. “I’ve been learning from your father, specifically.”

“My what?” says Nokov, stupefied.

“Jukov was a clever creature,” says Shara. “His backup plans had backup plans.” She takes another step forward. “We thought he was dead. We thought you and all your siblings were dead. Wise to learn from him, then, and trick you into assuming the same of me.”

Nokov takes another step back, away from Sigrud, and Ivanya and Taty’s nest. “This doesn’t change anything,” he says. “I’m…I’m still the last Divinity, I’m still going to kill the skies.”

“And you thought my black lead was gone too,” says Shara. She holds up the knife. “You thought you’d stolen it from me.”

“I-I did!” says Nokov. He stares at Sigrud’s black knife. “I know I did! That’s not…It’s not—”

“But you never knew how much I had in the first place,” says Shara. She takes another step forward. “This is the problem with you and your family—Jukov was so damnably clever that he was actually quite stupid.”

Nokov’s face twists, and suddenly he’s no longer a fearsome, powerful Divinity, but an adolescent trying to control himself after a playground insult. “Shut up!”

“He trapped himself with Kolkan,” says Shara. “And he went mad….”

Nokov falls back another step, but now he’s shaking with fury. “You shut up!”

“And when they emerged, twisted together, and I faced them, seeing them broken and bitter,” says Shara, “do you know what they asked me?”

“Leave me alone!” says Nokov.

“They asked me,” says Shara, her voice growing, “to take my black lead, and draw it across their throats. They begged me to kill them.”

“You and your aunt, you…I hate you so much, I hate you so much!”

“They said they didn’t even want to be Divinities anymore.”

“You’re lying!” cries Nokov.

“I’m not,” says Shara. “You know I’m not.” She takes another step. “It’s fitting, then, that you’re going to die the same way.” She lifts the knife. “Just as pathetic as your father. He imprisoned himself in a box of his own making. And now, Nokov, I’ll put you in a bo—”

Nokov roars with fury and lashes out at her in a desperate, wild strike.

Shara whirls around. She stands still for a moment.

There’s a dim tink as Sigrud’s knife falls to the ground. Shara follows, falling to her knees.

The top of her dress grows a dark, dark red, stained by the blood flowing from her throat.

She looks up, smiling faintly, looking first at Sigrud, then down the street, beyond him. It’s a curious expression, both apologetic and encouraging, regretful but hopeful, wistful and yet full of sorrow.

She collapses—and then she’s gone. She vanishes as if she’d never been there at all.

Nokov stares down at where she was, bewildered. “What?” he says. “What…What was that?”

Then comes the sound of screaming down the street, the high, tinny shrieks of a young woman in horror.

Sigrud looks up as he hears Taty screaming. He can see her, he thinks, standing in the street just a block down from him. Even though he feels faint, he can’t help but feel the urge to go to her, to run to her, to comfort her in her moment of grief.

But then her shrieks…change. They grow deeper. Older.

Stranger.

As if it weren’t one girl screaming, but hundreds of them, thousands of them, all overlaid on top of one another.

Then the streets fill up with a bright, bright white light, as if a star has burst into life right there in the middle of the road.

He hears Ivanya screaming nearby, shouting, “What in hells is going on?”

The screaming continues, but the light fades. He opens his eye to see Taty floating there, hanging above the street, arms and legs splayed out and her face lifted to the sky. Even Nokov seems astonished by this turn of events, looking on with a confused expression.

The screaming stops. Taty slowly, slowly floats down to the ground. She crouches there for a moment, head bowed, hair falling in front of her face.

Then she speaks, whispering, “I…I…remember.”

And for some reason her words hurt Sigrud’s ears, or perhaps his mind. At first he thinks they seem to come all at once, but that’s not quite right—rather, it’s as if the words he’s hearing haven’t been spoken yet, like he’s hearing words that will be spoken, perhaps in the next second, or the second after that, and this queer, schizophrenic feeling is breaking him.

Ivanya leans toward her. “Taty?” she asks nervously. “Taty, is that you?”

The girl stands, her face still obscured by her hair. “No,” she says. “No, it’s not.” Then she raises her head and screams up at the tower above, “Tulvos! Tulvos, daughter of the past, do you remember? I remember! I remember everything now!”

Nokov’s jaw drops. Then he snarls and springs at her, “I know you now! I know who you are, I know who you’ve been all along!”

He’s too late, too far away. Taty—or whomever she is now—springs up into the air and shoots up, flying straight for the far wall, right for where the Divine battle was taking place just a few seconds ago.

And as she nears it, things…slow down.

Nokov, who was a shadowy streak mere feet behind Taty, slows until he hangs in the sky, a black insect trapped in amber.

Ivanya, who was turning to look up, slows until she’s stationary, her hair frozen in a peculiar position, like the hair of a woman swimming underwater.

Sigrud looks around, panting. It’s very hard to stay conscious now, but he can see specks of dust hanging in the air, distant Bulikovians frozen in mid-stride as they sprint away, even a nearby moth suspended below a streetlight, its delicate white wings caught in mid-flap.

“Ivanya,” he whispers, choking. “Ivanya, what…what is going on?”

She doesn’t answer. She hangs in space, suspended and still.

Taty’s voice rings out above him, as loud and furious as thunder, “Daughter of the past, do you know me? Do you know me, Tulvos, do you know me? Do you remember when we were one? Do you remember what they did to us? Do you remember who we were?”

And instantly, Sigrud understands.

He understands why Shara was lying to him in the sanctum. He understands why she wished to stay alive, why she wanted to delay her daughter’s elevation.

He understands who the maimed Divine child was, the one whose domain was so vast it threatened all the original Divinities.

He remembers Olvos saying to him: Soon the walls will grow and the dawn will be threatened. And time, as always, will remain our deadliest foe.

Sigrud’s mind whirls. What if the maimed Divine child wasn’t just maimed? He twists his head up, ignoring the brutal, horrible pain, and tries to look at Taty as she grows close to Malwina. What if it was split in two? Split into two different people, who were never permitted to be close to each other, forced to forget about each other, otherwise all of creation would be threatened…

“They’re time,” he says weakly. He blinks, growing faint. “Past and future, each halves of a whole. They’re time itself.”

His head is too heavy. He lets it fall. Then he shuts his eye, and things grow dark.