The Hound turned its wrist and studied the harvest in its palm.
Spear-teeth—dozens—clicked together like cruel wind chimes. It lowered its great head and breathed on them. Heat lacquered bone to a glossy, hateful sheen. From the far side of the cliff we felt that breath arrive as a kitchen-memory made cathedral—an oven door opening on the world. Threads of saliva swung from its jaw and fell; where each drop touched stone, the hardpan blistered, sagged, and slumped into glass that cracked itself trying to cool.
"Is it— is it blessing them?" a Wyre private said, voice shaking.
"Back ranks give to front—shield low, eyes up—" an officer started, then forgot how sentences worked.
The Hound didn't savour. It set its shoulders to the horizon. The arm went back. The valley went tight.
Thoom.
The throw made the world flinch. The fist opened and the first handful of burning teeth turned into a sky—red-hot lances tumbling end-over-end, drawing cursive across daylight.
They arrived.
The front of our column ceased to be a column. The first tooth punched through a running knot at the crown of the road and buried itself in the earth, blooming a round, obscene flower of light. Air whoomphed and kicked. Bodies stopped like lamps in rain. Behind them, men dropped with their arms over their heads as heat emptied their lungs of permission. Another tooth sank into a pocket where litters had been set down wrong; the blast took poles, bodies, straps, and the idea of organization, and made a crater whose rim was ringed with gear that would never be lifted again.
"Names! Call names!" a captain bellowed, voice breaking. "If you hear your name—"
"Faris! Faris!" someone screamed.
"Here— I'm— no— here—" another answered until a second blast replaced the rest of his sentences.
"Keep the crown! Keep—!" a Lydia sergeant yelled, then coughed flame into his own hands.
A tooth missed a woman by two paces, hit low, and blew her backward with two others into a tangle of limbs and ash. One of them got up and walked carefully without his scream, as if he could come back for it later. He could not.
"Water! Not on the burns—carry, don't pour!" a healer shouted, the kind of voice that had children once.
More fell. Not a line—weather. A hail made of single decisions. Each impact bit the ground and opened a small sun. The ditch boiled. The scrub lit. The road lifted and thumped back down like a heart trying to leave a body.
Nhilly realized he was sitting down only when his hands told him they were bracing him.
His legs had folded. He'd become a child after a shove: palms behind, chin forward, eyes glass-wide. The Hound's silhouette was clean against the cliff; where the first barrage had struck, fire wrote tiger stripes over a field now learning to be a crater garden. The smoke hugged low to the ground like a mean idea. His ears were bells. The world had shrunk to hot light and the shape of that arm lifting again.
"Orders! Find him— Great Hero— where— where—" a Wyre captain coughed himself sideways, blind in the smoke. "Where is—"
"Back centre— blown right— clear the blown!" a Lydia voice answered from the throat and not the head.
Celeste was already running.
He saw the green on her like a tight dress of law. Her mouth worked—his name, his name—and the bells in his skull made it theatre without sound. She vaulted debris with the efficiency of a habit you hate. The outline along her limbs pulsed—fours, always fours—brightening as she spent herself faster than minutes would allow.
The Hound admired its first brushstroke and dipped for paint again.
It turned to the left and threw.
If despair could be scheduled, it would look like that minute.
The left flank broke before the teeth arrived—not cowardice, comprehension. Men ran because the equation finally wrote itself big enough to read. The first blasts pulped a squad of Wyre skirmishers into an unkindness laid over their own gear. A litter team tried to angle out and saw a tooth coming; one man yanked the poles, turned the litter sideways, and took the blast with his body so the patient wouldn't. Love was stupid and exact and mortal. It still wasn't enough.
"On me! On—" an officer kept calling, and when the wind shifted there was only a helm where his voice had been.
"White! White!" someone shouted out of old courage, and three flags rose to be seen by no one who could use them.
Teeth that missed by yards still served their purpose: struck, opened the world, turned dirt to glass and then to shrapnel. Even our cries degraded, becoming a language, we would never teach a child. The road bucked again. Heat rolled like the ocean you drown in standing up.
Nhilly's mind ran small circles. The woman in the car telling him that Clearing Scenarios is impossible. He wanted to laugh—not because jokes lived here but because vanity had been tidy back when he chose it. He had believed in the little ladder to the big act. He had believed you could rehearse your escape.
No laugh came. He arranged his mouth around the idea anyway because there was still one audience he would not dismiss. Celeste was coming, and he wanted her to see a shape that would put steel in her wrists. He wanted to put on a good ending, not for the Constellations, let them choke on their box-seats, but for the woman whose hands turned air into armour.
Perhaps it wasn't so bad, the idea of dying. For years, he had wanted it, the right flavour of sleep. Only here, in this end-coloured air, some dishonest piece of him flapped in his ribs like a trapped bird when he pictured being done. Breath was suddenly precious to him, breath was suddenly art. That offended him and then moved him and then shamed him and then he forgave himself all in the space of one heartbeat.
If there's an afterlife, maybe Seris would be waiting, arms folded, pretending she wasn't proud, and Kael would be fox-mouthed and mean and say, "Boring, Nhilly. You picked a boring death." He almost smiled for real at that.
"Of course not," he corrected himself gently, because the truth is a kind of prayer. "They were good. Good goes where good goes." Whatever took him would be black and honest and empty. Maybe his mother would be there. Maybe she would pretend not to know him for a minute and then pull him into the kind of hug that makes boys remember they were once small.
Celeste's green was close now, close enough to paint his cheek with light.
He turned his head so she could see him smiling. Take this. Make something cruel with it. You were given the right power and the wrong world. I would have used it only on myself. You use it on the world.
Tears had cut clean lines through her dust. She was shouting something the shape of his name, the shape of an order, the shape of a promise, and the bells kept it outside the house of him. He wanted her voice in his head once more, just once, to live there like a matchbook. He wanted a small thing, finally.
Behind her, the Hound wound up exactly for their lane.
"Where's the Hero?!" an officer howled into smoke. "Where— answer if you hear me!— answer—"
"Up! Up!" another screamed at the same time. "No—down—no—" Doctrine argued with terror and lost both debates.
Men ran past, lit from the front as though the day itself were on fire. One boy had both hands lifted to his face like a priest begging the sky to blink, a tooth took him through the shoulder and turned his prayer into steam and light.
Nhilly pushed himself upright.
Not standing, he sat cross-legged, tidy, as if a teacher had asked for quiet bodies. His spine made a line the wind could understand. He raised his right arm. He made a fist. Maybe, he thought, or yes. The gesture was so small you had to decide what it meant. That, too, was a mercy.
The Hound threw.
The sky filled with teeth.
They came in at different heights; some to spear and sing, some to land and then choose to be bombs, some to skip like stones that set fire to water. The sound braided, a high scream riding a low freight hum, the two shivering against each other until they decided to be one terrible music.
"Down!" someone screamed, full, raw.
"Don't!" someone else screamed, because down meant something different now.
"Mother!" a voice cracked in a man who had sworn never to say that word in daylight. "Mother—"
"Cel—" he mouthed, because the name fit behind his teeth and because if he said the whole of it the hour might become kinder, which is not how hours work.
She was nearly on him, and the green along her arms brightened with the same terrible tenderness as a midwife's hands.
He closed his eyes so the last picture he kept would be the outline of her, furious and holy and wronged by the day, coming toward him without saving a step for herself.
He let the bells in his skull become a hymn without words.
He smiled, small and exact, a man too stubborn to bow and too tired to stand, an actor giving his favourite scene to an audience of one.
His fist stayed raised.
The barrage came down.