The field burned like a map someone had tried to erase with fire and breath. Craters glowed at the rims, pulsing, glass at the edges still sagging and cracking as it decided what it wanted to be. Smoke crawled low, greedy, and the wind pushed it in slow bellies over men and women who were still trying to be vertical. A few crawled, leaving shin-bright tracks where their palms polished the dust; a few staggered, half-blind, shirts smoking at the seams. Someone crawled with only one sleeve left and used the empty arm like a lever. Someone else held a friend's belt with his teeth and dragged him a yard, then another, then let go when his own breath ran out and took him back.
Orders had melted. Words were shapes in the throat that came out as coughs and names. "Mira—Mira—" from somewhere that used to be a left flank. "Here—here—" from a mouth that didn't know where here was anymore. A flag lay in a shallow puddle and tried to be a white river. A healer screamed at a boy not to pour water on a burn and then did it herself, weeping, because love isn't a doctrine in a minute like this.
Nhilly's eyes were closed.
He had kept them that way, very carefully, for the length of two thoughts and a prayer he didn't believe in. The barrage had hit. He felt no pain. No heat. No punctuation where his body ended. He had been killed clean, then. Good. He could be done with it. When he opened his eyes, there would be an afterlife, black and honest, maybe with his mother in it. Or nothing at all, which would also be honest.
He opened them.
Hell was exactly where he'd left it.
The sky was a grey lid. The smell was cooked iron and hair and old sweat. His hands were his hands, filthy. Down his forearms, faint as the idea of veins under skin, a green pulsing traced him—outlines blinking themselves thinner with every breath. The recognition climbed him like cold water poured into boots. He looked, didn't understand; looked again, and the understanding dropped a floor in him.
His ears had stopped ringing. The world returned like a bad habit. His face made a face humans shouldn't make.
"Nhilly."
A whisper, as if someone were being taught how to whisper and wanted to do it properly.
He turned his head very slowly, because there are turns you cannot make quickly and remain a person. She was there, five paces away, no—closer; everything was closer now. He saw her once, saw it all, turned away in a violent smallness that wanted to edit the hour, then turned back, because you cannot love and refuse the page.
Celeste lay wrong on the ground. The world had come in on a bias and taken most of her right side with it, neat as a butcher who hates a wasteful cut. Half her chest was open to air that had no right to see it. The barrier's green had gone into him; what little law remained on her fluttered at the edges like ribbon in a draft and then died. Blood had written the first sentence and was now too tired to finish the paragraph.
She lifted her remaining hand—trembling, correct—and touched his cheek with it. The hand was cold and very clean the way hands are clean when the body has other concerns. "Come closer," she said, voice like paper being turned. "I wanted to tell you when we were back on Earth. But it doesn't look like… that's going to happen now."
He slid to her on his knees like a dog that had been called finally by its true name. He lifted her, gentle, into his lap so she wouldn't choke on what her own body was doing to her. He was breathing too fast and then faster, head jerking with little dog-denials as if those could make physics change its mind. "Don't," he said, trying to hold her together with voice. "Don't say things like that. Survive. We'll get help. Hey—HEY! —over here! Help! HELP!"
The field answered with the sound of a new volley farther off and the considerate, enormous silence between blasts that is where prayers go to be told no.
"Nhilly," she said again, coughing a little, the cough that uses up a life's worth of strength for no purchase. "Please. The thing… I know you'll hate me for this. I just wanted to be selfish, Nhilly. Just once. You said I had one sin left, so I used it to protect the man I love. I love you, Nhilly."
He looked down. He looked down at Celeste, at what was left of her, at what was too much. His head swam; the skull was not built to hold this arrangement of facts. For someone who had been alone so long he had become a room with no doors, being told he was loved—here, like this, now—was a torture that made clean death look like manners.
His mouth opened and the words came wrong and then exactly.
"I don't understand.... Why, why, why, putting your life on the line for someone else" Nhilly shouting now "Throwing your life away for someone else" "Running into danger without thinking for someone else, I don't understand I don't understand, I won't understand any of it, You don't know me, You don't know me, How can you possibly be in love with me, who am I, who am I, who are you in love with. Answer me, Celeste.
Tears rushed down his face like a river. He could not tell if she heard any of it. He could not tell if she had already gone before the cruelty of his honesty arrived. Or if it arrived like the last nail, neat and correct, finishing the coffin the hour had built together with her body.
He folded over her and wept with a child's sound, jaw off its hinge, the noise a boy makes the first time he learns that the world does not apologize. He had killed so cleanly for so long that he had begun to believe himself a surgeon. This was butcher's work. His tears dropped onto her hair and vanished into it as if hair could drink grief.
A tooth fell a long way off. The ground said yes to it and made a new sun.
—
Elsewhere in the smoke a Wyre private staggered, hands out. "Garet! Where are you? Garet!" He was not brave. He was ordinary in the way that saves cities if you stack enough of it together.
"Here," came a voice that should have been louder—a voice under something heavy. He scrabbled at a slab of road stone—two men's width—burning his palms and then not feeling it anymore. "Garet—don't move—don't—"
"I'm pinned, idiot," Garet said, affection present even here. Two more voices answered under the same stone—one whispering a prayer to a god he did not believe in, one apologizing for stepping on someone's fingers. "Go," Garet warned. "You won't—"
"I'm not leaving you," the private said, the way men who have seen thirty winters tell jokes, as if the weather will be moved by tone. He prised a spear from a dead hand and jammed it under the slab like a lever and leaned his whole thin life on it. "On three. One—two—"
A shadow went over them. They didn't look up. They had learned that looking up was a form of poetry that cost you hands.
The tooth landed somewhere left and forward and the shock kicked the slab. The private fell; the slab obligingly fell with him. Dust ruled. When the private could breathe again he was staring at Nhilly—at a small dark stitch rising slow, then faster, toward the cliff.
"You're crazy!" someone shouted at the stitch. "Run!"
"Hero!" someone else shouted, because men will use the word when they don't know what else to feed the hour.
Nhilly didn't answer. He was done with people's names for him. The word in his chest now didn't have letters. It had an edge.
He set Celeste down with a reverence that hurt to watch and closed his hand around the sword as if it might decide to be something else if he didn't hold it until his knuckles went white. He stood up without standing; Float took him with the reluctance of a mule that has learned a man's habits and disapproves. He rose. The field fell away into a painting he would not keep. He cleared the smoke's low roof and came into a day that was wrong and very clean.
The cliff face waited. He reached its lip and stepped onto it.
The Hound was there, entire.
It had turned its face a fraction toward the road to admire the way the second barrage had practiced across it; now it turned the fraction back. It regarded Nhilly without hurry. Heat made the air between them ripple as if someone were stirring an invisible pot. It did not sniff. It did not posture. It simply arranged its expression the way a man arranges a chair before sitting.
It smiled.
An ear-to-ear thing, obscene not for the teeth, those the hour knew, but for the intent behind them. The smile said I will teach you. It said I am enjoying myself. It said a day can be a toy. The corners ran high, the middle ran higher, the gumline was a landscape of new growth and old hunger. No warmth lived there. Only fluency. It was a creature practiced at this, it had smiled at a thousand last stands and would smile at a thousand more.
Nhilly's eyes were very clear.
"That's good," he said, to himself and to the world and to the man inside him who still wanted to believe there were pages left. "You can feel. I'm going to make you suffer before I die. For Seris. For Kael. For Celeste. For the puppets you killed. For the Dissapants before me you killed."
He smiled back.
Not the perfect smile that had learned to calm rooms. Not the broken one that stopped at the cheap seats of the eyes and refused to pay extra. A full, crazed baring of teeth from a man who had finally been granted the luxury of nothing to lose. It looked good on him in a way that would have frightened his kinder self.
Wind pushed ash between them in a courteous veil. The valley heartbeat struck the cliff through his feet.
He raised the blade until the metal's line wrote itself into the heat.
He stood like a tragic thing out of an older play—alone on the high lip of the world, the fire-field below him, the city a thin lie to the west, the monster smiling back, ear to ear.
Down on the road, men who could still look up saw only silhouettes and made them into story because that is what men do when they are afraid.
The Hound's grin widened by a small, ugly degree.
Nhilly's did too.