Jannoula heard us. Were our very minds open to the air now? “Keep back!” she shouted. “I will walk them off this wall!”
Abdo ignored her and reached toward the city with a fist of fire.
An ityasaari pitched off the battlements, screaming as he fell. Abdo and I reached convulsively to catch him, but he fell through our immaterial hands and shattered on the ground.
It was Nedouard. His light went out.
The loss reverberated through my being. All the light was my light.
Even the eerie glow in the north.
It was enormous.
I see you! I cried, addressing that glow. The earth shook, the tremor lasting seconds, then minutes. Pieces broke off the walls; trebuchets tumbled end over end; cauldrons of pyria burst into geysers of flame. My body fell down, and my mind reached out, despairing, for the people of my city and the ityasaari on the wall.
Jannoula held the ityasaari back from the edge; the tremor wasn’t her doing.
Behind the city something rose, its life so unbearably bright that I narrowed my mind’s eye and used my human eyes. It was a walking mountain covered in dirt and scrubby trees, black ooze pouring off it. As it walked around the city, pieces of swampland starting to cake off, it began to look like a monstrous man. The city walls came up to his waist; he moved like he’d forgotten how, or had rusted during his years underground. He seemed to be made of metal.
No, not metal. Silver scales.
He steadied himself with one great hand against the city wall. He had told me he’d never stopped growing. He’d meant it literally. What had I been addressing all these years? His finger?
Pandowdy was vast; his mind-fire was vaster. “You let yourself out, Seraphina,” he roared in a voice like the world breaking. I was dimly aware of people around me covering their ears and buckling under the weight of sound; he wasn’t just speaking in my mind anymore.
“You too,” I said. “You’re not what I thought you were.”
His eyes, rimmed in mud, blinked slowly, and the lower half of his face split horizontally, revealing a gaping maw, a terrifying smile. “Neither are you. That’s why I’ve come. I observe that you are stuck,” said Pandowdy, leaning against the buckling wall. “You’ve worked out the mind, but sometimes what you need is matter.”
Jannoula ran back and forth on the battlements, crying to the bombardiers to fire on Pandowdy. Some did. Pandowdy shook pyria off himself; the trebuchet stones bounced away harmlessly.
He reached a gargantuan hand across and plucked Jannoula off the battlements. She screamed. Someone lunged after her, jabbing Pandowdy’s hand with a spear. It glanced off the giant’s scaly finger; the spearman tumbled over the edge of the wall.
It was Lars.
Pandowdy caught him in his other hand and set him gently on the ground. Jannoula still flailed, shrieking. The other ityasaari shuffled toward the edge of the wall, ready to fling themselves uselessly against the giant.
“Pandowdy!” I cried.
“Do not be afraid, little sister,” he said. The ground vibrated with his voice.
He brought his hand across and broke the shining filaments, like a gardener pinching off buds. He released the ityasaari, the soldiers on the wall, the councilors at court, the Regent of Samsam, the generals of the Old Ard both here and in the Tanamoot. He moved to break Abdo’s tether, but Abdo gestured for him to wait, then reached inside and unhooked himself. Pandowdy nodded respectfully.
The Saint—for I was convinced he was a Saint, indeed, whatever the rest of us might have been—now had a fistful of dangling mind-fire threads. “She is broken, this one, in her mind and heart,” he said, carefully scooping up the blazing filaments and packing them back into Jannoula. “You must learn to fill yourself with yourself, Blessed.”
“D-don’t break her any further,” I pleaded, feeling responsible.
He gave me a sidelong look, and for a moment I thought he was angry. But he said, “Would you break a mirror, Seraphina, because you fear to look into it?”
“What will you do with her?”
He held her up in the sunlight, as if examining her for cracks. “She’s interested in the Saint trade,” he rumbled. “After nearly seven hundred years, I may finally have worked out how to be one. I have the next millennium free. I’ll see what can be done.”
He moved as if to walk away, but an outcry rose all around, from the Samsamese behind me, the Goreddi and Ninysh soldiers to the south, the entire city: “St. Pandowdy!” They’d heard me call his name, I imagined, but how were they concluding he was a Saint? What did they see, what did they make of all this mind-fire?
Pandowdy paused and looked at the tiny people surrounding him, his aspect deeply weary. “I’m not carrying away all your problems, Seraphina,” he boomed. “Only the smallest. This”—he gestured to the armies around us—“is for you to sort out.”
“I understand,” I said, my voice sounding smaller in my own ears. I was fading back into my body; I struggled against it. “How do I maintain this fire?” I cried.
“No one can live like this all the time, inside out,” Pandowdy said over his mountainous shoulder. “It’s too much, even for me.”
“I don’t want to stop seeing!”
He laughed; the earth laughed under our feet. “You won’t. You’ll return to it, and you’ll measure the world by a different scale now. But you can’t stay. Release it, good heart. Give it back to the world. There will be more.”
He turned on his enormous heel, tearing a divot out of the pasture where he stood, and in four strides he was around the end of the city and heading north into the hills. He waded through the Queenswood, over the first of the foothills, and was gone.
I looked back at the conflagration called Abdo. We agreed without speaking and collapsed into ourselves again, the mind-fire exploding outward in a shock of rightness and love and memory. It rippled through the world in a great wave, rattling the bones of knowledge, shaking the heart of complacency, echoing in a hundred thousand skulls.
I found myself on my back in the dirt, sick and dizzy. I raised my head in time to see the gates of the city open and a golden-haired Queen on a red horse come galloping toward me through the crystalline sunlight.
And then there was, blissfully, nothing.