Isabelle rolled to her knees, brandished the staff at the warder, and pointed to Julio. “Remember your orders! Let nothing harm him!”
The warder blurred into motion, smashing into Kantelvar’s spider. A tremendous bang shook the air. The concussion kicked her in the side and knocked her into a wall. The constructs wrestled, like a kraken grappling with a black behemoth in the abyssal Gloom. The spider coiled its appendages around its assailant, trying to pin its arm long enough to ram the spinning, screaming auger through its central eye, but the warder lifted it from the ground and smashed it into the wall so hard that the stone cracked and rocks clattered from the ceiling.
Isabelle lunged to Julio’s side and tore at the bonds holding his head. Another thunderous impact shook the room. Tearing metal screamed. A fan of razor-sharp splinters sprayed across the room. A needle pierced Isabelle’s left shoulder, and the pain shattered her concentration. She slipped and landed heavily on Julio’s back, covering him by accident. By the Builder, you had better be worth it! She forced herself up and plied the bindings with both hands, ghostly fingers fumbling on the metal buckles, sweaty, bloody flesh sliding on the leather straps. Calm. Calm. To go faster, work slower! Hard to do with her heart roaring like a cannonade. She ripped a strap free and then another. Too slow. And then Gretl was there on the other side of the table, unstringing Julio as fast as she could, bless her bold heart.
Isabelle ripped the last strap off Julio’s head and moved on to his torso, arms, ankles. The whole world became a gauntlet bounded by metal monstrosities and barred by tongues of leather pierced by brass. The floor shook and folded, stone cracking and rolling as if in agony. Cracks raced up the walls and chunks of rock fell from the ceiling. The omnis were but a haze of glittering, oily edges. Julio screamed, but his words were lost in the din. Finally she loosed a buckle and found nothing else to grab. Done! Julio slithered from the table just as a falling slab of granite smashed it flat. Gretl grabbed him by one shoulder, Isabelle seized the other, and they propelled him from the room, a plume of gray dust rolling in their wake. Behind them, the machines continued their battle even as the room caved in.
Pain jabbed Isabelle’s shoulder at every step, but they didn’t stop running until they stumbled and nearly killed themselves pelting down a flight of stairs. They heaped up against the far wall of the landing and slid to the floor, backs to the stone. Isabelle panted, trying to catch her breath.
When the rasping sensation of sucking air into her frosted, burning lungs finally lost its grip on her attention, Isabelle took stock of her surroundings. The noise of the mechanical battle above had died down to a distant ringing, like a manic percussionist in a forge, accompanied by the occasional thumping quiver of the floor and the crunch of falling rocks. Eventually the thundering stopped. A thin pall of freshly ground dust floated down the stair and settled around them.
“Do you think they destroyed each other?” Isabelle asked.
Julio, sitting on her left, shook his head. “Or buried themselves. I don’t know. They’re notably persistent.” He had somehow thought to grab Kantelvar’s staff when he fled. Did he know how to use it? What would he do with it?
Beyond him, Gretl sat hunched over with her head between her knees, panting, but not apparently injured. Good.
Julio focused his mirrored eyes on Isabelle. “Has anyone ever mentioned that you’re completely mad?”
Isabelle laughed. She would have laughed at anything just then. Unbearable coils of tension unwound like clock springs loosed from their housing. She laughed until she cried, then coughed, and finally hiccoughed to a stop.
When she lifted her hand to blot tears from her eyes, a jab of pain reminded her of the shard in her shoulder. Blood trickled from the wound, and every little motion scraped the jagged thing against her bone. That shoulder was going to be a mess, even if she didn’t die from an infection. “I think I need an infirmary,” she said, and then laughed again, drunk on pain and horror.
Julio’s brows drew down in concern. “We should get that out of you.”
Isabelle clamped her hand on his forearm as the world rippled, peaks and troughs of light and darkness washing through her consciousness. “I need you to go to San Augustus. Stop this war.”
“First, Highness, I’m going to make sure you don’t bleed to death.”
Isabelle felt consciousness slipping away, eroded by waves of shock and trauma, but she refused to yield it up. “Let Gretl get the shard. She’s a surgeon.”
Julio looked doubtful.
Isabelle squeezed his arm. “Trust me. Trust her.”
Julio turned and tapped Gretl on the knee, drawing her attention to the wound. Gretl’s eyes went round and she shouldered into the narrowing circle of Isabelle’s vision. She gently peeled Isabelle’s clammy fingers off his arm and probed the flesh around the shard in her arm.
Isabelle clenched her teeth and used her spark-fingers to help stabilize the ragged splinter and prevent its tearing any more flesh as Gretl teased it out of her shoulder. A long animal whimper escaped her throat, and pain forced her awareness deeper and deeper until the world was little more than a pinhole at the top of a bottomless, dark well. Only her need to focus on the shard kept her from slipping all the way into unconsciousness.
With a whispered slurping sound, the quondam metal exited her skin. She gasped with relief and then groaned with the certainty that the pain that remained was hers to keep.
*
Isabelle woke to jostling and thence to pain. Her whole body ached, like burned-out acres of forest after a fire. Her left shoulder still felt like it had a burning arrow stuck through it. There was a dampness in the air like fog. She was lying supine. Covered in a blanket. The ceiling above was little more than a roughhewn blur of rust-colored light.
The sound of movement drew her attention. Julio dragged a heavy crate across the floor. Gretl followed him with an alchemical lantern and a lantern hook. The cut on the back of his head had been stitched up, but his collar was stained with blood. He seemed to be setting the crate up as a weight to hold the lamp hook with the alchemical lantern suspended over a dark pit.
Isabelle forced herself up onto her elbow, trying to get a better look. Every movement she made provided evidence that not moving would be a fruitful alternative to explore. She groaned. Julio and Gretl set aside their project and hurried over.
“Princesa,” Julio said. “Don’t try to get up.”
“What’s going on?” Isabelle asked. “Where are we?”
“In the aerie’s Temple, making preparations to depart.”
“What about Kantelvar?”