“You just—” The guard groaned. “Hey!”
Umar turned back to Corbin; another guard ran out from the stair behind him. That guard’s mouth opened when he saw his fallen comrade; he reached for the truncheon at his belt, but Umar caught him by the neck and slammed him into the wall. A peal of silence ate the thud of the guard’s skull against plaster. The guard fell, and plaster flakes drifted down onto him. Umar knelt, placed his fingers precisely to either side of the guard’s jugular, and pressed. The man squirmed like a caught snake, kicked twice, then rag-dolled. Umar pointed to the body—still breathing—stood, and walked away.
Corbin pried off the guard’s shoes, pulled down his pants, and started to unbutton the shirt. Umar had already vanished through the stairwell door. Corbin tore the rest of the buttons from the guard’s shirt and followed, hopping into pant legs. “How are we going to do it?” he shouted to Umar. “How can we hurt her?”
The ground floor was a mob of running orderlies, shouted commands, cries of pain and need. Ghostlights flickered. Periodic silences shattered the noise to nonsense. Umar broke the crowd like a tugboat’s prow broke waves—poorly, with a lot of froth and commotion. When they reached the fire exit, Corbin tensed, ready to run, but Umar touched the alarm box, said words another silence ate, and opened the door.
The alarm did not protest their exit into the alley.
They were free.
Corbin looked up.
He was a simple man. He bought vegetables from farmers, and sold them. He worked with simple men who prayed for blessings on their crop, who plowed with oxen and fertilized with cow shit and sweat. Not for him the death-tainted fields of Central Kath, zombie workers and demon-haunted scythe machines and alchemical poisons. Corbin Rafferty, and his girls, avoided all that. They kept the soulstuff they earned in the same altar his great-grandfather carved from the heartwood of a tree he felled. Corbin drank—who didn’t?—but he never touched dreamdust. The last few days were easily the strangest of his life.
So he had no words for what he saw overhead.
A silver wheel burned in the center of the sky—its exact center, no matter where he looked, as if the city he inhabited was only a reflection of some deeper city to which the wheel belonged. A seamless curtain of fire stretched from the wheel, burning in all the colors fire really was but people never said: purple and green and black as a week-old wound. Needles of light pierced the fire. But the needles were also enormous worms, eating the fire with mouths of crystal teeth. And in the center of the wheel he saw another wheel, in which a star of black and a star of white danced, moving so fast they left tracks in air. When the tracks met, the world turned, and the silent thunder pealed—and in that emptiness he heard words that made no sense yet were more real than the air he breathed.
—as maintained in the quarterly report, which if Your Honor will be so kind as to—
Somewhere a hammer struck a wooden table and made no sound because the sound it made was silence.
He knelt. He could not look at that sky. And worst of all was the chattering inside him, that if he just looked up long enough he could understand everything, why June left and why he hurt and what he should have said—
A hand caught his shoulder. There was no tenderness in the touch.
“Follow,” Umar said.
Corbin wept. “I can’t.” He gestured openhanded at the sky. “Look at that. It’s so big.”
Umar did not look. “I do not need you,” he said. “But you can aid me. And in return I will let you hurt her. No god is so great that small weapons cannot bring her low. I will make you mistletoe. Without me, you will rail for eons outside her temple and end trapped in nightmares. Be of use to me, or surrender yourself to her.”
Needs warred in him: safety, revenge, control.
Corbin would have done anything to turn from that bleeding, burning sky. If Umar, or the thing that rode him, told Corbin to tear his eyes from their sockets, he would have hooked his thumbs and gouged.
But this was better. This way, the moon would die, and he would own himself again.
Corbin followed Umar through empty streets. Concrete tore his bare soles.
60
Tara woke in an army-green fog. Two blinks, three, focused the world, added edges and depth and form to color. Words came next: tent, cot, sun. Shale. Once she worked past monosyllables: mission.
She sat up fast, blinking blood-motes away.
“Here,” someone said. She reached for the voice, found a glass of water, and drank until the water froze to ice and clicked against her teeth. Frost feathered from her grip on the glass.