A darkness crossed the Chancellor’s face then, and it had every hair on my entire body standing on end. Run! I mentally urged them, my feet already moving toward Emmy and Atti again, forcing Siret to move with me since he didn’t seem to want to release me.
I was too slow, of course. I was always too damn slow. The Chancellor whipped his right hand from that deep pocket, and a glint of steel was all I saw before the blade sliced across Atti’s throat. Emmy let out a choked cry of shock, before hysterical screams began to rip from her body. They rang through the clearing and my heart ached at the pure agony lacing each sound. The Chancellor lifted his arm to cut into Atti again, but Emmy dived into his side, knocking him down before he could swing again. This time it was me who let out a yell. My panic had colours flashing across my vision as I sprinted for her. Pressure encased me from all sides, and with some sort of pop of energy, I was no longer with Siret. Instead, I was somehow just about to crash between the Chancellor and my best friend.
Blood was everywhere, splattering across me as he lifted the blade to strike again. The man was absolutely insane! Was that really how the sols dealt with people who threatened the hierarchy of the gods? By stabbing them?
“No the hell you don’t!” I shouted, wrenching my left arm up to take the force of his attack. It bit deep into my skin, but I barely felt it as I used my right hand to scratch several deep gouges across his face.
With a howl, he threw me off him, and I caught the stunned faces of so many dwellers and sols watching us. They seemed too shocked, or too terrified to intervene. They apparently didn’t know about the stabbing rule when it came to people who bad-mouthed their deities. There was a scuffle behind us, and I knew that the Abcurses were making their way to me. Emmy tumbled across the lawn behind me, and I turned to crawl to her. My arm was aching as I put weight on it, and I was praying under my breath.
Please let her be okay.
Please let her be okay.
Please let her be okay.
I had no idea if he had stabbed her before I got there. They had been wrestling and the blade was flashing, and there was so much blood. It seemed foolish to think that she had escaped unharmed. Just as I was about to reach her side, a burning pain sliced across my calf, and I flipped over to find the Chancellor there, his trusty knife held aloft.
“Your friends deserved to die,” he spat at me. “Blasphemy like that, speaking of the gods in such a manner.” He waved the blade around, and when my eyes went toward it, he grinned and stilled the movement. “You like my weapon? It’s a gift from the gods: a blade from Crowe. I serve them well, and they reward me for it.”
I tried to look passive, but I must have failed. The Chancellor looked intrigued when he added, “I see you know what that means. That this blade can kill even a god. The wounds inflicted will heal slower and slice deeper. It is a blade of Death.”
Literally, since Crowe was the Death god.
He opened his mouth to say something else, but instead of speaking, his eyes widened in surprise and with a small squeak, his head jerked to the side, and he flopped down on the ground in a crumbled heap.
I was gasping as Coen stepped over the sol that he had just killed without a second thought. He marched to me, and with more tenderness than I had come to expect from this particular god, he gently lifted me up, setting me down on my uninjured leg.
I hopped around so that I could see Emmy, but she was gone, and everything was chaos again. “Where is Emmy?” I cried, frustration and fear pulsing through me in heavy, sickening thumps.
“Siret took her to the healer—she has a few flesh wounds, nothing they can’t handle. He’s going to use Trickery so that they think she’s a sol.”
That would ensure the healers did everything in their power to heal her. “She’s going to be okay, right? I need to see her.”
Coen hugged me, taking most of my weight, which helped with the pain thrashing through my body. “She’s going to be fine, but you can’t see her yet. She needs to go into the healing wing. She’ll need to stay in there for a few sun-cycles.” My face must not have looked convinced, so he added, “Siret won’t let her die; you really don’t need to worry. If at any point it looks like she’s not healing, the healers will inform him and we’ll take her to Topia.”
I sagged into him, a relief spreading through me that was so profound it left me light headed. “What about Atti? Is there anything we can do for him?”
Coen’s hard body seemed to grow even harder beneath me, and there was half-a-click of silence before he finally spoke. “I’m so sorry, Willa. There’s nothing we can do. Atti is beyond our power.”
I had known—from the moment I saw the blade slice his throat—that there was no hope for him. At the time I could do nothing but try and save my sister. Now, though, the tears poured hot and heavy from beneath my tightly closed lids.
“It’s not fair,” I cried. “Atti was a good dweller, and he didn’t deserve to die.” My wailing increased slightly as I added, “His server name will probably be Dolly now, and he’s going to hate that.”
After I gave myself a few clicks to mourn, I somehow pulled myself together enough to observe what was happening around us. The other four Abcurses were spread out across the landscape, all of them using their power to reel in the fighting. Before my eyes, I could see the world calming again, and this time there was no divide between sols and dwellers. All of them stood intermingled.
Yael tilted his head back and I wondered what he was about to do. He opened his mouth and a series of lilting words emerged, words I could not understand, long and flowing, moving from one word to the next. “What is he doing?” I whispered to Coen, somehow drawn to the beauty of this language. I felt like I could listen to him speak like that all sun-cycle.
“That is the language of the gods,” Coen told me. “Our gifts are more potent when we use the ancient prose, and Persuasion is working right now to calm this fire. He’ll convince the Vice-Chancellor and a few dweller representatives to have a real discussion about the dissatisfaction of the dwellers. He’ll use the death of the Chancellor to demand change. It might not be good change, but at least the discussion will be open.”
My heart burst again, some of the sadness over Atti suddenly surrounded by a flare of hope. “Yael doesn’t care about sols or dwellers,” I said, my voice cracking. “So he’s doing this … for me?”
I found myself passed from Coen to Aros, and then I was being hugged so tightly that I wasn’t even holding up my own weight anymore, which was good because I was starting to feel a little light-headed from all the blood running down my arm and leg.
“He’s doing it for you,” Aros whispered. “And now we need to leave and get you patched up.”
I snorted then, my light-headedness increasing. “If I had a token for every time I’d heard that phrase, I would be the richest dweller in Minatsol.”