“What is it?” Mokoya asked. His pinched expression said many things, none of them good.
“Your enjoyable night aside, this day has just taken a massively hell-shat turn—”
“Thenn.”
He shut his eyes and forced calmness over his face. “The naga we’re hunting? The big one? We found it.”
The breath he drew should have warned her what was coming, because it was shaky, and she’d rarely seen him shake. “Nao, it’s the size of the sun. And it’s attacking Bataanar.”
ACT TWO
BATAANAR
Chapter Seven
MOKOYA HAD BEEN DRILLED in basic Slack theory at the Grand Monastery by Master Chong, a tall and hard man, with long steps and a seismic voice that carried across the classroom. Decades later, she could still close her eyes and recall its heavy boom, accompanied by a high chorus of summer crickets.
“The nature of objects is fixed and known. That bucket is red; wood is consumed by fire; ice floats upon water.” He strode across the room like he owned it. “Pity the object, for it is trapped in its circumstances. Water can no more freeze in high summer than the sun can decide to stop falling across the sky.”
One of the acolytes had snickered. Master Chong had rapped her across the head with his knuckles, cutting her mirth short. His voice had rung out: “Listen carefully, you dogs! Today you learn to break the chains of circumstance. For the masters of the five natures know that the Slack is ever in motion. And through the natures of the Slack, we can change the nature of objects.”
Through the natures of the Slack, we can change the nature of objects. That hot afternoon each acolyte sat, sweat beading, as glasses of water refused to turn into ice, and the walls and floor of the pavilion, warm as a sibling’s embrace, mocked their efforts.
Those childhood lessons felt both incalculably distant and intimately close as Phoenix cut full-tilt through the wind, her narrow head lowered, each massive footstep cracking across fresh ice. Mokoya could barely pull the fire from the waters of the oasis fast enough to freeze a pathway beneath them.
If Mokoya had been paying any attention to the math, it would have looked something like this:
Force is mass times acceleration; pressure is force divided by surface area. The load-bearing capacity of ice is a factor of the square of its thickness. A running creature of Phoenix’s weight requires a yield of solid ice beneath for support. Volume is length times breadth times height. Two li from the caverns to Bataanar, spanned by a path a yield wide. Ten thousand cubic yields of water to freeze.
But none of that was on her mind. In the window of extreme focus that had opened and swallowed her, all thought was a distraction, a background hum to her actions. Her mindeye superseded her physical senses, the world surrendering to the shimmer of the Slack. Thennjay, mounted on his lightcraft, was a pinprick on the horizon. Behind him, Rider decorated the Slack with polygonal patterns as they pushed Bramble against the wind. Phoenix was falling behind.
Light and pressure exploded hundreds of yields away, as though a volcano had woken into violent enlightenment. Bataanar.
Mokoya’s eyes snapped open, and fear slammed into her. On the horizon, wavering like a mirage, Bataanar was wreathed in a fiery dome. But it wasn’t burning down. The light came from the city’s thermal shields, defending it from the creature attacking it.
The naga dwarfed Bramble in size, eclipsing her five to six times over, in a way that rendered math irrelevant. Bloodred clamored against poison-black on its skin. Its spread wings, clawing into the shields, obscured half the city from sight.
The naga screeched, a sound like metal tearing, like gods dying. It pressed its wings into the shields and struck with its hind legs as if it would disembowel the city itself.
How was the naga still alive? How had the shields not burned it to death?
Cracks appeared in the shields, a foul radiance as intense as death. Thermal shields were powerful and complex, setting aflame anything that crossed their threshold. Only Tensors could charge one or hold one against prolonged attack. Bataanar was a working people’s city, a blood-and-sweat city, and its reluctant handful of Tensors were better suited to maintaining and charging mining equipment.
Where were the pugilists? Where was her brother? Would they be able to hold it off?
Mokoya’s heartbeat made her dizzy. Phoenix could run no faster. She could not fly. They weren’t going to make it.
What had Rider said? The Slack knows neither time nor space. . . . If you bring one point to another, you can travel between them.
Back in the cavern, she had felt the Slack twist like a child’s napkin, sliding away under her.
She returned to the mindeye. The heaving struggle between shield and naga deformed the Slack, tearing a fault line into its fabric. The conflagration looked close enough to touch, but it wasn’t. If she could abridge the space between them—
It shouldn’t be possible, and yet—
It was like watching a pattern appear out of cloud. The geography of the Slack changed around Mokoya. Everything was still the same, yet the way she saw it had shifted, and if she just pulled it this way—
The Slack folded.
Ice turned to sand under Phoenix. The raptor shrieked as her legs buckled under her, balance lost. Sky and ground lurched. Then came pain: a solid mass of land slamming into Mokoya’s head and shoulder and hips. Sand invaded her airways.
Mokoya struggled upright, coughing and spitting. Phoenix was likewise climbing to her feet. The smell of molten metal burned on the air—death smell, industrial-kiln smell. Her clumsy Slack folding had ejected them onto a narrow strip of sand between the oasis and Bataanar. Where the oasis narrowed to a pucker and kissed the side of the city, dozens of boats waited to take workers to the mines. The naga cast a shadow over it all.
The pugilists on their lightcraft were no more than a cloud of mosquitoes, irritating the naga’s skin with their tiny lightning bolts. Mokoya saw Adi and the crew huddled limply in the shelter of the oasis inlet.
The naga screamed again. This close to the city, the sound pierced the eardrums like a spear.
Mokoya reached for earth-nature and tensed, hard as she could. Gravity warped, pulling at the naga’s massive bulk.
Mokoya felt the naga tense back, and in a moment of shock, she let go. A creature that used slackcraft. Impossible.
Like a cart struck by a falling tree, Bataanar’s shields failed.