Dawn was breaking as they trudged up the main north-south road that led into the heart of the City, K'aekniv, Am-Gulat with his war hammer, and Er-Izat still stripped bare to his waist at their head. Mirk was among the rear guard, where he belonged. But he didn't feel any better for it, even with the rest of his team and Am-Hazek at his side.
"I hope that blockhead knows what he's doing," Yule grumbled off to his left, checking through his bag full of healing supplies one final time. "The Second and the Fifth have six companies each. Two djinn are going to be enough to counter that?"
"Morty said he'd come with the lads from back home," Danu replied.
Yule rolled his eyes, letting his work bag fall back down around his hips with a sigh. "That doesn't exactly inspire a lot of hope. For several reasons. First being that it's coming from Mordecai."
Danu was dealing with the tension much better than the rest of them. An easier thing for her, since she wasn’t so aware of the feeling of dread radiating from the darkened dormitories and workshops that lined the street. The blockers Yule had given him hours ago had almost totally worn off. With his head clear, Mirk could tell well enough that the City was far from abandoned. The people who kept it running, who filled its streets most mornings just before dawn were hiding from the fighting to come, just like K'aekniv had said they would.
And it was her husband who had promised that aid would come. Mirk couldn't fault her for finding hope in that. He had his own hopes, ones that he wasn't willing to share aloud.
Genesis hadn't been among the fighters and ladies who'd come up from Fatima's with Alice. No one had said anything about it. But Mirk had seen the pointed looks both the men of the Seventh and his fellow healers had shot at him as they'd all started out. He didn't know what to tell them. Mirk doubted any of the other members their small force, with the exception of Genesis's oldest fighters, had the same faith in the commander he did. All of his promises, his insistence that Genesis wouldn't leave them alone to die, would have fallen on deaf ears. So he’d shrugged and put on the best cheerful face he could manage, hoping that it wouldn’t add insult to injuries.
"Why aren't you up front with the rest?" Sheila asked from somewhere behind them. The two other members of her team — the woman Mirk suspected was a vampire like Sheila and the man who he wasn't certain was fully alive — were fast on her heels. Hiding behind Sheila, and for good reason. Mirk had seen the way Sheila handled unruly patients.
Both Mirk and Am-Hazek turned at the question. Sheila smirked and continued. "You aren't injured like the other djinn. You're strong. Why are you back here with the wounded?"
Am-Hazek smile was brittle, and Mirk felt the barest edges of his regret brush against his mind. "I'm afraid I have neither the courage of Monsieur Am-Gulat nor the skill of Monsieur Er-Izat, mademoiselle. I've been tasked with making sure the others make it into the infirmary."
Sheila's nose wrinkled. "You're lying. To yourself, if nothing else."
"Perhaps. But I believe I could ask you the same question, mademoiselle."
She flashed him a smile full of very white, very sharp teeth. "Are you above hauling supplies for us healing out in the streets?"
Am-Hazek lowered himself into the best bow he could manage while still on the move. "I am at your service. And at the service of all of your fellow healers as well."
"Then I suppose you can stay," she said, turning back to answer a question that one of her teammates whispered to her, one that only she had the inhuman senses to hear.
Sighing, Am-Hazek straightened the lapels of his coat, frowning at the way the scabbard he had strapped around his waist upset the fit of it across his shoulders. "I fear neither of us are dressed for the occasion, seigneur. Perhaps it'd be better if we followed Monsieur Er-Izat's lead."
Mirk looked down at his ruined suit. White wasn't the best color to wear when he'd presumably be up to his elbows in innards soon. But it felt too petty of him to be saddened by the loss of the suit he'd put so much thought and gold into, all things considered. "Methinks it's a little too cold to be running around in shirtsleeves, Monsieur Am-Hazek."
The crowd of fighters ahead of them all came to a halt with a gesture from K'aekniv, a clenched fist raised to the level of his head. Mirk was so lost in his own thoughts that he bumbled into the skirts of the women just ahead of him. Alice was among them. She had her crossbow raised the instant they stopped, and Fatima beside her didn't move to call her off. Kali had refused to go with the other women, instead joining the men of the Seventh up nearer K’aekniv.
"Do you feel anything?" K'aekniv said to the two djinn on either side of him, though his gaze didn't drift from the road ahead of them.
Er-Izat only nodded. But Am-Gulat answered in a low growl that took him by surprise, the same as the hisses that'd been escaping him ever since he'd been freed. "Djinn magic. But no djinn."
K'aekniv lowered his fist, stretching out his wings and drawing in a deep breath. As if he was a hound scenting the air, his head drifting up toward the sky once more. Maybe he was offering a prayer to the God they shared, Mirk thought, in the way he'd been taught as a child. "Ah, fuck. Wait here, yes? You two don't know the City good."
Rather than following along the main road, K'aekniv drew his right-hand sword and slunk off down an alleyway just ahead of them. Which left the rest of them with nothing to do but wait, entirely exposed in the middle of the road. Something about it didn't sit well with Mirk. But none of the others seemed any more ill-at-ease than they already were.
"You're the strategist, apparently," Yule said, leaning forward to glare around Mirk at Am-Hazek. "How is this supposed to work? Can he do the same things Gen can?" He pointed with his chin at Am-Gulat. The djinn seemed oblivious to the tension in the air, lost in his own frustration and anger, continually tapping the head of his war hammer against his palm.
All Am-Hazek could do in response was shrug. "I am uncertain, Monsieur Yule. I believe it would be better for us to keep focused on our own objective. The infirmary."
Yule's scowl deepened at being called monsieur, but it did refocus the older healer on the immediate matter at hand. K'aekniv had divvied out targets during their hasty huddle outside the Seventh's dormitory like he was setting up for a game of dice: it was the Seventh's job to secure the parade grounds, along with Am-Gulat and Am-Hazek, and it was up to Fatima's ladies and Mirk's team of healers to get the crowd of shivering, weakened djinn into the infirmary, where they'd be safe from any efforts by Percival to reclaim them. Once the djinn were under Emir's care, Fatima's ladies who had crossbows would make their way to the roof to take potshots at the fighting below, while Mirk's team would rejoin the other healers outside, healing those who could keep fighting and dragging the rest back into the infirmary.
It all worried Mirk. He wasn't fit to be a combat healer. Nor was he suited to fighting. Once they got into the infirmary, Danu had already promised to run to the supply closet and find enough pain blockers for everyone outside. But Mirk knew he couldn’t take any of them without making himself even more of a liability. The weight of his weakness pressed on him, the same as his grandfather's staff clenched in his hands.
K'aekniv returned then, his feathers puffed out in frustration and his sword crackling with fire and order. "It's the real shit," he said, dropping his earlier attempts at bolstering all of their spirits with his usual good-natured confidence. "That bastard Percy scared the Watch into listening to him. He's got them around the parade grounds, them and Paul's infantry. Don't know where Lorenz's people are. All the mages are hiding with the djinn back by the tower."
"What do we do?" someone piped up from the center of their small, mismatched crowd of fighters.
"Go in hard. Fast," K'aekniv replied, drawing his other sword, ice already forming on its blade. "Hope that Orest shows up with those horses. And Mordka with the Irish."
It didn't seem like much of a plan to Mirk. But none of the members of the Seventh questioned it. That or they'd fought alongside K'aekniv long enough to know what he meant, despite using so few words. "Slava! Ilyusha! You big people get the healers and the djinn to the infirmary. Go around back by the library," K'aekniv called out over his shoulder as he headed back the way he'd come. "Once they're in, come back to us. Everyone else, we take the parade grounds from the street by the Academy."
On K'aekniv's orders, their small group split. Mirk and the others who were responsible for getting the djinn to safety followed along after Slava and Ilya down a back alley opposite the one the rest went down. Mirk felt an uncertain churning in his stomach at the prospects of being away from the rest of the Seventh, from K'aekniv and the two djinn. But he followed along regardless.
Providence made no mistakes. And he had to trust that K'aekniv didn't either, not if he'd safely guided the others through worse things.
It all happened faster than Mirk had been expecting. Five minutes and they were in position, shuffling along the side of the library, those who could fight with weapons raised and those who couldn't hanging back, ready to run if their attack failed. The freed djinn's fear and pain was a dreary cloud in the back of Mirk's mind along with their pain. If their emotions had come through as clearly to him as those of humans, it would have immobilized him. The flares of pain and anger from up ahead, where the fighting had already begun out on the parade grounds, were already almost too much for Mirk's tender mind to bear.
"Should I come up front?" asked a weary voice from the rear. Samael. He'd come along with them to the alleyway, determined to carry his still unconscious sister to the infirmary, no matter the cost.
Ilya and Slava exchanged a shrug. "Angels are strong," Ilya said. "Even little ones."
Mirk shook his head, glancing back over his shoulder at Samael. All Mirk could see of him in the early morning gloom, hiding behind the anxious djinn, was the glow of his winglight. "No thank you, Samael," Mirk called out, as loud as he dared. "You've already done your part, methinks. Take care of Sharael."
Mustering his determination, Am-Hazek drew his borrowed sword once more. "You're right, seigneur. We all must do what we can. Whether it's in our nature or not."
Slava flashed him a grin, trying to lighten the mood with one of his usual jokes. "Eh? We got a fighting djinn too? Nobody told us."
Am-Hazek sighed. "I am not incapable, monsieur. I am only...out of practice. I'm sure it will return to me in the heat of the moment."
"Let's hope," Ilya said. He'd poked his head out the end of the alleyway, surveying the fighting going on ahead of them along the main street and at the parade grounds. "The teleporters came. Jumping everywhere. Look out."
Without any other words of advice or encouragement, Ilya headed out onto the street, crouched low to try to keep from attracting more attention. Slava waved them all onward, hissing that he'd take the rear, to make sure no one got left behind. As they passed him by, he clapped a hand on Am-Hazek's shoulder and told him to follow Ilya close. He did the same to Mirk, though he found the advice Slava had for him much less encouraging.
"You don't need to kill to stop people from coming. Just take them down and keep going."
Mirk didn't have time to dwell on it. Ilya was moving fast, much faster than Mirk had imagined a man of his size could. And if he made any noise at all, it was drowned out by the clamor of battle. Ilya had been right to tell them to look out. The sound of teleportation spells slapping through air and drizzle punctuated the clash of swords like the sharp retort of cannon fire.
He couldn't allow himself to take it all in, to search out every friend who'd engaged the infantry fighters and Watch guardsmen who'd been forced to defend the parade grounds and Percival’s stolen djinn. The pain of the wounded was blunted by frustration and fear, by the numbed shock of having been cut down. Mirk pulled his shields up hard and lifted his grandfather's staff, keeping his attention fixed on the infirmary down the main road. It felt impossibly far away, even though he knew it wasn't more than a five minute walk.
They got within fifty paces of the infirmary before one of the teleporting mages spotted them. None of the faces registered in Mirk's mind, just the slap of his spell and the sudden appearance of a half dozen armored chests between Am-Hazek just ahead of him and Ilya at the front. Am-Hazek did his best to ward the fighters off, to scare them away and bring them low without hurting them badly like he had when facing the Watch men under Samael's control.
It didn't work that time. These men were determined, in full control of their own faculties. Even though Mirk was too startled to take in what division they were from, he knew from the way they fought that they weren't Watch guardsmen. Their movements were too quick, too practiced. Too economical. Too accustomed to killing.
Am-Hazek faltered. Mirk had no choice but to help him however he could. He yanked up on his shields once more and plunged into the fray, focusing on memories of the hours he'd spent sparring with Genesis and the other men of the Seventh to try to take his mind away from the pain. The fighters the teleporting mage had brought with him had the benefit of experience, of being able to focus in the heat of battle. But Mirk had his reflexes and hours spent chasing after a shadow that moved quicker than thought, one that always danced just out of reach and lashed out at him from every angle with inhuman grace and accuracy. A fighter who could follow the sound of his heartbeat and spot the slightest changes in his stance even in pitch darkness.
In comparison, the fighters were clumsy, slow. Mirk aimed for knees and elbows, following Slava's advice, focusing on bringing the fighters to their knees and knocking swords out of hands instead of killing. Still, the pain his grandfather's staff rained down on the fighters ate away fast at Mirk’s mental shielding. He wasn't prepared when he ended up looking down into a frightened man's face after he'd swept his legs out from underneath him.
He'd cracked his head against the cobbles in his fall. His eyes were hazy, distant. He'd bit his lip. Blood poured down his chin. But he had the strength to block his neck with one arm, groping for the sword he'd dropped with his other hand.
The man thought death was coming for him.
Mirk couldn't bear it. He closed his eyes and banished his shields. The pain was more bearable than having to see the reality of what he was doing. And he'd learned well enough by then how to fight using his mind's eye rather than his physical ones.
The world transformed into an ever-shifting multicolored tapestry, golds and reds smashing into blues and greens, whirlwinds of gray snuffing out pinpoints of cold white and black. Mirk saw the fighter's sword as a sliver of crimson against the muted gray-green of the Earth buried beneath cobblestones, heard it as a high pitched whine that the fighter's own, duller vermilion was reaching out to. The fighter considered him a dire enough threat that he had decided to draw upon his limited reserves of potential to strike him down. Mirk shoved the sword out of reach with the end of his grandfather's staff, its gold-green glow reaching out into the haze of the City's ambient magic, resonating with it in a way that Mirk had never noticed before. Like the creeping blackness, the faint static that buzzed beneath everything in the City, recognized his magic. And was willing to bolster it, unbidden.
Mirk continued on like this, dodging and parrying blows, raining down strikes on unarmored limbs that made pain shriek through his mind, until he was blinded by a sudden flash of mingled red and white. He reeled backward, blinking open his eyes.
Another group of fighters had spotted them and had been teleported over from the main fighting out on the parade grounds to counter them. That time, it was two dozen men. Or it had been. Ilya must have judged that their group — three healers, Am-Hazek, a handful of Fatima's ladies who had better bows than blades, and Slava, all fanned out around a group of injured and frightened djinn — wasn't strong or practiced enough to fend off so many. He'd pulled out one of his myriad cunning devices, things like cannonballs that were stuffed with knives, and had lobbed it into the middle of the crowd of fighters after igniting it with his fire magic.
The aftermath made Mirk's stomach churn. Men who were hobbling away with bits of metal sticking out of their limbs and armor, unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of the teleporting mage who'd summoned them to fight there. Even more were lying moaning on the ground, some with limbs missing, others with horrible, blackened shards of metal sticking out of their most vulnerable parts. Mirk fell back to hurry the djinn onward, trying not to get sucked into their vortex of pain. Yule was at his side, chugging one of their few remaining pain-blockers as he hurried the djinn along.
Danu was the only one who bore up under the blast well, other than Slava. Though she grimaced at the broken bodies, she drew some sort of strength from the escaping spirits of those who didn't survive. She shoved herself under the arms of two djinn who'd been sent reeling by the blast and carried them onward, her eyes gone black.
"Almost there!" Ilya called out from up ahead. "Fast! Before they send a mage!"
They all limped to the infirmary steps unscathed. But the blast had drawn the attention of the mages back by the Glass Tower, just like Ilya had said it would. Fatima's ladies hurried up the steps first, Alice at their head, then whirled around once they reached the top to fire a bevy of crossbow bolts at the fighters sent to intercept them. Ilya barreled up the stairs after lobbing another bomb at the oncoming fighters, not stopping as he reached the top, flinging himself at the closed double doors shoulder first. Mirk felt the lock snap, heard it as a bang that matched that of the teleporting mage that was sent after them to make up for the group of fighters that had been leveled by Ilya's bomb.
That time, rather than bringing a squad of fighters with him, the teleporting mage brought another mage with him. A real mage, one who could bring the elements down on them in waves, who would force them into drawing on their scattered magical potential, unsuited for combat. Elijah Oliver, pale with fright, his shirtsleeves singed by spells that had been cast too wide.
Mirk was three steps up from the bottom, urging the djinn up toward the doors. But he froze when he saw Elijah, locking eyes with him. Though it made him feel sick to force emotions on someone, Mirk was prepared to project all the terror he could conjure at Elijah, to make him run away.
It wasn't necessary. The mage swallowed hard and gave a determined nod, drawing himself up to his full height and turning to face the teleporting mage beside him. A man Mirk didn't recognize, with the quartered circle of the Fourth Cavalry stitched onto the sleeve of his overcoat.
"Sorry, Matty," Mirk heard Elijah say, just barely, over the din of the fighting. "But I'm sending you back. Don't send anyone else after me. Made my choice. You'll have a bad time if you try again."
Elijah made a flurry of arcane gestures, cast a half-circle with the toe of his boot in front of the bewildered teleporting mage. Mirk caught the beginning edge of a bevy of curses as Elijah stomped on the circle and cast his spell. With a pop, the teleporting mage disappeared.
"Where do you need me?" Elijah shouted up the steps, pushing up his sleeves. His determination was shot through with fright, pressing against Mirk's mind with a sound like stone grinding against itself.
Fatima, hauling herself up the steps after the djinn, turned just long enough to smirk over her shoulder at him. "Coward like you won't last five minutes hand to hand. Get up on the roof where you can cast from a distance like you're used to."
With a reflexive salute, he hurried up the steps alongside her. She shoved off his attempts to help; instead, Elijah offered his shoulder to one of the djinn. Amidst all of the black emotions filling the parade grounds, Mirk felt an instant of his wonder, Elijah’s amazement at being able to feel the magic of a djinn unchained, even one who'd been weakened by years of fighting and imprisonment.
"We'll hold the outside," Slava said to Mirk. Though he spoke to him, his eyes were scanning the parade grounds turned battlefield instead of looking up at him, searching for where Eva had gone along with Sheila's team. "Me and Ilya. Hurry. Get rid of Cyrus and get back outside."
Mirk didn't know what the fighter meant by getting rid of Cyrus. But Mirk turned and scrambled up the front steps nevertheless, slipping through the infirmary's double doors alongside Samael, who had slung his sister, still dead to the world, over one shoulder so that he'd have both hands free to fight if he needed to.
The infirmary waiting room was a mess. Patients and healers had come down from the upper floors to see what all the commotion was, to spectate the battle of wills going on between Emir and Cyrus. Emir must have come down to unlatch the bar that usually went across the double doors in case of an emergency so that they could get in. It had left Emir trapped in the waiting room alongside the panting and dazed djinn. Cyrus had called upon his elemental magic for the first time since Mirk had met him, using it to summon a barrier of hazy, half-real blocks of stone, ready to snap them into existence should any of the crowd challenge him.
"You're not welcome here," Cyrus snarled at Emir, at Alice and the other ladies armed with crossbows who had drawn up behind him. None of them risked firing, aware of the cramped quarters and uncertain of what Cyrus was capable of doing with his half-formed stones. His words had a certain ringing tone to them, one that hinted at some magic he was building up to but had not yet released.
"These people need healing," Emir shouted back at him. "It doesn't matter who’s allied with who. We took an oath, Cyrus."
"Damn you and damn your oath. I won't go along with your little revolution, or whatever this is."
"We don't have time for this," Fatima hissed under her breath, flipping a lever on the side of her cane that revealed the blade hidden inside. Ilya had dashed back out the door once they were all inside, to the sound of another teleporting spell that was too close for comfort.
"Wait, wait!" Elijah called after her, grabbing her shoulder only to have his hand shoved off once more. "That's Brecke's Entombment Enchantment! See that wavering on the edges? He'll crush us all!"
"And himself. This bastard won't waste his own life getting rid of us."
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"I'm...I'm not so sure...he could have combined it with Jorgensen's..."
Mirk didn't hear the last of Elijah's protests. Something inside Mirk snapped then, his fear banished by the sight of all the djinn collapsing onto benches and burying their heads against one another's shoulders, shivering and exhausted. For the first time since they'd set out from the Seventh's dormitory just before dawn, Mirk felt certain of his ability to do something instead of standing by and watching the horror unfold around him.
He'd never liked Cyrus. The sneer on Cyrus’s face then, as looked out at the room full of djinn and Fatima's ladies, was the same one he'd flashed at Mirk on the first day they'd met, when he'd turned up his nose at the suggestion that it wasn't right to send the djinn through the transporter wounded. It propelled Mirk forward. He pushed his way past Fatima and Emir and the others until he was face to face with Cyrus.
"Please move, Comrade Commander." To Mirk's ears, it almost sounded like someone else was speaking. Someone who could put some iron in their voice instead of only polite deference.
Instead of yielding, Cyrus scoffed, bringing his hands together. Around his knees, the stones rose. "Make me, you worthless brat."
Mirk called to the stones Cyrus had half-summoned. Instead of listening to Cyrus’s orders, they moved at the press of Mirk's mind, with a thrust of his staff that pushed Cyrus aside with a crack to the ribs that Mirk couldn't hear over the murmuring of the voices of the stones. There was some magic at work there, a spell Cyrus had woven, some harmony of granite and limestone and marble that had been ripped from a dozen different places. It was rising to a crescendo that threatened to crash down on them all. By instinct, Mirk forced it to take a different track, made the stone fall into a different shape without the use of any arcane words or principles. Instead he used only plain words and another wave of his staff.
"Stay out of the way."
The next thing Mirk was aware of was Fatima and her ladies rushing past him, Danu quick on their heels. They all had to turn to the side to shuffle past a sudden heap of stone that'd appeared in the middle of the hallway that led up to the second floor barrier. From inside it, Mirk could hear the indistinct sound of someone screaming curses, though he couldn't feel their emotions.
Mirk heard Elijah's mumbling as he followed after them, but didn't understand the meaning of what he was arguing with himself about. "Shouldn't have worked...you hedge mages are a weird lot...not that I'm not grateful! Be careful!"
"Could have at least let the rest of us take a shot before you buried him," Yule said, cuffing Mirk in the shoulder and bringing him back to the present. He had his last pain blocker clenched in his fist. "It's only going to get worse from here. Take it or don't, it's up to you. Danu and I will carry you the best we can."
Mirk shook his head, working up a pathetic excuse for a smile. "Methinks I need to be able to feel everything to help."
Yule shrugged. "Suit yourself. But I'll have Danu save you one or two just in case," he added, as he uncorked the bottle and downed the blocker himself instead.
The healers who'd come to watch the confrontation between Emir and Cyrus returned to their duties now that the threat of Cyrus bringing a spell down on all of them had passed. Some of them retreated back upstairs without helping any of the djinn or guiding any of the patients who'd come down along with them back to their rooms. But more of them worked together to encourage the weary djinn to come further back into the infirmary, to keep them safe if the defenses on the roof and at the foots of the steps failed. It gave Mirk's smile just a hint of life.
"Are you going to the roof, or back out?" Emir asked Mirk, dismissing Cyrus's continued shouting from inside the improvised tomb as if the other commander had ceased to exist. Though Cyrus's magic was strong enough to rattle the stones, it couldn't break through them. In the pit of his stomach, Mirk knew that the stones would stay until he told them to release him. That they'd no longer listen to Cyrus's voice after hearing his own, after feeling the tug of his staff's magic.
"Back out, methinks. I'm not a combat healer, but..."
But he couldn't leave all the wounded out on the parade grounds to the others. Not when he had so much life-giving potential to spare. Though there was another pressing matter that troubled him, one that Mirk didn't want to think of.
There'd still been no sign of Genesis.
Emir nodded, rolling up his sleeves as he surveyed the waiting room. "Don't try to heal on the field unless you have to. Bring them back here instead, as long as they can be moved. Get your shields back up. Don't be a martyr."
That last command felt like it was directed not just at him, but at Yule shifting restlessly from foot to foot behind him. Pain blockers never seemed to have a calming effect on Yule, never seemed to send him into that golden other place where everything was half-formed images of gaping wounds that were disconnected from dying agony. It only sharpened the older healer. Made him ready to fight, unburdened from the empathy that he viewed as a curse more than a blessing. Yule snapped a dismissive salute at Emir, then headed back toward the doors, seizing the handles of them, one in each hand.
"Let's see what we've got."
Am-Hazek took one of the doors as Yule threw them open, cringing even before he ducked a head around the slab of wood to peek out. Ilya and Slava were working together to keep a fresh batch of fighters from entering the infirmary, both of them with swords that time. Mirk was surprised that Percival hadn't seen fit to send another mage after them.
Then Mirk saw them, at the far edge of the parade grounds opposite the infirmary, along the side of the Academy building. Crashing down the main road that led to the East Gate, five abreast. Horses. Orest had finally arrived with his men.
Mirk didn't hear the command. But he saw it ripple through the groups of fighters locked in heated but scattered battles against clusters of men from the Seventh and strange fighters Mirk didn't recognize who wore no armor or padded gambesons but feared no swords. At least half of all the men abandoned their present fights in favor of dealing with the cavalry. And for the first time since the fighting had began, Mirk saw Percival, along with the djinn he'd kept from Am-Gulat.
Percival was almost too bright to look at, he'd stolen so much djinn power. He wore no armor over the now-tattered set of black robes he'd worn to Madame Beaumont's ball. Yet he shone as if he was clad from head to toe in the same gleaming armor Mirk's father wore when he fought on behalf of the Empire, something that was more magic than metal, flesh transformed into a towering pillar of light. Though Percival's stolen magic still had that multicolored tinge to its edges rather than being pure white, revealing the secret of its source. It almost looked like his godfather Aker's magic, but without his olaein's odd, chiming resonance. Perhaps because it'd been robbed from the djinn rather than given freely.
Casyn was at Percival's side, permitted to touch his elbow only for as long as it took to teleport Percival across the battlefield. Then he stepped back and slapped on a personal shield, of the sort that only the most well-off mages took into battle. Casyn cowered behind it, sword drawn and hunched over, as if some combination of his shield and the mere presence of Percival at his side would be enough to make everyone ignore him and spare him despite all the harm he'd caused. Percival's handiwork could be seen in the wide swaths of grass out on the parade grounds that had been reduced to smoldering ash from his spells. And in the bodies.
The bodies. Mirk tried not to look at them as he and Yule waited for Danu to come back with the pain blockers. He didn't have to look very hard to tell that most of those who'd crossed Percival hadn't survived. And that those who had withstood it weren't long for the living. They'd been abandoned by their fellows, a lost cause given up in favor of those who still stood a chance of survival. There were more than a dozen of them.
The only reason there weren't more was because of two teams, Er-Izat and Am-Gulat in one, and K'aekniv alone in the other. The two djinn were taking advantage of Orest's distraction to attack the mages who'd been left to guard the rest of the still-captive djinn at the base of the Glass Tower. K'aekniv, on the other hand, was tearing through anything and anyone who moved and wasn't on his side of the fight. Only when K'aekniv dealt with a whole squad of Watch guardsmen who tried to outflank him with a reckless fireball that sent the guard scrambling rather than immolating them did Mirk realize that half of the scorch marks out on the parade grounds were from K'aekniv rather than Percival.
Am-Gulat's magic no longer had much fire left in it. Instead, he was left battling the mages near the Glass Tower with coils of shadow bolstered by Er-Izat's fists. But Am-Gulat's chaos was still so hot, so wild and desperate, that Mirk knew without looking that Genesis wasn't yet out on the parade grounds with the others.
"Where is he..." Mirk mumbled under his breath, looking off down the street back toward the south as he headed out onto the front steps, to make room for the others to follow him back outside.
Either no one heard him, or no one else had any hope that Genesis would come. Instead, Yule went to the top of the steps and scanned the battlefield, nodding to himself with confidence that Mirk wished he shared. "Go help the rest of your friends," he said over his shoulder at Am-Hazek. "Danu, let's start hauling. We'll get the ones by the transporter first."
Mirk and Am-Hazek exchanged one final, worried nod. Then it was down the steps and out into the fray — no one paid Mirk's team much heed, clad as two of the three of them were in healer green. Though the feel and force of Danu's Deathly magic helped just as much. She only needed to level one infantry fighter who stepped into their path with a hard punch to the gut to convince the rest to leave them alone. Mirk looked down into his face as they ran past, only having time to take in the odd haze of his stunned soul hovering above his body and the boar's head insignia of the Fifth Infantry painted on his useless cuirass. Not dead, but too close for the comfort of him and anyone else who may have had thoughts about getting rid of the healers before they could do their work.
His team had only just made it to the injured men who'd been dragged over near the bulwark of their defenses, near the field transporter, when Percival launched his attack on the cavalry. Mirk was too lost in surveying the wounded, studying them both with his physical eyes and magical senses to gauge which needed to be carried in first, to see the magic. But he felt it: a bolt of ordered magic so strong that it threatened to rip his own out of his chest and carry it off toward the cavalry along with it. Mirk dropped his staff in his rush to press both hands hard against his thundering heart, whirling toward the spell to ease the strain on it.
Orest and his men would have all been reduced to nothing had Catherine not been with them. Though the clashing magic was still flaring too brightly for Mirk to see anything past it, he knew from feel that it had to be her. He'd danced with her earlier that night, had allowed his magic to intertwined with hers to form a shroud as they pressed as close as propriety allowed to exchange strategy in whispers. Another kind of chaos mixed with a greater measure of darkness. Catherine's was warm like Am-Gulat's, but well managed. Her specialty was defensive spells, not wielding darkness and chaos as a blade to strike down others.
Her defenses had been just strong enough to ward off Percival's attack. The cavalry crashed onward toward the parade grounds, all the horses unflinching even in the face of such terrible magic. The only one that faltered was the great black stallion with the white blaze on his forehead — Orest's horse, the one he'd brought along with him from home.
The stallion didn't pause for any lack of training or courage. Orest wheeled the horse around to the rear of the charge, all of his attention focused on the smaller, dark-clad figure slumped against his back, shaking it with one hand and holding the reins with the other.
Catherine warded off Orest's concern, though she didn't lift her head. She kicked the stallion back onward herself, doing something with her legs that reversed the horse's retreat and sent him charging back toward the front.
In the distance, Mirk heard Percival curse. A small part of him, something untouched by the bloodshed and panic, muttered about it not being very Christian language, coming from a man who was so ostensibly fixed on honoring God. Then Yule yanked hard on Mirk's arm and brought him back to his work.
"Get your staff," Yule shouted at him,over the din of the fighting. Magic and swords and cries of pain and anger. "We'll start with Vitali, on the end. One with his guts hanging out. Pack them good enough to move and Danu and I will watch your back."
Before Mirk could do more than pick up his staff, a wayward Watch guardsman tried to get between them and their patient. Danu was already kneeling beside Vitali, steadying his soul. Yule stepped into the gap, stomping on the man's insole with one foot as he brought his knee up into his groin with the other. The older healer delivered a punch to the man's face as he fell, to make sure he stayed down. Although the sharp burst of pain made Mirk wince, the warmth of Yule's mingled annoyance and satisfaction against his mind helped to bolster his spirits. Yule was in his element. He really would have been better off as a combat healer, just like everyone said.
"Fucking Watch idiots," Yule grumbled, as he hauled Mirk over to the wounded man. "Never know who to pick a fight with."
Mirk would have never been able to place the man's name from his face alone had Yule not prompted him. But he did recognize him. A man who Mirk had loaned a few silver coins to once, when the barman at the Seventh's favorite tavern had refused to serve him. Mirk had waved off his cringing apologies with a smile and reassurances that he was sure everything would even out between them in the end.
Now Vitali’s mouth was hanging open as he struggled to breathe, eyes glazed over, his face as pale as Danu's hands pressed on either side of it, holding his soul steady. Mirk tried to put the memory of the man out of mind as he plunged one hand into his ripped-open midsection, the other still clenched on his staff.
It wasn't as bad as it looked, not at the moment. Mirk’s mind's eye and his fingers only found one spot where blood and life-sustaining magic was rushing out of him at a pace the man's potential couldn't compensate for. Mirk closed his eyes just for a second, to muster the concentration needed to draw on his own life-giving potential and force it into the wound, into shapes he hoped matched the ones that the wound had ripped in two.
But once Mirk opened his mind to Vitali's body and magic, he felt himself drawn to it. Pulled down into it, feeding him more and more of his potential, anything to put a halt to the well of pain in front of him. He hadn't yet drawn on his healing magic that morning. Giving Vitali an extra measure wouldn't hurt anything.
He would survive. He would flourish, he would return to the little village on the banks of a cold, fast-running river that he'd come from, would lift Afanasy on his shoulders again and laugh at the way he told him he was too slow, always too slow...
Again, Yule smacking him, that time across the face with the back of his hand, brought Mirk back to himself. "Don't do it," Yule cautioned him, as he and Danu worked together to lift Vitali off the ground. He was still wounded, his midsection a raw red mess that his innards had been stuffed back into, but he wasn’t nearly as glassy-eyed and pale as before. He had the strength and the breath now to curse Yule and Danu for letting his midsection sag. "Or else I'm putting the blockers down your throat whether you like it or not. Watch our backs."
Swallowing hard, wiping the man's blood off on his ruined justacorps, Mirk nodded and did as he was told. His staff clenched in his hands, warm and crackling with potential now instead of dead and cold, was the only spot of brightness in what he saw as he followed Yule and Danu back to the infirmary steps, always half-turned to watch the battle continue over his shoulder.
Percival was straining to collect enough potential from the djinn to launch a counterattack, their multicolored magic snaking in long tendrils across the parade grounds toward him. Casyn was spouting more of his worries at him; Percival paid him no heed. Out of the mass of grappling and straining fighters, Kali and a band of fighters from the Seventh surged forward to challenge Percival before he could attack her sister again.
Casyn diverted her with a teleportation spell and a reckless stab to the thigh that brought Kali down screaming. But she struggled onward on hands and knees toward him as Casyn teleported back to Percival's side. Casyn yanked on Percival's robes and turned him around with an urgent plea that Percival didn't ignore that time.
Instead of hurling his next spell at the cavalry making headway on the Academy side of the parade grounds, Percival raised a hand toward the infirmary and brought his stolen magic crashing down onto the roof. Fatima's ladies with their crossbows and Elijah had begun to clear a path toward the djinn for Am-Gulat and Er-Izat, but no longer. The arrows ceased; three figures fell from the edge of the roof. A fireball rose sailed off the roof a second later — Elijah's doing — but it wasn't enough to break through Percival's defensive haze of magic.
But the second bolt from the blue that fell on Percival and Casyn was strong enough to make Percival falter. If it'd been solely directed at Percival, Mirk thought, it might have wounded him. Instead, the crack of dark magic, an inverse thunderbolt that screamed through the air and rent a deep pit into the earth, was focused on Casyn. Mirk searched the parade grounds for its source, even though he was sure from the feel of the magic — as cold and unyielding as a blade, honed by decades of bottled-up fury — who had brought Casyn down. There, atop the Glass Tower, above the screaming and writhing djinn Percival was draining more and more magic from by the second. A dark figure in billowing skirts, still standing rigidly upright. Margaret. She sunk to her knees a moment later. But Casyn didn't rise from the hole he'd been driven into either.
Then they were at the infirmary steps, and Mirk had to look away to make sure he didn't trip himself on the stone, slick with puddles of mixed rainwater and blood. Percival had lost his personal teleporting mage. He could force another one into his service, but there were few who had potential that could rival Casyn's. Maybe the tide of the battle would turn on that.
A roar of fury rose above the din of the fighting. Midway up the front steps, Mirk was knocked to his knees by a gust of wind from behind. He had only a second to stare into the dark, lifeless eyes of one of the ladies who'd been smashed off the infirmary's roof. Alice, one of her own crossbow bolts buried in her chest.
Then a body crashed down onto the steps between him and the rest of his team, carried on the same whirlwind that had knocked Mirk over. Am-Gulat, his leg so badly broken that bone pierced through his breeches at the thigh. A whispered message reached Mirk's ears, thrown over the chaos of the battle raging behind him by the wind. One in Am-Hazek's voice.
My apologies, seigneur. Heal his leg. He's changed too much for us djinn to help him any longer.
Yule and Danu had frozen at the top of the steps, hunched against the wind that had come and gone. Mirk waved them onward, turning his attention to Am-Gulat. Despite his terrible injury, he was trying to get up and rejoin the fighting. The same small, detached part of Mirk that had been cross at Percival's cursing had equally cross words to say about Destroyers never knowing their limits.
Am-Gulat drew his war hammer back to strike at Mirk as he approached, until he realized it was a friend coming to his aid rather than an enemy looking to finish him off. Cursing again and again in djinn, Am-Gulat let his arms and his war hammer fall limp at his sides, glaring down at the bone sticking out of his leg. The pain was eye-watering. But the rage radiating off of him was even worse.
"It'll take just a second, monsieur," Mirk reassured him, his staff tucked under his chin as he tore open the leg of Am-Gulat's breeches to expose the extent of the wound. A horrible blow, one that would have knocked a lesser man into unconsciousness.
"Er-Izat already tried," the djinn snapped at him. "And the other one too. I can fight through it. It is done."
Mirk leaned on his intuition once more. He put his staff down across Am-Gulat's lap, just above the wound. For some reason, it put an end to his struggles to try to regain his feet. "Please, monsieur. I've done this before. Let me help."
Before Am-Gulat could protest again, Mirk banished his shields and let his mind's eye rove over the djinn's body, his hands poised on either side of the wound on his leg, touching skin to skin. He understood why the other djinn could no longer help him. The delicate dance of elements inside Am-Gulat, kept together by the guiding hand of an ordered orientation, was gone. All that remained were snarled knots of fire and chaos, pulsing in time with Am-Gulat's rage. A djinn wouldn't know where to begin with that.
But Mirk understood that twisted, backwards dance, with its erratic tempo, its ill-timed ebbs and swells, better than any other. Am-Gulat hadn't fully embraced the chaos that'd awakened inside of him yet. The change was as painful as the bone jutting out of his leg, as searing as if his remaining fire magic had set his whole form alight. At the moment, it was only bearable because he was flowing with the change rather than fighting against it, willing to forsake the magic he'd known in exchange for the power to strike everyone who stood between him and the captive djinn down.
That made his body easier to work with. The pattern to Am-Gulat's chaos, the way it turned everything around on itself, was clearer than Genesis's, despite being more wild. Am-Gulat had only lost the rest of his elements along with his order a few hours ago. Traces of it remained. Mirk leaned on those traces to buy time, undercutting the parts of Am-Gulat's magic that wanted to rip everything apart by following the dying remnants of the stability that'd been there before. Mirk shifted one hand to his staff across Am-Gulat's lap to draw extra potential from it and pushed the other down on the exposed bone. Tearing and mending all at once, one making way for the other, until the chaos yielded and its own strange dance took hold again. From somewhere outside himself, Mirk heard a scream, then a curse.
Mirk blinked his eyes open. Am-Gulat was glowering down at him, but Mirk felt a good deal less pain against his unshielded mind. At least from Am-Gulat in particular. Everything else around Mirk was still the misery and fright of the dying. Mirk took comfort in the fact that he'd at least been able to set one thing right. It helped to keep him from falling into the cold eternity in Alice's sightless eyes still staring down at him from a few steps above.
Am-Gulat tried to scramble back to his feet the instant Mirk took the staff off his lap. But he was hurled onto his back a moment later by a bang from behind him, Mirk collapsing onto his front beside him, his staff clutched tight against his chest. Mirk heaved himself over onto his back as soon as he could, eyes wide as he tried to take in the changing tide of the battle still raging on the parade grounds across the street.
Another group of reinforcements had arrived. Mordecai, exhausted and hobbling, leading a mob of pale-faced but determined men out of the parade grounds transporter. But Percival was taking no chances with this lot, not with the K'maneda he despised most of all. He made up for Casyn's loss by ordering the mages still guarding the djinn by the Glass Tower to come to him, to get rid of anyone foolish enough to stand between the source of his power and him.
That was down to K'aekniv and the two remaining freed djinn. Er-Izat and Am-Hazek were warding off infantry fighters and Watch guardsmen who were trying to help the mages, while K'aekniv faced the mages’ spells head on, his left hand sword, surrounded by a haze of ice, held up like a shield while he smacked away every spell launched at him with the left. He was straining to the edge of his potential, Mirk knew. His winglight was as strong as that of a full-blood angel's. It was only a matter of time until it winked out.
And further up the street, beyond the Glass Tower, Mirk could see another contingent of fighters creeping forward, though he couldn't see well enough through the haze of smoke and spent magic to see who was at their head.
"I need to get back," Am-Gulat snapped, snatching up his war hammer.
Mirk felt it at the same time K'aekniv did. But K’aekniv had quicker reflexes, knew better what was coming. From the outside, it must have looked strange, K'aekniv abruptly lowering his fiery sword and calling to all the men and women on his side to retreat even though the mages between him and the djinn hadn't conjured up some impossible offensive. Yet something in his tone made all the men of the Seventh obey. The rest of the fighters followed suit, though they exchanged confused glances as K'aekniv hustled them all around the edge of the parade grounds toward the transporter.
Percival must not have felt it. He may not have had the capacity to, with nothing to fuel his magical senses but the djinn's stolen potential. Percival yanked back his sleeves and laughed, his voice audible even from the infirmary steps now that the sound of the fighting had lessened. "Make your charge all together. It won't save you. I'll finish you off like I should have when I cut the heads off your fathers at Donegal."
Am-Gulat tried to get to his feet beside him, but Mirk seized hold of the back of his coat and pulled him back down. He only managed it because Am-Gulat wasn't expecting it, not from him. "Let me go," the djinn insisted. "This is our..."
It finally must have reached him too, must have snaked through the haze of his rage and pain. The static. Cold and indistinct, but growing. Mirk couldn't feel how Am-Gulat's magic responded to it. But something in it convinced the djinn to settle, to wait and see like the rest of them.
The sudden pause only enraged Percival. He pinwheeled one arm backwards, the tendrils of magic connecting him to the djinn glowing bright and forcing them and the mages ahead of them to advance. But both of them only did so reluctantly, much to Percival's annoyance.
"Don't think I won't come for you too if you turn coward now. There is work to be done! We'll take the City back from this filth and we'll all be better for it."
"The City...is not yours to take."
Mirk didn't know what magic made the voice ring out so clearly. Some resonance in the cobbles, in the stone beneath the thin, torn-up layer of grass covering the parade grounds, an echo in the Glass Tower looming over them all. A low, sibilant voice, all the more vicious for the lack of emotion in its tone. Mirk knew from the feel of the wave of coldness that rolled over them all where to look. Down the street to his left, toward the distant South Gate.
His form was distinct, not yet cloaked in darkness or obscured by shifting coils of shadow. A lone figure in a dark overcoat and dress uniform, one arm behind its back, the other holding an open book out at a sensible reading distance. Walking at the same, precise, even pace as always, neither hurrying nor delaying the inevitable. A sliver of immaculate control, of restraint amidst a world that had gone to wild shambles.
Genesis. Still reading the book he'd borrowed from Mordecai's grandparents, as if there hadn't been a battle raging on the parade grounds minutes before. His head didn't lift as he approached, though the smallest tendril of shadow flicked out from underneath the sleeve of his overcoat to turn a page for him. Mirk knew the sound wasn't a real thing, was a trick of Genesis's magic and how it resonated with the core of chaos twisting beneath the City. But it was as if Mirk could hear his approaching footsteps over the nervous whinnying of Orest's horses and the murmured questions of confused fighters, even at a distance of a hundred yards.
K'aekniv issued one last warning command to the fighters who'd gathered near him, wading to the back of them and shepherding them a few paces further away from the parade grounds transporter. It had begun to spark angrily to itself like another mob of fighters would soon be coming through. "It's fine. Fine. I'll tell you when we go, yes? But until then, you all stay put. I know how to work this."
Percival wasn't having any of it. The mage was just close enough for Mirk to see the whites of his eyes as he rolled them, yanking hard on his stolen djinn magic again as he headed for the road at the side of the parade grounds to confront this new challenge. "Come! Come, you cowards! Don't be cowed by his parlor tricks! There's work to be done! A City—"
There was a flicker of motion out on the street, of shadows stretching too long and wide. One moment Genesis was a hundred yards away. The next he was a dozen paces away from the foot of the infirmary steps.
On the step below him, Mirk felt Am-Gulat's back stiffen against his knees as the djinn's fists tightened around his war hammer. "This is not...what is..."
"It'll be all right, Monsieur Am-Gulat," Mirk whispered to him. It felt wrong to raise his voice above that, to break the unnatural silence that had fallen over the parade grounds.
Genesis closed his book with a snap, then tucked it away into the folds of his overcoat. There was no hint of displeasure on his face, no frown or furrowed brow. Nor was there any hint of the pain he'd been in when Mirk had left him hours ago at Fatima's. Instead there was only that quiet blankness, ten times more worrying than any snarl or vicious grin ever could have been. "Again. The City...is not yours to take."
Huffing at his mages' intransigence, Percival strode across the parade grounds to meet Genesis with head held high, his long pale hair whipping in the silent breeze that had kicked up on the streets of the City. Shoulders rolled back, casting arm raised.
"We'll just see about that."
