21st of Thira, Continued

I was strangling. There was no air. No light. Something heavy was on my chest. I clawed at it, my fingers sliding through warm liquid.

Henmyrre. The heavy thing was Henmyrre, lying on top of me. Crushing the breath out of me. All those training sessions with Arramy came back in a rush: knees up, feet on the floor, brace. Shove.

Henmyrre's body shifted, and my lungs finally took in air. I got my hands flat between Henmyrre's chest and my front, braced my feet again, and this time managed to buck him far enough to the side that I was able to roll him the rest of the way off of me.

Someone was moaning nearby, but all I could do was stare at Henmyrre. He still wasn't moving. His head was resting at an unnatural angle, his face was set in the same slack expression I had seen before the blast knocked him into me. His back and neck were a bloody, oozing mess.

I looked down. There was blood on my hands. On my arms. In my dress. I blinked at it for a moment, then tried to wipe it on my skirt, only to find more blood. I took a breath. Shook my head. Tried to make myself think clearly. I didn't have time to be fussy. I lurched to my feet, grabbing at the potted palm as I swayed.

I needed to find Braeton. Arramy was loose.

I looked around, taking in the shredded furniture, the torn drapes, the haze of smoke drifting in the air. Other people were either beginning to stir or moving to help those who had been struck by flying glass. Guards in blue uniforms were running for the windows, rifles at their shoulders.

There were no guards at the top of the stairs.

Braeton would have gone up those stairs while I was dancing with Evarynne, and Reixham was mingling with his guests. That had been the plan. At least, I thought it had. But the plan had apparently changed.

A memory of Henmyrre loading something into the horseless flickered to life; a long metal canister, painted army grey. I saw it when they threw Arramy in the bootleg box, but hadn't thought anything of it, more worried with getting away from the hotel than anything else. It had been an explosives box, the kind used for incendiary cartridges. And now Arramy had them.

Pain lanced through my head, and I closed my eyes for a moment, dragging air through clenched teeth. Then I forced my feet to begin moving.

No one stopped me as I made my way across the dance floor and started up the steps. By the time I reached the top, I was jogging, that awful, creeping sensation that I was being stalked settling between my shoulders.

The doorway at the top of the stairs stood open, and the hallway beyond seemed empty. It didn't take more than a moment to turn around and pull the two halves of the door closed behind me, but in that fleeting instant I caught sight of a guard heading for the stairs. A helmet covered his head, but I would know that long, decisive stride anywhere. My heart stopped when the guard looked up, and a pair of frigid steel eyes met mine before I slammed the doors shut.

There was no bolt on my side of the door. Only two large handles, and a lock-plate.

I needed something to keep the door from opening. I whipped around. There was a bench along the wall. The bench had legs. I dragged it over to the doorway, lifted one end, and shoved one of the legs through the door handles, just before something heavy plowed into the other side of the panel hard enough to bow the whole thing inward. I jumped as the bench skidding in a screech of wood on wood.

"Bren! Wait!"

I stumbled backwards, my breath caught on the hot ball of dread in my throat.

Another percussion sounded from somewhere in the depths of the building, then another, rocking the walls, bringing plaster down from the ceiling, rolling through the floor. The hallway remained intact, but out in the ballroom there were new screams of "fire" and the sudden sound of warping metal and breaking glass.

Arramy hit the door again. "BRENORRA!"

With a sob I turned and ran.

The hallway was long, with doors and stairwells leading off of it into other parts of Reixham's personal quarters.

An ominous crack of splintering wood sent a new rush of panic straight to my middle. Arramy was nearly through the door. I ground my teeth and kept going, desperately searching for anything that would tell me where Braeton had gone.

The hallway turned into a gallery, with a towering bank of windows on the left overlooking Reixham's private gardens. I was so focused on what door would take me to Braeton that it was only by chance that I glanced out the windows instead.

Both wings of Reixham's manor were on fire, the flames rising high and hot against a dying sunset, side-lighting the garden between them in flickering gold. It was a different sort of light that caught my attention, though, a brief flash of blue amid the dusky evening shadows. It was enough. I had found Braeton: he was in the garden, crouching low behind a sculpted hedge, a strange, glowing device in his hands.

I staggered to a halt. For all of a second I stood there, gaping at what I was seeing. Then a quick glance around confirmed there were no doors on that side of the hallway. But the windows could open, and there was a balcony below them. It was as good an exit as any. I rushed to the nearest latch, fumbled the hook off its peg, then shoved the windowpane wide and scrambled through the casement in a slither of skirts. My feet hit the ground, and then I was racing for the balcony stairs twenty yards away.

My only real thought was warning Braeton that Arramy was coming, but my shout died on my lips.

Braeton was leaning carefully around the shrubbery, watching something I couldn't see.

On instinct, I dove for the paving stones of the balcony, pressing myself as flat as possible against the base of the railing.

Bringing my head up a fraction, I peeked through the railing latticework and muttered a curse under my breath.

Six men and two women were moving in a line down the broad pathway that cut straight through the middle of the garden, their steps rapid and purposeful. The Coventry. They had to be. A group of their personal bodyguards kept pace with them, shuttling them toward the fountain at the center, guns drawn, eyes on the manor.

If I moved, they would see me. If I didn't move, Arramy would see me. I was about to look over my shoulder when a deep, grinding rumble dragged my attention back to the garden, my body tensing like a coiled spring.

There was no explosion, though. A section of the fountain pool was rising up out of the water. It stopped abruptly, split in two, and swung apart around the base of the fountainhead of King Teiras the Great until a gap had opened at his feet. A gap with metal stairs that lead downward, disappearing into the ground.

The bodyguards reached the sunken doorway and fanned out around it, forming a human shield as their charges began descending those metal stairs.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Braeton slink around the edge of the shrubbery, dash forward, and duck behind a statue of King Rindan. Then he did it again, running from cover to cover, working his way closer and closer to the fountain. He wasn't the one I was focused on, though. The last of the Coventry had gone down the stairwell, and the bodyguards had followed – all but the last two, who were retreating backwards, rifles still at their shoulders. The one on the right had me squinting hard. It had to be a trick of the light, that fine nose and handsome, aristocratic face. Penweather was supposed to be in Nimkoruguithu. I blinked and looked again, but the bodyguards were already gone, and the pool was closing in a gurgle of water and a rasp of moving stone

At that exact instant, Braeton made a break from behind a topiary, tearing across the expanse of lawn around the fountain, carelessly out in the open, that glowing blue device easily visible. He might as well have been waving a flag. There was a shout from somewhere on the other side of the garden, and a rifle shot rang through the air, but he had already reached the fountain doorway. He dove for the stairwell, vanishing just as the two halves of the door met with a dull crunch.

Stunned, I lay there, staring at the water frothing and splashing as the fountain pool returned to bowl-shape.

Another shout from the garden broke through my stupor, and my blood ran cold as several men in the royal blue uniforms of Reixham's manor guard spread out and began combing through the garden beds. I was trapped. It had only taken me a minute, two at most, to get from the hallway door to the window. I had been on the balcony for nearly that long. If Arramy had broken through, I only had seconds until —

That thought hadn't even finished skating through my head before there was a quiet thump on the balcony behind me. I didn't hesitate. I shoved myself up off the ground, stumbling as my feet caught in my hem before I wrenched my skirts up around my knees and ran.

Arramy swore and started after me.

I didn't stop, my only goal to run until I couldn't, a mouse fleeing for a corner. There wasn't anywhere to go, there wasn't any way to win, but I wasn't going down without a fight. My fingers found the infuser tucked into the front panel of my bodice.

I had just reached the top of the balcony stairs when one of the manor guards yelled something in Lodesian, and a round ricocheted off the face of the building ahead of me. There was more yelling. I caught the words, "need to go," and "fall back," just before an ear-splitting siren began wailing, and a tremor rocked the balcony, sending me staggering.

The next instant, Arramy slammed into me, tackled me to the ground, pinned me beneath him, and snarled, "Stay down!"

The tremor intensified till the balcony was shaking. Pebbles from the mortar popped out and began bouncing and clattering over the surface of the pavers. One of the windows fell out of its casement and shattered inside the manor.

Arramy's palm was between the right side of my head and the ground, and from under his shoulder I got a glimpse of the garden.

The fountain of King Thieras was coming apart again, the statue folding down into the pool like a clockwork toy. Then the whole thing began moving, breaking into four neat quarters and separating. The ring of lawn around the fountain followed, cracking along the same quarters as the pool. The cracks kept growing, the fountain pulling apart wider and wider, the water draining away, the topsoil tearing in jagged lines and bunching up like a carpet before falling into the black gape of a massive hole.

As the hole opened, the tremor became sound: the grind of gears and the clank of machinery, and a strange, deep, throbbing hum that worked its way into bones and teeth and lungs.

Images began blending, the edges blurring together, making solid objects go double. The balcony wobbled under us, heaving and rolling, and an involuntary cry tore out of my throat as chunks of masonry began crumbling off the walls, smashing into the paver slates all around us. The whole world was coming apart.

In the middle of the chaos, a massive object began rising slowly out of the hole, the sides dull black, reflecting no light from the fires still burning in the manor. It was coming up at an angle, nose-first; as it rose, the roundness of it became a sleek, almost shark-like shape, larger and pointed at the front end. What looked like the command deck of a new ironside ship appeared next, jutting from the top, complete with a front viewing window and rows of portholes. The body tapered, and then came a set of elongated fins. Below the fins, an engine glowed the same eerie blue as Braeton's device, and suddenly I understood what I was seeing: it was a ship, but it wasn't meant for water. This ship was made to fly.

Arramy planted his left arm around my head, shielding my face as the back end of the engine cleared the edge of the hole. That awful throb suddenly became a deep-throated roar, and for several agonizing heartbeats the air was sizzling hot and full of dust. Choking, I fought for a breath beneath Arramy's arm while he held me tight, and then the roar receded into the distance. The shaking stopped. The siren cut out.

Everything was intensely quiet.

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