Kordas felt his exposed skin drying in the ambient heat. Ash fell from the orange sky, in flurries like snow, and the earth itself heaved upward from the Palace outward. He wiped at his face. Tears distorted his vision.
“My Lord,” Star said loudly from beside him, and gripped his upper arm. “This is too dangerous for you to stay!”
“I have to,” Kordas bellowed back. “I have to see this. It’s my doing. It’s—it’s not something I can turn my back on.”
A deafening, explosive shock came from the Palace, and a set of bright yellow molten-metal knifeblades—no—claws ten stories high punched upward through the center of the Palace complex, and Kordas fell to his knees. Lightning crackled in jagged bolts through the clouds of ash, which itself was now expanding up and outward, utterly covering the sky. The canals of the City drained toward where the Palace once had been, and Kordas felt his eyes dry out. Where water once was in the canals, pyroclastic flow now raced toward them, and if Kordas was screaming, he couldn’t hear it. The City’s remains heaved, then burst into a flower of fire and molten stone. More searing claws emerged, and a pair of red-hot jaws emerged from the lava, snapping at the air, like a fish snapping at a fly just above the water, and as the torrent of ash and fire began to cook his skin, Kordas was pulled back through the Gate by Star.
* * *
—
Kordas couldn’t register anything from his senses quite right. He was drowning, he was gasping, he was burning. There was yelling, and he was being prodded at and lifted. He fell. Shapes moved around him but none were distinct. There might have been voices, but mostly, there was incessant ringing in his ears, and crackling when he moved his jaw. His tongue was dry, and he tasted nothing. He was jostled and carried, and his nostrils were caked in blood and ash. Time passed, but he didn’t know how. He sensed Mindspeech and then stinging sensations, and feelings like being . . . peeled. He did not like that at all, and was nearly sure he coughed up blood and ash. He caught himself blinking and took it to be a good sign. If he could blink, he was alive. If he hurt, he was alive.
He thought he heard cursing, and then things snapped into a clearer version. Someone removed the Carcanet from him, and then the soothing warmth of magical Healing flooded into his core. He felt water poured over him repeatedly, and much fuss around him. It could have lasted days. He had periods of coughing, periods of drunkenness. He felt himself being bathed. Outside of that, there was continuous commotion. Several times he lost all sense of balance. He knew he’d tried to stand up and had been laid back down again.
Maybe this was for the best, he thought. If I’m being looked after by somebody, I’m alive, and the Plan must have worked, and everyone must have the situation in hand. I should stay this way a while. I can be done without, for a while.
I killed the Emperor. I killed the City. I—may have killed the Empire.
Maybe I’ve earned some rest.
But he couldn’t quite bring himself to feel happy about it. He’d witnessed the annihilation of a City that was centuries old. It was horrible. What if there had been people trapped there? What if not everyone made it out? What if the Elementals from Below didn’t stop there?
Was he screaming again?
Then he was warming up inside again. It was so hard to tell what had become of him.
What have I become?
Epilogue
“ . . . So then we set the Gates in the Imperial City to accept everyone and everything living that came through them, even if they had no talisman,” said three Dolls nearest him, as he carefully sipped wine, propped up on cushions on the roof of the living barge he and Isla would share. With their boys, their three boys, a family at last. “For those that had no talisman, the destination was random—to whatever Gate outside the City that did not have something or someone in it. You told us you wanted as many saved as you could. I think that most, if not all, escaped.”
And thus the word that the Imperial Capital had fallen to monsters was spread directly to every corner of the Empire. Well . . . that was efficient.
“It was efficient,” said the third Doll, Rose, echoing his thoughts. It was easier to tell them apart now; Star was covered in scorch marks, imperfectly covered by the clothing someone had given it.
The Dolls were staying. They were counting on him and his collection of mages to figure out how to free them, yes. But, Star told him, they were also staying because they liked him and his people. “Even when we are freed, this one thinks that you will not be seeing the last of us.”
Mostly, he’d been told, the only people coming here had been those he’d intended to come. The hostages, the people of Valdemar, and the people of Valdemar who’d slipped talismans to friends or relations outside of Valdemar. The dissidents had ended up here too, though, which could be a future problem—one he was too tired to address right now.
The sun setting over the lake, the smell of cookfires and campfires, and all the boats, some of them painted up gaudily for the Regatta they never reached, made things look and feel deceptively peaceful.
Deceptively, because people were troubled. When Dolls and horses and people had come pouring through the foot-Gate, smelling of smoke and ash and screaming their heads off about demons, the Circle had done some sort of massive scrying spell, and pretty much everyone around the lake had gotten a bird’s-eye scrying view of the destruction.
Isla told him most people had cheered and openly rejoiced. But then, most people had just seen their most feared enemy getting pulverized. They hadn’t been there. They hadn’t seen innocent people, people a lot like them, running for their lives through a burning hell. They didn’t have it on their conscience.
And now, of course, the folks who’d been too far to see the scrying had heard about it secondhand and wanted to be told. So the entire lakeshore was alive with the murmur of tens of thousands of people, and probably three fourths of it was the people who’d been here to see the scrying disk telling the people who hadn’t been here what they’d seen.
And probably all sorts of wild interpretations of it.
Can I correct any of that? Do I even want to? Every bit of the Plan had assumed that the Empire and the Emperor would still exist after Regatta Day, and an awful lot of it had been built around preventing him from finding them.
Now—
I’m not going to think about it, he decided. I’m going to sit here with my sons and my friends and drink and watch the sunset.
He had been rather crispy, he’d been told, when Star dragged him across the Gate. The Carcanet had saved him from fatal damage, but it had also fought all the attempts to Heal him when he’d gotten to safety. Finally the Record Keeper had taken it off, and Alberdina had done her work, aided by other Healers he didn’t know. Whoever they were, they were geniuses. There was hardly any scarring. Right now, he felt mostly like he’d had a bad sunburn and a wretched cold.