Ironfist blinked until the black spots retreated from his vision.
The Blackguards who should have come to the back gate had never come. Even with the musket shots, no one had come.
Up. Up!
Ironfist must surely be running out of time before the execution. He looked at the stars, but he’d never paid enough attention to know at what hour certain stars rose and set at this time of year. He couldn’t tell how long he’d been unconscious. Besides, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was saving Gavin Guile.
“One more lap,” he said.
The great race ended with two laps in the hippodrome before cheering crowds. Hanishu and Harrdun had no idea that they’d nearly caught up with the Tiru-clan bastards they’d been following across the desert until they arrived in the hippodrome itself. The men were walking, beaten, exhausted. One was limping. They looked at Hanishu and Harrdun’s entrance with frank terror.
Like young antelope, Hanishu and Harrdun had found sudden energy. They’d closed the gap. They’d passed the men, laughing as they headed into the final lap.
They were going to win. Win!
Forty thousand people were on their feet, shouting, cheering. And then the young men passed the Tiru section. Their tribal rivals had been aghast, in denial on the first lap.
This time, they were furious. They began pelting the boys with stones, crockery, coins, anything they could throw.
Ironfist had given Hanishu the inside, intending to make the last lap a friendly rivalry, to see if he could pass him in the final stretch. But that put Hanishu closest to them, so he caught the brunt of the Tirus’ fury. A cup hit him in the knee, midstride, and then a gruel bowl smashed over his ear.
Hanishu had gone down, nearly unconscious.
“Come on, brother,” Ironfist said aloud now, his worlds blurring together. “Everything we’ve done up to now has been for this. No surrender, or it’s all for nothing.”
Using his good hand while keeping his other arm clamped tight to his side to try to slow the blood loss, Ironfist pushed off the ground. He swayed, faint, and reached out. He braced himself on the boathouse to keep from falling, a sudden wave of vertigo cresting over him.
After he steadied himself and the dizziness passed, he opened his eyes.
He was a good ten paces from the boathouse. There was nothing to steady himself on.
Hanishu had stood, staggered, and fell again as the Tiru runners came back into view around the corner behind them, catching up.
Harrdun pulled him to his feet and braced him with an arm, and tried to pull him to a jog.
But his younger brother’s knee gave out after the first step. He fell again, pulling Harrdun down with him.
Hanishu had started weeping. ‘I can’t. I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.’
“Don’t you make me carry you,” Ironfist said aloud now.
Two more teams had just entered the stadium. There was a near riot in the stands where other fans were attacking the Tiru for their stone-throwing.
With trembling arms and trembling legs, he’d picked up his little brother. Hanishu clung to him fiercely, trying to distribute his weight, trying to help, even as he’d doomed them.
Ironfist had jogged a few steps, but he couldn’t keep it up, not after all the leagues they’d run. He slowed to a walk, and then it was all he could do to stagger forward one slow step at a time.
And then the hippodrome erupted in cheers and also shouts of outrage as the Tiru team crossed the finish line to win, and the brothers were both weeping.
And then another team passed them. And another. And Hanishu broke down as his big brother carried him. ‘I failed you. I failed you.’
God damn this whole world to fire. Those were the very words Hanishu said again last year as he’d lain dying in Ironfist’s arms. As if the failure were his.
The last hundred paces were agony. Someone offered to help, but Ironfist hadn’t even been able to see them. There was only the finish line, and his brokenness and his rage and a tenacious love for his brother that said, I will not quit.
“We don’t quit, brother. We don’t quit,” he’d said then and said now.
The last forty paces were a blur of unvariegated pain. The acid in his muscles, the roar of the crowd—helpful or hostile, he couldn’t tell—building to a crescendo, and the burning of the sun. He wept—ashamed as a boy is foolishly ashamed of tears—and none judged him. He wept, and those walking behind him, a throng swollen to hundreds, perhaps thousands, wept with him.
They finished fourth, collapsing across the line, and that placement only because the fifth-and sixth-place clan teams had seen what happened and slowed to a walk behind them, and refused to let anyone else pass them.
They fell—and were instantly lifted on shoulders and paraded through another lap, the actual victors forgotten.
Their defeat had garnered more acclaim and support for their clan than any victory would have. Their grit and courage in adversity had not only made them famous, but had guaranteed their Tlanu-clan ascendancy.
Mother had been assassinated soon thereafter. And once a rival to his big brother, bitter at his constant defeats, Hanishu had changed utterly. He’d suddenly worshipped Harrdun, taking his few victories over his big brother with quiet joy and his own defeats with equanimity.
The two had become best friends.
And it had all been for evil.
If Ironfist hadn’t decided on a whim to join that race and forced his little brother to be his partner, if Ironfist hadn’t carried his little brother that one lap, Hanishu wouldn’t have come to the Chromeria to join his big brother. He’d still be alive.
Ironfist slogged now to the rear dock and the hidden door in the little boathouse that disappeared into the secret bowels of the Chromeria. It was right where his last Order contact had said.
Even the Old Man needed people to do the actual digging, and even the Old Man had recruitment problems—if you simply kill your workers every time they dig a tunnel for you, you run out of workers.
He ducked his head to enter yet another tight, loathsome place. He was fully in the darkness before he realized that this time, he didn’t need to worry about anyone seeing a light. His thinking was coagulating like the blood matting his tunic.
Cracking open a mag torch, he was blinded by the glow—too stupid in his present state to look away.
The path forked and he took the higher way. Soon he caught sight of a blue arc off to one side of the path. Like a tangent line, this path had been cut through the rock to intersect with a blue sphere at only one point. The path was above the luminous sphere, looking diagonally down on its contents.
Ironfist braced himself on the rock and looked down. Gavin Guile wasn’t inside.
But something was. A vaguely man-shaped mass of glittering blue motes swirled in the cell. The cell itself was broken, a hole gaping in one side, and shards of blue luxin littering the area beyond. But jagged hellstone glimmered in that tunnel, trapping the glimmering creature.
The pieces tumbled around Ironfist’s besieged brain like the individual colored tiles of a mosaic refusing to coalesce into an image: Gavin, in the first year after the False Prism’s War, once asking, ‘Ironfist, your family were priests long ago, right? Do you know what happens when the djinn die?’
It had been an odd question, but Gavin had been an odd young man.
Gavin wasn’t in there, and Ironfist was dying. He had to move on before his time ran out.