Chapter Three

From Horizon to Horizon

It was, Fana thought, a good day to kill.

Her luminous sail lifted her heavenward, buoyed by otherworldly winds, winds that worked counter to the one rippling her dark garment. The Pit’s shattered dome hung below her, and all around it the stone fragments she had launched into the sky came crashing down, slamming into nearby buildings. She did not allow the cries that the bombardment exacted to divert her from her mission.

Such was the dread import of her task.

What was a few lives compared to the fate of the world?

What was Kalum?

Nothing. Nothing.

And yet. . . .

Fana shifted the unearthly harmonics of her Hymn and her upward migration stalled, then transformed into a forward leap across the sky as the crimson sail inflated into a half bubble to the front of her. Forgotten passions seethed and glowered. The air howled in her ears, blotting out all other sounds but the throbbing of her heart. The sun dipped into the western horizon, an orange orb sinking into the earth.

Dilgan flashed beneath her feet, buildings and clogged streets. She caught fleeting glimpses of people retreating before the red-coated soldiers of the 13th Regiment, saw structures burning in the fading light. Wherever she passed the fighting ceased, and eyes and fingers lifted to track her trajectory.

The Holy Fire roared within her, both a shield from and a magnat to the dark agencies that heeded her song. Her insides careened with a sense of power, a sense she had been taught to repress but was now failing to do so. When was the last time one of her sisters had worked so openly in any city in the Empire but New Uruka? At least a hundred years, perhaps.

She paused over the Weeping Square across from the Lord-Governor’s palace, trying to orient herself. There was a reason the Third Compact had been implemented, she reminded herself, and it was not merely to protect the Empire from dangerous knowledge—or not fully. Nuns had lost control before, had grown drunk on their power, had lain waste to whole towns before being put down.

Yet she was not one of those weak fools, she was a Scarlet Vestal of the Fourth Aureole. War and death were her domain! Where others broke and faltered, she maimed and mutilated. Did not the very heavens groan and sputter in terror of her presence?

Something was wrong. . . .

The shadow of fear crawled across her aspect.

What happens?

She laughed, her confidence suddenly renewed by a surge of kicking glee. Death! This was what happens.

There!

Through the crimson sheet, she glimpsed the direction she must tread to reach her quarry. She shot forward upon a thunderous gust of air, a blood-colored star burning bright for the swelling gloom.

Fires burned below, screening the skies in obsidian smoke. She soared through and past mountainous plumes.

Soon this new Mindripper would meet its end, as all the others had.

But there was something she was forgetting, wasn’t there?

No. No.

Capering across the darkening sky, the Sophic Nun breathed out light and smiled.

She swept her gaze across the rooftops of one of Dilgan’s most affluent districts, scanned left and right. The mansions appeared similar from the ground, but from the air they looked almost identical, each girdled by white walls overgrown with vines.

She slowed, dangling from an ethereal sail. Which one? Doubt cracked and popped like a burning twig. Which one was it?

A stomach turning shudder ran through Fana. How much time had she already squandered? She could not afford to waste more! Worship Osei had said she would take responsibility, then let her. . . .

Arms spread wide, she began the first of her War-Hymns, cried out in an impossible voice.

The Mindripper. . . . The Sophic Nun decided would die in a hail of fire and brimstone for the toil its siblings had exacted upon Kalum.

A blinding flash.

Ghostly comets appeared about her, a circle of arcane death, exploding downward with the crack of thunder.