Chapter Four

Downfall

Death, Godling. I am here to record your death.

With his eyes locked on Marduk’s broad back, Enk stiffened, the creature’s inhuman words hissing through his skull like tossed snakes. Then he felt it, his prophesied doom, an unearthly cry that filled his chest with clutching need. His inner mystery twined along to it, lancing his mind with visions of a disrobing Inanna. He spun around, caught sight of a crimson light high in the evening sky. It hung above streets and homes, flapping like a silk sheet in the breeze, illuminating the back of a floating figure.

Enk blinked up at the stranger, fighting a tightness in his breast. For a span, he had trouble believing his eyes. The place where the distant figure hung, his power sensed only nothingness, just more swaths of empty sky.

Wait. That was not quite right.

There was an impression of twisted space where the figure hung, as if existence had bent around and impossible bubble.

Was this madness? First, glimpsing Inanna through a hole in reality, now this? Had the Naunak curse cracked his mind at last?

He glanced over his shoulder, but Marduk was nowhere to be seen. When he turned back around, he found the creature standing at his other shoulder, peering up at the heavens, as if he had always been there. The Scion of House Gueye jumped, skittered back, and raised his sword.

“She is a moth compared to the Pattern Singers of old,” Marduk said, his tone wry and mocking. “If you could but witness their glory your heart would cry out in wonder and horror.”

“What’s happening?” Enk asked, returning his eyes to the strange radiance. He understood he should know the answer to this question, but his thoughts felt as molasses for their lack of quickness. He had suffered too much in too short of a time frame for him to be anywhere near his best.

Phantom meteorites appeared in a circle about the floating figure, sheathed in blue flames. And at last, Enk could make out the stranger’s dark habit and glowing halo. Terror groped for, seized his heart in its taloned hands.

“A Sophic Nun,” Enk hissed, realizing she could only be here for him.

Marduk lowered his inhuman face. “You should run. Now.”

A calamitous downpour of hellish fire. The glass ceiling exploded inward. Glittering shards fell like murderous sputum. The floor groaned and rolled. Enk was tossed onto his back, gasping, panting. He raised an arm over his face.

The world roared about him, wailed in a cavernous voice.

He clamored to his feet, deaf to all but the pounding in his ears. Once more the Recorder was nowhere to be seen, but he speared that fact little thought. The sense of danger was much too pressing.

He bolted toward the door, only to falter upon its threshold.

All around him, he sensed lives wink out like candle flames in the dark.

No-no.

It was happening again.

Others were dying because of him, sacrificed so that he might escape.

Always the innocent had to be—

Not again. Never again.

He closed his free hand into a fist, turned to glare up at the Nun. As death clothed in otherworldly lights, she hung in the sky, a beacon that cried to be blotted out. And howling out in fury, the young scion reached out with a radiance all of his own, one impossibly bright next to the setting sun. . . .

■■■

Fana lurched upward, flung higher into the sky.

A fiery gust blasted the ivory coif from her head, sent her crimson curls cartwheeling like blood-colored snakes. Her mind strained against what she had wrought even as her heart swelled with pride. She was the Holy Consort of Death! None could stand before her and hope to survive. None!

Mountainous plumes rose from where her attacks had rented the earth, demolishing homes and lawns. Yet here and there patches of land remained untouched by everything but rubble where the living once stood.

A vague sense of wrongness skittered across her mind.

This was not the way it was supposed be. Since when did she take joy in death and destruction? Control. She had lost—

Something unseen slammed against her secondary Wards, the ones that protected her mind from external influences. Her luminance sail broke apart like foaming surf, and she plunged downward, the hem of her habit billowing like indecent skirts. Her heart skipped into her throat. Her scarlet mane leaped away from her face.

Impossible!

Fana gathered her wits and began another song, plumed the depths of creation with her radiant voice. The air thicken beneath her feet and she lurched, staggered across an oval sheet of gold-tinged violet.

The memory of terror gripped her, and she spun, searching for the abomination with different eyes even as she reinforced her secondary Wards. Waves of hatred bashed against her, tried to crack the pocket of twisted space that sheltered her mind.

Die, an ethereal voice whispered in her ear. Kill yourself!

She bit back a cry, sang louder.

Worship Osei was right, this Mindripper was far stronger than it had any right to be. Her secondary Wards should have made her invisible to its power! Yet she was now struggling to keep it from collapsing. This just should not be.

There.

She traced the psychic attacks back to a figure glaring up at her through a shattered ceiling. Rage glowed like magma in her veins, a seething eruption that demanded to be fed.

Kill yourself, the voice repeated, this time a world ending howl.

No!

She would not die here! She was a Scarlet Vestal of the Fourth Aureole, she would not be defeated. Not here. Not ever.

Fana charged toward the distant Mindripper, and the moon-shaped splotch of light followed her, rippling with her every step across the sky. She drew deeper upon the Holy Fire, changed her song to another War-Hymn.

She raised a hand, aimed bent fingers at the Mindripper.

■■■

Lights gleamed from the Nun’s fingertips, five golden rays spiraling downward like silken knives.

Enk staggered back as he was struck in the chest, crashed into the wall beside the ballroom’s door, felt the cloth of his coat crumble into ash in his hand. The floor smoldered where the four other beams had landed, yet he was unharmed except for the flesh singed by the burning fabric. He thrust his sword into the sheath at his belt. Then he lumbered out of the chamber.

He was outmatched.

Escape was his only avenue.

The Nun was closer now. Her otherworldly song clacked the air behind him.

He ran faster, wheezing for the stinging of his lungs.

Luminescence sheared the ceiling to the front of him, sheeted the ground before him. He lurched to a stop, backed into a chamber stacked with rows of dusty books.

Fiery debris clapped the hallway, releasing sparks that gnawed on wood like hungry vermin. A shudder sent the floor teetering beneath Enk’s feet.

No-no.

He whirled around, desperate for any avenue of—

An explosion. A pillar of scarlet fire consuming the world.

Then he was falling, cloaked in a fierce light, screaming. . . .