CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Palace of Aqhat, Isembaard

A n Icarii? An Icarii? What the fuck have you done to me, Axis?”

“Isaiah—”

“I trusted you. I trusted you! And this is how you—”

“Isaiah, I am not to blame, I—”

“Don’t tell me that. I saw you talking with Ezekiel the other night. What were you plotting, eh? I can’t imagine you wanted my throne. What then? Ishbel?”

“I had nothing to do with it, Isaiah!”

The two men glared at each other, bodies rigid with anger and shock, faces tight with emotion, then Isaiah turned away, muttering an obscenity.

He’d known that Axis had nothing to do with the attempt on his life (and he was almost certain who had ordered it), but Isaiah was angry, furious, and he’d needed someone at whom to lash out.

His chest was still streaked with blood from his wound, which was now stitched and daubed with antiseptic. He’d been lucky. The arrow had struck him square in the chest, but it had hit a section where the golden collar draped down from his shoulders.

Although the arrow had penetrated the metal links, it had only superficially wounded Isaiah.

Without the collar he would have been dead.

It almost did not matter. Aqhat was in crisis.

Such a brazen assassination attempt, in the middle of a Spectacle, with every high-ranking witness Isembaard could produce, was a disaster for Isaiah. He relied on his image of total strength and invulnerability to maintain control over the military and over the vast and disparate elements of his empire.

To have an assassin penetrate into the very heart of his power, to have an assassin so brazenly and so easily evade all security, utterly undermined Isaiah’s credibility.

Everything was made so much worse by the fact the assassin had not been caught. He had simply…vanished.

Within moments armed men had hustled Isaiah, Ishbel, and Axis off the rooftop and down into Isaiah’s private chambers via a back entrance, Isaiah having recovered enough from the shock of the arrow strike in his chest to shout orders at his generals.

It was there, in Isaiah’s private quarters, as Zeboath stitched and cleaned his chest wound, that Axis told him the assassin had been an Icarii bowman. Ishbel had since gone to her own chamber to rest, and Isaiah had angrily pushed Zeboath aside, telling him to get out of the chamber.

“I was not responsible,” Axis said.

“It was an Icarii,” Isaiah said, although his voice had lost much of its accusation. “One of your people. Is that what you did when you went north to fetch Ishbel, eh? Make contact with the Icarii? Suggest they might like to assassinate me?”

“If I’d wanted to assassinate you,” Axis snarled, “I would have done it privately and I would have done it well.”

Isaiah stared at him, then his body subtly relaxed. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Axis to relax slightly, too.

“It wasn’t me, Isaiah,” Axis said.

Isaiah made a gesture with his hand, as if to wave away the fact he had accused Axis in the first instance, then poured himself a goblet of wine, draining it in a couple of swallows.

“Why an Icarii?” he said, wondering what Axis would say. “Why would an Icarii hunt me? Are they assassins for hire now?”

Axis hesitated.

“I’m not entirely sure it was an Icarii,” he said.

Ishbel had dismissed her attendants, and now sat in a chair, rubbing at her aching back.

She felt dreadful. She hadn’t been feeling well all day—nauseated, headachy, weak—but all those troublesome irritants had magnified fivefold after Isaiah had fallen atop her in the Spectacle Chamber.

Her legs were now so wobbly they could scarcely hold her, and her head throbbed as if the arrow had cracked her skull instead of Isaiah’s chest.

But, thank the gods, he was alive and relatively well. For a long, terrible moment immediately after that arrow had struck Isaiah, Ishbel had thought he was dead.

She decided to rise and fetch herself some iced wine, but as soon as she moved she gave a gasp as a band of fire encircled her body.

Her hands instinctively clutched at her belly, then she tried once more to rise in order to walk the fifteen or so steps to the bellpull to summon aid.

But the instant Ishbel tried to put weight on her legs she collapsed to the floor, unable even to shriek as agony of incredible magnitude encircled her body.

At DarkGlass Mountain, the black bands encircling the pyramid throbbed and glittered, as if they rhythmically expanded and contracted.

“What?” said a voice. “Has someone managed to get in before me?”

Ishbel thought she vaguely recognized the voice. She managed to roll over, toward the voice, grateful that someone was here, then gasped once more, this time in mingled pain and horror and shock.

Ba’al’uz stood a few paces away.

She almost didn’t recognize him. His clothes hung in dusty tatters, and likewise his skin—as if the man had been exposed to so much sun his skin had dried and then shredded away from his face and the exposed parts of his limbs.

There appeared to be an ugly cur skulking about his heels, but surprised as she was to see Ba’al’uz and in such a state, Ishbel gave it no notice.

Already in shock from the continuing viselike bands of agony contorting her abdomen, Ishbel’s mind couldn’t quite make sense of what she was seeing. Ba’al’uz? Here? Why? And what had happened to him to—

More viselike agony, and Ishbel screwed her eyes shut and moaned.

“Are you giving birth?” Ba’al’uz asked, quite pleasantly.

“I need help,” Ishbel said. “Can you fetch me aid, please. I beg you, Ba’al’uz, please, I need—”

“I am the only aid you will ever see,” said Ba’al’uz, “and even that not much aid at all, I think.”

Indescribable pain gripped her. Ishbel wanted to scream. Her mouth hung open, but even breathing was impossible with this much agony consuming her, and to make a sound was utterly beyond her.

The fingers of one hand scrabbled desperately at the cold floor.

She felt the baby shift within her.

She heard Ba’al’uz laugh, softly and pleasantly, and mutter something, as if he were talking to someone else in the room.

Then she heard the unmistakable sound of a sword being drawn from its scabbard, and she looked up.

“What do you mean, not an Icarii?” Isaiah said. “You have just finished telling me that—”

Axis made a gesture of frustration. “It looked like an Icarii—but there was something…wrong.

Something different. Gods, Isaiah, I saw him for an instant only, and that from a distance. I can’t give you anything more than that. I’m sorry.”

“You are of little help to me, Axis.”

“I am trying my best for you, damn it!”

“What I need, Axis, is—”

Right at that moment the Goblet of the Frogs, sitting on the low table in the center of the chamber, screamed in formless terror.

Isaiah heard it, and Axis sensed it, and both felt it to the core of their beings.

Isaiah stopped midsentence, staring at Axis.

Then he blinked.

“Ishbel,” he said, and ran for the door.

Ishbel supposed she had managed to rack in a little air, for otherwise she should now be dead, but breathing was of little matter to her now.

The baby was being born too rapidly for her body to cope. She was rendered virtually soundless save for the occasional gasp, and incapable of moving save for her desperate writhing.

All Ishbel wanted to do was to get away from the frightful apparition of Ba’al’uz, now standing over her, his eyes gleaming, his sword held ready. All she wanted was for someone to rush in and discover her, and save her, and make this pain stop, make this pain stop, oh, gods, make this pain stop…

She tried to reach out for the Great Serpent, tried to use the power of the Coil, but Ishbel had not so much as thought about either the Coil or the Great Serpent for what seemed like weeks now, and in her current extremity both seemed very far away, and untouchable.

Then, suddenly, the baby was being born, and Ba’al’uz was reaching down.

At DarkGlass Mountain, the bands of black encircling the pyramid now raced for the shafts which fed light into the Infinity Chamber.

Within moments, every one of the bands of black blood had slithered into the shafts, and were sliding toward the Infinity Chamber.

Isaiah didn’t even pause to order the armed men waiting outside his chamber to follow him. He ran, using every particle of strength and speed and agility he commanded, through the corridors toward Ishbel’s chamber.

Axis was a step behind him, and then a bare step behind Axis came the dozen or so armed men whose commander’s desperation had been order enough.

Isaiah reached Ishbel’s chamber in a matter of moments. There was a guard standing outside, clearly alarmed by the sudden arrival of Isaiah, Axis, and the soldiers.

“Your sword, fool,” Isaiah snapped, then snatched it from the guard without pausing to wait for him to react.

Then he was inside, and staring at a tableau that, for the rest of his life, he would never be able to forget.

Ba’al’uz—a terribly disfigured Ba’al’uz, but Ba’al’uz nonetheless—straightening up from a bloodied Ishbel sprawled on the floor, a baby in one hand and a sword in the other.

A dog at his heels, an ugly street cur, baying and yapping as if it wanted the baby for its own.

Isaiah ran for him, but it seemed as if every step he took was in slow motion.

He took one step, and Ba’al’uz raised the child before him.

He took another step, and Ba’al’uz lifted his sword.

He took yet another step, hearing a distant roaring, which he only very dimly realized was himself, and Ba’al’uz took the baby’s head off with one clean sweep of the sword.

Another step, and Ba’al’uz was turning toward him, an expression of half surprise, half pleasure on his face.

“I did it,” he said. “Kanubai is born.”

And then Isaiah took his final step, and he raised his own sword, and he smote Ba’al’uz’ head from his shoulders with such force it flew across the room and smashed against a far wall.

Isaiah took off the dog’s head with the return swing of the sword.