If she’d kept quiet, perhaps the veil she wore would have kept her hidden, but there was no muffling grief in a place like this.
Blaine grabbed Caris by the arm, heart pounding as he yanked her back while the Daijalan soldiers all around them reacted to her outcry by aiming every pistol at them. A voice came from above, cold and familiar from a chase through this very city’s streets last year. Blaine glanced up, meeting the gaze of a woman who wanted them all dead on behalf of her queen.
“Welcome back, usurper,” Terilyn said from the mezzanine.
Eleven
SOREN
Soren cast starfire with the intent to defend, which ultimately meant killing the Daijal soldiers nearest them with a searing burst of heat, sending those on the mezzanine scattering. The starfire was enough to make the soldiers fall back and look for cover.
“We need to leave!” he snapped. They shouldn’t have detoured to begin with, though some part of him could understand Caris’ need to reunite with the people she loved. But the revenants in that cell with dried-out husks for faces were no longer her parents.
“No!” Caris shrieked, fighting Blaine’s grip. “No!”
Her brass goggles were fogged up from tears that had nowhere to go. She kept fighting Blaine, who clearly didn’t want to hurt her. Nathaniel solved the problem of her panic by hoisting her over his shoulder and ignoring the way she pounded his back with her fists.
“They’re gone,” Nathaniel told her, voice breaking. “I’m sorry, my love, but they’re gone, and we can’t lose you, too.”
The sound of pistols going off made Soren instinctively duck. He gestured sharply with one arm, causing starfire to rise higher in the air around them to act as cover. He did his best to keep it away from the prisoners in the cells, but if the heat melted the locks off, well, so be it. And if it burned the Daijalan soldiers who couldn’t escape quickly enough, so much the better.
Soren opened up a route between walls of starfire back the way they’d come since it was the only way out. Maurus led the Royal Guard in a charge for the door, pistols out and ready to shoot. Blaine stayed beside Nathaniel, who refused to put Caris down, while Halyna took up the rear with Soren.
“Our cover is blown. We aren’t getting past the barricades between here and the palace,” Blaine called out.
“That was a given,” Soren grunted.
“So what do we do?”
With the allied forces still locked in pitched battles in the trenches and the outer wall only partially broken through, they couldn’t rely on the cavalry to arrive. They’d have to fight their own way through the handful of miles between the jail and the palace, and they didn’t have the bullets to survive that.
“We evacuate who we can and burn everything down between us and the palace. The city survived the Inferno once before. I’m sure it’ll survive another.”
Blaine made a strangled, horrified sound that Soren ignored. Maurus had reached the door leading back to the administrative side of the jail but hadn’t opened it yet. The Ashionen ordered everyone to stand aside out of shooting range before pointing at Soren.
“Ready?” Maurus barked out.
It didn’t take a genius to know what he was asking for, and Soren nodded. He drew the starfire closer, shifting some of it into a rope of burning flame that he shoved through the doorway once Maurus yanked open the door.
The screams from the other side mixed with the crack of pistols going off, but the bullets melted in starfire before finding any targets. The soldiers on the other side didn’t have time to escape the searing heat and died for their efforts. Soren shoved the wall of starfire forward, keeping it ahead of them as they all scrambled through the doorway. He let the starfire behind them in the jail die down once they all made it into the hallway.
Nathaniel set Caris back on her feet, though he kept her hand in his as they raced through the abandoned work area, kicking up ash along the way. The entrance was ahead, all the desks between their position and the door hastily abandoned. The only people left in the work area were the ones locked up in the holding cell for processing.
“Let us out!” one of them yelled.
Soren ignored their cries for freedom, all his attention focused on the forecourt he could see out the front windows. “Everyone get down!”
They dove for the floor as the thunderous sound of bullets tore through windows and walls. Soren slammed his back against a desk and unholstered his pistol. He looked over at where Halyna was crouched, one of the Royal Guards having handed back to her the shoulder-mounted-grenade launcher.
“I can buy us a few moments for you to get us a way out,” Halyna said.
Soren nodded, pulling starfire from the aether. “Do it.”
The suppressive fire from the Daijalan soldiers outside never stopped, forcing them all to stay hunkered down. Vibrations through the floor made Soren grimace, the sensation a warning that a sentinel-class automaton was moving into position. They wouldn’t survive the strafing fire of a Zip gun.
Halyna finished loading her grenade launcher and hefted it onto her shoulder, the long-distance weapon primed to shoot. She’d only have one chance to take her shot, and she took it with a calmness all wardens were trained to carry when in the poison fields. The flare of the launch sizzled out the rear of the wide barrel as the chemical grenade streaked through a broken window, exploding amongst the soldiers outside. Soren didn’t know what poison or toxin had been inside the grenade, but the screams from everyone in range of the explosion outside told him it was probably one of the more painful types.
Soren looked back at Halyna, mouth open, but the words on the tip of his tongue never made it out whole. They turned into a shout of warning that came too late as Terilyn appeared out of the lingering smoke behind the other warden and slit her throat.
