“Have you never thought of why such a monstrosity would be kept hidden away in a mere school, where no one would think to look? Why a Class One Power generator should be locked away in such a place?”
Eldred shouted,“Why are you dawdling? Hurry! Do it now!”
“After I executed Eldred and made him into a generator, we connected him to the Circuit of Destiny. Do you know what that is?”
Arienne nodded.
“The real problem occurred long after that. It was more thanone hundred years ago now, but I remember it like it was yesterday.”
She was desperate to hear more, but Lysandros was only steps away from her. She could delay no longer.
Arienne concentrated on the room that was collapsing in her mind. The rafters were bending, the floor was splitting, lime fell from the walls. She imagined herself in the room and she was there. She heard the creaking, smelled the dust, touched the splintering wood and lime powder.
She imposed those senses of collapse on the derelict inn around her, and imagined the inn collapsing under that pressure. Arienne spoke the incantation Eldred taught her, leaping backward with all her might.
A rafter fell directly toward Lysandros’s head. He grabbed it with both hands. Arienne realized with a start that his arms were made of metal. With this motion, his cloak slipped from his shoulders, and Arienne could see the gears turning and pistons firing within his body. Everything except the top half of his head and the right side of his face was machine. He carried a wooden box on his back, which looked out of place next to his metallic form.
The humming of his machinery suddenly rose to a keen; the weight of the rafter was too much. Then, the roof collapsed on top of him. Lysandros tried to get out of the way, but the floor came up from under him as the roof came down.
In the scattering dust, the pressure on Arienne’s heart disappeared. The inn lay half in ruins before her.
Eldred said,“We do not have time to wait until the sun rises. You must cross the pass now.”
“But Lysandros is dead, isn’t he?”
“Did you not see his body of metal? This will not be enough to destroy him. We must keep him at as much distance as possible.”
More lights were coming on at the open inn. The sound must’ve woken the guests there. The edge of the eastern sky was tinting red, the sun just under the far away hills. Arienne quickly grabbed her things and set off toward the pass.
25LORAN
“No, Your Highness, we shall not! We shall not let you go!”
Three people had lain down on her path, preventing Loran from going forward. One was a man who looked at least seventy. The other two seemed to be his daughters. Behind them were about a dozen others with determined expressions.
“Why must we give up?” one of the women on the ground cried. Her face was wet with tears, soon to freeze on her face. It was a cold winter, even for Arland. What if they should get sick? She remembered how difficult it had been that winter when the winds seeped into her house and her daughter became bedridden for much of the season.
There were nearly a hundred people following her now. They had beseeched her not to surrender herself, and then joined her in her walk, saying they would at least see her off. Many more had turned back when they heard what Loran was going to do.
To the three people lying in the road in front of her now, pleading with her to stop, Loran spoke as gently as possible.
“You say you cannot give up,” she said, “but I have only been fighting since late autumn. It has been less than a season. You shall forget me soon enough.”
“Late autumn? We have been awaiting Your Highness’s arrival for twenty years!”
A woman in the crowd behind her shouted, “I sell fruits and greens in Kingsworth. Do you know why I am here in the country every winter with my relatives? It’s because my whole family was killed by that prefect! I cannot bear the cold, empty house in the winter.”
Loran knew this feeling all too well. The only difference between the woman and herself was that she had gone to the volcano instead of her relatives’ house.
“But the prefect is dead,” Loran said, almost apologetically. “Perhaps this is justice enough—”
“They will send another to take his place! I no longer have a family they could murder, but what about those who do?”
“But surely the new prefect would not be as cruel as Hesperus?”
Another shouted, “How can we know that? What if he’s worse? Then who will fight for us? Why must we live under such fear?”
Then why don’tyourise up instead of asking me to do it,she almost said. But she’d been the one who set out trying to become king. No one had asked her to do it. It wouldn’t do to complain about it now.
