She took another step backward into the arch of the doorway.
The wire construct sliced through her rag dolls, and they fell from his wrists and ankles. “No!” she yelled as they dropped to the floor. They hadn’t deserved that fate—they’d been loyal and brave. But there wasn’t time to mourn them now.
Leaving the now-free Eklor, the construct scuttled beetle-like around the desk. Both monstrosities advanced on her. She took another step back, one foot still in the room and one foot in the hallway.
Eklor lifted a silver cup of blood as if to toast her. “We are not so different, you and I. Violating the rules for the sake of love. Making our own future, though no one understandsour choices. Needing to be the one who alone rights the wrongs—”
Beyond him, through the glass panes of the window, Kreya saw a hint of movement. “I’m going to cut you off again,” she said. “Because I amnotthe same as you. And this time”—the glass shattered as Zera burst through, feetfirst—“I’m not alone.”
Eklor dropped the silver cup.
Blood spattered onto the floor.
He opened his mouth to say a word, one that would activate a talisman—perhaps to fight, perhaps to run, perhaps to fly. He didn’t get a chance to say it. Zera plunged a blade directly into his heart, shoving against it until the metal was buried up to the hilt.
“See, I did change,” Kreya said. “This time, I didn’t need to be the one who killed you.”
Zera shoved Eklor’s body backward, and it crashed into the desk. Cups scattered everywhere, and the blood of a hundred bone workers splashed over the floor.
Kreya then turned her attention to the two constructs as they attacked, and Zera joined her. Together, they fought, the old muscle memory returning with each strike, as the spilled blood of the bone workers stained the stone.
Chapter Thirty-One
Jentt ran and then slid, his knife out. He sliced the hamstrings of one inhuman soldier, stabbed another in the groin and a third in the ankles. He rose and winced—he was going to pay for this later in aches and bruises, if there was a later.
He spun to face the next one as one of Kreya’s statues—a granite slab carved like a bear’s skeleton—plucked a soldier off the street and ground it between its stone paws. Another three soldiers hurled themselves at the statue’s legs. Knocked off balance, it crashed onto the street, and the constructs swarmed over it, hacking at the stone with axes and swords until one of them hit the bone that powered it.
Another one down,Jentt thought.
Her statues were strong but not fast. And they were vastly outnumbered.
Like us.
Beside him, Stran was using up talisman after talisman. Powered by two at once, he was an unstoppable bull. Every construct he encountered fell to his fists and blades. Yanking a chunk of a stone out of the wall, he hurled it at a spider-shaped automaton. It crashed into the creature with such force that thespider tumbled off the edge of the tier to smash into the ground below. Glancing over the edge to make sure no innocents had been harmed, Jentt saw citizens from the first tier swarming over the spider, bashing at it until it quit twitching.
He wanted to feel good about that.
He hadn’t died (again) yet, which was excellent. Neither had Stran. He wanted to feel good about that too. But for every one he and Stran brought down, another three escaped them. The mountain kept disgorging more and more of them, a seemingly endless stream from the caves beneath the city. It was clear that the tangled mass of metal and bone they’d found on the plain had been a trick—he bet if they’d chiseled into its heart, they could have found mere dirt and stone and bones gathered from the forbidden zone. Eklor had saved the vast bulk of his army and brought it here, via the valley and then through the caves beneath the city.
Jentt caught a glimpse of a line of city guards, marching against a construct with a torso of twisted metal and arms like claws. It swung a mace of thick iron, catching the first guard in the chest and hurling him back against the second. Two houses down, a giant horse statue was being pulled to the ground by a swarm of vicious beetle-like constructs with saws instead of pinchers.
We can’t fight them all,he thought.
Seeing a blur out of the corner of his eye, he dodged right. A massive blow slammed into the ground where he’d been standing, the fist of a massive construct. It fractured the paving stones. He sped around the giant. “Hey, Stran, got another one for you.”
“Excellent,” Stran replied. “I was getting bored over here.” He shoved back three machine-men with a horselike kick. Acrossthe way, another of Kreya’s statues—a former pillar carved like the vertebrae of a snake—bashed into a line of Eklor’s soldiers, before the mechanized soldiers leaped on it. The stone snake reared once, knocking them aside, but more attacked. It would be overwhelmed soon.
“We need an endgame!” Jentt said. He tossed aside a drained speed talisman and withdrew another. He was running dangerously low on talismans and knew Stran’s supplies had to be even lower. Using it, he zipped across the plaza and extracted a city guard a second before a spear would have skewered him. “Watch your swing. You leave your left flank open.”
The guard stammered thanks.
Across the street, Jentt saw another bone worker wielding a tree trunk as if it were a mace. But he didn’t see the smaller construct made of gears and wheels roll behind her until it was too late. The bone worker stiffened as needle-thin blades sprouted from her chest.
Jentt swore as he darted to her. He smashed the construct and caught the bone worker as she fell. He laid her gently on the street and then whirled around to duck beneath the blade of a bearlike horror with a face of twisted metal.
A horrible thought hit him, with certainty:We’re losing.
It didn’t matter how fast he moved, how hard he fought. There were simply too many of them, and they kept coming and coming. Sooner or later, he’d make a mistake. He’d run out of energy or out of talismans.
