Page 13 of A Monsoon Rising

A rebel’s sword rose behind him.

And because Alaric’s back was to this new assailant, because it was too late for anything else, because they needed him alive—

—becausesheneeded him alive—

Talasyn used the last vestiges of her strength to fashion a spear from the Lightweave. She hurled it at the Sardovian rebel sneaking up on Alaric. The blade sank into the man’s chest and the life faded from his eyes, and he fell to the ground at the same time that Hiras was tackled by two helmed figures in black armor. Out of the path of a Shadowforged throwing knife.

“We have to leave one alive for questioning!” Sevraim yelled at the weapon’s source as he helped Ileis pin Hiras to the ground. “Honestly.”

Standing a few feet away, Nisene shot him a rude gesture. In the sky above her, beyond theChiton’s hull, five squadrons of Kesathese wolf coracles closed in on the plaza, along with the grim specter of a Night Empire stormship.

Hiras was lying on his stomach; Ileis and Sevraim were practically sitting on him, twisting his arms behind his back.

I should kill him.

The words pierced through the haze that was Talasyn’s mind. Hiras would prefer that brief moment of agony to days at the hands of Kesathese interrogators. It would be a kindness.

And what’s one more?

“Do it,” he said through clenched teeth, and at first Talasyn thought that he was speaking to her.

But Hiras had turned his head to look up at theChiton.

“Do it,” he repeated, his bitter gaze fixed on that dread silhouette like a deep-sea creature risen to the heavens. “For everything we have lost.”

The Sardovian stormship, its Squallfast-imbued aether hearts glowing a brilliant, venomous green,plunged, away from theoncoming Kesathese fleet and down toward the plaza. Thousands of tons of steel frame and metalglass panels swooping down upon them all. Large enough to flatten a quarter of the Citadel, large enough that it was too late to run.

Talasyn finally saw the rebels’ plan in its entirety. All of the Night Empire’s political and military leadership had turned up for her coronation. Everyone on board theChitonwould die, yes, but they’d take House Ossinast, Kesathese High Command, and the Shadowforged Legion down with them.

And there was nothing anyone could do to stop the assault. Legionnaires cast their inky shields over their heads, bracing themselves, while military officers and their subordinates abandoned the fight and fled to whatever paltry cover they could find in the surrounding buildings, which would soon all be smashed into dust. Talasyn stood too slowly, too shakily, as Alaric ran to her, wild-eyed.

She would have called out to him, would have told him to either shield or get inside, to protect himself, but the words evaporated halfway up her throat, lost in the screaming all around her, in the certainty of death, in the daylight fading and theChitondiving down.

Darkness erupted from the northeast. A few towers in that direction had been demolished by the lightning waves, leaving Talasyn with a clear view of one of the Citadel’s drab stone buildings. It was quivering at the very foundations as the Shadowgate poured forth from the openings in its roof.

The magic was so thick that it initially seemed as though the building was on fire from within. But all the black smoke soon swept toward the falling stormship, in a tidal wave of night, and took on the hazy shape of chimeras, those creatures on Kesath’s imperial seal that were long gone from the Continent but today had been brought back to phantom life. Obsidian energy from aetherspace twisted into eel-like bodiesthat unleashed the guttural shriek of the Shadowgate with lions’ maned heads and galloped through the air on antelopes’ hooves. The chimeras filled the sky, all black smoke and nightmare, a feat of aethermancy that Talasyn would never have believed possible if she had not been witnessing it herself.

Alaric reached her at the same time that the stampede of inky chimeras consumed the Sardovian stormship. He pressed her up against the wall, covering her with his body as a rain of metalglass and steel blanketed the plaza. As the Shadowgate tore theChitonapart.

Overwhelmed with relief, Alaric stared at the wall while his father’s magic raged above the capital. He didn’t have to look around to know what was happening; the chimeras would be winding around the stormship, ripping through its hull and devouring everything—everyone—within. Unleashing such power was not without cost, but it was a necessary sacrifice. Today the Citadel would not fall.

Alaric felt Talasyn take a shaky gasp of breath against him, and he hunched further down, further into her, stirred by an instinctive protectiveness that was all he had to give for now. He was rattled by how close she’d come to getting killed—by her former countrymen, no less. He could barely comprehend that she had saved his life, that she had killed a former comrade in order to do so. He was struck by anguish at how he and his people had been sitting ducks, wholly unprepared for a surviving Sardovian stormship.

Just as the Citadel had been unprepared for the attack of the Sunstead Lightweavers all those years ago.

Alaric watched dust stream down the wall as he caged Talasyn in his arms the way his mother had held him while his father bled and his grandfather died somewhere beyond the bolted door, in this very city where war and ruin were raginganew.This is why we have to keep fighting,he thought over the cacophony of twisting steel and shattering metalglass and imploding aether hearts.Everything can be snatched away in the blink of an eye. It will never stop.

All around us are enemies.

The wrenching sobs sounded as though they were coming from a long way off, despite the fact that the sitting room in which the Nenavarene contingent was barricaded wasn’t anywhere near large enough to account for such a distance.

Talasyn worried—vaguely, somewhere deep under layers of numbness and fading adrenaline—that the sobs were coming fromher, but upon taking stock of her surroundings, she saw that Jie was hunched over in the adjacent armchair, weeping violently, while Elagbi patted her back in a befuddled attempt at consolation. He kept glancing over at Talasyn as though he couldn’t believe that she was alive. It had been awful, earlier, when Alaric brought her to Elagbi and the Dominion prince had wrapped his arms around her and cried into her neck. Now Jie was the one having a breakdown.

“What kind of country is this?” the poor girl wailed, trembling from head to toe. “Ancestors, I want to go home!”

In an old life, Talasyn would have been bewildered and quite possibly downright annoyed by all this carrying on, but now she knew something of what people were like when they had been brought up in luxury rather than in wartime. Moreover, Jie was only sixteen. To be that young, to hail from that sort of background, and to be so abruptly confronted by the sort of violence that could erupt outside of the Dominion’s harmonious isles must be hard to bear.

Urdujahadseen war, however, and she was quick to take matters into her no-nonsense hands. “Chin up, Lady Jie. This is just like court politics back in Nenavar, with different factionsvying for power—albeit using more barbaric methods. You are the Night Empress’s lady-in-waiting. If you are to survive this new game, you have to be strong.”

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