Page 36 of Fateless

This is the world I return to.

The voice echoed in my head, heavy with fury and disgust, seeming to ripple through all of Kovass.

Sand and dust and short-lived insects crawling over one another. Pathetic. A filthy shell of the shining kingdom that used to be. You do not deserve life. You do not deserve my glory. But I will grant it to you regardless, insects. I will show you what you have been longing for all this time. Let the shining kingdom rise once again and bury the filth beneath it in the majesty of your new god!

The Deathless King raised his arms, and the tremors turned to shaking. I staggered as the ground heaved like the waves of the Dune Sea. When I straightened, my legs went numb and I vibrated with horror. Buildings swayed, rocking like branches in the wind, and then several of them collapsed to the ground in a muffled roar of stone and dust.

The roof beneath me cracked, one corner falling away and smashing to the street below. Screams rose up from below us, and the stones under my feet shuddered and began to fracture.

“Come on!” Raithe held out an arm, indicating the edge of the roof. “The whole building is falling apart. Let’s go!”

We scrambled to get clear, leaping off the roof and grabbing the wall of a shorter building. I pulled myself up onto its roof, then backed away from the edge, watching the Docks District shake and heave like a sick animal. “What’s happening?” I gasped.

“The Deathless King is raising his empire,” Raithe said grimly.

I frowned in confusion, until I realized what he meant, and my mouth dropped open. “You don’t mean... theancient city?”

“I told you.” The assassin’s blue eyes met mine, bright with anguish and helpless fury. “No one can stand against the Deathless King once he rises. He’ll destroy Kovass and replace it with his kingdom, and there’s nothing we can do but flee before it consumes everything.”

One street over, the ground collapsed with a roar that made my ears throb, sending a plume of dust into the air. The house that had stood there vanished as well, breaking apart and disappearing into the pit. As I stared, cracks spread across the road like spiderwebs, and the pointed spire of a tower began rising from the hole.

“Sparrow!” Raithe’s voice made me jump. The iylvahn held out a hand, his gaze stern and yet almost pleading. “The city is lost,” he said, and the truth of his words turned my heart to ice. “Kovass has fallen. We have to get out of here before it crushes us, too. You know the city better than me. Where is the best place to go?”

“The docks,” I whispered. There was no way we would get through the gates; we’d be crushed under buildings or swallowed by the earth before we made it out of the district. “The striders might still be operational. We have to get to the docks.”

We fled across the rooftops, leaping from building to building and feeling them shake under our boots. Around us, the city continued to collapse, clouds of dust rising into the air as one structure fell and another pushed its way to the surface. The new buildings were huge, blotting out the suns as they soared into theair. The scale of destruction left me breathless; the sheer power of what was happening around me was incomprehensible. Raithe hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said the Deathless Kings were nearly gods. I wished I had listened to him sooner, but it was far too late for regrets.

As I followed the assassin, leaping onto another roof, the stones beneath me crumbled. I dropped, but managed to throw out my arms and catch what remained of the edge. My legs dangled over the street as I tried to claw myself up, feeling the entire building tremble beneath me.

Strong fingers clamped over my wrist, and the iylvahn pulled me onto the roof. Surprised, I met those pale eyes for just a moment. I hadn’t expected him to help; none of my teammates in the guild would’ve come back for me. The unspoken rule was every hood for themself, and if you couldn’t keep up, you weren’t fit to be there in the first place.

“Are you all right?” the iylvahn asked. He sounded breathless, too. I nodded, feeling another tremor quiver through the ground beneath us, and he turned away. “Keep moving, then. We’re almost there.”

The docks were a madhouse. People were scrambling over each other, blindly shoving others out of the way, trying to escape the chaos. Waves of sand smashed into the rocks, sending geysers of dust into the air. Figures swarmed the piers like ants, several tumbling into the roiling sea and being immediately swallowed by sand.

On the farthest dock, at the end of the pier, silhouetted like a great wood-and-metal insect against the sky, one last stridercrouched. Mobs of people rushed it, scrambling over the docks and sending more figures tumbling into the churning sea, shoved or thrown over the edge by the panicked and the desperate.

A grinding sound reverberated through the air, echoing over the voices of the mob. A shudder racked the strider’s body and it rose from the sands, as if it were standing up.

“It’s getting ready to leave,” Raithe said, and leaped down to the docks. “Hurry!”

We ran for the pier, dodging multitudes of bodies. Thankfully, I had a lifetime of practice weaving through crowds, and Raithe seemed to be an expert as well. People stumbled, pushed, shoved, and jostled around us, but we dodged and wove our way through the human sea until we hit the last dock.

The strider began to move. People were still flinging themselves at it, reaching for the rope ladder that was quickly being drawn up the side. Some leaped for its legs, missing and plummeting into the sands below. A few managed to cling to its sides, hanging on for dear life as the wood-and-metal beast continued down the dock.

Raithe narrowed his eyes, gauging the distance between the strider and the pier. “We’re going to have to jump,” he muttered, glancing back at me. “Can you make it?”

“Yes,” I gasped, but my voice was drowned out as, with the thundering of a landslide, the earth broke apart and a great tower surged into the air at the edge of the docks. Shedding sand and boulders, it loomed over us, its gilded roof flashing a dull gold in the eerie light. Raithe grabbed my wrist and yanked me back as rocks rained onto the pier, smashing into planks and crushingcivilians. Most of the crowd vanished into the waves, screaming. We pressed back against a wall as chunks of stone continued to rain down, sending up massive plumes of dust as they crashed into the sea.

The strider wobbled, lurching to the side as stones bounced off its body. The ground beneath it heaved, and a huge wave of sand smashed into it, causing it to stagger even more. I watched it lean to the side in seeming slow motion, shedding figures that went flailing helplessly into the waves. A metallic scream pierced the air as one of its legs buckled under the unnatural weight. With a groan like the dying howl of a great beast, the strider collapsed into the churning waves. A swell rose up to swallow it, and then it was gone, taking my heart to the bottom of the sea with it.

Raithe and I staggered away from the wall and stared at the harbor, at the empty spot where the strider had gone down. The docks were in shambles, wooden planks smashed apart and floating on the waves. Bodies lay everywhere, struck by falling rock or crushed under the feet of their fellow humans. The boats and sand skiffs had long been taken, and the last strider lay in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the Dust Sea. No way out, except to go back through the collapsing city to try to reach the gates, clear on the other side.

I knew for a fact we weren’t going to make it.

“Sparrow!”

I jerked at the sound of my name. Nearly inaudible, it floated to me through the chaos around us. It hadn’t come from the harbor or the streets behind us, but from somewhere in the ocean of sand.

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