Page 100 of Eyes of Kings

Something strikes a residential building to the north. The building teeters, seeming like it might hold for a split second, before its collapse accelerates, crashing into its neighbor.

The market-goers hurry to move. Bibi whirls around. A flash—another heretic, sprinting across the alleys, making for the center of San, for the Palace of Union. She makes chase, ditching the saucepan. More than once, she shoves aside a civilian who is still outside hanging their laundry, screaming at them to get inside. How can people in San-Er be so hopeless about perceiving their surroundings? They have been at war since the Crescents attacked the palace. Since Calla took the crown from August. Do they not worry? Do these millions think that their fortunes will be so lucky, spared by statistical improbability?

“Hey!” Bibi roars.

Right as the heretic turns, she lets loose her blade, throwing it into their shoulder. She expected the strike to offer some level of damage. Instead, the heretic stares down at the blade in apathy. Then their hand cuts through the air. The heretic continues on their path, making for the palace.

Bibi’s hand flies up to her throat, where a wide slash has opened. Pain. Red-hot pain. When she drops to her knees and gasps, her breath gets stuck, halting somewhere beneath her collar. Blood pours between her fingers. Into her palms. Her vision doubles, then crosses, and she can’t understand this growing puddle of red, this image of her qi flowing outward and outward.

When she joined the Dovetail, she accepted that it meant she might die in the line of rebellion. They often charged at carriages coming from the palace, willing to throw fighters into the fire if it meant killing one councilmember, if it meant rippling fear into San-Er. They could do this for years, decades, centuries—different faces cycling through their ranks until something finally picked up momentum. Change would not come easily, but the natural gravity of the kingdom bent toward it. Bibi, perhaps too optimistically, hoped that shewould be a part of the cohort that got to see their efforts make an irreparable mark.

Bibi’s vision goes dark. For one second. Two.

Then it comesback.

She coughs. As she grasps her throat, it is unbearably slippery, soaked with the smell of metal. Her fingers spasm, then suddenly it is difficult to control them. Her head jerks, and she’s not the one tipping it skyward against the sliver of gray visible from this path.

What is happening?Nobody warned her that this was a symptom of dying. Losing control. Becoming a witness to her own body…

“Hey, will you stop?” her voice, her tongue, her mouth is saying out loud, but it is not she who makes the decision to speak. “I’m trying to save you. Stopstruggling.”

Bibi relents. Beneath the wet stickiness soaking her palms, the blood slows. Her wound is closing. A new source of qi swirls with hers, adding to the small amount she has left after such an injury. She has never been conscious before in the few times someone more powerful has taken over her body. Rarely hasanyonemanaged to take over her body. She was almost a makeshift Weisanna.

The hold snaps away. The invader has left. Bibi gasps for breath, both her hands gripping the bloodied ground while she regains her senses, her smell, her sight. She hurries to touch her throat, but there is only a thin, clotted scab left behind, the only proof that indeed, she had not imagined her throat split wide open.

A familiar face comes around the corner. Pink eyes and a ponytail. Chami.

“I told you to let me work, didn’t I?” Chami chides, dropping to a crouch and inspecting Bibi’s neck. “It doesn’t look so bad. You’ll live.”

“But…” Bibi doesn’t know how to finish her sentence.But the qi block is still active. But, despite that, these heretics who have rushed in are not impacted either.

“You need to unblock San-Er,” Chami says. “There are many who wish to defend the twin cities. Many minor members of the pantheon who can do nothing while the god of shields’s sigil is active, but they would be equally powerful if you give them their qi back.”

“You,” Bibi rasps. “You can, though.”

Chami tuts. She is effortlessly kind. Her hand stroking the side of Bibi’s arm to keep her calm, even as—by all definitions—she engages in a telling-off.

“There is an order to the pantheon. I rank beyond the god of shields. As does the godling of control, which is why each of these little invaders is capable of pushing over whole buildings.”

A crash echoes from the direction of the palace. It sounds like someone colliding with the coliseum.

“Some of us have been scraping at the sigils on the wall, but nothing is working,” Chami says, increasingly agitated. “We can’t keep wasting our time—we have to put up a defense where we can. Whatever the Crescents did, you have to undo it. Quickly. Or else a lot of innocent people are going to die.”

Chami runs off. And Bibi, a Makusa, an insurgent, staggers to her feet, barely able to grasp what has unfolded. She is powerless in the midst of this. Nothing but a watcher, an idler. Screaming—so much screaming. Step by step, Bibi staggers her way back to the wall. Through the quieter alleys, the parts of the city where rubble has not yet decimated revolving doors and ground-floor windows.

Bibi trips when she finally returns to the wall. It’s a wreck. Bricks spilling onto the field, the watchtowers collapsed and overturned. Half the principal gate has been bent back to face the sky, its metal bars resembling stakes driven into the ground.

She searches through the bodies. Some are still breathing, still alive. Others have had their throats cut, just as she almost fell victim to. Others have arrows pierced through their stomachs, their weapons turned back on themselves, ortheir faces caved in, subject to the brutal force of the wall before they could move out of the way.

Bibi finds Tsosia near the remains of one watchtower. She is slumped and unconscious. But she is alive.

“Tsosia,” she says. “Can you hear me?”

It takes several moments before the cleric stirs. Her eyes are unfocused. Pupils blown too large, the red of her irises merely a sliver.

“Stand up. Come on.”

She steers Tsosia away from the wall. Into the alleys, where it grows dark, and that is a relieving discovery. It means the buildings remain standing and tall, blocking out the day.