Page 126 of City of Stone and Silence

The Kindre user stays behind, as I’d hoped, alone in the alley.

But still—a full-grown, well-trained soldier in armor, with a sword at his belt, alert and ready. And me, a fourteen-year-old girl with a knife, already winded. Useless. Unless—

Monster, monster, monster.

I turn to the single doorway leading deeper into the house.

Most of the people of the Sixteenth Ward have evacuated. Those who haven’t—we told them to leave, we told them, why wouldn’t they listen—put their own lives at risk. I sensed four minds here, and I find them in the storeroom. A man and a woman. Two children, a boy and a girl, maybe twins, close to my age. A family. The man has a small knife, and he stands in front of the other three. His face twists as I pull the curtain aside. He expected looters, or Ward Guard soldiers. Not me.

A monster—

“W—what do you want?” he says, uncertain.

I swallow hard.

“I need your help,” I tell him. And I reach out for their minds.

The contents are no surprise. Fear, pride, despair. I crush it all underfoot, careless in my hurry, a giant trampling through a city of ants. I draw new emotions from the depths of their subconscious. Rage. Hatred. And I give it a focus, a figure in black armor and a chain veil, just outside.

A monster uses what she has to.

The girl is the quickest, bursting through the doorway, features twisted beyond recognition with an unnatural fury. The Immortal sees her coming, deflects her clumsy rush with a backhand cuff that sends her sprawling to the dirt. He draws his sword in time to cut her brother down with a diagonal slash that opens his chest in a wash of blood. But the girl is throwing herself at the Immortal’s legs, and the mortally wounded boy staggers forward another step and wraps himself around the soldier with a snarl. The parents, close behind, are next, father and mother each grabbing an arm and dragging the Immortal to the ground.

I follow, knife in hand. I can feel the man reaching out with Kindre, but I shut him down. He may be better trained, but I’m stronger, and for a few moments that is all that matters. The mother is on her knees, attacking the soldier’s arm with her teeth, and the father shoves his son’s corpse aside to get a better grip. I kneel and pull the Immortal’s helmet and veil away, revealing a boyish face with a peach-fuzz beard and wide, scared eyes. My knife goes into his throat, under his jaw, and blood bubbles up. His body jerks for a moment, then stills. His frenzied attackers don’t notice that the object of their ire is dead, mother and father and daughter tearing at the corpse with teeth and fingernails.

I look up. At the other end of the alley, two figures in black are watching me, the scarred woman and her Tartak-wielding companion. I stare back, defiant, ready to reach for their minds if they come close enough.

They don’t. The scarred woman gives me a nod, like an acknowledgement to a worthy foe you might see in some historical drama. Then the two of them take off running, down another alley and out of sight.

I reach for the minds of the poor family, smothering the rage I granted them as quickly as I summoned it. It leaves their minds blank, featureless slates, their bodies sitting placidly beside the mutilated corpse. I don’t know if they’ll recover eventually, but I suspect not. Given what comes next, it hardly matters.

Jakibsa jogs back into sight from one alley, Giniva from the other. I walk to meet them, wearily, suddenly feeling a tremendous weight on my shoulders.

“What happened?” Jakibsa says. “Tori, are you all right? Who are those—”

“She’d almost caught me,” Giniva mutters. “And then she just stopped.”

“I’ll explain later.” I won’t. “Come on, we’re not safe yet.”

But we make it back to the Eleventh Ward gate, the latest in a stream of stragglers fleeing the disaster on the waterfront. Voliel Breta is waiting for us. She reports Ward Guard troops sweeping through the Sixteenth, defenders dead or in full flight, no resistance left.

When the stream slows to a trickle, I give the order. We close the gate, retreating across the military highway to the Eleventh Ward wall. Giniva sends up a flare, like the one that had triggered the naval assault, a burst of Myrkai fire in the sky visible across half the city.

I know what happens next, because I gave the instructions before the battle began. In basements and back rooms across the Sixteenth Ward, men and women see the signal. They strike matches or use small Myrkai talents. A hundred fuses are lit.

They were each supposed to find themselves a hiding place. Some of them might survive.

A hundred fuses reach a hundred barrels. We didn’t have time to arrange any complicated pyrotechnics. There are just piles of things that the harborside has always had in quantity. Kindling—splintered boards and shredded ropes.

And whale oil.

We use a lot of oil in Kahnzoka. It lights lanterns and fires boilers, especially in the upper wards. And it all comes in by ship, transported by traders from the iceling lands, where strange, blond foreigners hunt the great sea-beasts and render them down. At any given time, there are thousands of tons of the stuff on the docks and in the warehouses. It’s kept in wax-sealed barrels, fairly safe from accident. But if one were to knock a hole in a few, and let the viscous content puddle on the floor …

From the wall, the flames look like blooming flowers.

The buildings where we’d stashed the oil catch immediately. I made sure there was a cache in the Black Flower, and I smile a little at the thought of Thul’s pleasure palace going up in smoke. The oil burns fast and hot, and the still-sealed barrels soon start to explode, spraying wood and burning oil across the roofs of neighboring structures.

The lower wards of Kahnzoka are built of dry wood, plaster, and straw. Getting them to burn is no trouble at all. Great sheets of fire are racing across the Sixteenth Ward within minutes, turning it into a set of shrinking islands in a rising crimson sea. The blaze spreads along the docks, leaping to the furled sails of the ships, spreading from pier to quay. The smoke soon blocks our view of everything except for the sullen, leaping glow of the flames.