“We’ve got no chance whatsoever,” said Gwennec, coming to stand beside her.
“None,” she agreed. The monk grinned without humor. He was still wearing his habit and had made no attempt to array himself for war: standing among the rest of them, dressed either in makeshift armor or in the fanciful garments Mary had created, he looked like a visitor from some other, starker reality. Fatima felt silly beside him. They had been playing at kingdoms, at kings and courtiers, and now their play would come to a swift and ludicrous end.
“They would probably take you back,” she hazarded. “Especially if you went now. There’s no reason you should have to die for all this. You’re a cleric. They can’t blame you for what’s happened.”
Gwennec stared at her as if she had spoken in tongues.
“How could you possibly say such a thing?” he said. “How could you say that to me, after everything we’ve been and done?”
Fatima was immediately sorry. She did not have time to apologize, however, for as soon as she reached for the monk’s threadbare sleeve, a sound she had never heard before lit up her ears, growing louder and louder until it became a mechanical scream and buried itself in the cliff beneath her feet. The keep shuddered. White dust bloomed in the air: chalk pulverized finer than snow.
“What was that?” shouted Fatima, her ears ringing.
“That’s a cannon,” called Rufus. “That’s a bloody big cannon.”
“On a ship?”
“On a ship, and probably not the only one.”
Another shriek and tremor punctuated his words. Someone screamed. Out of the corner of her eye, Fatima saw Deng move to shield Luz from the white dust, covering her with a fold of his robe.
“They mean to win this battle without ever setting foot on land,” said Fatima to the drifting powder.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Hassan, sweeping through the main hall to stand on the cliff. “Here comes a longboat.”
Fatima pushed through the crowd that had gathered around her, her fingers sliding past leather and velvet and the slick poreless exterior of a jinn, all covered in the same white dust, as though prepared for some unknown sacrament. Outside, the air was clearer, the new sun baleful and hot in a sky from which the clouds and haze of yesterday had disappeared. Hassan was right: a dark shape was cutting through the water toward the beach, propelled by the amphibian dip and pause of oars. Wood scraped against sand and echoed between the punctured cliffs.
In the hall, the anxious press of men and women and children and jinn was silent. Fatima saw Asher’s youngest brother standing at her knee. His hair was white with chalk, transforming him into an old man with an old man’s heavy gaze. Fatima stroked his shoulder. He turned without speaking and pressed his wan face into her hip.
A braying squeal broke the silence. Fatima flinched as batlike wings brushed her face and Mary’s jinn swept through the eastern archway and down the face of the cliff. It soared along the stone stairs, gathering speed as it dropped, then veered across the thin strip of beach toward the men in the longboat, who fell back, frightened, tumbling across each other onto the sand like poorly made toys, only to be engulfed by the tiny jinn, which was suddenly all mouth, and gone as quickly as if they had never arrived at all.
The empty longboat rocked gently on its keel and settled sidewise into the sand with a thud.
In the keep, there was a stricken pause. Then the noise began, howls and yelps of bewildered celebration, and Fatima found herself carried toward the stair by a fevered wave of bodies.
“Stop!” she called, but it was too late: the thrill of their advantage was upon them, and they rushed down the chalk steps toward the beach. Another scream filled the air; the cliff shook. Fatima heard the shrill creak of stone splitting behind her. There was another scream, a human scream, and a body fell past her too quickly to be identified. Sweat poured down her back. She tried to turn but found herself half lifted by the pressure of limbs and forced onward. Panic overcame her, a visceral panic that made her want to claw at the faces around her, faces she knew and cherished that were now simply objects in her path. She fought it, planting her heels in the yielding chalk.
“Stop!” she called again.
“Can’t—no—not here,” came a voice, possibly Gwennec’s. “We’ve got to get below that cannon fire now, go, go—”
Fatima felt sand beneath her feet. She tumbled onto the beach, landing on her shoulder, and found herself staring at a thin spatter of blood, almost discreet, smelling faintly of bile: Mary’s familiar buzzed overhead like a distended horsefly, its belly stretched tight and shining. On her back, Fatima saw an inverted tide through which another longboat was cutting toward them, upside down, the men already drawing their rapiers. Her own forces’ good luck would not last through a second onslaught. She rolled onto her knees and spat sand from her mouth. A spear flew overhead: a fishing spear, one of the greenwood sort that Deng had taught them to make, barely hardy enough to kill its intended prey, let alone a man in armor. Yet it did fly, glancing off a polished hauberk and landing uselessly in the surf.
The second longboat scraped up on the sand. There was a wild cry and a man flew past her toward it, brandishing a club: it found purchase beneath the jaw of a soldier standing in the bow, who fell with barely a cry. The others were quicker. The man with the club—Bruno, Udolfo; Fatima could not remember his name—went down under the hilt of a rapier and did not rise again. Fatima fumbled for her sling. She watched her first stone fly with dispassion, as though someone else had loosed it, and was almost surprised when it caught one of the soldiers beneath his curved half helm. He reeled backward with a shriek, one hand to his face. Fatima loosed another stone and then another, but these missed their mark and went soaring wildly past the boat into the ill-defined gloss where the sun met the sea.
She was almost certain it was Gwennec who shoved her, for she saw his sandal as she went down. She swore at him as she fell, but he didn’t hear her: his face was panicked and unseeing. Around him were identical faces, bodies pressed too close, a certain noiselessness, features not of battle but of chaos. Fatima curled up and protected her face with her hands. Through her fingers, through the forest of limbs and sand, she saw the water, and in the water, the coils of the mote.
Fatima held her breath. The mote rose from the froth, gathering about itself its shreds of wood and viscera, and though it had no features aside from the legless spiral of matter upon which it sat, it turned and looked at her.
Who is your master?
Fatima screamed, writhing to free herself from the miasma of limbs and metal, pressing her hands over her ears to block out the voice between them.
Who is your master? the voice repeated.
An opening appeared in front of her. Fatima lunged for it, scrambling to her feet. As she rose, she felt something fall from her sash: it was the boot her hunter had found in the den of the leviathan.
Who is your master?
She snatched it from the sand and ran, unthinking, across the beach, gasping for air amid the powdered chalk and the sulfuric scent of cannon fire. It was only when she was well away that she turned and looked back.