Chapter 188: Gods Have Mercy

The shadow crossed the first Sun slowly, a hand closing over a most massive lantern.

Malik watched it from the edge of the square, his boots planted in the dust.

The light faded from gold to amber to the color of old bronze, and the people along the corridor started looking up, one by one, until the whole line of them stood with their faces tilted towards the sky.

Nobody moved; even the children had stopped crying.

That was when the second Sun began to go dark as well.

Ships came out of the west in a slow tide.

Malik counted hulls the way he had counted spears, and gave up at the same point.

They were black and angular, with sheets of pale blue light running along their sides, and each one was large enough to hold a city district.

They hung close together, so close their shadows overlapped, until the whole western sky had turned into one great ceiling of metal.

Day became dusk in the space of a minute.

Somebody in the crowd screamed.

It started small, and then it caught like fire in dry grass.

The corridor buckled, hands shoved at backs, carts tipped.

Malik felt the whole column lurch towards the circle in a single terrified wave, and he knew exactly how this ended if nobody stopped it.

The people at the front would be crushed against the silver lines, and the people at the back would trample over them.

He drew a breath and...

"DON’T LOOK UP."

Let it out.

Heads snapped towards him.

A thousand frightened faces, white in the gloom, turned away from the ships and onto their Sultan.

"Look at the person in front of you. Put a hand on their shoulder. Walk. If you stop, the person behind you dies. If you shove, the person ahead of you dies. Walk."

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then an old man near the front put his palm on the shoulder of the woman ahead of him.

She reached for the person ahead of her, and the gesture passed down the corridor.

The column straightened and began moving again, tens of thousands of people holding tens of thousands of shoulders.

Hakim let out a breath beside him.

"It worked."

"Hm."

"Your mother used to do that. Give people a small task so they’d forget to be afraid."

Malik’s eyes narrowed.

"Don’t."

"I only meant..."

"I know what you meant."

Hakim closed his mouth once more.

Malik turned his attention back to the horizon, because there were enough things to be angry about without adding a conversation about Mariam to the list.

The vanguard arrived before the main fleet had finished spreading.

Malik saw them drop first.

Thin white threads fell from the belly of the nearest ship, hundreds of them, then thousands, each one trailing a spark of blue at its tip.

They fell like seeds from a split pod, and where they struck the earth they burst open, and soldiers in pale armor stepped out of the wreckage with their blades already drawn.

Class Six and Seven Magi, mostly, far from weak, and so very numerous.

A few of them glowed faintly with the sheen of Angels’ blessing.

This vanguard joined those already there.

The Order’s formation was completed.

Upon them was the precipice.

"Guard of the Fifth!"

Zayna’s roar cut across the square, and the Guard answered in unison.

A wall of dark cloaks and drawn steel formed across the southern road.

"Faraja! Hold the corridor!"

The wrapped officers fanned out along the ropes with their blades low.

Malik noticed that none of them hesitated.

He drew Spine Splitter and took a single step forward.

The Angel of Devil’s Maw, the only Sultan, the Devil Cloaked in Fire, raised his sword.

The first soldier reached him in three strides, a woman in pale armor with a spear tipped in blue light.

She lunged for his chest.

Malik stepped aside, caught the shaft in his left hand, and drove Spine Splitter through the spearhead and the armor behind it in a single cut.

She dropped without a sound.

It was the last time he fought a single soldier that day.

Behind her, the vanguard came on in a wall, thousands of spears level, blue light streaming from every point.

They had been drilled to hit a line together, and they hit it the way a river hits a dam.

Malik did not wait for them.

He planted his boots in the dust, drew a long breath, and let his whole Soul open at once.

"Zephyr’s Kiss."

The wind did not coil around his blade this time.

It came up out of the ground and the sky together, every current of the plain answering him in the same breath, and he swung Spine Splitter once from left to right across the width of the road.

The air tore.

A crescent of wind a mile wide ripped across the farmland, bright as a bent moon, and the front four ranks of the Order simply ceased to stand.

Armor shrieked and split.

Spears snapped in the air.

Bodies went up in a long spray and came down a hundred paces back.

The road ahead of him was suddenly empty down to the bare earth, scored deep, with a drift of broken steel piled against the edge of the cut.

Ten thousand, perhaps.

He did not count.

The ranks behind them stumbled over the wreckage, and he was already moving.

Devil’s Footsteps burned under his heels, and the world stretched once more.

He crossed the first formation in the span of a heartbeat, gold fire trailing from his boots in two scorched lines.

Every soldier he passed felt the heat before he saw them.

Ember’s Touch rolled off his shoulders and washed over the ranks in a golden tide, and where it touched, the pale armor ran like wax.

Men did not scream.

There was no time.

A whole block of three hundred went to ash standing, still in formation, a field of gray statues that crumbled in the wind of his passing.

He cut left.

A formation of spearmen came apart under the crescent of Spine Splitter, a hundred in a stroke.

He cut right, and a war-beast the size of a cottage fell open from shoulder to flank, and the soldiers who had been riding it did not reach the ground before the fire reached them.

Goliath’s Fall answered when he asked.

His frame swelled, a head taller, then two, until he towered over the vanguard.

He was a mountain walking through a village.

His sword grew with him.

Malik lifted it in both hands and brought it down.

The earth split open in a seam a quarter mile long.

That cleft swallowed a regiment whole.

’Again.’

He did not stop to look.

Malik swung back across the field, and the seam closed on what remained of them.

Even then, with such might on display, it was not enough.

Rather, it was a drop in a lake, and he knew it.

He swung again anyway.

Hakim saw it from one of the corridors.

He had braced himself for a long fight, and had set his legs to hold a line for hours against anything the Order threw at it.

Now he stood with his arms half raised, fire running from his palms, and watched his son tear a hole through an army the way a plough tears through snow.

This was the Flipper of Armies.

Sultan of Devil’s Maw.

"Gods..."

Hakim let his flames die down.

"Gods have mercy."