Another shockwave detonates through the square.
The chandler's sign tears free overhead and spins into the street. Brohm throws his body over Vi again. I flatten against the wall beside them, pressing my palms flat against the stone
"Now," I say sharply. "We move now."
We drag them upright and push through the thinning crowd toward the upper streets. Vi moves under her own power, limping slightly but steady.
I look back toward the square. Khaivor still stands at its center. His coat is darkened with sweat. His arms have dropped to his sides, but the air still bends around him, faintly, less controlled than before, the barrier thinning at its edges. Two children crouch near the overturned music platform behindhim. He does not look at them. He does not need to. He is already positioned between them and the water.
His legs are shaking.The knowledge lands like cold metal in my chest.
He cannot counter the bell. He can only absorb it, delay it, spend himself against it until there is nothing left to spend. Whatever Orrick unleashed beneath the temple, it was built specifically to overwhelm exactly what Khaivor is and I had no idea how to stop it.
12
KHAIVOR
The frequencies are no longer sound. They are alive.
Each wave Orrick releases from beneath the temple does not simply press against my barriers — it reaches inside them, past the discipline of decades, past every wall I built in the years after Kantor, and pulls. The resonance knows what I am. It was designed by someone who studied what I am. It finds the seams in my control the way water finds cracks in stone, patient and inevitable.
I hold but barely.
Another pulse detonates across the square and the cobblestones beneath my feet crack in a jagged line running toward the docks.
I redirect the worst of it, bending the frequencies outward, away from the cluster of people still sheltering behind the overturned market stalls. My hands shake. The tremor began in my fingers and slowly reached my shoulder.
And then Kantor finds me. Not the city but the room. The room beneath the Chivdouyu estate where the stone walls were thick enough to swallow screaming. Where Lord Vaeren sat atthe far end of a long table with his wine and his patience while I stood at the center and did what I was made to do.
“You are nothing without us,” their voice echoes through my subconscious.
Another wave hits. I absorb it and somewhere behind me, a chimney collapses.
You are doing it again.
I can't help doubting myself.
"Khaivor." Roseth's voice cuts through my disarray.
I turn and she stands at the edge of the square, soot darkening her jaw, one sleeve torn at the shoulder. Her amber eyes find mine through the smoke and dust and chaos and she does not flinch from what she sees in my face.
"Come with me," she says.
"I cannot leave the?—"
"You can't hold on, not in that state." She holds out her hand. "Come with me."
The forge liststo one side where the southern wall took the first shockwave. Half the roof is open to the sky, rafters hanging at broken angles, but the furnace still stands.
Roseth closes what remains of the door behind us. The sound outside does not vanish. It dims. The stone walls absorb enough of the resonance that the frequencies stop feeling like fingers reaching directly into the base of my skull but doesn't stop the sting.
I lean against the furnace, wincing as the pain becomes unbearable.
"Look at me," Roseth says.
"I am looking at you." I pant.
"No. You are looking through me." She crosses the floor and takes my face in both hands, pressing her palms flat against my jaw. Her hands are rough.
