I think about the forward position. About the gaps in my memory. About the specific quality of the Maw's currentpresence, which is not a whisper and not a shout but something settled and patient and very sure of itself.
"I can hold it," I say.
Draevik doesn't say anything.
"I know what I just said," I tell him. "I know what it looked like. I'm still here. I can still?—"
"I know you're still here," he says. "I'm asking you if you'll still be here in three hours."
I don't answer. He knows I don't know.
"Keep the eastern approach clear," I say instead. "She needs a path back to the chamber entrance. Whatever happens to me, whatever I become — keep her path clear."
"My lord?—"
"That's an order, Draevik."
He watches me. Thirty years of partnership, thirty years of him watching my back and me never asking him to and both of us knowing the understanding was there. He has the look of contemplation, and the decision he makes shows in the small shift of his jaw.
"The eastern approach will be clear," he says. "And if you lose your margins before she gets there — I will not let you destroy this city. You understand that."
"Good," I say. "I'm counting on it."
He holds my gaze for another moment. Thirty years of standing at my back, thirty years of knowing when to push and when to simply be present. He knows which one this is. He nods once, and goes.
The second engagement starts an hour later when House Vel'eth's private forces breach the estate's south wall.
I know the moment the Maw stops waiting and starts deciding, because the air in my chest changes temperature and the shadows that have been following me since dawn acceleratefrom behind to ahead, and I follow them, and I stop making choices about what I follow them toward.
I am aware of the battle around me the way you are aware of a fire you're standing at the edge of — present, hot, real, but not something you're attending to directly. What I'm attending to is something below the battle. The network. The abyssal infrastructure beneath the capital's stones, pulsing like a second heartbeat, and the Maw is pulling toward it with the specific hunger of something that has been patient and has decided patience is finished.
The shadows I'm trailing take out the south wall breach unit. I know this. I watch it happen from one step removed.
"Sevareth."
Draevik's voice, from behind me. I stop.
The shadows are eating the edge of the nearest building. I can see that. I can see the stone darkening and crumbling at the shadow's border and I can feel the Maw's satisfaction and I can feel, distantly, my own horror at that satisfaction.
"There are civilians on that street," Draevik says, very quietly. "Two streets over. They're still evacuating."
I look up at the building, at the shadows at its edge.
I pull. Hard. The way you pull on a chain attached to something enormous, with the full understanding that it might not move and might move you instead.
The shadows contract. Not all the way — they writhe at the bottom of the building, furious, resisted — but they pull back from the stone. The Maw pushes back against my resistance with a force I feel in my spine and behind my eyes and in the specific place where I stop and it begins, which is becoming harder to locate.
"Get the evacuations on that street done," I say. My voice sounds like my voice. I hold onto that. "Get them done in the next twenty minutes."
"They will be," Draevik says. And then, quieter: "Hold on."
"I'm holding," I say.
The shadows wait. I wait with them. The Maw is impatient — I can feel its impatience like a second pulse, irregular and urgent, pressing at the boundaries I'm keeping with everything that's left of me. But beneath the impatience there's something else. Something that knows exactly what is happening under the city. Something that recognizes what it's been building toward for thirty years is very close now.
I keep my eyes on the street Draevik is clearing. I keep the shadows at the building's edge and not further. I keep doing this one thing because I cannot do everything but I can do this.
And somewhere under the capital, Mireya is running toward what comes next.
