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Not until, over the lip of the platform, I see one of the armless figures lurch toward the railing. She raises her face to the open air she must be able to feel even if she can’t see it.
“Hear me, godlen! I give my all to this man’s power in this moment, to letting him show the world his way!”
Her declaration rings out toward the sky—and then she pitches herself over the railing.
“No!” The protest bursts from my throat without any thought.
Julita’s presence freezes in the back of my skull.Sky, sea, and earth, what are theydoing?
Even as a sickening thud sounds from the roof far below this tall tower, the other two figures call out their own words of sacrifice. Two more fleshy thumps of fallen bodies reach my ears.
I flinch, stomach acid burning up my throat. For a moment, I’m afraid I’m going to vomit all over my torn dress. The daimon won’t let me even buckle over.
They’ve offered a much grander momentary sacrifice than the blood-letting Wendos once inflicted on Julita. And a voluntary one.
Is it going to work? Will their fatal offerings actually—
Wendos’s dark laugh gives me all the answer I need. His voice rises. “That’s right! Listen to us. We command you now—all of you!”
He speaks his strange chant louder than before, letting it spill out into the thickening dusk. From far away, I think I hear a panicked shriek.
Oh, no,Julita murmurs.What do we do now?
I squeeze my eyes shut, my throat closing up too.
I can’t let Wendos finish this. The elite of the inner wards don’t deserve the horror he’s planning to rain down on them, awful as they can be.
And what if the daimon spill their destruction over into the fringes?
What will become of Zuzanna and her sickly son, Marta and her many lovers, Frida and Ewalin gossiping while they tend to the bees…?
My magic claws up through my chest. I tense instinctively… but this time I can’t dismiss it completely.
Could calling on my own power now really beworsethan what’ll happen if I don’t?
I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I have a monster inside me with a mind of its own.
Hopelessness washes over me in a wave, tinged with a strange sense of absurdity.
I’ve fought with myself for so long. Refused and refused and refused, no matter how my power hurt me.
But I’m the only one here. It’s the only weapon I have left.
How can this be the answer? How can I trust myself to make that call?
Unless… Unless I’m not entirely alone.
Someonewas able to control it once before. Someone who might be watching right now over a temple that bears his and his siblings’ blessings.
Even as the temple itself quivers with a quake from below, both my mind and my body balk. Can I really count on the godlen, the divinities who broke souls like mine in punishment for crimes committed five hundred years ago?
What other choice do I have?
Wendos cackles madly between roughened phrases, and my resistance fractures.
I suck in a breath like a sob and will my mind to open. More and more, from the slightest quivering crack until I feel as if my fractured soul is reaching out toward the walls around me.
Godlen,I think, like I spoke in my head to the voice while I was dying.If you can hear me, please help me. Please guide my magic so I don’t do harm that’s undeserved. Let me stop him without ruining something else.
