Something cold and clammy grasped at her ankles. Rin jumped back just as a soldier hauled himself out of the water. He sucked in air with hoarse gasps; he must have held his breath the entire length of the channel.
He saw her, yelled, and fell backward.
All she could register was how
She advanced on him slowly, walking as if in a dream. Her sword hand felt foreign to her; it was someone else’s arm that brought the blade down, it was someone else’s foot that kicked the soldier down by his shoulder—
He was faster than she thought; he swept out and kicked her kneecap, knocking her into the mud. Before she could react, he climbed over her, pinning her down with both knees.
She looked up. Their eyes met.
Naked fear was written across his face, round and soft like a child’s. He was barely taller than her. He couldn’t have been older than Ramsa.
He fumbled with his knife, had to adjust it against his stomach to get a proper grip before he brought it down—
Three metal prongs sprouted from above his collarbone, puncturing the place where his windpipe met his lungs. Blood bubbled from the corners of the soldier’s mouth. He splashed backward into the marsh.
“Are you all right?” Altan asked.
Before them the soldier flailed and gurgled pitifully. Altan had aimed two inches above his heart, robbed him of the mercy of an instant death and sentenced him to drown in his own blood.
Rin nodded mutely, scrabbling in the mud for her sword.
“Stay down,” he said. “And get back.”
He pushed her behind him with more force than necessary. She stumbled against the reeds, then looked up just in time to see Altan light up like a torch.
The effect was like a match struck to oil. Flames burst out of his chest, poured off his bare shoulders and back in streaming rivulets; surrounding him, protecting him. He was a living torch. His fire took the shape of a pair of massive wings that unfurled magnificently about him. Steam rose from the water in a five-foot radius from where Altan stood.
She had to shield her eyes from him.
This was a fully grown Speerly. This was a god in a man.
Altan repelled the soldiers like a wave. They scrambled backward, preferring to take their chances on their burning boats rather than take on this terrifying apparition.
Altan advanced on them, and the flesh sloughed off their bodies.
She could not bear the sight of him and yet she could not tear her eyes away.
Rin wondered if this was how she had burned at Sinegard.
But surely in that moment, with the flames ripping out of every orifice, she had not been so wonderfully graceful. When Altan moved, his fiery wings swirled and dipped as a reflection of him, sweeping indiscriminately across the flotilla and setting things freshly aflame.
It made sense, she thought wildly, that the Cike became living manifestations of their gods.
When Jiang had taught her to access the Pantheon, he had only ever taught her to kneel before the deities.
But the Cike pulled them down with them back into the world of mortals, and when they did, they were destructive and chaotic
and terrible. When the shamans of the Cike prayed, they were not requesting that the gods do things for them so much as they
were begging the gods to act
The more Altan moved, the brighter he burned, as if the Phoenix itself were slowly burning through him to breach the divide between the world of dreaming and the material world. Any arrows that flew in his direction were rendered useless by roiling flames, flung to the side to sizzle dully in the marshy waters.
Rin was half-afraid that Altan would burn away altogether, until there was nothing but the fire.
In that moment she found it impossible to believe that the Speerlies could have been massacred. What a marvel the Speerly army must have been. A full regiment of warriors who burned with the same glory as Altan . . . how had anyone ever killed that race off? One Speerly was a terror; a thousand should have been unstoppable. They should have been able to burn down the world.
