We left the fortress without ceremony.

  No one spoke as we crossed the broken outer threshold and emerged into the cold open dark of the City. The air outside felt sharper after the wet underground passages, thin enough to sting the lungs.

  We moved fast.

  Sir Ard kept most of us close. Francine stayed near Sir Sylvio, checking his bandages to make sure he didn't reopen anything. Only Evelyn ranged farther out, a dark shape slipping from cover to cover with scarcely a sound.

  Rocher remained beside me.

  I no longer had the energy to object to the way his shoulder kept nearly brushing mine, or to the fact that every time the road turned treacherous his hand found my arm without asking.

  The farther we got from the fortress, the more obvious it became that the road to the Forge had not been left uncontested.

  At first it was only scattered signs. A dropped shield. A snapped spear haft. A bck scorch mark.

  Then the pattern became clearer.

  The damage stretched in a long broken line toward the Forge. Stone was crushed inward in circur pits where something heavy had struck from above. Wagons had been overturned as if by a passing storm. Several shields y face-up in the street, their backs gouged and bckened.

  The bodies started after that.

  Not many. Not all at once. We found one crumpled beside a fallen pilr with half his gorget torn away. Two more were id together under cloaks that didn't fully cover the boots protruding beneath them.

  No one had commented. No one had needed to.

  I raised a hand and the group slowed instinctively.

  "Stay under cover where you can," I said quietly. "Keep your eyes trained on the sky."

  Sir Ard gnced up at once. "You think it may circle back on us?"

  "I think we should be prepared for the worst," I said.

  We adjusted our course, keeping closer to colpsed walls and roofless colonnades where the shadows were deeper. The City around us rose in jagged bck shapes: broken towers, empty overhangs, aqueduct lines like ribs against the dark. Every open span now felt exposed in a way it had not a few hours before. The sky above the ruins was a single vast blind ceiling.

  A sound tore through it.

  The screech came from ahead and high, a raw metallic shriek so piercing it seemed to scrape along the inside of my skull. Every muscle in my body locked at once.

  "Down!" I snapped.

  Training and fear did the rest.

  We scattered off the road with gratifying speed. Rocher caught Francine by the back of her habit and hauled her bodily behind the shell of a toppled building. Sir Sylvio dropped behind a waist-high section of broken wall with a muffled curse. Seraphine fttened herself beside a colpsed buttress, Pulseweaver already humming faintly with gathering charge. Evelyn vanished outright—one heartbeat she was there and the next she was simply another seam of darkness.

  I threw myself behind a cracked stone trough and put one hand on Phymera's hilt.

  The screech came again.

  Then the Demon Lord cleared the rooftops.

  Even forewarned, even having seen it before, the sight of it in flight still struck some primitive part of the mind as fundamentally wrong. It was too rge to move like that, too heavy to cut through the air with such effortless speed. The ruined span of its wings blotted out what little light there was. Smoke or shadow streamed from its body in torn veils. For one wild instant I thought it had seen us, that it was diving directly for the road where we hid.

  Rocher rose half from cover with his sword already in hand.

  I braced, every thought narrowing to angles and distance and whether the stiletto would answer me if I demanded it so soon.

  The creature never turned its head.

  It screamed over us in a rush of fetid wind and heat and kept going, hurtling away from the Forge at such speed the wake of it dragged dust and loose grit after it. Then, once it had cleared the broken line of outer workshops, it pulled sharply upward. Its body became a smaller darkness against the dark above, then a speck, then nothing at all.

  For a moment no one moved. The silence it left behind felt brittle.

  Then air returned to my lungs all at once.

  Rocher lowered his sword but did not sheathe it. "Was it retreating?"

  "Returning somewhere, maybe," Evelyn said. "Regrouping."

  "Either way," I said, pushing back to my feet, "let's move before it changes its mind and decides to come back."

  No one needed persuading. We took the road at a pace just short of a run.

  The Forge rose ahead of us sooner than I expected.

  Even from a distance something about it felt wrong. The furnace towers should have been breathing heat. Instead the chimneys stood dark, and torchlight flickered unsteadily at the entrance where the great doors had been forced half open. Figures moved in front of them in dense shifting clusters.

  As we drew nearer, the shape of the scene resolved, and with it came the smell.

  Blood.

  Fresh enough to overpower ash and hot metal both.

  The broad apron outside the entrance had been turned into an improvised triage ground. Padins y everywhere across the stone, some propped against shields or rolled cloaks, others stretched ft with their armor cut open. Priests moved between them in blood-dark robes, hands glowing faintly gold as they worked compresses into wounds or poured draughts between clenched teeth. The paving stones beneath them had been washed once already and were still slick.

  My eyes found Lumiere almost immediately.

  She stood near the great doors in the midst of it all, white robes streaked at the hem with soot and blood, her hands csped so tightly before her that the knuckles stood out pale. The sight of her alive struck me with such force that the rest of the courtyard blurred for a heartbeat.

  "Lumiere!"

  I was moving before anyone could stop me.

  She turned at the sound of my voice.

  For one single instant her entire face changed. Relief lit through her so openly it made her look younger, stripped clean of the careful composure she wore before others.

  "Sister—"

  She took one quick step toward me.

  A crack split the air behind her.

  Loud. Wet. Wrong.

  The expression vanished from her face as if a curtain had dropped over it. She crossed herself at once and began a prayer under her breath, the words so practiced they seemed to emerge before conscious thought.

  I reached her just as one of the injured padins on the ground convulsed.

  He had been lying three paces from the doors with priests working over him, his chestpte caved inward so badly the metal had folded around whatever ruin y beneath. His back arched. A sound escaped him—not quite a scream, not quite ecstasy. The priests nearest him drew away at once, not in arm but in expectation.

  Then the front of the chestpte split.

  The warped metal peeled outward in jagged petals.

  Something silver shone wetly in the cavity beneath.

  Not blood. Not viscera.

  Liquid metal.

  It rose from the broken torso in slow gleaming strands, floating upward against gravity as though drawn by an invisible hand. More followed, slipping through torn padding and ruined ribs. It collected in the air above him, turning, thickening, folding into a shape with terrible familiarity.

  A man.

  Or rather the memory of the man he had been, rendered in living metal.

  Around us the other injured padins began to speak.

  No, not speak.

  Exalt.

  Voices weak with blood loss lifted in ragged worshipful gasps.

  "Blessed release..."

  "Eternal life..."

  One of the padins near the transforming figure actually smiled through tears.

  Beside me Rocher went still in the way he only ever did when on the verge of violence. "What in the name of the Goddess is this?"

  The metal figure ignored him, turning its face toward the Forge doors with sightless devotion.

  Lumiere caught my wrist. Her fingers were cold despite the heat coming off the threshold.

  "Not here," she said. "Follow me. We had better speak in private."

  We followed at once.

  She led us through a side passage just inside the main doors and down a narrow corridor lit by wall braziers turned low. The sounds of the courtyard dulled behind stone: the groans of wounded men, the murmur of priests, the occasional impossible metallic chime when another death became something else. My stomach had not settled by the time Lumiere pushed open a small side room and ushered us inside.

  I recognized it at once.

  The same room where she and I had once stood awkwardly trying to navigate honesty with each other while the rest of the world seemed, briefly, held at bay. A side chamber off the main forge corridor, spare except for a long bench and a narrow slit window too high to see out of properly. The memory of that earlier conversation sat on the room like a faint second atmosphere.

  The irony was difficult to ignore.

  I pursed my lips and turned to Lumiere. "If nothing else, I'm gd that you're safe."

  "It is good to see you alive, sister," she said softly. For a moment the careful composure slipped from her face.

  Then something like pain crossed her expression. "Though I am not sure that 'safe' is the correct word."

  Rocher shut the door behind us and pnted himself between it and the room without needing to be asked.

  Seraphine narrowed her eyes. "Expin."

  Lumiere lowered her gaze for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had changed. Softer. More sorrowful.

  "Do you remember," she asked me, "the story Halbrecht told us? About the women of the First Men? Their devotion. Their sacrifice."

  I remembered it too well. The approving tone in which he had spoken of those who gave themselves gdly to strengthen the men deemed worthy to carry history. The sanctified ugliness of it. The way he had dressed consumption in the nguage of reverence and duty.

  Lumiere's eyes lifted to meet mine.

  "This," she said, "is what he meant."

  She reached into the fold of her sleeve and drew out something small and metallic, pinched between thumb and forefinger.

  A pill.

  At least that was what it resembled at first gnce. It was the size of a broad bean, smooth and darkly reflective, with a surface that was too alive in the light. It shifted almost imperceptibly as she held it, as though listening.

  Every hair on my arms rose.

  "Halbrecht calls it a sacrament," Lumiere said quietly. "A promise. To his most devoted followers, he has offered eternal life."

  The room had gone still enough that I could hear Seraphine breathing through her teeth.

  Lumiere's mouth tightened. "To die in his service is to become immortal. That is the doctrine he is preaching now. These—" She lifted the thing in her fingers a fraction. "—are pieces of Phymera. Or rather, the fragment she has granted him. If one of his followers swallows a piece, she absorbs them at the moment of death. Their willing soul becomes part of Halbrecht's weapon."

  Francine made a small strangled sound.

  Rocher's face had gone bnk. "He is feeding his own men into it?"

  "They are offering themselves," Lumiere corrected with bleak precision.

  Seraphine simply stared at the metal pill. "Madness," she said. "It's pure madness."

  I looked from the thing in Lumiere's hand to the stiletto hidden beneath my shirt and felt cold settle into me yer by yer.

  Beyond the wall came another distant metallic crack from the courtyard outside, followed by a murmur of exultation that turned my stomach.

  At st I said, "If he had more opposition, would they still be obeying him?"

  Lumiere gave a short humorless ugh. "Some did refuse him. A few padins called it bsphemy outright, and rejected his protection. He had them all thrown out."

  Her gaze dropped. "If I had possessed more power of my own... perhaps I might have tried the same mutiny. As it is, I am of more use here, limiting the damage where I can."

  She looked tired in a way I had not seen before. Not physically. Spiritually.

  "Saving the wounded," she said. "Preventing them from falling into his hands. I try. I fail often."

  "It's not your fault," I said, reaching out to steady her.

  "I know."

  Another crack sounded outside.

  Halbrecht had built himself a theology of consent around annihition. He was not merely spending lives. He was teaching men to desire the manner of their own consumption. To call it glory. To call it eternity.

  And outside that door, enough of the padins had already accepted it that the courtyard itself had become a recruitment sermon written in blood and metal.

  Sir Sylvio pushed himself upright with a hand against the wall.

  "The men who refused him," he said. "Where are they now?"

  Lumiere hesitated only a moment. "Last I saw, they were headed due south. After Halbrecht would no longer entertain their presence."

  Sylvio's jaw tightened. "Were the men of the Second Choir among them?"

  "Yes."

  That was all he needed.

  Sylvio crossed the room and pushed the door open. "Anyone who still remembers their oath can come with me."

  Two of the remaining padins followed him immediately. Their boots echoed in the hall.

  For a moment, Sir Ard remained where he stood, one hand resting against his pommel. His gaze moved from Lumiere, to Rocher, and finally to me.

  Something like apology passed across his face. He inclined his head once, then turned and followed Sylvio out the door.

  No one spoke or moved to stop them.

  Rocher watched the door for another heartbeat, then exhaled slowly.

  "Good men," he said quietly.

  Then he looked back to Lumiere.

  "But chasing splinter groups won't stop what's happening here. Not tonight. If Halbrecht is the one driving this..."

  His hand settled on the hilt of his sword.

  "Then we end it at the source. With the strength we now have."

  Lumiere's expression fell.

  "Rocher..." She shook her head slowly. "There's been one other development. Things are not so simple as you make it."

  "No," a voice called from the doorway. "They are not."

  We turned.

  Bishop Halbrecht stood in the open doorway, one hand resting lightly against the frame as if he had been there for some time. Torchlight from the corridor burned behind him, turning his robes into a dark silhouette.

  For a moment I started toward him, thinking he was alone.

  Then I saw something shift in the light behind him.

  And heard the slow scrape of armor.