THE HOLLOW CHOIR ATTACKS

I had meant to close my eyes and not open them again until it was done.

That was the plan. A mage in the ring does not watch the world. She turns inward, to the place where the Sigil sits, and she waits for the Storm, and she lets it find her. It is a delicate thing, at the start, a leaning-into, and the slightest distraction can break it. Declan had been quite clear. Whatever comes, he had said, whatever you hear, do not look.

I heard them come over the lip of the plateau.

It was thirty-one pairs of boots, in no particular rhythm, and a sound under it that I took at first for wind. It was a hum. It was thirty-one voices, low, tuneless, drawn out on a single note, rising and falling in a slow soft wave. It was not a chant. It was an absence of one. It was the sound a congregation makes in a cathedral when the priest has stopped speaking and the silence has begun to be unbearable.

I kept my eyes shut.

I felt the Cinder Field open round me, as it did now without my asking, a ring of heat ten paces wide. I felt it brush the first of the invaders. I felt a spell on him curl and die. A man gasped. A rune sputtered out.

"Hold!" called a voice. It was a woman's, thin, cultured, lilting. "Hold! Do not touch the girl! She is not to be touched! Form the ring!"

I opened one eye.

They were spreading round the outer edge of the plateau in a wide black crescent, thirty-one robed shapes with skull-lanterns. In the cold pale light, I saw the glimmer of silver masks. They were the masks of the Choir: smooth, blank, featureless, with a single vertical slit where the mouth should be. They looked like pieces of the moon.

At the center of the crescent, the litter had been set down. The tall figure in white and silver rose from it. The mask was beaten gold. It had eyes, two long almond-shaped slits, and between them a ruby, red as a drop of blood.

"Good evening, Miss Reeve," said the Cantor.

The voice was the one I had heard: soft, almost amused, a woman's. But I did not believe it. There was a depth in it, a hollowness, as of a voice speaking from the bottom of a well.

"You are in a most vulnerable position," said the Cantor. "How fortunate for us. How very convenient."

…

"You've come a long way," said Declan.

He had not moved from his place at the edge of the outer circle. He stood with his feet apart and his arms at his sides, tall and dark against the moon, and in the silver light the great star on his breast burned dully, like a coal under ash. His voice was quite calm. It carried across the stones with the unhurried certainty of a man reading a verdict.

"I regret that you have wasted the journey."

"Ah." The golden mask turned. "The Warlord of the Iron March. We had heard that you had risen. We had not expected to find you so... attentive." A soft laugh. "You always were a faithful hound."

"I have been called worse. By better."

"No doubt." The Cantor lifted a hand, in a slow, lazy gesture. "My dear Warlord, we have no quarrel with you. The Choir takes no interest in the old affairs of the Senate. We have come for the girl."

"You will not have her."

"We shall have what the Chancellor has paid for." The voice cooled. "The Heart. The Reeve girl is of no consequence. A vessel. A husk. When the Storm has done its work, we will take what remains, and the rest may be buried."

"Over my body."

"That, too, can be arranged."

She dropped her hand.

…

I have tried many times to describe what followed.

It was like watching a war from the bottom of a well. I sat on the basalt disk in the center of the ring, with the Storm gathering in the air above my head, and I felt each blow as a shiver in the stone. The Choir attacked all at once. Thirty-one mages, thirty-one skull-lanterns, thirty-one voices rising in a single dissonant scream. A wall of black fire leapt from the crescent and rolled across the plateau toward the ring.

Declan met it with his bare hands.

He did not draw a sword. He did not cast a spell. He raised his right hand, palm out, and the fire stopped in the air a yard from his fingers. It hung there, boiling, a great black wave, and he closed his fist, and it crumpled. It came together in a ball, and shrank, and went out with a sound like a pistol-shot.

A gasp went round the crescent.

"Again!" cried the Cantor.

A second wave. A third. Spears of frozen darkness. Chains of shadow. A tide of crawling things, half-seen, with too many legs. They broke on the edge of the ring and fell back. Declan stood in the midst of it, motionless, with his hair streaming in the wind of the spells, and with every gesture of his hands he took the Choir's magic apart, thread by thread, as a seamstress unpicks a seam. His face was set. His eyes were silver. A faint nimbus of white light had begun to play round his shoulders.

Archmage, I thought. This is what it is.

I had never seen him fight. I had seen him in the Pit, watching. I had seen him in the Fort, in chains. I had seen the Shade, a pale reflection. I had never seen the man himself, at full height, with the power of a lifetime in his hands.

He was magnificent.

…

I could not hold the stillness.

I tried. I tried to turn my attention inward, to the Gold tree and the Heart. But the Storm had begun, and it was louder than I'd known. It came out of the sky in long rolling peals. It struck the pillars, and they rang. It struck the ring, and the circles flared. The air was thick with ozone and heat. I felt the first lick of lightning along my spine.

I screamed.

It was not the scream of a child. It was a low, hoarse, animal sound, wrung out of me. The bolt had gone in at the crown of my head and out through the soles of my feet. For one moment I was nothing but light. I saw the whole of my skeleton, white and clear, like an X-ray. I felt the Sigil on my wrist crack, glowing, and begin to come apart.

Hold.

I held.

The second bolt hit. Then the third. Then so many that I lost count: a rain of white fire, striking the disk, striking me, striking the bones of the mountain. The Gold tree on my arm cracked, branch by branch, and each break was a spear of agony. My veins ran with light. My heart stuttered. My teeth rattled in my skull.

Don't look, I told myself. Don't look.

I looked.

Through the white haze, through the running fire, I saw the edge of the plateau. I saw the figures on it. I saw the wall of black robes, advancing. I saw Declan, in the center, one man against thirty, throwing back wave after wave. And I saw, to the left, behind a ruined pillar, a short round figure in a brown dress with a flare-gun in each hand.

"Duck!" yelled Josie.

She fired.

Two rockets screamed across the plateau and burst in the middle of the crescent, in a shower of green and gold. The Choir reeled. Three masks went down, clutching their eyes. The Cantor staggered, and swore, in a most unladylike voice.

"The girl!" she cried. "Kill the girl!"

Josie dropped behind the pillar. A volley of black fire gouged the stone. She screamed, and swore, and began to reload with fingers that fumbled.

"Hawk!" she shrieked.

…

Hawk Boone had been sitting on a rock.

I had forgotten him. We all had. He had lowered himself onto a boulder at the far edge of the platform at the start, with his hat on his knee and a long canvas bundle across his lap, and he had sat there, perfectly still, through the whole of the opening exchange. Now, slowly, with an air of weary patience, he stood.

He unwrapped the bundle.

It was a gun. I had never seen it before. It was a long, slender, beautiful thing, six feet from muzzle to butt, of dark blued steel and walnut so old it was nearly black. The barrel was etched with a spiral so fine that it looked like the grain in wood. The stock bore a brass plate engraved with a single word. I could not read it from where I sat.

"Mabel's cousin in the Southern Port," he said, in a conversational tone, to nobody. "He's a collector. I'd been after this one nine years." He lifted it to his shoulder. "It was the last one my daddy made. Never fired it. Said it wasn't ready."

The Cantor turned her head. "What is that?"

"A long-gun, ma'am."

"A what?"

"A rifle." He sighted down the barrel, calmly, with one eye closed. "It's a very old design. We don't make 'em any more. Too slow to load, too heavy to carry, and they cost more than a house." A pause. "But you'll find, if you ask the right folks, that there's nothing in the Republic that'll throw a ball so far."

He squeezed the trigger.

I have never heard anything like it. It was not a bang. It was a crack, a vast flat thunderclap, a sound like the sky tearing. The muzzle spat a tongue of white fire thirty feet long. The recoil threw Hawk back a pace and nearly knocked him from his feet. The ball, a spinning bolt of silver light, shrieked across the plateau and struck the golden mask squarely between the eyes.

The ruby exploded.

The Cantor flew backward off her feet. She crashed to the ground in a flurry of robes and lay there, motionless. The mask rolled free, glittering, and clattered across the stone.

Hawk lowered the gun. He blew down the barrel.

"Told you," he said.

…

Fifteen of the Choir ran.

I saw them go: a sudden black rout, robes flapping, lanterns tumbling. But sixteen stood their ground, and these were the best. They closed round the crumpled figure of their leader. They raised their hands. And from the ground, from the cracks between the stones, from the very air, a pale lurid light began to rise.

"They're calling the Hollow," whispered Declan. "Tamsin. Don't look."

I looked.

It came out of the stone like smoke. It was the color of old bone. It had no shape, at first: a vast, soft, shuddering fog, rising from the cracks. Then it thickened, and drew together, and began to take form. It rose above the Choir in a column twenty feet high, twisting, writhing, and the form it took was a face. A huge, hollow, wailing face, with eyes like empty wells and a mouth that gaped wider and wider, a cavern of nothing.

It opened its jaws, and screamed.

I felt the scream in my teeth. I felt it in my heart. It was the scream of everything lost and forgotten, a wail of such enormous, bottomless, hopeless hunger that my whole body shook. Nimbus yowled. Josie dropped her flares. Even Hawk stepped back.

The Hollow fell upon the ring.

It struck the outer circle, and the white stones blazed. The wards held. For one moment the whole plateau was lit as bright as day, and I saw Declan in the center of it, his arms raised, his hair on end, holding the great hungry thing at bay by sheer force of will. His face was white. Sweat ran down it. His lips were drawn back from his teeth.

"Nimbus!" he shouted. "The left!"

I did not see what the cat did. I saw only a white streak, low and fast, across the stones. I saw him vault a ruined pillar. I saw him land on the shoulders of a robed man at the edge of the crescent, and I saw four pale claws rake down, and a silver mask fly off into the dark. There was a scream. There was a spray of black blood. Nimbus sprang away with his ears flat and his fangs red, as small and fierce and furious as a thunderbolt, and landed on the next.

The man fell. The man beside him fell. The line began to waver.

Good, I thought. Oh, my good boy.

…

And then I saw her.

I had been looking at the Hollow, at the lines of the crescent, at the dying lightning. I had not been looking at the dark beyond the plateau's rim, where the goat-track wound up out of the night. A single figure had come up it, alone, after the rest. She stood now at the very edge of the platform, in the shadow of a boulder, as still as a statue.

She was small. She was thin. She wore a robe of pure black, without a mask, and her hair hung loose to her waist, pale gold, tangled and filthy. Her feet were bare. Her arms hung at her sides, bound from wrist to shoulder in strips of black cloth, tight as mummy-wrappings, and from beneath them there crept, up her neck and across her cheek, a web of faintly shining lines, white, thin, spreading, like veins of frost on glass.

Her eyes were black.

I do not mean dark. I mean there was no white to them, no iris, no pupil. They were two pools of perfect, glistening night, and when they turned to me, I felt a chill crawl down my spine.

She tilted her head.

"Tamsin," whispered Cordelia Fairchild.