Mercurial Read online

  I know, whispered Nyx from somewhere in the murk.

  She’d drank poison. Why would she do that? He tried to swim forward through the gloom, strained to pick out clues that might ascertain whether it was the past or the future that he saw, but his emotion strangled the vision until he could barely make out the shape of his sister. He struggled to calm himself.

  The dream wavered for a moment and then crystallized into a new scene. The Destroyer, wearing a diaphanous cloak woven from sparks and smoke. At her back: iron bars and a sheet-metal floor. At her feet: Nyx.

  Clothing charred in spots. Long hair burnt to nearly shoulder length. Spots of melted, steaming brass clinging to her tunic here and there: the beads that had once decorated her braids.

  Something formless and horrible roared through Tal. Hate, he named it, and turned on the Destroyer. His phantom hands reached for nonexistent blades, only to grip the nothingness that he was here. He was as helpless to stop her as he had ever been.

  He tried to tear himself from the fabric of the dream, thinking only of running to the prison car before this vision came true, if it hadn’t already—but a great stillness suddenly wrapped around him and held him in place.

  Wait, came a whisper.

  Tal froze. The voice rippled through him with unbearable gentleness, tugging at his blood like a lodestone. He had never heard it before, but every ounce of metal in him was singing with it, basking in it. He trembled before it—no, he trembled before himself. Before the wild, desperate hope that had instantly awoken, though he’d sworn it was long dead and buried deeper than he could ever reach again. He trembled before the knowledge of just how much power his god still held over him.

  Before him, in the vision, the Destroyer knelt in front of Nyx. Her expression was alight with a mad sort of fury that Tal had only seen a handful of times. So you are his sister, then, she said in a tone that spoke death. She reached out a hand. In it was a white-hot flame. This was it; she had unmasked Nyx, and now she would kill her.

  Stop, he tried to shout. The words echoed only inside his own skull. But still, despite himself, he clung to hope. His god had spoken. After two years, after a lifetime, he’d made himself known. Maybe it meant something. Maybe Tal hadn’t been abandoned, not forever.

  The Destroyer paused then. Her head tilted as she gazed at the flame in her hand. Tal followed her line of vision. The fire was flickering in and out of existence, one moment miniscule and the next leaping so high it nearly burned the Destroyer’s own face. Her cloak of sparks was flickering too. She looked down at herself and back at Nyx, her forehead wrinkling, and then in a swift movement pushed herself away and stood. What have you done to me? she demanded. She staggered then, falling sideways into the cell door. It swung open under her touch.

  It was then that, beneath the acrid scent of burnt flesh and charred hair, Tal smelled the faintest trace of hemlock and copper.

  The stillness surrounding him lifted. Dizziness lurched into him like a train slamming through a snowbank, and he sat up in bed and was immediately sick over the side of his cot.

  He gasped for air. Disoriented once again, he shoved himself off the other side of his bed, falling to one knee in the process. He grabbed for the bedpost to steady himself and with the other hand covered his eyes. He was shaking.

  Nyx had poisoned the Destroyer. That was why she’d drunk the flask, which had smelled of hemlock and copper—a poison which could apparently be transmitted from Nyx to the Destroyer in the course of her torture. That was why she’d come here. To kill the Lady of Mercury, and to free Tal.

  He covered his mouth. A sob wrenched out anyway. His sister was assassinating the Destroyer, probably right this very moment, for his sake—and because he had seen this vision, he would have to stop her. Again.

  He scooped up the clay mug and hurled it against the window. It shattered, spraying tea dregs across the pristine landscape of snow and mountains. It was all he had time to do before his oath ghosted through his veins, wound like roots around his bones, and yanked him upright. It reached out with his hands and buckled on his sword belt. It forced him toward the door.

  His god. His god had done this. If Tal had left the vision when he’d tried to, he wouldn’t have been compelled to save the Destroyer now, because he wouldn’t have known she was in danger. He wanted to cry, wanted to rail—at both the Unforged God and at himself, because for that one moment, he had nearly allowed himself to believe again. Having his hope crushed a second time was even more agonizing than the first, because it was his fault. He had known better, and still, he had hoped.

  He yanked the door open. In the hallway, he tried again to fight the oath, but it propelled him forward mercilessly, taking over his muscles, jerking him down the corridor. A servant was in his way. He shoved them aside, and a tray of cranberry tarts splattered against the carpet like blood. He wrenched open the door to the dining car. The empress was there. She stopped midsentence, a bite of truffle omelet lifted halfway to her mouth as she took him in. The glass walls beyond her framed the serrated peaks of the Skyteeth looming on every side: his home, so near and forevermore out of his reach. He barreled past it all, not pausing to answer the empress’s shouted demand or even register what it was she said. The next door rebounded off the wall to slam back into his shoulder, and when it closed behind him, it made a splintering noise that probably meant it would be difficult to open again.

  The door to the prison car was next. He pulled it open. A rectangle of light stretched out before him, feeble and blue against the shadows that seethed through the car’s interior. Then the door shut behind him and the light was gone.

  He breathed in the darkness. Let it coat his lungs, his mind, his soul. And then he turned and searched for the Destroyer.

  She was on the ground. Struggling to raise herself up on her elbows, to drag herself further into the hallway and out of the cell. Flames burned madly all around her, a whirlwind of fire that tightened, loosened, dissipated and formed again. Her magic was unstable. He had only seen this sort of thing happen to her twice before, though then it hadn’t been poison but exhaustion that had spurred it on. The first time, the empress had hurried her to the Lord of Copper—who was also their cousin and the royal physician—before her condition worsened. The second time, she’d burned down a wing of the Alloyed Palace before losing consciousness. That was how he’d gotten the scar on his collarbone.

  His oath took control again, commandeering his body to make him kneel at the Destroyer’s side as her fire blinked out. His hands curled on her shoulders, just barely gently enough to not be considered “harming,” and flipped her onto her back so that he could pick her up.

  She inhaled sharply at the touch—she hadn’t seen him enter—and jerked away. Her eyes snapped up, wild and…

  Afraid?

  The sight hypnotized him. Fear paled her cheeks and drew her jaw in all sharp angles, shrank her pupils until the mercurial silver of her irises seemed to swallow them. Her breath came in short gasps. A sadistic pinprick of satisfaction lanced through Tal’s wildly beating heart; he had wished to see her afraid, and here it was, painted before him in clear shades of terror. But as soon as the satisfaction came, shame slipped in to dilute it. A person was cowering before him, and he was glad. That was not how he was built.

  He shoved both the shame and the satisfaction away in disgust, and scooped up the Destroyer.

  She cried out and flung a hand instinctively at the sudden movement. Tal turned his face away and braced for fire, but nothing came.

  He looked back at her. She was blinking, her pupils adjusting. “Tal,” she said, and the word quavered with a profound and wholly unfamiliar relief.

  A shuffling noise sounded from the cell behind them. Tal braced himself once again, tore his gaze from the Destroyer’s, and then, finally, turned to look at his sister. Emotion crept through him, a slurry of horror and guilt and a terrible, terrible fear. He had avoided looking for Nyx until now because he was afraid the oath
would make him kill her. He had waited until the Destroyer was in his arms, hoping that his oath would then prioritize getting her to the healer over killing her would-be assassin.

  He’d already seen Nyx in his vision, he knew what to expect, but he was still unprepared for the sight of her so damaged. Her skin was only burned in a few places. The Destroyer knew how to do that—how to turn her fire inward through an entry point, to bring pain without doing untoward outward damage. But it was the uncharacteristic despair in her expression, and the ominous rattling of her breaths, that nearly brought Tal to his knees.

  They stared at each other for a moment. “I’ll…I’ll come back for you. I’ll save you,” Tal promised, though he knew he had no business swearing any such thing. He would swear it on metal, though, if it could ensure it came true.

  Nyx exhaled a garbled laugh. “Supposed to be…me saving you, little brother.” She reached for him then, as if she was helpless to do anything else. Her fingers grazed the hem of his pants. In the gesture, he saw the ghost of the girl she’d once been: a snarling terror on the sparring grounds at eleven years old, gripping the dagger he’d gifted her in those same hands.

  Before she could touch him, Tal took a step away. He ground his teeth. “You shouldn’t have come, Nyx. Not for me. I’m lost already.” The oath jerked him another step toward the door.

  Nyx stared back at him, then her gaze fell, and her eyes met the Destroyer’s. Something passed between the two girls in that instant, and a change came over Nyx: some alchemy of ferocity and fatalism that scored away her despair, leaving only hardness in its wake. She curled both hands around the iron bars of her cell. “Destroyer,” she said, low and brutal and certain, “I swear on this metal that I will see your empire fall, and your reign ended, and you dead. Do you hear me, Elodie?”

  “NO!” Tal shouted, but he was too late. He saw the moment the metal accepted his sister’s oath. She shuddered as it sank in.

  “Nyx—” Tal said urgently, but before he could get out more than that the Destroyer sagged in his arms, her eyes rolling back. Her whole body jerked. Fire lashed out in tendrils all over her. He was moving toward the exit before he registered taking a step. He tried to turn back around to get one last glimpse of Nyx, but he was too late again; the Destroyer’s fire blocked everything behind him out. It charred the edges of the doorframe as they passed through it and snapped like whips against the floor, but somehow, none of it burned him. The flames arced around him instead as if he were encased in an invisible barrier.

  He kicked open the door to the dining car. It took three tries, because this was the door that had been stuck shut. When the hinges finally broke and sent the door cracking open, it knocked back three servants who’d been clustered around the other side, and another one leapt aside barely in time to avoid a broken nose. Everyone shouted at once when they saw who Tal was holding and the condition she was in. Several nobles—the wise ones—fled, heading for the open hallway at the other end of the car. Others pushed through toward Tal, their eyes alight with curiosity or, in several cases, a predatory glee. Chairs clattered as they were kicked aside. Bits of breakfast splattered on the floor as one woman shoved a table out of the way, a carnage of jam and butter smearing across the thick cream carpets. Tal barreled through it all, intent on getting through the horde of people and to Albinus, who could mend the Destroyer. And then maybe, while she was recovering, Tal would have time to think of some way to get Nyx free of both her oath and her prison.

  The fire whirling around the Destroyer tightened. It went white-hot, roiling with barely-leashed energy. When Tal pushed past a table, it caught fire instantly, and the flames quickly spread to the dress of the lady standing next to it. Screams erupted as the nobles and servants surrounding them all tried to scatter at once, finally realizing the danger.

  Someone stepped in front of Tal. He made to shove past them when he registered that it was the empress, and stopped. She took in the scene in a single, sweeping glance, the nobles around her falling back in a wave as her gaze scythed through them. She held out a hand and let it hover over her sister. Then she stepped back. “I can’t put out the fire,” she stated. Her posture was calm, but her words snapped with tension. She turned, grabbing an older noblewoman—a distant aunt of hers, who had bronze communication magic—by the arm. The woman squawked in outrage but went pale and silent at a look from Sarai. “Send a mental message to the conductor immediately,” the empress ordered. “He is to enact the emergency transportation magics. If we aren’t at the Alloyed Palace in less than thirty seconds, I shall have both him and you garroted and your families’ bodies hung from the city walls for the crows.”

  The older woman shrank back in shock. A younger man, one who had the same hooked nose as the older bronze Smith, put his arm protectively around her shoulders. He was the Head of Transport, Tal recalled.

  “You can’t enact the teleportation protocols!” the man protested, turning to the empress, raising his voice to be heard above the shouting. “It will ruin all the enchantments on the train, it’ll take me weeks to repair, we wouldn’t be able to use it at all in the meantime—”

  Suddenly he stopped speaking. His mouth continued opening and closing but not a sound passed his lips. He blinked in surprise at first and put both hands to his throat, as if to feel for whatever was keeping his words penned up. Then his surprise rippled into a dawning horror, and his mouth opened wide, gaping.

  He was suffocating.

  Sarai watched him impassively, one hand lifted to control the flow of air around the man. “Albinus cannot treat my sister for this on the train,” she said. “He will need his office at the palace. And if she is not treated quickly enough, her magics will explode with a force no one here would wish to see. Hence my transport order.”

  The man nodded frantically.

  Sarai arched a brow. “I take that to mean you will no longer quibble about how long repairs may take?”

  He nodded harder.

  “Neither,” said the empress coldly, “will the new Head of Transport.”

  The man reached out for her, his eyes glassy with tears, his grasping fingers gone knobby and white with panic. The empress swept one foot back as if she were dancing in the palace ballroom and the man overbalanced, falling to his knees and then onto his face. His shoulders shuddered and went still.

  “One less for the crows,” Sarai murmured, then looked back at the older woman. “You’ve ten seconds remaining, and three more family members present on this train. That’s rather more math than I’d planned on doing so early in the morning. Send the message now and save us both the trouble, won’t you?”

  The woman’s face had gone hard, her expression marble-carved as she gazed down at the young man at their feet. She raised her eyes. “Yes, Highness,” she said flatly. “I am sending it now.”

  In Tal’s arms, the Destroyer spasmed again. She inhaled once, a sharp, shallow sound that Tal was surprised to have heard over the commotion. He looked down at her: wreathed in destruction and trembling with it, flames lapping angrily over the whole of her body. The smell of burning fabric wafted up. Both her clothing and his were beginning to singe as whatever invisible barrier that protected them began to corrode. She had never been burned by her own magic before. Tal knew, to his bones, that this could only mean she was about to lose control entirely. From what Sarai had said, that would be fatal for anyone nearby. For him, certainly…and potentially also for the Destroyer, if she could no longer protect herself from her own power.

  Those who live by the rule of fear shall die by it as well, thought Tal, and immediately hated that his last thought would be a scripture.

  The Destroyer’s eyes snapped open then, unfocused and unseeing. She inhaled again. This time when she exhaled, it was on a scream. Her back arched so violently that Tal had to scramble to keep his hold on her.

  Around them, the contours of the train suddenly blurred. All of the metal went bluish and gleaming. The train juddered, its compone
nts humming in a low metallic choir as the emergency teleportation magics began to take hold.

  Looking down at the Destroyer screaming in his arms, Tal knew it would be too late.

  Her eyes suddenly focused. Her gaze snapped to his. He closed his eyes, because she had owned his life for two years; she would not own his death, too.

  He thought of Nyx.

  He thought of home.

  And then the Destroyer’s magics exploded out of her, and Tal thought of nothing at all.

  WHEN THE GIRL WOKE, A GRAY SNOW WAS FALLING, and the world was silent in the way it only ever was in the aftermath of a great cataclysm.

  She lay on her back for a long moment, enfolded in an empty sort of peace. The sky above her was an even darker charcoal than the snow. The clouds grew ponderous while she watched, lumbering in and out of her field of vision, their fat dark bellies scraping against the saw-toothed mountains that surrounded her. A blizzard was imminent—but for now, the strange and lovely snowflakes were drifting on the merest of breezes, and she had the sudden impulse to stick out her tongue and taste one. So she did.

  It didn’t dissolve the way she’d expected but was instead uncomfortably hot and horribly bitter. In a fit of shock, she thrust herself onto her side and up on her elbows and spat into the snow. Not a snowflake at all; it was ash. And she was covered in it.

  She jolted to her feet, shaking out her hair and her clothing—which was charred and burned through in spots, and definitely not warm enough—with an unfamiliar sort of desperation. She didn’t want to be covered in ash.

  Her gaze caught on a twisted piece of blackened wood that might have been part of a column. She paused. She raised her head and, for the first time since waking, looked at her surroundings.

  She stood in the middle of a pit. Tall snow walls curved around her, pocked here and there with smoking, twisted debris that was slowly melting its way to the frozen earth. Lying half a dozen feet away was a chunk of something that looked like it might once have been a train wheel. The ground beneath her feet sparkled coldly, not with frost but with glass, shattered to dust and shards.