Chapter 40

  Heidi Sheppard

  “Oil?” said Heidi.

  “Oil!” said Luki cheerfully as he gestured with the anchor that probably weighed more than she did. “Don’t know where it came from. A network of lakes at this depth. Gets thick toward the core.”

  The ‘lake’ was floating, a glistening globule of oil at least a kilometer across, its form in flux as invisible gravitational tides kneaded its surface.

  “That’th it there,” said Vyrix. Some minor act of magic traced a grainy greenish line down to a shadowed location just beyond the lake of oil.

  “The workmanship of Glaurung,” chittered Ruth above and behind Heidi. His tone was unusual, perhaps thoughtful or excited.

  “I can’t read it,” said Vyrix. “But thomeone can. I’m thure it’th important.”

  Heidi received a message on CHIME. She checked it only for long enough to see that it was the Burning God, then she ignored it. No doubt some threat, or a teasing comment, or a cutting observation. Possibly the god would try to set the lake of oil on fire. But then what? There would be a burning lake in the sky. With the help of Vyrix’s shell charm, which really did protect Heidi and her clothes from fire, Heidi found she could pretty much ignore the Burning God now.

  “It’th quite flammable,” murmured Vyrix, seemingly to herself. “The oil.”

  The Almost Victorious swung ponderously down around the lake in a wide arc. Because, Luki explained, there might be rue hiding in the oil. It would not do to disturb them. The Almost Victorious had had to deal with two separate rue encounters already. And now that Heidi knew what the rue truly were, she found it difficult to destroy them. She let the others do it.

  Because ‘down’ meant nothing on the Metal Moon, the Almost Victorious had no need of a bottom or a top. With its modular design, it had no need of any kind of symmetry or centrality. In shape, it most closely resembled a clumpy mass of coral made of patched-together metal. It bore only loose similarities to the cargo ship it had once been. Heidi and her companions stood on a small open-air observation deck that allowed a rapid exit from the craft should that be necessary.

  “Baha,” said Heidi. “Scout the area.” Bahamut had made a friend, and her name was Cazzie. They were curled up together, and it looked like Cazzie was experimenting to see whether she could bite through Baha’s armored scales. She was gnawing on his tail.

  Bahamut perked up at the sound of his name. He raised his head and turned it lazily toward Heidi as though he’d been dozing.

  “I want you to…” Heidi broke into a giggle, so sudden and uncharacteristic that it startled her companions. Two of Cazzie’s floating eyes had come down to rest atop Bahamut’s head, giving him a goofy googly-eyed stare. It got worse when Bahamut opened his mouth, in the appearance of a wide grin, and one eye started looking in another direction. Heidi brought a hand to her mouth to stifle laughter.

  According to Vryix, Cazzie felt bad for Bahamut, not having any eyes. Cazzie seemed to think that Baha was some kind of small, flightless, unsuccessful eye thief. So she had taken him, literally, under her wing.

  “Scout the area,” Heidi repeated when she trusted herself to speak again without laughing. Bahamut stretched, twisting his body and splaying his legs, and vanished in a shuttering of darkness.

  The Almost Victorious made an awkward landing; it could hardly make any other kind. It had no formal hatch or door; the crew hopped, crawled, flew, or slithered out of whatever aperture was available to them. They assembled in front of the ship. Luki stayed with the Almost Victorious while the rest of them went on ahead. Heidi and Ruth and Vyrix, who rode Cazzie, led the rest.

  The lake of oil was overhead from their perspective, but the gravity was weak. So many conflicting gravitational tides this deep in the Metal Moon mostly canceled out, but they were strong enough that when one got an edge, it pulled hard. Heidi’s crew of roughly nine companions (because she didn’t know if the Maun twins counted as separate individuals) walked with wide, swinging steps, ready to lean at a steep angle against the gravity as though against an extreme and unpredictable wind. Occasionally the force of their own steps lifted them airborne as gravity for a short time disappeared entirely. Heidi had become used to countering the shifting tides almost automatically. With Kaitlyn’s fantastic goggles, she could usually see the shifts coming before they hit.

  The monument stood on a cold shadowy plane, set into the side of a broad, flat, deep-maroon lorn spike several kilometers across. A thicket of deadly spikes ran along an oblique edge to their right, while a hundred meters to the left the lorn ended in a sharp corner, opening up into the big empty pocket of space in which the lake of oil floated, trapped. No sense putting too much thought into the layout of the surroundings on Orpheus, though. They’d be different in a day, or an hour, or possibly even a minute.

  Heidi had never seen a lorn that was pure jet black. Even the darkest lorn, if you looked closely enough, was just a very deep shade of some color on the blue-red spectrum. But this, this Monument as Vyrix called it, was black as obsidian, and it rose straight and solitary from the reddish lorn underfoot like an obelisk with a jagged top.

  “Warden,” hissed Winnow from behind, her voice soft but urgent. “Craft ahead. Dark World.”

  Her words caused a stir, but Heidi didn’t doubt them. Above and beyond the Monument, in the shadows, an entire armada could be lurking, unseen. But Winnow could see in the dark.

  “Ah,” said Vyrix, sounding pleased and speaking softly so that only Heidi could hear. “Did I forget to mention? I invited thome friendths. I hope that’th okay. Tell your dogth to hold their fire.”

  Heidi, mind reeling, held up a fist to signal a halt. Again? Had Vyrix tricked her again? But why?

  Wait, Heidi told herself. Wait and see. But if this is a betrayal, Vryix isn’t waking up from her next nap with the bale thorn.

  “Spread out,” said Heidi. “Prepare to retreat. Maun will cover us.” What else? “Point Thirty-Seven, alert Luki. We might need to get out fast.”

  “They here,” whispered Winnow. “It…” Her voice trailed away. Moments later, the rest of them saw why.

  The dim landscape behind the obelisk peeled away as though it was a curtain torn down and flung aside. Behind it lay the same scene as before, except that a strange assembly of figures stood there, shrouded in gloom.

  “Behind,” muttered Splitter at her back. Heidi glanced back and saw the smoldering form of Lady Fires blocking the path back to the Almost Victorious. The Lady only stood there, for the moment.

  Back to the front. Three figures stepped forward from the crowd. Heidi’s dark-enhancing helmet had difficulty rendering them visible, but one she recognized easily enough. He had that hat, that coat, and the two shining silver revolvers. Abraham Black nodded at Heidi as he and the others stepped into the relative light close to the obelisk.

  The shorter figure beside Abraham Black had no outstanding features to speak of save for a curved golden faceplate, a featureless mask. He was short, of average build, wearing some formless dark fabric. A small case or satchel hung loosely from one shoulder. And on the other side of this shorter figure stood a hulking gorilla-shaped thing, skeletal and blue. She saw right through the many gaps in its body.

  The Dark Ruler speaks, for it is he in the golden mask. Set forth from the tower of Storisende on the advisement of a lost and powerless god, he has come to meet the Hero of Gravity. He knows that he is early. He is not following the script. But he can write his own Script.

  He speaks to the Hero, asking if she has lost something, and his guard casts down a broken body onto the lorn. It is the body of an angel, black as night, in which a flame of life still flickers.

  Heidi’s whole body tensed. Waves of heat and cold washed over her. She couldn’t take her eyes off of Bahamut, barely visible, twitching on the lorn. Cazzie wailed softly nearby. The words rang in her mind: Dark Ruler. Shit. And it wasn’t the big guy; the dark ruler was the small one with the faceless golden mask.

  Seldom, says the Dark Ruler, has he had the opportunity to speak to Heidi Sheppard. Yet every time she has so little to say. She favors deed over word.

  He was right. Heidi couldn’t think of anything to say; par for the course. This was him, the Bad Guy, the Dark Ruler. He didn’t look like much, honestly, but that was somehow scarier than if he had been some hulking monster like Glaurung. If he had been big, Heidi would have feared his strength. But he didn’t look strong, so Heidi’s fear was formless.

  “That’th right,” said Vyrix, who had worked some magic so that all could hear her while she spoke at her normal mumbling volume. She urged Cazzie forward. The eye-thief warbled softly and took a few reluctant steps, torn between fear of those ahead and the desire to aid Bahamut.

  Ah, says the Dark Ruler. The witch. Well done, cursed one. For this, I may have the Mandragoran undo your affliction.

  Heidi’s guards, who also heard the unspoken ‘words’ of the Dark Ruler, muttered, shifted, swore vengeance. That’s it, Heidi thought. Vyrix has betrayed me. I was a fool, as always.

  “No,” said Vyrix. “Not thith time.”

  The Dark Ruler is taken aback. No? What, then does the witch desire as reward? No matter. It can be settled later.

  Heidi was surprised too. What could Vyrix want more than to be cured of her curse? Like the Dark Ruler said, it didn’t matter. The question now was: how was Heidi getting out of this?

  “Look up,” Vyrix continued. “Can’t a witch change her mind?”

  Look up?

  “Yeth.”

  The Dark Ruler is puzzled. The witch had best arrive quickly at her point.

  Heidi looked up. The only the thing ‘up’ was a lake of oil. Was Vyrix trying to tell her something?

  Vyrix spoke again, this time without the magic that broadcast her voice. “By the godth, you’re thtupid.” She was holding something in her hand, cradled so that Heidi could see it. A red and gray shell, almost exactly like the one Heidi was wearing. And now Heidi saw that Cazzie wore one as well around her neck. Had she been wearing it before?

  Oh. The lake. Oil. Fire. Had Vyrix planned this? Why? And what about Heidi’s guards?

  “My point,” said Vyrix, speaking to the Dark Ruler again, “ith that in a thituation of thuch gravity, we mutht fly from our ecthpectathionth. They can burn uth tho.”

  The Dark Ruler reaches out at hand, and a pen is there in his gloved fingers, aflame with violent light. Enough, he says to the cursed witch. We shall deal later. For now, he inscribes a word that sizzles on the air.

  Heidi wasn’t sure she understood exactly what Vyrix expected of her, but she had to do something. She knew that her guards were quick, and that a sharp corner in the lorn was behind them, and that Bahamut was fireproof. And she understood that unless she did something, something soon, something dramatic, neither she nor her guards would be getting out of here alive.

  “Dark Ruler,” said Heidi, because whatever he was doing writing words in the air, she didn’t want him to finish just yet. “Do you mean we’ve met before?”

  Seven times, says the Dark Ruler. And he tells Heidi Sheppard how on three of those occasions he killed her. This time, he thinks, will be no different. And he has it on good authority that this time will be the last. There will not be another.

  There was something there. Something important in what he was saying, something that Heidi thought maybe she could use. Correction: something Elizabeth or Kaitlyn or literally anybody else could use, but not her, because Vyrix was right, and she was an idiot.

  Vyrix said something, but Heidi wasn’t listening anymore. Maybe someone else could figure out how to deal with the Dark Ruler. Maybe someone else could understand what exactly Vyrix was trying to do here, and why, but she was Heidi Sheppard. She would only do what she could. And that meant getting her and her guards out of here alive.

  She gave the signal. The guards of Orpheus, Ruth and Splitter and Winnow and .37 and the rest, surged into action. All at once: smokescreen, noise, the ping of bullets ricocheting off the lorn, the crackle of lasers. Heidi paid this no heed. She concentrated on making the biggest, strongest compass she had ever made.

  It was surprisingly easy, the way that a certain weight on a bench press will suddenly seem light one day. She grabbed almost the entirety of that lake of oil above in a gravitational field and pulled it down toward herself in an accelerating fall.

  Everyone noticed this, or at least they noticed the blazing compass spinning between Heidi’s hands. They all noticed that ‘down’ suddenly seemed a lot more like ‘down’ than it had before, as several Gs of gravity anchored them all to the lorn.

  The Dark Ruler smiles behind his mask. Of course. It is always this way.

  Behind Heidi, blazing in the haze of smoke, Lady Fires stopped the retreat of the guards. Shouts exploded, the sound of combat, gunfire. Ahead of Heidi, the Dark Ruler finished writing his complex word in the air. It shone blue; it shivered and shifted in a sparkling crackle, and Heidi could read it even though she couldn’t read it: MIRAMON . Beside Heidi, Vyrix clutched tightly to an anxiously dancing eye thief. “Them, you fool! Not uth, them!” If she meant the oil, it was too late.

  The lake of oil crashed down upon everyone in the area; Heidi only managed to shield herself, Vyrix and Cazzie, and several of her nearby guards by pushing the oil away with a sudden strong reversal of gravity, though its momentum pressed it close.

  Lady Fires touched the oil.

  Vyrix was saying something, something about enemy ships, and insulting Heidi while she was at it, but Heidi wasn’t listening. The world ignited around her. The lorn shuddered with impact under her feet; something somewhere exploded; she couldn’t see what. She saw only the racing flames as the oil, everywhere, caught fire. It didn’t explode—it was just oil, after all—but she was in the midst of a lake of it, and the overwhelming scent of it made Heidi gag inside her helmet.

  Time to go.

  She pulled the surfboard from one pocket and flicked it up into the air. She jumped, changed gravity, and caught her feet on it as it grew to full size. She oriented herself, and—

  Lady Fires appeared, camouflaged against the all-encompassing flame. She tackled Heidi, wrapped her in blazing leathery wings, carried her away. Lady Fires burned hot, maybe attempting to scorch Heidi to death. But although Heidi became uncomfortably warm, she did not burn. The most painful thing was Vryix’s shell charm, which had gone cold as ice against her chest.

  Lady Fires must have realized this, for she opted for the alternative approach of simply crushing Heidi. This she could do; Heidi’s armor was designed to protect against the piercing and slashing of the rue, not being squeezed to death by a Lady of Skywater.

  Heidi saw nothing but fire through the visuals of her helmet. But she also saw, thanks to Kate, the grainy blue matrix of gravitational waves. She looked at them, not the fire, and saw them warp around some nearby object. The Monument exerted its own gravitational field. The crushing grasp of flaming wings trapped her arms, but she could still open her hands enough to make the compass. She flipped herself and Lady Fires up into the air and then dropped them as hard as she could toward the Monument.

  Lady Fires couldn’t fly and crush Heidi at the same time. They both crashed into the Monument. Heidi felt the Lady’s horrible, skeletal, leathery body shake with the impact. But her grip did not loosen. If anything, it tightened, compressing the last breath of air from Heidi’s lungs.

  A fine demonstration, concedes the Dark Ruler, nearby. But futile, of course. He—

  Something rattling and metallic struck snake-like down from the suffocating dome of fire overhead. Lady Fires’ grip on Heidi loosened.

  Heidi created two centers of gravity to force herself away from Lady Fires like two north-end magnets.

  More chains snaked down, and now a winged figure descended from the chaos, aflame but unharmed. After all, her wings were chain.

  “I will deal with her,” hissed Lady Fires, left wing wrapped in chains.

  “Deal as you must, sister,” answered the clanging, rasping voice of Lady Chains from above. “But know that a fiercer one follows in my wake.”

  Lady Fires burned so hot that the chain touching her turned from tarnished grey to dull pink. She unbound the chain from her wing and rose with a great scorching flap to meet Lady Chains in the air.

  Heidi gasped for breath, blinked spots out of her eyes. The natural tides of gravity were clearing the fire now, drawing away the burning oil, spreading it thin. The air was hot and getting hotter, and it was hard to breathe. All the fire was consuming the breathable air, replacing it with acrid smoke.

  Elsewhere, in the fire, sound and fury. Her guards refused to leave the Warden in the hands of evil; they braved the fire to come for her, facing unseen foes in the burning oil. How many of them were fireproof?

  Nearby stood the Dark Ruler, golden masked and small compared to the others present. Beside him loomed that huge skeletal figure, the one that had thrown Bahamut onto the cold lorn. There was Bahamut, maybe alive, and Heidi wasn’t leaving without him. And now there were two new things in the area: MIRAMON and ANAVALT. She knew their names because she could read them. They were their names, shining in the air, MIRAMON in blue and ANAVALT in gold. They were words, but they were also what the words meant. She knew they were LOGOI because that was also written there—it was the same as their names, and the same as what they were.

  Kill her, Thex, says the Dark Ruler.

  The huge skeletal brute stepped forward, feet clanging against the lorn, right past the body of Bahamut. Heidi prepared to flee, perhaps to fling Thex aside, scoop up Bahamut and escape. But a voice whispered into her ear, “jutht run, thtupid.”

  Something shot out from the fire, glinting violet in the light. Heidi recognized it as bale thorn the instant before it shattered against the creature called Thex. That creature stood stunned for a moment before collapsing unconscious to the lorn with a mighty crash. Cazzie swooped down from the flames with Vyrix, streaking fire. The eye thief plucked up Bahamut like a seabird snatching its prey, and the pair disappeared back into the flaming darkness.

  The Dark Ruler sighs. This again. Logoi, he says. Kill her.

  ANAVALT and MIRAMON flickered with dancing light. They shed words that shimmered in the air before fading: YES. KILL. DESTROY. YES.

  Heidi tried to flee. She yanked the surfboard to her and hurled herself up into the air.

  Lightning struck her, not from the sky but from ANAVALT . Except it wasn’t lightning. Or it was, but it was also just the word LIGHTNING written in the air, taking the form of a crackling bolt of electricity. Heidi screamed in pain. It hurt; every muscle in her body seized in agony. But when it was over, she was still alive, still able to move. Maybe not as badly hurt as she should be. The charmed shell against her chest was so cold that Heidi feared it would scar her skin with frostbite, not that she knew anything about frostbite.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  CHAINS encircled her—the word, not actual chains—written in blue light. Except, they were chains, blue but real, binding her tightly.

  Heidi was confused, afraid. What was happening? This was so far beyond her.

  Two of her guards emerged from the flame, Splitter and Winnow. ANAVALT struck the already charred Winnow with FIRE —the word and the thing the word meant—immolating her in a shriek. The Dark Ruler wrote something purple on the air, and the violet words on Splitter’s skin suddenly blazed with light. Splitter fell to the lorn, spasming and writhing like a dying spider. And MIRAMON approached the chained and helpless Heidi; he hovered through the air, a blue word several feet across, crackling, changing, and now it held the word SWORD up in the air, the letters of the word limned in sizzling blue flame. It was only a word. But somehow, it was really a sword as well. And it was about to kill her.

  Thunder. It crashed in the darkness and fire. The word SWORD broke apart in MIRAMON’s grip. Thunder again, and Splitter ceased his agonized writhing. Thunder a third time, in rapid succession, and the CHAINS binding Heidi broke apart into brittle fragments of letters.

  She saw him then, making a dramatic entrance. The flames swirled around Abraham Black as he stepped into view, fired twice more, shattered pieces of the word MIRAMON, which broke like glass. The bluish form wavered.

  The last two shots were Heidi’s. She didn’t remember drawing her gun, but there it was in her hand, and it was enough to break apart the word, and to destroy the being that it designated. MIRAMON dissolved like dust.

  Well, Black? asks the Dark Ruler.

  “It’s a strange thing…” Abraham Black replied. He stepped in-between Heidi and the Dark Ruler. His long burning coat wafted strangely aside in the gravity. Flame glinted on his shiny revolvers. “I don’t think I want you to kill her.”

  Death, then, is your choice? The Dark Ruler speaks as though in rote, rehearsing lines he has spoken before.

  “Seems so,” replied Black. Heidi dropped to the lorn behind him.

  Well then. The Dark Ruler is fully aware that this is too early. He should not be here, aggressing against a hero on their own moon so soon. Nor ought he activate the power of the dark key when not one of the heroes has yet become Champion. But he is beyond the point of caring about such things any longer.

  The Dark Ruler holds up a hand, on which is the dark key in the form of a ring. It changes and becomes a pen in his hand.

  As the Dark Ruler began to write, Heidi had enough time to think that she and Abraham Black were in big trouble. A cloud of darkness spread from the Dark Ruler; it mingled with the flame and fire and smothering smoke and chaos. It carried a cold, creeping dread—not the terror of something frightening, but the awe of being in the presence of some great power as it began to work. The thought came clearly to the front of her mind: the Dark Ruler was a foe meant to be faced by all of them, all six, working together, after much preparation. And here she was, alone.

  Well. Not really alone.

  It was hard for Heidi to understand what happened next. The Dark Ruler wrote words on the air, and the words became reality. They converged into a monstrous beast of darkness, a mass of living words like the LOGOI, like ANAVALT whom Abraham Black now sought to destroy with thundering bullets, but whose BARRIER proved too strong.

  Heidi, back on her surfboard, fled up into the flaming darkness, but the creation of the Dark Ruler followed. It was as black as the rue, but limned with flickering light delineating CLAW and FANG and TENTACLE. It was a great unspeakable mass of letters and words, and yet somehow it all came together into one greater label: MONSTER.

  She fled while Black confronted ANAVALT, and the MONSTER followed, trailing her up into the darkness, and she could not outrun it because it was FAST. (The word FAST swirled in its wake like a discarded comic book sound-effect.) It caught her in the air, and Heidi screamed at it and fired her weapon until the bullets ran out, then she dropped the gun for the strange crystal weapon used for fighting rue. She hurt the MONSTER (the word HURT flashed where the bullets hit, and ICHOR bled from the WOUNDs), but it was not enough. Of course not. This MONSTER was MIGHTY; she knew because she could read it right there in front of her.

  It snatched her up in its CLAWs, too QUICK for her to dodge, and it glared at her with HATE in its EYEs.

  But again thunder saved her. The black beast’s EYEs broke apart, shattered by perfectly placed bullets from below, and then its LIMB shattered, and then its GRIP.

  Heidi looked down just in time to see Abraham Black get speared through the side by ANAVALT as a reward for his distraction.

  She glimpsed Lady Fires and Lady Chains as she fell, still locked in vicious combat in the void.

  The fire was everywhere, spread by the gravitational tides into sheets and walls and bubbles of flame. A burning, smoky, hellish landscape buckled in the gravitational tides. And there among it, her remaining guards battled the forces of the Dark World. The Almost Victorious was lumbering in, showing just how little time had passed since the chaos had begun. Rue crowded around the edges of the conflagration, drawn by the commotion but held back by the heat and light of the flames.

  She dropped, spinning, wounded, disoriented, back down to the Monument, to the feet of the Dark Ruler.

  She broke her fall but still struck the lorn hard. Her vision blurred.

  She saw the Dark Ruler, only feet away, with the word GUN in his hand. And she knew that in a moment the word BULLET would come shooting out, too fast to read, and pierce her armor.

  The Dark Ruler did fire, but thunder coincided, and Heidi yet lived. The word BULLET had shattered in mid-air, met by a perfect shot from Abraham Black, wounded, nearby.

  The Dark Ruler is vexed. Please, Abraham, he says. You are drawing this out unnecessarily.

  “No,” said Abraham, his voice strained. “Just enough.”

  The Dark Ruler recognizes dramatic timing when he reads it. He turns his gaze above, knowing already what he will see there. And there it is.

  Lord Fierce cares not for dark, nor fire, nor any force that dares conspire to harm those he has sworn to guard. No god, no beast, no written word, nor spoken though it go unheard, shall hinder him from this his deed: to aid them in their hour of need.

  The Dark Ruler assures Lord Fierce that he is well aware of the Lord’s propensity for arriving at just the—

  No words from you, you scrivener! cries Lord Fierce, and his voice makes the lorn ring. I will show you how your words compare to my deeds! The work of my hands and my blade will sing.

  Something picked Heidi up; a stab of agony coursed through her. It was the arm of Abraham Black. He pulled her away, limping swiftly from the Dark Ruler. The Dark Ruler let them go; he had other problems now.

  As did they all. For if Heidi perhaps had been careless in dropping a lake of oil on everyone, Lord Fierce was hardly less so in battling with his full might against the Dark Ruler. Heidi saw their first clash. The Dark Ruler slashed a sweeping arc in the air, writing a line of shimmering light with his pen. That line meant nothing to Lord Fierce’s sword, which was the size of Alan’s surfboard and broke the line like a crystallized thread of spider’s silk. The Dark Ruler had dodged aside at the last moment, but the sweeping blade of Lord Fierce clipped the lorn underfoot.

  It all exploded.

  The lorn, Heidi had learned, was sort of like a living, growing metal, akin in strength and durability to tempered steel. Yet, as Kaitlyn had observed, it had a crystalline structure. That was why it was so sharp and jagged. It didn’t bend; it broke. But until now, Heidi had only ever seen the smallest of the lorn actually shatter. Nothing, she had believed, could do more than scratch the colossal lorn comprising the heart of the Metal Moon.

  But when the tip of Lord Fierce’s blade encountered the surface of the lorn, it continued as though the lorn was not there at all. The entire vast expanse of the lorn erupted in a chain reaction too fast for the eye to perceive—one moment a solid landscape of hard metal stretching for miles and miles, the next a dense galaxy of shrapnel exploding and collapsing in on its own gravity all at once.

  The sound was excruciating, even through her helmet.

  The gravitational undertow of this event flung away Abraham Black, who had been carrying her. Heidi spun in the air wildly before concentrating enough to still herself with a few compasses. She tried to make sense of what was happening around her, but that proved almost impossible. Tiny shards of lorn flew everywhere, trailing flame and dense smoke. Shrapnel rained upon her body armor from every direction with the force of small-caliber bullets. Rue wailed nearby, and the other mountainous lorn smashed and jostled dangerously, with fathomless force, in the sudden gravitational vacuum of the one broken to pieces. Heidi could barely hear either the rue or the clamorous chiming of the lorn. She mostly heard a high ringing in her ears.

  Somewhere over there, Lord Fierce battled the Dark Ruler. Heidi couldn’t discern how the battle fared through the thickening haze and the cloud of debris, but she could tell when Fierce struck another lorn shard, for its entirety disintegrated into wave-warped metal shards with a great crash.

  Somewhere, Ladies Fires and Chains might still have been fighting. Somewhere, her guards battled valiantly even in the midst of the chaos. Somewhere, Vyrix and Cazzie had Bahamut. Somewhere down there was Abraham Black. Somewhere, in her leg and on her back, Heidi was bleeding.

  Then it got worse.

  …BURNS…

  That was all the warning Heidi received. She made a sphere and flung herself to the side. Fragments of lorn clinked against her helmet like a high-speed hail, leaving long scratches on her faceplate. If it weren’t for the helmet and her full-body armor, she would have been flayed alive.

  Glaurung arrived like a nightmare: golden eye in the black smoke, a leviathan shape wreathed in fire and dark, descending to the chaos. The Queen of the Rue could control gravity like Heidi, and she used this power to wipe away the fire and the debris of the lorn, sweeping it aside in a wave that caught up Heidi in it. Heidi fought back, maintained her position. This was her chance. But where was Bahamut? She wasn’t going to leave without him.

  I’ve got him, thtupid, said a voice that seemed to come from Vyrix’s shell. Get out!

  Glaurung, the greatest rue in the Metal Moon, glared down at Lord Fierce and the Dark Ruler like a cat upon two mice. A diagonal crack in Heidi’s faceplate separated them. And those two, the Lord and the Ruler, gazed back, their conflict momentarily deferred.

  Lord Fierce said something, but Heidi couldn’t hear. She couldn’t hear much of anything.

  The Dark Ruler opened a book and wrote something at Glaurung, and Lord Fierce swung his blade, and Glaurung’s unfathomable mass of shapeless darkness descended upon them, crying

  …ALONE…

  The lorn crashed around, still unsettlingly quiet in her damaged ears. The oil still burned, clouding all with smoke, and the rue still wailed, and somewhere weapons were still being fired. Glaurung cried out,

  …COLD…

  and another lorn exploded. The gravitational waves were in chaos, sweeping every which way, jerking Heidi and everything else in every direction. Soon, very soon, the lorn itself would become the biggest threat. Rue haunted the edges of the madness. Glaurung and Lord Fierce and the Dark Ruler battled, all of them forces beyond Heidi.

  She turned to flee, and she glimpsed a body, drifting unconscious far down there in the fire, where it would surely soon be crushed, or pierced by lorn shrapnel, or set upon by rue, or washed in burning oil. She noticed it because of the glint of silver. Somehow, anywhere, from any angle, those revolvers would glint.

  Her mind was quiet for a long instant. Then she thought: I can also be one of the forces beyond.

  She outstretched her hands, created spinning orbs of compasses in each. She anchored herself to her board, summoned a wave of gravity, and surfed it down.

  The great beast Glaurung must have sensed her moving gravity, for its vast mass shifted toward her. A great golden eye appeared from the dark, the sickly gold of the Bleak Machine. Heidi sensed a malice there, an intent to crush and break and destroy, that sickened her.

  Heidi reached up a hand and took hold of a clustered mass of fragmented lorn far above her, seizing them in a fist of gravity. They were the size of pencils, semi-trucks, skyscrapers, and she connected them with an invisible stream of incredible gravitational force directly to that horrible golden eye. They fell as though shot from a cosmic railgun. Glaurung’s eye closed and concealed itself away somewhere in her pitchy body as the shrapnel struck, burying itself deep into her dark mass.

  …HURT…

  Heidi didn’t wait. She plummeted down, borne by a wave a gravity. Faster, faster. She twisted, spun, dodged debris that came between her and her target or simply swept it sideways out of her path.

  Abraham Black became obscured by smoke when she was halfway to him. Heidi swore as a LOGOI appeared. It was ANAVALT ; she could clearly read it because it was literally a word and nothing else, but it was also a roughly humanoid framework of skittering, sparking, honey-colored light. ANAVALT wrote the word SWORD into the air and flew at Heidi, the word FLY rippling in its wake like a golden banner.

  Heidi materialized a gun in one hand, and with the other directed a cross-current of gravity that deflected ANAVALT away from her. She spun as it passed, stabilized herself, took aim, and fired. It was no good. She was better with a rifle than a handgun, and ‘stable’ was an awfully relative term, and anyway she would barely have been able to comprehend what exactly she was looking at when she saw ANAVALT even if her vision wasn’t getting blurry.

  She dropped the gun and instead slammed ANAVALT between two wildly spinning house-sized chunks of lorn careening into the dark nearby.

  ANAVALT , it seemed, could not be slammed. It was just a word, after all. Maybe it only existed in two dimensions. The Logoi flickered out from between the coruscating glitter of lorn shards. It blazed bright with a fresh attack. Words spun out from it, glittering gold, waving in the air. They spiraled out in lines and circles, too many to read, too small, too swift. The spinning symbols filled her entire vision.

  She watched, captivated.

  A tiny voice, insignificant somewhere in the back of her mind, panicked. It said that she had something to do, that she was in danger. It called her stupid; it spoke with a lisp.

  But Heidi didn’t pay that voice any heed. There was something about the spinning golden words. It wasn’t pleasant, it wasn’t relaxing, but it was…compelling. She had to read them—that was it. She could almost just barely make out what those words were, what they were saying. And the glimpses she got, the little hints, were so tantalizing…

  The shell charm against her chest exploded, blasting her with icy pain. Heidi thrashed, panicked, remembered where she was, what was happening. ANAVALT was directly in front of her, and it was no longer humanoid. It was a huge, radiant MAW , lined with razor-sharp TEETH , seconds from devouring her.

  She screamed, as much from the sudden pain as from panic or fear. She remembered Bahamut, and Ruth, and Abraham Black, and the Burning God.

  Her fear and anger appeared in her hands as spinning compasses of light. She clapped them together at the Logoi. All the arrows in the compass pointed to the center. More and more. Harder, harder, she concentrated. She squeezed the compass as though trying to crush it in her hands.

  The word ANAVALT crumpled under the pressure. And the more the word was disfigured in the mounting gravitational intensity, the more it ceased to be ANAVALT .

  At last, it was a mangled ball of letters and light, bent like wire and broken like glass, ashiver and sparking, screaming with silent symbols. She didn’t know if she had killed it, or if it had even been alive, but she left it there and surfed down to find Abraham Black.

  She located him in the haze of smoke, coughing and hacking, just as another great lorn shattered nearby and Glaurung shook the moon with her wail once more, signifying that the conflict between Lord and Ruler and Guardian had not yet ceased. Abraham drifted, unconscious, bleeding from countless small lacerations, cocooned in a shifting swarm of droplets of his own blood.

  She took hold of Abraham Black by one wiry arm, drew him into the gravitational field that kept her on the board, and set off with as much speed as she dared. She dropped away from Glaurung, away from the Dark Ruler, away from everything. Had her guards regrouped? Had any survived? What about the Almost Victorious? She didn’t know. If anyone had reported anything through her helmet, she hadn’t heard it. She still couldn’t really hear anything besides Glaurung and a high-pitched ringing.

  Abraham Black struggled to his feet behind her. Heidi did not mind at all when he placed a hand on her shoulder to steady himself, because she too was in need of steadying. They steadied each other.

  They encountered rue lurking at the edges of the fire. The rue wailed and attacked, but they found Abraham Black’s thundering revolvers answering in reply, his bullets somehow effective against the poor monsters, the thunder of their firing remote in Heidi’s ears like a distant storm. She concentrated on surfing, getting them away from the crush and shatter of the battle behind, which disturbed all nearby lorn into dangerous movement, and she left the rue to Black.

  They did make it out, alive. She roughly landed them by a small triangular cave formed from crossed spikes, tumbling from her surfboard and onto the hard surface beside it, stunned. She was thirsty. She was in pain. She was tired, hot, hungry, lonely. She still couldn’t hear much besides a high ringing in her ears. She wanted to be home. She wanted Alan, or at least Bahamut. She wanted, though she would scarcely admit it to herself, to curl up into a ball and cry. But she did not want to do that in front of Abraham Black.

  In the end, she cried not in front of him, but leaning against him, because it turned out that he wasn’t very happy about things, either.