Gil stands up and gulps in the fresh air. Kiddu is in front of him, along with Kripa and Ayan.

They stand astride a small pha­lanx of hoplites lay­ing dazed or dead on the ground. The explo­sion had sent a chunk of wall sail­ing into their ranks, bury­ing some of them in burn­ing debris.

A few of the hoplites start to pick them­selves up.

Kripa does not hes­i­tate. He takes out a clay can­is­ter from his robe, throws it up in the air, and swings at it with his club.

The can­is­ter con­tains with­er­ing tinc­ture. It shat­ters and sprays all over the hoplites, dis­solv­ing patches of their pearl­stone armor onto their skin.

Some of the hoplites rip off their helmets—and Kripa’s huge club smashes into their exposed skulls, ham­mer­ing them back down the ground.

The princess and the war­rior run, and Gil and Kiddu fol­low right behind. Two thrown spears whis­tle past Gil’s head just as he turns a cor­ner.

Mud hov­els line the twist­ing sand streets of the occu­pied dis­trict. The build­ings blend in with the dusky sky, which is cropped by the zigzag­ging out­line of the Divid­ing Wall. The Wall is omnipresent, hem­ming the native dis­trict in like the court­yard of an over­sized prison fortress.

Gil turns and catches quite a sight—the Sun Tem­ple, by far the tallest and grand­est struc­ture in the entire dis­trict, spews smoke like an erupt­ing vol­cano. Just as its dome begins to col­lapse in on itself, an arc of vio­let light shoots out from the smoke plume.

More lights flash through the sky, fol­lowed by peals of thun­der. A lone sor­cerer hov­ers in the smoke-filled air above the Tem­ple.

The sor­cerer sends jagged rib­bons of light­ning at Jaruna, who leapfrog-warps from rooftop to rooftop to avoid them. The light­ning bolts shat­ter the frag­ile mud build­ings that form the mystic’s tem­po­rary footholds, carv­ing a swath of fly­ing dust and flame across the dis­trict.

Gil had wit­nessed a sim­i­lar rooftop bat­tle sev­eral nights ago. But this time, the mys­tic is not out­num­bered.

He tears his eyes away from the duel above and runs after her. The streets are oddly empty. But Gil can hear a crush of foot­steps close by, along with chant­ing:

Death to the Empire! Death to Akkad!
Death to the defilers of our Tem­ple!

Gil glances behind him again—the con­stant roar of thun­der has sud­denly stopped. Surely enough, he sees the float­ing sor­cerer drop into the smok­ing wreck of the Tem­ple.

More trou­bling, he also sees a pha­lanx of hoplites march­ing rapidly down their street.

But the sol­diers seem distracted—they are being pelted with rocks.

Gil doesn’t. The east­ern gate of the Divid­ing Wall is vis­i­ble now, and the four of them race towards it, feet pound­ing into the sand—

Back • Next