Pinnacle III

— Guardian Maia, Pinnacle —

"There is no news," Guardian Maia told them for the third time. "We've had no contact since the parlay. Her Holiness cannot reach the deans with Speak On The Wind. You can ask again, but the answer will be the same. She fears the deans are dead."

"So try one of the other disciples," croaked Kassra, the First Karolo.

"She cannot because she has never met them. This is a disadvantage of isolating our Hierarch. She doesn't know most practitioners. She doesn't know anybody beyond her guards, the deans, and Leadership. There is no one else to reach out to." Maia held up a hand to preempt the Firsts' collective complaint. They might sit above her, literally on their dais, but they needed to listen to her. She had to make them see reason.

"Instead of demanding things I can't give you, let's do something constructive. I'll meet with Her Holiness today and ask her if it's possible to promote some healers to disciples. If that's within her power, we can choose some healers from branch families."

"Unacceptable," grumbled First Donglar, "they are not true descendants of the Five."

"So adopt them, like we used to. Don't you understand what's at stake here? We need three disciples to anoint practitioners. If the Hierarch doesn't have some special ability that overrides the limitation and all our disciples are dead, then we can't make any more practitioners. Not ever. When our last practitioner dies from old age, Enclave dies with him. No more healers. No more disciples. No more miracles. No more Enclave. The End.

"If she says it will work, I will choose some candidates. You will get them adopted into mainline families. That is how we save Enclave and the Five Families with it."

"You would pollute the sacred Heritage with the tainted branches?" The silken voice of First Namalous wrapped around Maia's neck and threatened to strangle her. It was impressive how much threat old Nikola could put into so few words.

"I would purify the branch families with sacred blood, to keep alive the greatest institution on Tenobre."

The Manifesto Shield lay where Kadivo and his hammer left it, embedded in the wall's masonry. The floor around it was swept clean. A space was prepared on the trophy wall, waiting for news of victory so they could hang the shield next to flags of the pettiest bandit kings who ever sailed the Inland Sea. If Enclave won, the shield deserved a more central place, Maia felt. What fools!

Then again, Guardian Maia had played her part in this farce, knowing from the start how farcical it was. She played along because she didn't want to die and, in her assumed cleverness, said something she shouldn't have said. Because of her, all of Enclave's disciples were probably dead, except a hierarch who was only half-trained because the so-called Council of Guardians feared a competent head-of-church would be inconvenient. First Families pulled the Guardians' strings, the Guardians let themselves be pulled, and now the entire institution was about to be taken over by outsiders.

It served them right. Someone else should run Enclave. But she couldn't say it because she didn't want the Shadow Council to stage her unfortunate suicide.

"Let's wait," sang First Fortuna. "When we receive word one way or the other, then we'll decide what's to be done. Perhaps your concerns are premature."

"Perhaps. But if this war has gone against us, we won't know until it's too late."

Several of the Firsts laughed at the impossibility.

And then the doors to the chamber burst open. They were three meters tall, iron-bound, and broke open with a crack of fractured oak that thundered through the building. The two guards by the door were struck and thrown across the room. A disciple stood beyond those doors, dressed in brigandine with a wooden holy symbol, bearing shield and spear. Bulwarks flanked them. Another disciple stood behind, with their bulwarks.

It was a cadre. A Nexus cadre. In the Pinnacle.

Maia never felt so much fear in all her life, not even when Mobeen the Sacred Blade had died in front of her. That event was so sudden she didn't have time to be scared. Here, the enemy let himself be seen. He stepped forward, radiant with awful intent.

Several things happened all at once. She recognized him as Brother Montgomery, but not the wide-eyed teenage monster hunter she met in Lavradio. This Montgomery (the nickname "Minty" did not fit this man) had come through fire and battle to this place, his enemy's home, to slay men. He would not hesitate to take her life, and she could only hope he wasn't here for her.

At the dais where the five Firsts sat on their fine thrones, a flurry of activity caught part of her attention. The old spiders could move quickly when they wanted to! They gathered in a panicked scrum at a section of the wall, pounded on it, and shouted for it to open. Whatever escape route they had planned was blocked. Of course it was blocked. Phillip taught his people to do their homework.

The guards didn't wait for an explanation but were in motion, even as Maia's knees buckled. Phrenos stood gawking. Three guards, each of them a veteran of deadly reputation, threw things at the bulwark formation. Throwing knives were parried in mid-air by spearpoint. Flasks of dangerous liquids (she didn't know what) were caught bare-handed. Darts bounced off of shields. While the cadre had its hands full with flying objects, the guards charged them.

Maia would only understand later why so few would throw themselves bodily at the cadre. The guards knew they were outnumbered and hoped to bottle up the attackers inside the doorway or push them back into the hallway beyond. If the outside contingent was still alive, they could come up from behind and flank the disciples. But Pinnacle's defense force was already dead, and the three who flung themselves at the enemy did so alone, and died alone, as Maia's collapsing knees took her to the ground.

That left Kadivo, the monstrous man with the hammer.

"Mine." One bulwark came forward with her shield and spear to face the giant, Maia thought her name was Lynn. She used to be a simple city guard, but she had more than a year of bulwark training behind her now. She grinned at Kadivo. "Let's see what you've got, big guy!"

Kadivo spun his hammer to the spike side and brought it down onto her head, and Lynn raised her shield overhead to block it. The giant had such a reach that she couldn't stab him. How many times had his exact scene played out for Kadivo? The giant's hammer was such an overwhelming threat that his enemies could only cower behind their shields in fear. But shields were no protection against such terrifying power. The Manifesto Shield could bear such a strike, but could a normal bulwark's enhancements take the same punishment? Maia feared not, and the brave, foolish woman was about to be broken right in front of her.

The expected blow never came. Lynn stepped aside faster than Maia's eyes could track her, and Kadivo's spike drove deep into the floor. He had to pull on it twice to free it, but those moments were enough. Seven darts thrown by seven atlatl skewered the huge man and pierced his thick armor like he was an overripe fruit.

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To universal amazement, Kadivo did not fall. He looked down at his chest and counted the lightweight spears that had run him through. Still on his feet, he grasped a shaft that pierced his lungs and broke it, then tried to push it the rest of the way through. He barely grunted in pain, but he might have shouted if his lungs had fewer holes in them.

Kadivo's efforts ended suddenly, when the point of Lynn's spear ran through his head from back to front, emerging from between his eyes. A violent twist cracked his head open so wide, Maia could see the hollow spaces in his skull and, behind that, his brain. She bent over and retched from shock and nausea, no longer in control of her own body. Thank Olyon she used the facilities right before the meeting.

Is that what she should be thinking about right now? Her pride?

She retched some more. Sweat and tears dripped from her face. Bile dribbled from her lips. She wasn't meant to see inside another's head.

"Sit down," said a woman's voice. Sister Thalia was her name, another one of Phillip's avid teens, scooped up from inauspicious circumstances and taught the arts by his hand. Bulwarks seized the frightened Firsts and pushed them at the dais where, trembling, they took their respective seats. Each was shadowed by a bulwark who stood behind them.

"Usurpers!" barked First Donglar. He sounded fierce, but his shaking knees betrayed him. "You will get nothing from us! Not one tarnished bit!" The four other Firsts shouted their agreement, but their voices were pitched in fear and they could not ignore the armed men and women behind them. Such was the madness of the First Five. Even now, with all their protection stripped away, they could not conceive a temperate response.

"Kill them."

Weapons flicked out, flashed bronze and blood, and the smell of death overwhelmed Maia. She cried for their end. Cried! And it wasn't only her. Phrenos was sobbing. It was all too much. Their imminent death. The relief of being unbound from the insane Firsts. Their fear for Enclave. The old traditions meant nothing to these people. She hated the Families, but she couldn't imagine how Dace and Unity City would run without them. Everything she'd thought was certain could be swept away, and Maia didn't know what came next. She never thought of herself as a timid person, but now she understood she'd never faced true uncertainty, the kind that changed everything you knew about the world.

Firm hands lifted her up and walked her away, past the dead guards, through the door, and down the hall. They passed dead guards and gathered live servants behind them as they went. Thalia gave orders to evacuate the building.

"That includes the two prisoners on the top floor, north side," she added to the chief steward. "Don't make me go up there and do it myself. You have five minutes. Anyone left inside will die. Go now!"

They passed through to the gardens and kept going all the way to the very back, where a wall separated the garden from the downward-sloping hill beyond. They went through a gate, and the line of servants (and two Guardians) were pushed against the wall.

"Sit here, and you should be safe," said one of the bulwarks, and they were pushed down to the ground. The word 'safe' rang hollow, but their spears were pointed up and their shields were on their backs, so maybe Nexus wasn't interested in killing the staff.

"Look what I found," said one bulwark, as he showed off the Manifesto Shield to Thalia. "His Holiness will be happy to get it back, right?"

The minutes dragged on, packed knee-to-knee with servants and maids, all stinking of fear. Maia's sickness ebbed away, and her brain lumbered back to life. The disciples wouldn't kill mere servants unless they became a problem. Unlike her own "suggestion" to the Firsts (all dead on their dais), Phillip would never go out of his way to harm unarmed nobodies. Maia and Phrenos might be another matter. They were Leadership, and Phillip had just shown he wasn't afraid to kill off the politicians and moneymen. If Maia and Phrenos were alive, it didn't mean they were being spared. It meant Phillip wasn't done with them yet.

And where was Phillip, anyway? If he delegated a cadre to cut the head from Enclave's snake, what was he doing in the meantime?

The last of Pinnacle's staff came running, along with two young adults, a man and a woman, who weren't in staff uniform. They shielded their eyes from the sun as if they hadn't seen daylight in weeks. The prisoners. Hostages. Maia wished their existence surprised her, but the Five Families were known for their ruthlessness.

The cadre's third disciple appeared and started touching each person on the shoulder, working quickly down the row.

"Khali is giving each of you a blessing of protection," Thalia explained, "and she will skip anyone who makes trouble. Sit against the wall and don't move. This is for your own protection."

"I hope you will pardon me for asking," said the Pinnacle's steward, "and not kill me out of hand like you did our masters, but what do you plan on doing with us." Although he spoke, he still did what he was told, and that seemed enough to placate Sister Thalia.

"Nothing," she told them. "We have no plans for you. We don't care what you do from here. But you should reconsider that 'out of hand' crack. Those five ordered the murder and enslavement of fifty thousand people. They were enemies, and Nexus will not fail to kill our enemies. Now sit quietly, do as you're told, and you'll live through this. Act like an enemy, and you'll get the same treatment they did." In a louder voice, she called, "Places everyone!"

The Nexus disciples distributed themselves among the staff.

"Detonation!" Shouted the lead disciple.

A bright flash of light lit the world before them as if the world's biggest bonfire had been lit all of a sudden. The report rocked the ground and the stone wall at their backs. Hot wind flashed over their heads, diverted by the protective wall. She feared the shock would break the wall like Kadivo's hammer, break them all into small pieces. She couldn't scream and couldn't breathe. The dread light of destruction heated the air around them, seared their faces like raw sunlight, crept into the corners of their eyes.

And the sound! Oh God Olyon, the sound! Thunder was too weak to compare! The explosion's noise disturbed the fluid in their eyes, making their vision swim. The noise held them for an eternal second, squeezing them like grapes in a baby's fist until they thought the pressure would split them open. It released them all at once, and Maia breathed in like a drowning woman. There were many screams, and some of them were hers.

Then it started to rain, not with water but with fire. Burning debris plummeted to earth, leaving a thousand little trails of smoke behind them. Something heavy, several somethings, pelted the garden wall and made them flinch. The little fires were sometimes overtaken by larger fires made of burning rock that sank through the atmosphere faster than smaller bits of wood and cloth that could be caught by the wind. Fire was falling for a long time, long enough for Maia and the Pinnacle's staff to stop screaming and start watching the show.

A few, braver than most, turned their heads and stood tall enough to look over the garden wall. Maia was among them (though not the first), and what she saw put her in the mind of the mad and fiery visions shared by users of the drug Apocrypha. The Pinnacle was a flaming ruin with a roiling ball of fire above it, standing on a stem of white smoke. Even as she watched, the ball climbed higher and turned darker and darker, an inverse sun foretelling doom.

There was little left of the Pinnacle's stonework sides and nothing at all of its roof or upper stories. The area all around was littered with flaming remnants of the building's contents. The garden was blown flat. Trees near the main building were blown over and on fire. The farthest wings still had second stories, but the center was laid bare to the ground. A rule had been passed, some divine law, declaring not a single thing could pass through the cataclysm whole. She could see nothing that was not burning or broken.

The dais of five thrones was at the catastrophe's center, their human cargo still in place, stripped of cloth and flesh, burned down to the bone.

When Phillip sent a message, he liked to make it clear. The witnesses read his message carefully from behind the garden wall.

Disciples were healing ears and calming hearts, mercies none of them deserved. At the very least, they had enabled war, mass murder, and slavery. At worst, as in Maia's case, they had instigated it. She was alive because Nexus intended to use her, and she would let them.

It was official: She was too afraid to feel fear.

"Steward." Sister Thalia called the man, and he approached with all the dignity he could muster. To his eternal credit, the steward's elegant tail did not tuck between his legs but remained low to the ground and behind him, submissive but not craven. "If I give you letters, can you see they are delivered to suitable members of the Five Families?"

"I daresay I can manage such a trivial task."

Thalia handed him missives written on bright white paper, folded and sealed with wax. "They say very much what you expect. The Five Families may continue ruling Dace, but they will keep their hand out of religion from now on, and they will not interfere with Nexus. If the next batch of Firsts becomes a problem, then today's events will repeat until a more enlightened council is chosen. Feel free to repeat that to anyone who asks."

"Yes, Madam."

"It's Sister Thalia to you." She didn't wait for his reply. "The two hostages will go with Sister Khali. She will hear your stories and start work on getting you home. Enclave Leadership will come with me." Thalia didn't wait for a response but started walking down the hill.

Maia and Phrenos followed her. What else could they do?