Rebel Blade by Davinia Evans

Author:Davinia Evans [EVANS, DAVINIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2024-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Siyon didn’t remember much of being paraded through the city. Bronze power had swamped him anew, on this side of the barrier, and everything came thickly through that—shouting faces and angry words, stumbling steps and the reek of smoke.

By the time he fought his way through the wash of energy, he was lying on a narrow cot in a small room. Stone walls, dirt floor, stone ceiling, all of it shining with Mundane effort. Siyon knew where he was—under the old hippodrome—just by the weight above and the way the city draped around him.

Which unsettled him enough to jerk him the rest of the way out of his daze.

Siyon had heard that the government—the actual useful part, unlike the Council itself—had taken over the old hippodrome. He hadn’t really cared, blithely assuming that none of it mattered to him in the lower city.

It mattered now. Siyon was no longer safe in the lower city. And whatever the Council had in mind, what it meant for him seemed quite obvious.

Nothing good at all.

The azatani were scared—again and still, of what had been happening, of losing their stranglehold on alchemy, of him. So unused to problems they couldn’t buy or bully their way out of, they’d started scared, clinging to tendrils of panic from the summer and autumn. He’d confirmed all their fears when he released the dragon. Nothing since had helped. Not the endless bubbling magic of the city, nor the monsters hammering at the city bounds.

Siyon could hardly blame them. Those shadowed glimpses of the giant scorpion-tailed lizards smashing through the depot had been the stuff of nightmares.

Something else had happened as well. Something at Zagiri’s Ball.

That much had been easy to glean from fragments of overheard conversation, as inquisitors and clerks went back and forth along the corridor in front of Siyon’s cell. Something awful had happened at the Ball, something that had the azatani terrified.

They weren’t good at feeling afraid and powerless. They preferred to be angry and vengeful.

And now he was in their custody. At the mercy of their justice.

They were going to kill him. It made it a little hard to concentrate on anything else.

He had to keep a tight cork in the flagon of his panic, though. Siyon remembered all too well his audience with Mama Badrosani, and the eagerness of the Mundane energy to shape itself to his fear. Easier to keep a grip on things when his head wasn’t aching with a recent knock, but Siyon could still feel the power licking along his urges, whispering at the edge of his mind. Even more eager now, as though hopeful that the amount he had drawn to hurl at the depot monsters was just the beginning.

If he let it, the earth could shake his captivity to dust around him. All his own fears would be flattened. It would just take destroying the city.

Maybe the azatani were right. Maybe he was a risk and a danger.

Footsteps outside jerked Siyon from these dire thoughts. Grateful for it, he sidled over to the door.

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