Fortunov turned the detonator over in his hands, savoring the anticipation now that the work was done, and all that remained was the pressure of his thumb on a button. The news from Doomstadt was not what he would have liked, but he had known better than to hope for too much. He had always conceived of the truck bombs as a distraction. This was the real strike, the one that had the chance of transforming Latveria.

  Don’t count on victory. But be prepared for the possibility.

  “Where will the water go?” Seefeld asked, curious.

  “Along its old course,” said Fortunov. “Down the valley and to where there was once a lake, and where the usurper is now in battle, distracted.” He smiled, looking at the distant strobing against the clouds. “And if it isn’t stopped, I think it will flood the low-lying areas of Doomstadt.”

  “Who will stop it?”

  “There is only one person who is responsible for stopping it,” said Fortunov, still watching the brilliant pulses of combat.

  “Can he?”

  Fortunov shrugged. “That isn’t for us to say. He fashioned himself as the savior of Latveria. Let him save it, or be exposed as the fraud he is.” He paused, his thumb hovering over the detonator’s button. “Do you know what I think, Emil? I think he’s too preoccupied with his personal ritual at this moment to pay attention to the needs of his country.”

  Seefeld grinned. “I think you’re right.”

  “Let’s find out, shall we?” Fortunov pushed the button.

  A vertical chain of explosions ripped up the center of the dam. Fortunov had purchased the demolition charges from Advanced Idea Mechanics three years ago. He hadn’t known then how he would use them. He had only known he wanted them in reserve. Now, in the perfection of their function, he wanted to see the hand of fate. The A.I.M. explosives punched through the entire width of the structure. The dam opened up like a gutted animal. The reservoir shuddered, then a wall of water, hundreds of feet high, roared through the valley.

  The ground shook beneath Fortunov’s feet. It felt like the shudder of a toppling throne.

  Part II

  Under Harrows of Iron

  “…actions are our epochs: mine

  Have made my days and nights imperishable…”

  Byron, Manfred, II.i.52-3

  Chapter 10

  “YOU DARE? YOU DARE?”

  Purson’s outrage roared through the firestorm. It parted the flames as a tornado parts wheat, and the demon appeared before Doom, consumed by fury. He was ablaze. Flames circled his limbs and flashed outward from his mane. The viper and the bear had become creatures of fire, extensions of their master’s rage. Purson was the source of the firestorm, the origin and lord of destruction.

  “YOU DARE?”

  Purson stared at his stump of an arm. The disbelief in his words was almost as great as his anger. Fire spouted from the wound, but the arm did not grow again. Inside its silver runic prison, the limb vibrated, trying to escape. Doom held it down with a whispered spell fueled by his will. That was the only strength he had left.

  Hellfire washed over his prone form. The assault was unceasing. His force field and his sorcerous wards had crumbled almost completely. He had spent everything in his last assault. He had done what he had intended, and now the reckoning had come. The last of his reserves went to reinforcing the prison of the Sator Square.

  The pain of the flames was transcendent. Agony forged from all the regrets of the past and the terrors of the future joined physical agony. Doom could not move.

  Endure. Endure. Endure.

  He always had. He always would.

  “YOU WILL SCREAM!” Purson howled. “I WILL HEAR YOU SCREAM!”

  Doom laughed. He laughed at the pain. He laughed at Purson’s futile wrath. He laughed at the perversity that had led him to do what he knew would make him lose the duel. He laughed because it was the only action he still had the power to do, and he laughed because Purson was helpless before it.

  Endure. Endure. Endure, and keep our prize.

  It was Purson who screamed. Hell’s firestorm became chaotic. The demon’s adversary was defeated, unable to fight back, yet laughed as if victorious. Purson’s rage went beyond words. He shrieked and danced, his firestorm of hellflame becoming chaotic. The blasts hammered Doom harder and harder, burning and crushing. They would have killed almost anyone else a hundred times over. But he lived, and he endured, and he laughed, because he knew, he knew, that Purson would find no satisfaction.

  “IF YOU WILL NOT SCREAM, THEN YOU WILL BE DESTROYED!” Purson shouted.

  “I don’t think so,” Doom said, and laughed again.

  Purson roared. An apocalypse of hellfire came down on Doom. It was a storm of ending, of annihilation. The last of his shields fell before it. The storm would destroy him.

  And then it passed. The flames vanished. Purson’s scream of rage cut off, and its echo fell into silence. Doom’s laughter weakened to a whisper, but it did not end. In defeating him, Purson had been cheated out of his full retaliation. Doom could no longer defend himself, and so the duel was over. Mephisto’s rules were clear. The duel was not to the death. Hell was to be amused every year by Doom’s humiliation.

  You are not permitted to kill me, Purson. So your master has called you back. Without your arm.

  Is this victory? Doom wondered. He couldn’t tell. He could barely think.

  He couldn’t move. He couldn’t rise. But he had his prize.

  As he began the drift into unconsciousness, he thought he heard thunder in the distance. Thunder that would not stop.

  Zargo heard the explosions go off, a chain of concussions booming around the city. From his vantage point in the tower, he could see the smoke and dust rising from four of the blast sites. And after the bombs, the sirens.

  He could guess who was responsible for the explosions. Zargo wondered how much of a part he had had to play himself, without knowing.

  It was after the bombs, with the battle still raging to the north, that the procession began. First in pairs and small groups, and then in greater numbers, the people came into the streets and began to walk north. Zargo watched them for just a few minutes before he headed down from the tower. By the time he reached the street, he was part of a crowd streaming toward the war in the sky. No one spoke, and Zargo didn’t ask anyone what they were doing. He didn’t have to. Now that he was part of the procession, he felt the same pull. There was something different this night, something that marked out this Midsummer from all the others. Instead of hiding and trying to shut out the terror of Doom’s battle, they were going to bear witness.

  What can we possibly see?

  Zargo asked himself the question only once. The arena was miles away to the northeast. They could not walk there before everything was long over. There would be nothing to see even from outside the city walls. That didn’t matter. It was the act of marching as if there were something to see that mattered.

  They were all being called, but not by Doom. Perhaps the tug came from the tapestry of events. Perhaps, Zargo thought, it was the power of the ley lines, the power he had helped pull into a massive nexus, that was summoning them. He didn’t know. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he answered the call.

  The procession wound up through the streets of Old Town, growing larger all the time. It looped around the castle defenses, and at last out of the city walls, into the north-east. By then, the terrifying lights in the sky had ended. The night was quiet again.

  Why are we here? Zargo asked himself. There was nothing to see. The night was calm once more.

  Only he couldn’t bring himself to leave. The pull was strong. It was like the tug he had experienced at the site of the arena. You are a geomancer, Helm had told him. It was a truth he did not want to accept, but he felt it now. The ley lines had called them all, and the people had answered, whether they were sensitives or not.

  The moment Zargo was certain it was the ley lines that called, he jerked in sympathetic pain. The currents in the earth were thrashing in agony, creating a whirlpool of geomantic energy. Like a great ship going down and sucking everything nearby down with it, the lines were drawing the population of Doomstadt to their chaos. He didn’t know how their agony would be manifested. He knew only that it would be terrible.

  Fight it. Stop walking. Turn back.

  He couldn’t. He marched on, along with everyone else.

  From the north-east came the deep rumble of something vast.

  Chapter 11

  The helicopter flew over the lakebed, rotors beating hard. Seated next to the pilot, Verlak leaned forward as if she could see further into the night.

  “Shall I try the dam’s control station again, captain?” the pilot asked.

  “No. Lack of response is our answer. There’s no one there who can speak to us.” As soon as she had guessed Fortunov’s real target, she had raised the full alarm.

  “Do you think the bots will be there in time?” said the pilot, a compact bullet of a woman named Lodner. Along with drones, swarms of emergency repair bots were on their way to the Kanof Valley Dam.

  “We should be so lucky,” said Verlak. In her dreams, she had given the warning in time. In her dreams, Fortunov would not be able to damage the dam too severely.

  The lakebed became narrower as the chopper sped north. The mountainsides drew in on either side, hulking masses of greater darkness. The clouds that had rolled in at sunset had shredded themselves with the end of Doom’s battle, disintegrated by the conflict’s final paroxysms. The stars were visible again, cold witnesses.

  Verlak looked into the dark of the valley, hoping she would see nothing. Every second of nothing was a gift and a lie. But she knew she was too late.

  The first sign of disaster was turbulence. The helicopter bucked up and down. Lodner cursed and pulled up higher, looking for stable air. Then Verlak heard the roar over the hammering of the rotors. A few moments later, she saw the blackness seethe with whitecaps. The valley was gone. An ocean was thundering by beneath the chopper, making for the arena, and then for Doomstadt.

  “No,” Verlak hissed. “No, no, no.”

  The chopper dropped sickeningly, then caught air and climbed again.

  “Head back,” Verlak told Lodner. “There’s nothing we can do at the dam.” She knew the worst, and it was the worst.

  “What will we do at Doomstadt?” the pilot asked.

  I don’t know. “Whatever we can,” Verlak said. Her answer sounded too close to Nothing.

  Crouched low on the lakebed, Helm had watched Doom’s duel with Purson with a mixture of terror, awe, and disbelief. The blows that Doom and the demon hurled at each other shook the ground. Seismic and psychic tremors rippled through the earth and Helm’s soul. Her breath came in infrequent gasps. Hell had come for Doom, and he had fought it to a standstill. Knowing what Doom faced every year and seeing it was the difference between imagination and revelation. Helm had seen her fears made manifest, and seen the pain that could be inflicted upon them.

  She lost sight of Doom in the cataclysm of Purson’s final rage. But even as the demon smashed Doom into the platform, Helm had felt a fearsome exhilaration. Doom had cut off Purson’s hand. They had their prize.

  We can do it. We can defeat Hell. We can build the Harrower.

  In the midst of the hellfire, she saw the path to her salvation.

  When Purson fell back into Hell, she rose on unsteady legs. And then, before she could take a single step, Verlak was calling on the communicator Doom had given her when she had first arrived at the castle.

  The moment of triumph evaporated before the face of onrushing disaster.

  Helm sprinted towards the arena, and she called on the winds of Latveria. They answered, and a gale sprang up at her command. She spread her arms, and the winds picked her up. Her robe billowing, she flew to the top of the hill. “Be still,” she said, and the wind obeyed, putting her down and dropping to a breeze, curling around her like a faithful cat. Doom was lying on his back, motionless. Helm called his name. She tried to shake him, but it was like trying to move a marble sarcophagus.

  “Doom!” she shouted. There was thunder in the distance, thunder that came from the ground, and it was growing louder. “Awake! Latveria has need of you!”

  The metal statue grunted. The eyes behind the mask blinked and focused on Helm. Bloodshot, they suddenly filled with iron. Somehow, the immobile expression of the mask seemed to mirror what she saw in the eyes. They were the embodiment of a will so immense, she only now began to see how little she had understood its power. The titanium mask was not really a mask at all. It was the true face of the man who wore it. No flesh could give full expression to a will so utterly beyond the human.

  Doom stirred. He sat up, and the effort would have toppled cathedrals. “Tell me,” he said, his voice coming to her through eons of exhaustion.

  “Verlak says Fortunov is going to destroy the Kanof Dam.”

  Doom said nothing for a moment. He looked north, then growled. “The thunder,” he rasped with new anger, and he stood. “Can you hold the water back?” he asked.

  “I can delay it,” Helm said. “I can’t stop it. Not something that powerful. It will have to go somewhere.”

  “Somewhere,” Doom repeated to himself, and grunted again. “Yes, I think it will. Very well. First fire, now water. This night will have its symmetries, won’t it?”

  Doom knelt and passed his hand over the Sator Square, muttering incantations. The runes melted away, the square bulged and the silver parted like a web, revealing the demon’s forearm. The flesh had tightened and darkened around the bone, becoming a scaly gray. The limb was withered, mummified, as if its prison had held it for millennia. Doom picked up the arm and gave it to Helm. “Keep it safe,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Take a risk. If I’m wrong, we can’t afford to lose what we have gained.”

  Helm slipped the arm through the rope tied around her robes. “Without you, this is useless,” she said. “I can’t complete the work on my own.”

  “But you will try,” Doom said, and it was a command.

  “I will try.” Once again, she wondered how much free will she had in Doom’s presence. She wondered how much anyone had.

  The deep roar of the disaster drew closer. The horizon was still obscured by night, but Helm imagined she could see it move.

  “Give me as much time as you can,” said Doom. “Hold the water back in as narrow a form as possible.”

  “Understood.”

  A wind was picking up, blowing from the north, as the wall of water pushed the air ahead of it. Helm spoke to it, made it hers, and it lifted her up. Doom rose with her on his armor’s jets. He began an incantation, and Helm shut her ears to it. The first syllables alone were enough to make her shudder. They were in a language that did not belong to humans, and to speak them now, so soon after what had happened in the arena, was a risk that bordered on madness.

  Doom pulled back, and his voice became fainter. Helm closed her mind to what he was doing and concentrated on her task. Her sorcery was more sympathetic than Doom’s. Where he had seized the ley lines and forced their power to serve him, she reached out to the currents, felt their pain, soothed as she could, and sought to heal the torture of the land. “Strength of the Earth,” she called, “hear me and come to my aid. Let destruction end. Let me staunch your wounds.”

  She spread her arms. Phosphorescent spheres formed around her hands, grew in size and intensity, and then shot out, vibrating beams, extending her embrace around the entire width of the arena, linking her to the lines of the nexus. She trembled with the power coursing through her frame, and with the elemental pain. The beams from her arms multiplied. Her embrace took the form of a lattice a thousand yards wide and high. It burned with the light of a dawn come early to this single spot of Latveria. False day illuminated the land, and now Helm saw the flood. A monstrous tide thundered over the lakebed, returning what had been lost and too much more. Its wrath smashed at the hillsides. Its head foamed with speed and fury. The valley was wider here than at the dam, but the monster was still twenty feet high.

  Helm flew higher, and braced herself for the collision. As the water closed with the matrix of her embrace, the wave narrowed again. It climbed higher and higher, and then it hit, taking up the full height and breadth of the web of light.

  She gasped. The impact almost shook control of the spell from her. The towering wall raged against the barrier. In seconds, the force of oncoming water was too strong, and Helm pulled back, taking the lattice with her. She tried to make her retreat a slow one, but the force was too immense. It pushed her back faster and faster. She didn’t think she had done more than slow the speed of the flood by half. And when her spell collapsed, the wave it contained would be infinitely more lethal than it had been before.

  Behind her, Doom continued to intone. He flew back too. Though the imprisoned wave roared, and Doom kept further and further behind, Helm still could hear fragments of his incantation. His metallic voice, grating with exhaustion and pain, spoke words of such power that the sound resonated over the land like the crack of an earthquake.

  Helm focused her full concentration on maintaining the barrier. She had to give Doom time to prepare his response, time to find more of his strength. She had seen Hell at work. She knew what they had to defeat. Her fears and hopes were greater than ever, and they fueled her determination to hold back the wave.