They were not enough. The water pushed her back and back, faster and faster. The disaster was racing over the land, eating up the miles, too few, that separated it from Doomstadt. Helm didn’t know if she was slowing it down at all any longer, or if she was only preparing the greater destruction of the city. The land had been injured beyond her ability to heal it. Its pain demanded release. It strained her prison to the breaking point.

  Helm could not call to Doom to know if he was ready. She had no energy to spare for speech. She couldn’t hear him any longer, either. The wave pushed her with such force that her entire body, even her bones, rippled. She was flying backward so fast, the land was a blur.

  How close was the city?

  She didn’t know. It didn’t matter. She would hold until she couldn’t, and Doom would be ready, or he would not be.

  A little longer. Just a bit longer. Give him more of a chance. Give us both more of a chance.

  The wave thundered. Her hold on the energies wavered. Her body was a tiny thing, a rag in a hurricane, too weak for the power she demanded of it.

  One more second. One more second. One more second.

  She shouted, pain exploded behind her eyes and the spell collapsed. Gasping, she flew on hurricane winds to the side, barely out of the way of the wave as it burst free.

  Doom was a hundred yards behind her, positioned so that he was facing the center of the wave. Behind him, less than a quarter of a mile away, were the walls of Doomstadt. To Helm’s horror, there were thousands of people gathered outside the walls, walking forward as if to meet the wave.

  Why are you here? What are you doing? You fools! Run! Run!

  She wanted to shout at them, to bellow warnings. She couldn’t even move her lips.

  Doom pointed at the wave, and Helm had a wild moment of faith that the power of the flood would submit to the power of his will alone. Then, as the light of true dawn at last spread over the city, a tear opened in the air behind Doom. It seemed to unfold from the billowing of his cape, a black aura that blossomed into a portal as great as the wave. Inside the portal was the void, but Helm looked away, knowing instinctively that there was not true emptiness there, and if she stared, she would see something she would regret.

  Doom shot upwards. But he had more than a hundred feet to clear, and no time at all. The great wave slammed into him, taking Doom with it into the maw of unnatural night.

  The portal closed in on itself a few minutes later, a carnivorous plant sealing its trap. It left behind a shallow lake before the city gates, and a mob of thousands crying out in fear and confusion.

  Helm stayed by the shore until a helicopter landed and Verlak approached her.

  “Where is he?” Verlak asked.

  Helm pointed to the air where the portal had been. “Gone,” she whispered.

  The scale of her dread stopped all other speech.

  Chapter 12

  “Mark this occasion, comrades,” said Natalya Rumyanova. “This could well be the last time we meet in a cave.”

  Vadim Shkurat rapped the table in approval. He was joined by several other lieutenants. Leonid Kutuzov muttered, “I hope you’re right,” but he and the officers seated closest to him looked unhappy.

  Fortunov read the mood in the chamber before speaking. It was about what he had expected. The lieutenants who had lost the most troops to arrest and gunfire during the bombing attacks were the most displeased. They felt their influence diminished with respect to those who had come through with close to their full strength. He would have to deal with them now, and shore up their commitment to him. If that didn’t work, he would know what weak links to remove from his chain of command.

  He was standing at the head of the table, arms folded, his face in shadow. The lanterns on the table lit the other faces clearly enough for his purposes. He kept his features still. He didn’t want his subordinates guessing at his feelings about the events of Midsummer Night, especially since, three days after the solstice, he wasn’t sure of his own mind.

  “You seem defeated rather than triumphant, Leonid,” said Fortunov.

  Kutuzov frowned, but looked a bit worried now. Even so, he did not back down. “May I speak freely, Prince Rudolfo?”

  “That is why we are here.” So I will know whether I should be free of you.

  “Doom’s forces routed us. Not a single truck detonated at its target.”

  “The fear they created was real, and that was the goal, not casualties,” said Rumyanova. “If we had wanted to litter the streets with corpses, we would not have installed the warning sirens.”

  “I thought chaos was our goal,” Kutuzov shot back. “Was it supposed to be that small and evanescent? Have the people taken to the streets? Is Doomstadt burning? Has our revolution come?”

  “Yes, it has,” Rumyanova said quietly.

  Silence fell. Everyone waited for Fortunov to respond. When he said nothing, Shkurat stepped in. “You speak as if the destruction of the Kanof Dam never happened, Leonid.”

  “Yes, the attack none of us knew about.”

  Now Fortunov had to speak. “It was not for you know about,” he said.

  Kutuzov refused to be abashed. “The dam is already repaired. Doomstadt suffered no damage.”

  “And Doom is gone,” said Rumyanova. “Or did you forget that small detail?”

  “Is he?”

  That was the question Fortunov had been asking himself for three days. It was because he couldn’t answer it that he had said as little as possible at this council so far. Let the others thrash the questions out. Maybe I’ll see my way forward.

  “There is no sign he survived,” said Shkurat.

  “A corpse would be a good sign that he is dead. We don’t have one.”

  “The days pass, and we remain a threat to the city,” Rumyanova said. “The arrests the Watch made are pitiful compared to our real numbers. Would Doom choose to leave his power base vulnerable, day after day? I don’t think so.”

  “We’ve thought he was dead before,” said Kutuzov. “And been wrong.”

  Exactly. Damn you, Leonid, for articulating my fears.

  “What are you proposing, then?” Rumyanova asked. “What’s your plan, Leonid? Do nothing?” When Kutuzov didn’t answer, she turned to Fortunov. “This is our moment, Prince Rudolfo. It must be. We struck, and Doom fell. We prepared for the opportunity, and now we have it.”

  She was right. These were exactly the circumstances his strategy had been designed to produce. Before Midsummer, he had barely allowed himself to imagine the possibility that the dam breach would take Doom out. Kutuzov was wrong about the operation’s lack of success. It had been a stunning triumph.

  It went perfectly. So it’s too good to be true.

  This could be Doom’s trap. He could be waiting for me to show my hand. Attacking like Rumyanova wants us to do could be exactly what he wants too.

  And what was the alternative? To do nothing? To hide in the caves indefinitely, fearing a return that might never happen? Was this what Doom had done to him, make him unable to act, too frozen by indecision to capitalize on his own victories?

  He couldn’t say that things were too good to be true. He couldn’t afford to show that kind of weakness. And he couldn’t afford to let Kutuzov raise that possibility.

  “There is mourning and confusion in Doomstadt,” Rumyanova said.

  “But no chaos,” Kutuzov interrupted petulantly.

  “The order we see is brittle,” said Rumyanova.

  Shkurat nodded in agreement. “Where there is no crown, there is no head,” he intoned.

  Fortunov wasn’t sure that really meant anything, but he grasped what Shkurat thought he was saying, and suddenly his choice was clear. There really wasn’t a decision to be made. His fear was cowardly. Did he want the throne of Latveria or not?

  I do. It is mine.

  Then take it.

  “Latveria is rudderless,” he said. “Political inertia is the only thing holding the order together. It can’t last.”

  “The people need their leader,” said Rumyanova. “They need their rightful king.”

  “They need the order that was taken from them,” Fortunov said, and that reminder of everything that would be restored seemed to placate Kutuzov and the others who agreed with him but had chosen to keep their thoughts to themselves. “It is up to us to return Latveria to its true self.”

  Shkurat banged the table again, and this time everyone joined in.

  “Our forces are gathered,” Fortunov went on. “We’re ready.” Are we? Or are we delivering ourselves up to Doom? He wanted to shake himself. He had struggled so long, and so hard, to reach this moment, he didn’t trust its existence. “The order is given. It’s time to restore Latveria.”

  Vassily Dubrov opened the door to the archives. Helm nodded a greeting to him, and he watched her walk slowly down the ramp. Midway to the floor of the hall, she stopped and stared blankly down the aisle she was crossing.

  Dubrov approached, stopping a few paces back, so she would have to look up at him when they spoke. “Is there something I can assist with?” he asked, as carefully polite as he had been ever since Doom had first brought Helm to the archives.

  Helm looked at him blankly for a moment. Then she blinked and shook her head. “No. No thank you, Vassily. I’ll find my own way.”

  Dubrov was becoming well practiced in hiding his anger. He kept his face placid now, his resentment invisible. He hated her for having learned to navigate his domain so quickly. She had made it her own. It was a conquest he would never forgive. “If there is something I could locate for you…” he offered. Good little Vassily, helpful Vassily, obsequious Vassily, always there to be helpful, never to be appreciated. Resentment and self-pity were a warm bath for his psyche.

  “You’re very kind,” Helm said. “I’m afraid I don’t really know what I need at this moment.”

  “We are all at a loss,” Dubrov said. He congratulated himself on his convincing portrayal of sympathy. He had had three days to perfect it.

  “We are, aren’t we?” Helm sounded surprised to discover this applied to her.

  “Do you know what you are going to do?”

  “Not really, no. I’m trying to continue our work, even though I know I can’t complete it on my own.”

  “If you would tell me what it entails, I might be able to assist,” said Dubrov.

  “No one can assist me in this. Without the genius of Doom, there is no hope of completing the work.”

  “Will you be leaving us, then?” Dubrov asked, shaping his tone of voice so the question sounded curious instead of eager.

  “Not yet. I have to try. After what I’ve seen, and after what we’ve done, I have to keep trying, even if I know I’m going to fail.” Helm paused. “Is this what he felt every year?” she whispered to herself, so quietly Dubrov could barely make out the words. Helm brought herself back to the present moment again, and said, “What about you, Vassily? What are you going to do?”

  The question took him aback. It wasn’t one he had asked himself. He rarely knew what was going on outside the castle. Days, and sometimes weeks, could go by with Doom not putting in an appearance in the archives. Before Helm’s invasion, Dubrov had spent most of his days as the lord and master of a kingdom of one. The idea that Doom might really be gone had been an abstract one until now. The only consequence of Midsummer Night that had felt concrete was the effect it had had on Helm. She had been weakened. She had no clear direction any longer. Dubrov had begun to imagine ways she might be induced, or forced, to leave. That was as far as he had thought.

  What are you going to do now?

  For the first time since he had taken on the mantle of archivist, he began to conceive of a world without Doom.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I will carry on as I always have, until I cannot any longer.” The lie was convincing because it had been the truth until a few seconds ago.

  Helm nodded. “I think that is true for so many of us.” She started off down the aisle. She looked from side to side at the volumes on the shelves, but Dubrov didn’t think she saw any of them.

  What are you going to do now?

  The question was an exciting one.

  From the outside, Doomstadt Hospital was forbidding. Its brickwork dated back to the sixteenth century. Black with grime, it resembled a fortress. Its windows were small and gothically arched. Gargoyles stood sentry on its cornices, fanged jaws agape, wings spread as if about to leap into the air. Inside, the off-white, violet-tinged marble halls gleamed, their surfaces sterilized every few minutes by the passage of custodial bots. They were so thin in their construction, they were barely visible vertical lines passing along the walls and floors. They were collective entities that split apart to avoid contact with passing staff and patients, reforming to resume their cleansing. Whenever Verlak saw one go by, she thought for a moment it was an errant hair appearing for a moment at the corner of her eye.

  One went by now in the Emergency waiting room. There were no patients there for the moment. The sudden influx of injured after the truck bombs had strained the hospital’s generously staffed resources, but the organizational machinery of the hospital had operated at high gear, and the institution’s atmosphere of calm had returned. That Orloff had come out to meet Verlak here instead of her consulting office was a sign that things were still some distance from being normal.

  Orloff looked exhausted. She and the other specialists had, where possible, pitched in to help with the new arrivals. She had been working sixteen-hour days and longer since Midsummer. Verlak was matching her hour for hour. She worried, too, that Orloff thought the worst might be over. Verlak dreaded it was yet to come.

  “I wish you would stay at the castle,” Verlak said. “At least at night. We can bunk down there, and the trip back and forth from the castle to here is easier to secure than from home.”

  “Even though home is closer to the hospital.”

  “Home isn’t safe.”

  “For us, or for anyone?”

  “I don’t know the extent of the threat,” Verlak said. “What I do know is that I am a target, given my position, and therefore so are you.”

  “And how long do you want us staying at the castle?” Orloff asked.

  “Until the crisis is over.”

  “Can you be sure it will be?”

  Verlak didn’t answer.

  Orloff touched Verlak’s cheek. “I understand. I really do. I’m not being stubborn just to make you worry.”

  Verlak leaned her faced into Oloff’s palm, then nodded, resigned. “Being here is your calling.”

  “Yes,” said Orloff. “It is.”

  “I need to know that you understand what’s at risk, Elsa. If Doom is gone…”

  “He might not be.”

  “By everything we hold dear, hope that he isn’t. But if he is, then Fortunov will launch a coup. That’s certain. If we can’t stop him…” She trailed off, unable to find the words for her disgust.

  “You’ll stop Fortunov,” said Orloff. “I believe in you.”

  Verlak sighed. “I wish I did. I’m not Latveria’s savior. He’s missing.”

  Fortunov’s head brushed against the top of the disused sewer tunnel. He crouched lower, but his hair was slicked by fetid moisture. He coughed at the stench.

  Rats. Rats in a warren. That’s what we are.

  It was not how he would have chosen to begin his assault. It was not the glorious crusade it should have been. In a world where justice was not a fool’s dream, he would have led the charge through the gates of Doomstadt and advanced through to the castle, backed by the acclamation of the people. Perhaps somewhere there was a truly righteous universe where that was what was happening. But this was his reality, and he moved like a rat.

  And at the end of his creeping, the rat would show how terrible his bite was.

  The strike force had gathered in the cave complexes to the north of the city and traveled underground from there. It had taken years to dig the passages from the countryside to Doomstadt. Parts of the web had been compromised over time, but there had always been alternative routes that could be pierced. Always have a contingency. Always have a way out. Those were the lessons he had learned painfully in the years of his struggle against Doom.

  Movement in the tunnel was awkward, between the crouched walk and crowding. Just a bit longer, though, and the rats would emerge on the surface and transform into heroes. There were hundreds of loyalists advancing through the network, patriotic blood flowing through parallel veins in the rock under Doomstadt.

  Patriotic blood. That’s a nice idea. Make sure you use that later. It will go over well. Stick with it and make it true.

  There were plenty of troops who were the true sons and daughters of Latveria. But there were mercenaries too, hired from A.I.M. along with weapons. Not what should happen in a just universe. Needful for this one.

  Seefeld walked just ahead of Fortunov. He had to bend so far down he was almost crawling. They had been in tunnels this low for more than an hour now. He had to have been in agony. He hadn’t uttered a word of complaint, though. This man, Fortunov thought, was the stuff of heroes. This was loyalty. This was the true Latveria.

  The line of marchers reached an intersection with a larger tunnel. Foul water streamed by in a canal. Seefeld paused at the mouth and shone his flashlight on a mark in fluorescent paint on the ceiling. “Almost there, Prince Rudolfo,” he said.

  “Good.” He raised his voice just enough so the troops behind him could hear and pass the word. “We are minutes from destiny.”

  The army grew, fighters emerging from numerous small tunnels to gather in the main artery. Fortunov waited for his lieutenants to join him at the head of the line. They were covered in filth, as he was. Fortunov grimaced at the indignity of the advance, then pushed his anger aside when four soldiers came forward, carrying a coffin-shaped metal box between them. He stared at it eagerly. This is my bite. This is my terrible bite.