Stone platforms carried them swiftly downward, piercing through layers of madness made of incomprehensible objectives, strange spaces, wild artifacts, and traces of destruction. The air was becoming more life-giving, or perhaps it only seemed that way to Ortahn because he was holding Esh, and she was holding him.

  One of the rescued women, with the face of an ascetic and the hands of a homunculus, was performing an atypical spell on Karbo's broken arm. She skittered her fingers over his skin, and under a dark purple light and smoke, the tendons, tissues, and bones returned to their places with the wet sounds of organic friction.

  "Whoa," Karbo breathed. "Doesn't even hurt."

  "I don't think my abilities deserve praise in this case," the woman chuckled. "As I understand it, I couldn't cause you pain even if I tried my hardest. Incidentally, I was imprisoned here precisely for the art of pain. I must admit, your unique nervous system configuration fascinates me."

  Having finished the treatment, she didn't let go of his arm but continued to turn it in her slender fingers, as if studying a rare artifact. Vitl, unable to stand such blatant flirting, desperately looked for somewhere else to cast his gaze. But the alternatives were disheartening: Gron, quietly chatting with two of the freed female prisoners, and Ortahn, holding Esh close.

  "Ummm... what were you locked up for?" Vitl decided to ask the woman nearest to him.

  Her hair was the color of venomous green, and rune-tattoos streamed across her skin. They clearly held meaning only for her—the words didn't form anything coherent, and some symbols seemed to be the spawn of pure psychosis. She turned to him and smiled broadly. Vitl involuntarily recoiled—her sharp, numerous teeth converged into the maw of a perfect predator, designed for tearing flesh. And Vitl was, after all, predominantly made of flesh.

  "For a series of murders," she answered cheerfully, baring several more rows of those horrors. "Still thinking whether to continue or start a new one. Hey, destroyer, how about a competition? Who can send more witches to Procyron? Only kills with blood count," she added, addressing Ortahn.

  "No," Ortahn said calmly, not even gracing her with a glance.

  He was not going to unleash a slaughter. A slaughter was chaos, which would devour everyone, especially the weak. The only rational way out was to flee. The more cowardly, desperate, and fast, the better.

  Aether condensed around the serial killer, swaddling her far more thoroughly than the wardens. She hung suspended in the center of an invisible cocoon, her mad gaze no longer fixed on anyone, and her venom-green strands began to wave in slow motion, as if in thick water. Her attempts to break free turned into a barely perceptible, eerie tremor.

  At the entrance, Lun, Torb, Gartan, Krel, and Taut had not allowed Law to break through. Taut with a stone face held a charred lump—Krel, missing his right arm and consciousness. The others, holding their trembling hands out, were desperately feeding the wilting roses. The Law had managed to free one arm and was now sweeping it around the hall like a very angry blind woman. Its silver body was gashed with dents and scorch marks, its head twisted at an unnatural angle. The entire room was filled with slowly floating, warm-colored motes of light.

  "Don't touch the lights!" Torb croaked hoarsely, his face gaunt with exhaustion. "They hit in an area of effect on contact! It's a spell from the witches behind the Nephilim!"

  One of the rescued women knelt beside Krel, her hands glowing with a soft, healing light. "Poor Krel," Ortahn thought, a burning guilt stabbing him. "How will we find him a prosthesis? Tulila has to help. If, of course, she survives... and we survive... and we meet again."

  "Listen, everyone!" Ortahn's voice rang out with icy clarity. All heads turned to him. "We're splitting up. I'm staying to distract the Law and everyone behind it. You run."

  "But..." Esh began, her fingers digging into his arm with a force that left no doubt as to the interpretation of her "but."

  He looked at her.

  "You have to live, Esh. You and your knowledge. My duty as a teacher..." he trailed off.

  "I'm not leaving without you," her whisper was harder than steel, and she pressed herself against his arm.

  "You are leaving," his voice didn't waver. "Steal The Scar's island and get down to the ground. I will find you. I promise. Gron, Karbo," his gaze shifted to them, "Esh is leaving with you. Understood?"

  They understood, and their rough, loyal hands tore her away from him. Ortahn looked at Esh, and in his eyes there was no request—only an apology for the pain he was causing, and a promise he intended to keep.

  "Don't you dare die, Ortahn!" Esh bid him farewell with her own version of Viya's "Live." "I will never forgive you for it! Never!"

  "Ortahn..." Vitl began.

  "There's no time. Tell me next time. And the rest of you, too," Ortahn's gaze swept over his "Wild Roses," wounded, frightened, but not broken. "Torb! Lun! Let go!"

  With faces expressing both terror and relief, they dropped their hands in unison. The remnants of the roses crumbled into rot. The Nephilim, finally free, silently threw its mangled hand forward.

  Ortahn walked toward it, simultaneously batting away the deadly motes of light with aetheric currents. The floor, walls, and ceiling of the tower—everything turned into a stone hail, into a hurricane of ordinary, un-magicked cobblestones, that crashed down on the silver colossus with a deafening roar. The Law, thrown back by this avalanche, collapsed outside the hall.

  Behind him, silence remained. Ahead—a ravaged opening and air that belonged to no one yet. Outside, the canton shuddered from the residual magic, and the crimson sky was torn by flashes of sparks. Ortahn stepped out into this chaos as if into a new morning. Or his final sunset.

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  Before the gates of the Chancellery, the air was taut, like the nerves of the participants. Winds, descending from the upper tiers of the city, swirled into helpless funnels, hesitating to touch the ground. It smelled of ozone, ash, and burned aether—the aroma of apocalypse. The heavily dented Law, with an unnatural twitch, rose from the ground into the sky.

  At the foot of the ruined staircase stood two figures.

  The first was the Ministeress of the Outer Contour, Viya's murderer, with pink scales that glinted purple in the bloody light. Her vertical pupils had narrowed to threads, but there was no anger or other emotion in her eyes, only a predatory focus.

  The second was the Ministeress of Life and Death, in a guise that had been popular six seasons ago. Her obsidian-colored human torso lay on its back, with eight sharp, jointed legs emerging from her spine. Her human legs were fused with a huge abdomen, on which an illegible symbol glowed red. Her head was oriented relative to the animal part: eight black eyes, arranged in two rows at the top, and chelicerae, trembling almost imperceptibly below. An enormous spider with a woman in place of a cephalothorax.

  "I gave you your life, cattle, and this seed has sprouted into such a storm," the reptile hissed. It was the closest an Overlordess could come to admitting a mistake.

  "Everything ends in death," the spider-woman said. Her voice was soft and granulated, as if she were speaking through a layer of sand. "The only question is, whose."

  "You shouldn't have killed Viya," Ortahn said calmly. "None of this would have happened."

  "Death is the highest form of order. Life is merely the growth of entropy. Death is always the right choice," the Ministeress of Life and Death answered philosophically in place of her colleague.

  "Our argument is pointless," Ortahn parried dryly. "We are operating with definitions from completely different systems."

  The reptile was about to continue the conversation, but at that moment, the group of men and women—the "Wild Roses" and the rescued prisoners—burst from the dark maw of the Chancellery doors. The spider-woman raised her elegant human hands, and reality cracked in front of her. The air flashed with hundreds of the finest needles, which shot toward the running figures.

  Ortahn reacted instinctively. He changed the aggregate state of the space, and the air between the needles and the "Roses" solidified. As the spells collided, everything trembled, as if the sky had struck itself. The spider-woman recoiled, likely having maintained a residual aetheric link to her attack.

  "Go!" Ortahn shouted over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off his opponents. "Quickly!"

  They decided not to argue and, trying to take up as little of the battle zone as possible with their bodies, dashed into the nearest alley.

  "I find your existence undesirable," the spider-woman declared and released a sheaf of lightning from herself.

  Ortahn blocked it by tearing stone shields from the earth. And at the same instant, a wave of sticky despair washed over him. But he knew the taste of true despair, and this was a pale imitation. A psychic attack from the reptile. He mentally seized the alien impulse and redirected it at the spider-woman. She jerked, losing concentration.

  And again, the same dispassionate, almost gentle voice from the heavens spoke:

  "Attention. Attention. A combat engagement of multiple high-ranks has been detected. Everyone remain calm and evacuate the canton. This is not a drill. Attention. Attention..."

  Ortahn sent a seismic wave along the pavement toward the reptile and simultaneously tried to reach her with giant air-whips. He remembered Ildara's lesson, so every spell was accompanied by a shadow of a second, hidden a half-tone behind. This second spell was meant to crash down when the first was parried.

  The spider-woman surrounded him with a smoky dome with an intricate, lace-like ornament. Ortahn felt his strength begin to leave him—it was a trap for mages. Instead of resisting, he instantly softened the pavement beneath his feet into quicksand and dived down. Surfacing next to the Ministeress of Life and Death, he held an elegant stone sword in his hand.

  Remembering his strike on Yaron, he concentrated all his power into one movement and severed the spider's leg, shattering the sword in the process. With a piercing shriek that sounded more like a screech, the Ministeress flew backward at high speed, and the air wave from her movement almost took Ortahn with it.

  He barely had time to swat away a fire dragon sent by the reptile, extinguishing it by rarefying the air. A foolish attack against one who, like him, controlled the air element. Far more cunning was the mind-control of three simple homunculi that jumped out of nowhere. They threw themselves at Ortahn with a deafening wail and exploded, but he managed to cover his skin with a layer of stone. The carapace cracked but held, preventing the blast's energy from reaching his flesh.

  Mentally locating the reptile by the aetheric vibrations, he created a fissure in the earth beneath her and sent an image of Viya into her mind—not an image of death, but of the life she had been. This distracted the Ministeress for a split second—long enough for her to fall with a snarl, one leg plunging into the trap. Ortahn immediately entwined her with the stems of thornless roses.

  Elegant blades, stylized to look like a female figure, rained down from the sky. Ortahn took cover under a stone overhang, but a few blades still reached their target, leaving smoking stripes on his skin. His barrier protected him, but it also blocked his view—he didn't notice the spider-woman, sliding across the pavement as if on sloped ice, closing in on him. In her human hands, a spear woven from air condensed to plasma gleamed. With it, she shattered his stone shelter; the stone flashed dazzling white and evaporated. Ortahn jumped back, but the Overlordess kept pace. Each of her strikes was accompanied by a bright flash that destroyed the structure of the air.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a new wall of blades flying at him from the side. In response, he created monstrous friction in the air, which generated a directed bolt of lightning. It struck the spider-woman and extinguished her spear. He managed to rust and crumble the blades with his body, receiving several shallow cuts.

  Ortahn gathered the last of his strength and struck the reptile with a dual blow: an air-ram and a fist of earth from the pavement. She flew back and skidded across the pavement, striking sparks with a powerful tail that had appeared from under her hem. At the same instant, invisible air-spikes wounded Ortahn in the shoulder and side. The opponents were learning from each other in battle. A whole pack of Ministersesses of Life and Death began to surround him. On his intuition, vortexes of pink petals began to swirl around him. This was a new type of magic for him—elegant, beautiful, undoubtedly female prestidigitation. The petals ran into invisible spikes, and Ortahn, dodging, stepped to the side. The petals passed through the illusory spider-women, and he saw her true body. His double attack threw her back as well, just like the reptile.

  He pinned the rising Ministeress of the Outer Contour back down by throwing a stone sphere. Finding himself next to her, without slowing down, he poured all his pain, all his rage, and all his love—which had become the fuel of his existence—into his fist.

  "For Viya!" he roared.

  The fist, wrapped in air compressed to the hardness of diamond, reached the scales, crushed them, passed through the flesh, and reached the bones. The Overlordess' ribs began to break with a deafening crunch. Further—only her cold-blooded heart.

  "STOP!" she screamed, with animalistic terror.

  And everything stopped.

  Ortahn, the scattering sparks in the sky, the falling debris of towers, the wind frozen mid-breath, the rose petals—the entire canton, all of reality, froze, as if in a giant drop of amber. Only the Overlordesses continued to live.