Then hairline fractures race through the ceiling. I sidestep a piece of rubble before it crushes me. Gaia, who has stayed behind to help a colleague, sidesteps another dryad as it crashes down.
A shudder goes through the building as something slams into its roof. A crack races through the wall into one of the pillars holding up the exit arch. The pillar begins to lean inward. If it goes, the arch will collapse and we’ll be trapped with a sheer drop to either side.
I shout a warning to Diomedes and race up the risers to jump over the Moon Lords who clog the exit artery. I shove my way through the leaner moon-born bodies just as the lower half of the pillar caves inward. I arrest its collapse, taking the weight on my shoulder. Something pops on impact, maybe my collarbone. My feet scrabble on the ground until they find a crack between the paving stones.
On Earth, with its punishing gravity, I could not hope to bear the burden of the pillar. On Io I can take five times the weight. I grunt and roar with effort, holding the pillar up and holding back the collapse of the exit. Moon Lords flow past me. My body is breaking. The weight compacting my vertebrae. I am losing my battle against the stone. Then Diomedes is with me. Then a woman, her face centimeters from my own. Grecca au Codovan, whose dockyards I destroyed. And then two more Olympic Knights. Together we push against the pillar. It feels like an eternity. It must be less than half a minute. Then a hand grabs my shoulder and all together we throw ourselves through the exit arch. It collapses behind us with a grumble of stone.
Something hits me in the back of the head. I trip and fall. My vision swims. The world groans and shakes all around me. I struggle to get up, my shoulder a ruin, to see a leathery hand extending down toward me. I grip it and Gaia pulls me up with surprising strength. Stumbling like drunks after the Moon Lords, we pass through the antechamber filled with washing pools where the lords doffed their skipBoots for their ceremonial slippers, through another chamber where incense still burns in braziers. I feel the building tilting under my feet. Then we’re through the antechambers. Out under the blazing, thundering sky.
Rock grumbles and cracks behind us. I glance over my slumped right shoulder. The House of Bounty is gone. The great hand of Demeter upon which it sat has broken off at the wrist. For a moment a single Moon Lord stands in its place, frozen in time, his hand outstretched, his mouth open. But there is no ground beneath his slippers, and he follows the building down into the abyss.
The Moon Lords ignore the landing pads and carry on along stone stairs cut into the statue. They disappear into an aperture beneath Demeter’s right breast, one after the other. I must have been hit in the head harder than I thought, because I swoon on the stairs. Gaia’s grip on my belt keeps me from tumbling over the side. There is nothing to do but follow the quickening current of bodies into the statue. By the time I realize we’ve made it to safety the statue seals the door behind us.
The affectations of antiquity do not grace its interior. A modern lift lies within. Not one of the Golds rejoices in surviving their near brush with death. Their faces are drawn, pale, lacerated by broken stones, and their eyes hopeless as Lysander’s ships make their world shudder.
You really should think about changing the slipper policy, Cassius would say right now.
Crammed together with them, my right shoulder probably broken, blood slithering down the back of my neck, I think again of Cassius swaying on the end of that rope. I sink into my grief as we descend down and down through a chute into the metal and stone world of bunkers. A shudder goes through me. My heart weighs as much as a planet. It was all finally starting to go so well.
Medici greet us when we arrive in a bunker. They tend to us and start to usher away the wounded. Diomedes turns to face the others. His shoulder is fleeced of skin after his efforts with the pillar. The Moon Lords look no better. Their robes are tattered. Their skin flayed by stone.
Diomedes looks gutted, lost. Almost insane. “There are people on the surface. People in the second level. There are people everywhere…” He nods after the medici. “That way lies safety, shelter. The garages and tunnels to the surface are this way.” He takes off at a jog toward the garages. All but the oldest of the Moon Lords follow.
“Carry me,” Gaia says. I look down to see the old woman glaring up at me. Blood sluices down her left leg. “Carry me, gahja. I can’t run but I can fly.”
“Shoulder’s shot. Get on my back,” I say.
The old matron of House Raa clambers onto my back and I take off at a run.
88
LYSANDER
The Sack of Demeter
A LONE PIECE OF ASH twirls down from the sky. I catch it on my hand.
“The fire is spreading from the eastern Garter,” Kyber reports. The air has started to smell like smoke. I rub the ash into my palm.
“No matter, we’re almost done here.” I watch a loader mech slowly pulling a giant plum tree from the ground. Thick as four Grays lined abreast with long, narrow leaves and huge blue plums, the trees are the culmination of centuries of horticultural splicing and research by the growers of House Raa. I turn from the excavation and walk, surrounded by Kyber’s trusted Praetorians, toward the mobile command post where my house horticulturalists oversee the sack of the Garter. Industry bustles all around. Hundreds of mechs trundle with trees toward waiting transports. RipWings buzz in the sky. Praetorians land in curtains of dust, dragging trussed Raa growers behind them.
Three stories from the ground, Pallas stands with my growers atop the command post. She turns with a smile as I arrive. “Ah, Lysander. Lucilla here was just apprising me of the haul,” she says. “Lady Bellona will be impressed.”
“Not upset I’m going into the produce business?” I ask.
“As long as you stay clear of helium, she will revel in your success. You have creditors to pay after all. What a trove, Lysander. The value of the fruit trees alone rivals all the gold of Persepolis. I’ll not lie, I told the lady this adventure was likely to be nothing more than an expensive lark. I couldn’t have been more wrong.” She points at two passing mechs. “What are those, Lucilla?”
“Ah, a prized pair. Those Prunus domestica caeruleum will be the first of their kind in the Core, domina,” my archGrower, Lucilla, says.
Pallas sighs. “I feel like I’m watching Noah’s ark load, but the animals are all made of money.”
Lucilla was selected for my household by Glirastes, or rather by Exeter. She is a plain Brown woman with narrow, ochre eyes, a stout body, and ambition far beyond her thirty-six years. Until now, she has just been an expensive eccentricity on my household roster. I am grateful now for Exeter’s foresight. In the sixteen hours since the bombardment’s inception, she has earned her keep ten million times over.
“Lysander, might I borrow a Praetorian?” Pallas asks. I nod. She has more respect than to pick Kyber. Her eyes fall on Draconis, one of Kyber’s favorites. I’m told he shot Demetrius in the head personally. He is a dark-skinned man, with bright eyes, a solemn face, and an optimistic disposition. He despised the kill-pool nonsense, and is apparently Kyber’s best mate. “I’m lusting for some plums. Fetch me two, please.”
Draconis pops into the air on his gravBoots and returns with two plums. Pallas eats one and tosses one back to Draconis. “What do you think?”