The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 750

Nobody in the Arcanum State slept that night.

By two in the morning it was the only story in the country, and it was still pitch dark, and that was somehow worse — every picture coming in was a picture of something happening in the middle of the night, half-lit, shaky, filmed by people who should have been in bed six hours ago and were instead standing in fields.

Every paper had someone outside a tower gate.

The state broadcaster had gone to continuous coverage at eleven and never gone back.

There were forty people camped on the ridge above the Black Tower headquarters with long-lenses and no light to use them in, and a smaller crowd outside the White Tower in New Avalon with nothing to film at all, because the White Tower was dark and quiet and had been all night.

And there was betting, all of it done before the sun went down.

Open, loud, entirely legal betting in every hall and market in the country, on a war that at midnight had been three hours from starting.

Black had two hundred and fifty branches and thirty thousand magicians and five centuries of the worst reputation in the country.

White had thirty buildings and nineteen thousand children who'd been sent home.

You couldn't get odds on that. You could barely get someone to take the other side for fun.

...

The first picture went out at seventeen minutes past midnight.

A girl standing on a hill outside Cardew in the cold with a cheap crystal, filming a building she had grown up being frightened of, and the reason she was filming it was that she could see it.

In the dark. From a mile away.

"Everyone — everyone, you need to see this." Her voice was shaking and going up at the end of every sentence, and her breath was fogging across the lens.

"That's Cardew. That's the Black Tower at Cardew, I've lived here my whole life and I have never seen that building at night, you can't, it's black, it's always been black — look at it. Look at it. It's white. The Black Tower is turning into a white tower. This is the White Tower conquering the Black Tower, this is actually happening right now, I'm not—"

Then there was another one from Marrow Hill.

Then Dunmoor, and Coldbrook, and Ferrier's Gate, and by one in the morning they were coming in faster than anyone could cut between them, so the state broadcaster stopped trying and put nine on the screen at once.

Nine buildings, glowing pale in the middle of the night.

Nine buildings that had been black at sunset.

...

It hit hardest in the houses where somebody had spent the evening being told they were a fool.

Nineteen thousand White Tower students had been sent home the day before a war.

Nineteen thousand sets of parents had met them at the door with the same speech, in almost the same words, in kitchens all over the Arcanum State.

Well. At least you're alive.

At least the man had the sense to put you out before it started, because that tower is finished, and I'll tell you now — when this is over you're not going back. Whatever they promised you. There'll be nothing left to go back to.

Some of those arguments were still running at midnight.

At half past one in the morning, a boy in the old quarter of New Avalon — the one who had stood outside the gate a long time before he went in, because he'd been turned away at three towers already — was sitting at his mother's table in the dark not sleeping when his uncle came through the door without knocking, holding a crystal, saying the same word over and over.

The boy looked at the picture.

Then he was out in the street in his socks, in the cold, at half past one in the morning, and he was not the only one, because all the way up that road the doors were opening and the windows were coming alight.

By two o'clock there were four thousand White Tower students in the square outside the main tower.

Nobody had told them to come. Most of them had run.

They were screaming joyfully— not chanting, screaming, the way you scream when the thing you spent all evening being told to be ashamed of turns out to be the biggest thing that has ever happened in your life.

...

Silas Kessler watched the same nine pictures at two in the morning from a dark glass office sixty miles away, and the blood went out of his face in stages.

First branch: an accident. A trick. Paint.

Ninth branch: not paint.

Because if Black Tower fell, Ferrowgate lost the only two allies it had left, and the last thing propping up a company with an empty order book was the assumption that its friends could still frighten people.

That was bad.

The other thing was worse.

He had made a telephone call ten hours ago.

...

At four in the afternoon the previous day, with the state's twenty-four-hour clock still running and thirty thousand Black magicians moving quietly into position, Silas Kessler had been the most relaxed man in the United State of Magic.

"Beatrix. It's Silas."

"It's the middle of a working day and I have nothing to say to you."

"You'll want to hear this one." He'd been smiling; you could hear it down the line.

"You're backing the White Tower. I'm backing Black. We're both about to spend a fortune watching other people fight, and I've always thought that was a waste of an afternoon."

"Get to it."

"A wager." He let it sit. "Winner takes the loser's company. The whole thing, clean transfer, signed in front of the Minister so neither of us can wriggle out. When Black Tower wins this war, Regent Group is mine."

There had been a pause on the line.

Kessler had enjoyed that pause enormously. He'd assumed it was fear.

"All right," Beatrix said. "I agree."

"You—"

"But you do the same. If White Tower wins, Ferrowgate is mine. All of it. Signed in front of the Minister, exactly as you said, today, before the clock runs out."

And Silas Kessler had laughed out loud — a real one, the biggest laugh he'd had in three weeks — and said yes, and had the papers drawn and witnessed before seven that evening, because a woman too proud to back down from a bet was handing him a company for nothing.

Thirty thousand magicians. Two hundred and fifty towers.

Against a school for poor children.

He had signed his name with a flourish.

...

They came at Alex together.

...

He fought them for a hundred minutes.

Through what was left of the great hall, out into the west court, up the side of the north wing — and the north wing came down. He took a strike from the tail that put him through a granite arch, and got up out of it with his left arm hanging wrong, and set it against the wall, and kept moving.

He used everything.

Every form he had. Every scrap of white in the ground beneath a black tower that had never held any. He put light into a blade that had never needed it and cut through a femur four feet thick, and the leg came away, and the thing dragged itself forward on the stump and very nearly had him.

The last exchange took two seconds.

The dragon came in low. Ashe came in high, both hands, everything left in him, aimed at a man he could see was finished.

Alex went under the skull instead of away from it.

The blade went up through the roof of that thing's mouth and out through the top of its head in a line of white, and it came apart above him in a rain of burning bone — and he was already through the far side of the collapse, already turning, already inside Ashe's guard, close enough to watch the exact moment the old man understood.

There was no speech.

Alex put the sword through him and out the other side, held him there a second, and let him down onto the stones of his own courtyard.

...

Then it was quiet.

Bone-light guttering out across two hundred feet of wreckage. Dust coming down slow through the hole where the roof had been. The valley black again, and colder than it had been all night.

Alex stood in the middle of it with his left arm useless and his ribs wrong and blood running down into his hand.

He was still standing. Only just.

He knew exactly how empty he was, because he had counted every drop of it going out.

He put the point of the sword down between the flagstones and leaned on it, and breathed, and thought about sitting down for a minute.

That was when he heard stone move behind him.

...

At the back of the ruined hall, a section of floor that had not been a door ten seconds earlier ground open, and five old men came up out of the dark.

Nobody in the country knew that room existed. Nobody in Black Tower had seen the men inside it for thirty years.

They were what the tower kept for the end of the world — sealed down there with its oldest work, wards on the door, one single condition for waking them.

That condition had been met about nine hours ago.

They came up into the ruin of their own headquarters and looked at it in the dark. At the burning bones. At the body of Dorren Ashe on the stones.

And then at the man standing in the middle of it, lit from below by the last of the dragon.

One arm hanging. Weight on the sword. Nothing left in him at all.

The eldest among the five was the first to break the silence. "You dare strike at the Black Tower? Dying will be the easiest part of your fate. I will rip the soul from your flesh and torture it across centuries of agony."