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The wind had her. It whipped her around and around. She could see Balur staring up at her with wide, horrified eyes. Something struck her, a rock or a body, she wasn’t sure which. But she was flipped over in midair so she was on her back, and her own panic-stricken eyes could see what Balur was looking so cursedly scared about. And maybe she would let him off the hook just this once because the sky was, quite literally, falling.

  A chunk of rock the size of a church crashed past her. It smashed into the fallen army. Smashed through it. The ground beneath it had become as insubstantial as the ceiling. A gaping chasm howled below them. But still she didn’t fall. And still the wind grew. And chunks of the ground were in the air now. Mud rained sideways, spattering her with all the loving tenderness of crossbow bolts.

  And Will, oh, Will, what the fuck have you done? Weren’t you meant to get us to the gates out of here? I don’t remember the bit in the plan where you pulled an ocean of rock down on our heads.

  She was so going to have to kick his ass for this.

  It felt as if the whole Hallows was coming undone. And then she realized that yes, yes, of course it felt like that, because Will, her once and maybe future beau, had taken the power of deep, old, weird-as-fuck gods into himself, and he had unleashed it without having the slightest clue what he was doing.

  She wasn’t falling anymore, she realized. She was rising. She could feel the inverted tug of gravity hauling harder and harder on her. She could feel the wind pressing into her face. And the whole world was rising with her, rushing up. And gods, she could still see Balur, flailing wildly. And massive chunks of rubble, of earth, of rock. More and more souls. The whole unmade Hallows were rushing up, and up, and up, and up, and up. Forever they were rising. Forever sledgehammers of stone were crashing around her. Stone and sticks and wheat and bodies battered at her. Her friends whirled past her. Her own vomit, because gods yes, she had been sick, and she made no apologies for that.

  Up, and up, and up, and up, and up, and up. A never-ending, whirling, chaotic ride of fear and horror.

  And then suddenly … suddenly … what?

  A sense of rupture. Something bursting and breaking. And what could there be left to break? But something had. And there was blue sky above her, instead of the awful white nothingness of a moment before. And there were clouds and affronted birds being smashed to pieces by flying bits of another world. And she was no longer rising, she was falling.

  Oh shit! She was falling!

  And then she wasn’t. She landed. Hard enough to make spots dance before her eyes, and make her mouth fill with so much blood she couldn’t curse. And pain racked her. And all she could do was lie there as rock fell around her. And gods, gods, gods, how was she still alive?

  And still as she lay there, full of pain and wonder, the sky stayed obstinately above her. And then it struck her. Sky. There was no sky in the Hallows.

  She was in Avarra.

  She was home.

  PART 2:

  BAD DECISIONS

  20

  What the Hell Happened to Kansas?

  Afrit sat up. She bellowed a little bit. She was in a lot of pain. She had … Gods, she had no idea what she’d done. What had been done to her. She was sitting in what had been almost, but not quite, the exact center of an explosion. It seemed to have been quite a large one. Rubble was strewn about her. Taxonomically, she would have to file it among the monumental variety. Vast building-size chunks of rock were involved. Some of them were representative of quite large buildings, such as museums and universities. All of them terrified her.

  Somewhere, Afrit knew, there was an explanation for what in the Hallows was going on. Except she was very afraid that what was going on in the Hallows right now was nothing. She was very afraid, in fact, that Willett Fallows—farmer, false prophet, and all-around psychotic nutjob—had managed to ingest a god, and used the resulting powers to destroy the Hallows utterly.

  Which meant there was nowhere for the dead to go in death.

  Which meant …

  Oh gods …

  They were in Avarra.

  And gods … it got so much worse.

  This … this violent eruption of the Hallows into Avarra, this vomiting up of an entire plane of existence, it couldn’t have happened in a desolate plain somewhere. Not high on a mountain peak. Not in the barren desert. Nowhere far from life. At the edges of this crater, between the peaks of the wreckage, she could see buildings, real ones. That were collapsing. That were on fire. A town. Perhaps a city. A thousand or more lives had been ended by this arrival.

  And the bodies were everywhere. So many bodies. Bodies to outnumber the broken boulders that used to be the underworld.

  She realized she recognized some of the bodies. She could see Lette. Balur’s bulk was half-buried but stirring. Others were less familiar, but their colors and armor marked them as part of Gratt’s horde.

  And yet, of all the things she could see, the one that horrified her the most was the exact center of the crater, and it was about six feet from her own heels.

  The crater’s heart was perhaps fifteen feet across. Its edges were slightly raised, an upcurling of the earth emphasized by rocky debris. Beyond the lip …

  Afrit struggled to find the right words to describe the crater’s heart. It was not quite a whirlpool, but neither was it a storm. As she stared at it, liquid clouds of something that was not quite water boiled and whirled. Something black and purple and viscous and crackling like a thunderhead. The central well went down and down and down. Afrit could not see where it ended. She did not want to.

  There was a time, she thought, when I was just a college professor trying to get laid by another, more famous professor. And somehow this has led to the death of most of the gods, and the destruction of the Hallows.

  And then things found a way to get worse.

  A hand emerged from the whirling substance at the crater’s heart. Massive, red, covered in hair and horn. Vast talons marked the ends of vast fingers. It grasped the lip of the crater, hauled its owner up and out onto the savaged land.

  Gratt stood and surveyed the world laid out before him. And then slowly, like the sun breaking through the clouds, a beatific smile spread across his face.

  More hands appeared around Gratt. From out of the maelstrom, more people heaved themselves up into Avarra.

  Gratt grabbed one by the neck and hoisted him aloft. “Are you with me?” he bellowed.

  The man he was holding blinked at him. “Who the piss are you?” he managed.

  And that was apparently sufficient excuse for Gratt to grab the man by the ankles as well and rip him in half.

  Blood rained and Afrit blanched. Another man, fresh from the crater, stared at the gore and shouted, “I’m with you!”

  Around Afrit too the scattered bodies were starting to stir. Some wore the colors of Gratt’s army. Some didn’t. One of the former came around faster than one of the latter. Gratt’s man pulled a sword from a makeshift scabbard and gutted his opponent where he lay. Another man, wearing the colors of yet a third army, saw this, let out a yell, and charged. Gratt’s man looked up just in time to receive the charge full in his chest. The pair flipped back over the lip of the crater’s heart and were instantly struck by a blast of lightning that reduced them to little more than a red haze.

  Gratt laughed. Afrit started scrabbling away.

  She struck something. Someone. She screamed. The thing she’d struck lurched to his feet. She screamed again.

  It was Balur. He looked down at her, brow creased. “What?” he said to her. “Am I having …?” He brushed at his lips.

  Someone ran at the lizard man bearing a jagged rock in one hand. Without really looking Balur reached out, grabbed the man by the face, and then closed his hand. What was left of the man dropped, gurgling. Balur looked at Afrit’s wide-eyed, openmouthed horror. “What?” he said again.

  “We’re …” She tried to get across the magnitude of it. “We’re in Avarra. We’ve destroyed the Hallo
ws. Will did. And now the dead are invading Avarra. Gratt’s invading Avarra. And he’s not dead anymore. Because the Hallows have gone. They’ve gone, Balur. They’re not there anymore. So all the dead are pouring into … here. Avarra. Through that.” She gesticulated wildly at the maelstrom still boiling a few yards away, still brimming with bodies. Gratt was still there, preoccupied with killing half of them and recruiting the others. She started to back away.

  Balur, who had been nodding sagely and licking blood off his fingers, looked at her and paused.

  “Oh,” he said finally. “Sorry, I was thinking there was being more.”

  “Is that not enough?” Afrit screamed. Just over the lizard man’s shoulder, she could see some ghastly and possibly sanity-damaging acts being carried out on a corpse by two of Gratt’s soldiers.

  Balur sighed heavily. “I suppose it is being enough for now.”

  “For now?”

  “Secure the area!” Gratt boomed. “We will take this city. We will take this world. Any who are not with us are against us!”

  “Well,” said Balur, “now there is being that as well.”

  Some of Gratt’s troops were charging them now. Women and men apparently not even waiting to ask for their allegiance. And Afrit thought she was going to scream again.

  But then Balur turned his back on her, and he was … he was … graceful. It was awful, yes. It was sickening. It was bloody and brutal and full of inhuman savagery. But it was also graceful. And it was going to keep her alive. And so a part of her—small and to be hated at a later date—admired it too.

  Something or someone touched her. She screamed again. She was doing that a lot. She whirled around.

  Lette was grinning at her. The mercenary was covered in blood. Afrit bit back another scream.

  “He’s good at it, isn’t he?” said Lette, looking beyond Afrit to where Balur was using other people’s body parts as weapons. Then she flicked her gaze back to Afrit. “Tell him I said that, and I’ll gut you, of course.”

  And finally, Afrit was very messily sick. Afterward she felt better. Not much. But at this point she’d take whatever she could get.

  “We have to find Will,” she said. With the churning in her guts finally subsiding, clarity was starting to return.

  “Well, of course,” said Lette.

  “So he can put it back. So he can fix the world he just broke.” Afrit wanted to be sure she and Lette were on the same page.

  “Yes,” said Lette, though with a lot less certainty this time. Then she turned toward the lizard man and shouted. “Oi! Balur! Heel!” and they took off searching.

  Around them more and more of the scattered bodies were regaining consciousness. Some stood around blinking blearily. Some lay screaming at the horrific wounds they had sustained on their journey back to Avarra. Others said nothing. Their bodies were crumpled messes of meat and blood. Their souls burst free of their mortal containers and lost to the Void forever. The gods-hexed Void. Because there was nowhere else for them to go. Because the Hallows were gone. And so these people were unmade. Utterly. Because of Will pissing Fallows.

  And yet, what was perhaps even worse than that, most people—far too many people—fought. They fought for Gratt. They fought against Gratt. They fought just because fighting was going on. They fought because the epicenter of the explosion had been in the Killing Plains, which was full of the worst psychotics in history, and those people were scattered all around them.

  “Stop it!” Afrit shouted at them, feeling the vastness of her impotence. “Stop it!”

  “Shut up,” Lette snapped. “Will just spilled a civil war on the world, so this is going to be bad for a while. Please stop attracting attention.”

  To emphasize her point, three men, bare-chested and painted with other people’s blood, had turned around and moved to block their passage. Lette bent and picked up three stones from the ground. She grimaced at them. Then suddenly all three were in the air one after the other. They cracked into the men’s foreheads one-two-three, and the men all fell down.

  There were more horrors. They built upon each other, as if striving for a crescendo. And yet there were simply too many of them. Nothing coherent could emerge from the whole.

  Afrit began to suspect that they weren’t looking for Will at all. They were simply fleeing the scene. Lette just didn’t want to call it that in front of Balur.

  And then there he was. Will stumbling out of the smoke of a fire, looking around dazed and confused. Cois was with him. Balur ran toward the god(dess), picked hir up, and held hir. And gods, Afrit had forgotten about the gods. But she didn’t have time to worry about what their fate had been in the chaos and madness of everything because she was too busy hurtling toward Will, hands stretched out before her, fingers curled like talons.

  She seized him by the throat. “Fix it!” she screamed full throated into his face. Her voice felt too big for her chest. “Put it back!” She hurled the words like rocks. “Undo this!”

  Will mostly gawped and gasped at her. His fingers fumbled at her wrists. She realized she was throttling him. It took a lot of effort to let go.

  “Put the Hallows back!” she screamed at him, managing to restrain herself to simply punching him in the ear.

  “I …” Will didn’t seem capable of meeting her eye. “I can’t.”

  And no. That was unacceptable. Afrit hit him again. She was opposed to violence in general, but in this specific case, she was willing to make an exception.

  “Now!” Afrit thought she had damaged something in her neck, because her voice was a feral growl.

  Behind them Lette and Balur had picked a fight with a pack of fifteen men armed with other people’s legs.

  “I can’t,” Will said. He finally managed to face her. “It’s … it’s gone.”

  “What? What?” She spat and frothed monosyllabically at him. “What’s gone?”

  “The …” Will stared about him. Smoke and fire, murder and horror. Balur tearing a man’s head from his shoulders. “The power. The power I used. I took it into me. It became me. We were the same. We were …” He shook his head.

  She balled her fists again.

  “I spent it.” There was desperation in Will’s voice. Horror. “I changed something. Something too big. I didn’t know what I was doing. And then I did. But only after I’d done it. Only once it was too late. What I’d taken into me, I put it back out into the world. Too much of it. And there’s not enough left in me. I can’t change things back. If I could, I would have already. But … but …” He trailed off, stared through her as if she weren’t there.

  “No,” she heard herself say again, but it was a small sound now. A defeated one. Because she knew he was accusing himself more vehemently than she ever could. He was telling the truth. The awful, awful truth.

  Lette and Balur caved in the skull of the last leg wielder. Then they herded Will and Afrit and Cois away from an oncoming tide of bellowing men with red handprints smeared over their faces.

  “How do you get it back?” Her brain was struggling to follow logical lines while her body struggled over rocks. They needed power. They didn’t have power. They needed to get the power back.

  “I don’t … I don’t …” Will dissolved into staring. From the look on his face, Afrit didn’t want to turn around and see what he was staring at.

  And then a voice the size of one of the mountains of rubble boomed out across the land. “Now!” it called. “Now we take this world!”

  Gratt’s voice. Gratt’s voice with glee in it, and an animal energy. But the thing that made it truly stand out from this mire of chaos and blood was the simple confidence of it. Gratt spoke as if there were a natural order here, one he could see if all others could not. There was something even beguiling about it.

  The once-dead took note.

  Lette came back to them at speed. “It is time to leave,” she said. “Now.” She grabbed Will by the wrist. “Move. Fret about destroying large chunks of reality later.”<
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  They moved. They ran. Limbs and limestone conspired to trip Afrit. People were still picking themselves up off the ground. They started running too.

  Behind them an army gave chase. And whatever city it was that they had arrived in, whatever one it was that the Hallows had just violated in the worst possible way—its bad day had only just begun.

  The going got tougher as they reached the lip of the crater. The ground sloped up. There were overhangs. Dirt and sand and pebbles gave way beneath Afrit’s clawing hands. She gasped. Someone gave her a leg up, and she was genuinely shocked that someone would help her. Then they were up and over and still running. Someone had her by the hand. Cois of all people. There were others here. More bodies. And people blinking out from masks of dirt and dust. Bewildered stares and shouts. Crying children. Crying everywhere. And Afrit wanted to stop, to help, to apologize. But there was no time, because if any of her senses could still be trusted, there was an army at her back.

  And then, as she ran through it, it finally struck her. This was Avarra. Not just some tragically violated plane of reality. Not just a place where they had arrived. This was home. Her home. She had been striving to get back here. And she might not have agreed with Will’s methods, or even with his ultimate goals, but she had wanted to come back. Her desires had lain parallel with his. Because this was home.

  And then they were no longer fleeing from Gratt’s army. Gratt’s army was on them.

  It was like a mouth closing on the city. All about her was heat and sound and blood. Blood ran through the streets as fast as any feet. Someone grabbed her. Lette threw a punch at Afrit’s assailant, sent him sprawling. Out of nowhere Cois put in a kick. And Balur was roaring, and his fists were in—actually in—someone’s chest. Lette was picking up chunks of rubble and nailing attackers as they charged at them.

  And none of it, absolutely none of it, was enough.

  The degree to which they were outnumbered was absurd. A tidal wave of the dead was crashing toward them. And she had read myths about this sort of thing. Tales of end times. And maybe, just maybe those particular stories had been right.