There was a parking lot at the top of the hill, and a sign told visitors that it was a steep climb up to the Chapel of the Holy Cross. I closed the car door and stood there, shivering in the suddenly cold breeze, staring up at the place. It was... beautiful. Built into the rocks, organic, angular. Strikingly memorable. The shape was oblong, the sides sloping in with a short line connecting them at the top--all plain gray concrete, contrasting sharply with the red sandstone around it. The front was all glass, reflecting the sun and the beautiful eternity of the desert around it. It wasn't as large as I'd have expected, but then it was a chapel, not a church. It was a place pilgrims came to ask for favors, and to leave a gift of worship.
There were a few other cars in the parking lot. I was hoping there wouldn't be unsuspecting visitors caught up in this, but it was too late to worry. Everybody was in the crossfire now. Six billion potential innocent bystanders.
I took the steep stairs toward the chapel at a run.
Sweat dried on my skin as I pounded up the steps, and I was about halfway up when I realized that somebody was right behind me, and gaining. I glanced back.
It was Ashan, feral and bloodied, and as I looked, he changed himself to mist and flew at me. He surrounded me, and coalesced, yanking my head back by the hair and catching me off-balance. It would be a long, bruising fall. A broken neck, at best.
But he didn't fling me over the edge, or down the steps. Again, I got the weird sense that he just couldn't, no matter how much he might have wanted it. Something prevented him. While he was fighting against that instinct, something hit him like a small pinafore-wearing freight train, and he went sailing over the edge of the drop, with little Alice/Venna on his back and riding him like a struggling surfboard toward the rocks. He had time to mist. So did she. They reappeared at ground level, and I had the sense that Ashan was trying to get free to come after me, but she circled to counter him at every turn.
It was fun for her. There was a terrible tiger's smile on her innocent little face that made my stomach lurch.
"Go!" she called to me, and extended a little-girl hand toward Ashan.
And blew him past five parked cars to slam up against a concrete retaining wall. He bounced off and came back at her like a man-eating rubber ball. I turned my attention back to the steps, taking them two and three at a time. My calf muscles screamed in protest. I hadn't run stairs in... well, years. Since evil Coach Hawkins in high school, who'd made it the start to every PE class. I'd never been all that good at it then, come to think of it...
The stairs shouldn't have been this tall. It felt as if I were trying to run the stairs at Chichen Itza, not just a few dozen up to the local chapel. I couldn't see the top. I couldn't tell that there was a top.
And then I felt it... a whispering sense of presence. Something vast and powerful and not like me, not at all.
Not even like the Djinn.
I stopped on the stairs, grabbed the railing in one hand, and listened.
It was... whispering. I couldn't tell what it was saying, but I heard the voices. Lots of voices. Male, female, neither, all swirling. All questioning.
All crying out in pain.
"Let me in!" I yelled. My voice echoed from the rocks, from those lovely, silent, patient rocks. They'd heard it all, those rocks. Listened to lovers whispering, to warriors killing and dying, to speeches and preachers and songs. It was just noise. It didn't last.
I slipped under the railing on the side away from the drop and clambered drunkenly up a pitch, my shoes unsteady on the footing. I put my hands directly on the blood-warm stones. They felt rough as sandpaper, and flecks of mica glittered in them like flecks of gold.
Please, I prayed. Please let me in.
It wasn't going to work. I was just too small, too frail, too temporary...
"Venna!" I yelled. "Quit messing around and get up here!"
She didn't respond. When I looked down--risking a broken neck in the process--there was no sign of any Djinn at all in the parking lot. Dammit.
"Rahel! Dammit!" I yelled it without any hope at all. "David!" The echoes mocked me, ringing off into the distance. Losing his name in the empty spaces.
It was all going to be lost because I couldn't get up the damn stairs. I took two more steps, but it was like forcing myself through molasses, then drying concrete.
I froze in place, sweating, trembling, and clawed at the stone for another few inches.
Something pushed me back. I half slid, half fell back to the railing, skidded underneath, and began pounding up the steps again. No barrier this time. Two steps at a time, a regular, even rhythm. If the spirit of this place needed sacrifice, I'd give it. I'd run until my feet bled, if I had to. Until my heart burst. Until it damn well saw that I wasn't going to quit.
There was nothing in the world for me but the steps, and that simple stone landing at the top of them, with the enamel-blue sky heavy overhead.
Ashan was standing at the top, waiting for me. He wasn't Mr. Neat anymore. His suit was rags, his tie missing. Alabaster skin and fresh road blood showed through the rents in the fabric. It was just representation, I knew that, but he looked bruised and trashed and thoroughly pissed off. He'd defeated Venna, then. Probably Rahel as well. And David, David, oh God...
I put my head down and kept running. Screw Ashan. He was just another obstacle, and I would get past him. I could feel things changing in the air, feel polarities shifting. There was something coming alive in the Earth, and there could be no fighting that. The Wardens were useless. The Djinn were--or would be--hers. And human beings were just a resource-consuming problem, like an overpopulation of wood lice and just about as important to her.
And there was a corruption in it, too. A black, spreading, cold corruption that meant the Oracle had been infected, and the infection was spreading.
Please.
I sent my prayer up, up into the sky. Up to a heaven I wasn't sure even existed. Wardens were literal. Scientific. We weren't into the spiritual, and our theology tended to start and stop with the idea that nobody really knew what the hell was going on, beyond the aetheric level.
But if God was out there, if he cared, this was the moment for that hands-off policy to be rescinded.
I ran my heart out. Ran until my leg muscles felt like overcooked noodles. Until my heart was hammering so fast, it felt like one continuous long reverberation in my chest. Until I was soaked with sweat and spots danced in front of my eyes.
Until I could barely lift my feet for each endless step.
And then, I couldn't.
I tried, made it halfway, and tripped. I instinctively put my hands out to break my fall... and someone grabbed my wrist. I still banged a bruised knee painfully against a stone step, but the pain barely registered as I looked up to see who had hold of me.
Imara. Bruised, bloodied, but not beaten.
My daughter gave me a slow, lovely smile, and reached down to take my other hand in hers. "One more step, Mom," she said. "Just one more."
There was always one more.
I raised my foot, trembling, and set it on the step. Imara pulled, and with her help, I raised myself up.
One last step.
And then I was at the top.
Ashan stood between me and the door. Imara still had hold of my hands, and she was smiling so sweetly, so luminously, that tears flooded my eyes. Oh God she was lovely. She was all that was good about me, about David, and I barely knew her, I wanted to have time to understand her, who she was, what she meant...
"I love you, Mom," she said, and let go.
Ashan lunged at her from behind. He took her in both hands, snarling with raw fury, and snapped her neck with a dry, terrible crackle. I saw it happen, right in front of me, and I saw her eyes go wide, the pupils spreading. I saw my daughter die.
He threw her down the steps as if she was nothing. As if she wasn't worthy of respect and love and devotion. A broken doll thudding down those steep concrete stairs to flop limp and shattered at the bottom, small and human and mortal after all.
I didn't scream. I had nothing left to scream with. I stared at Ashan. He was primal. He'd defeated everything and everyone who'd come against him, from David to Venna to Rahel.
But none of that mattered now. He'd killed my daughter. And I was not backing down.
"No allies?" he said, and grinned. "No Djinn to rescue you? No Wardens to fight on your side?"
"No," I said raggedly. "No one."
He'd kill me if he could. If there was even the slightest chink in whatever was holding him back, it would break now, and my blood would soak into these thirsty, eternal stones, and it would be over.
Just... over.
I extended my right hand and walked toward him with deliberate steps. He snarled, and it was such a low, vicious sound that if I'd still cared about living or dying, I'd have stopped. But it was all or nothing, now. David had put my feet on the path. Rahel and Venna had defended me. Imara had pulled me when I couldn't make the last effort, and she'd--she'd--
My turn to sacrifice all, if I had to.
My hand was in his space. I waited for the blow that would snap my neck and send me to my death, but it didn't come. My fingers reached, moving forward, then flattened against his chest. His shirt was ripped, and my fingertips registered the difference between hot skin and cool fabric.
We were close enough to be kissing.
"You don't understand," he said, and suddenly I was talking to a man--an entity, anyway--not just a force of nature. Someone with flaws and fears and longings. I heard them trembling in his voice. I saw them in his inhuman eyes. "We were gods. We were kings of this world. Then you came, and we were slaves, slaves to you. You took our birthright. You took away our place."
As if he wanted me to understand. Forgive. Wind blew cold over us, swirling the rags covering him, tossing my hair back in a banner. The Chapel of the Holy Cross was ten steps behind him, and the doors were open.
"The Mother forgot us," he said softly. "Heat. Pain. Birth. A slow and quiet cooling. We were her children, but she forgot us."
"She remembers you now." I looked over his shoulder at the open doors, the glow of light through the huge expanse of glass window at the far end of the chapel. It was a simple place, with polished wood benches, a plain altar. I could hear the whispering again, stronger now. A union of voices. The Oracle was within. "You've killed your own, right in front of her. I don't think she'll ever forget you again."
He couldn't get paler, but I think he might have, at that. "Nature is selfish," he said. "Sacrifice is meaningless. Only survival matters."
I couldn't think about Imara, about sacrifice. "I'm not fighting you anymore." His eyes filled with a silver sheen of tears, and he pulled in a sudden breath. "No," he said. "I choose this. I choose to stop you, now, here."
"Don't."
"I choose!" He screamed it, and reached out with all the power that was inside of him to destroy me.
Stop.
It was a pulse of intention, not a word, and the world froze between one pulse beat and the next, waiting breathlessly. I thought it was Ashan's doing for a second, but I saw the wild fury and fear in his eyes, and I knew.
I turned. The air dragged at me, slow and thick as molasses.
The Oracle was doing this. She was giving me a chance, and I knew it was my very last one.
I walked into the chapel.