One of the women on the ground wore a feathered cloak.
“Qhora!” He lurched into the soldier again. “Please, let me pass! Let her go!”
“No one beyond this point,” the guard said. “They’re all traitors and assassins. They will be imprisoned and tried for treason against the queen.”
“What?” Lorenzo stared at the scene again, trying to guess how any of this had happened in the last ten minutes.
“It’s her, it was all her!” cried a woman in a blue dress. “The foreign one! You should have heard her at dinner. Every word out of her mouth was rebellion and revolution and war against the crown. She’s a blood-thirsty savage!”
Qhora rolled over and kicked her.
The woman in blue wailed. “You see! She’s a violent savage!”
Two guards converged on Qhora.
Lorenzo examined the garden, noting the positions of the eleven guards, and which ones were holding their weapons, and which ones were looking away from him. It felt like a destreza lesson from his youth. Angles and lines of attack, circles of movement. Simple geometry.
I can do this. Rifles are simple things. Long straight weapons that only shoot in long straight lines. Fixed points of origin. Limited fields of fire. Simple geometry. He swallowed. No. I can’t fight eleven armed men.
The two guards reached for Qhora. “Get her up. Let’s get her somewhere secure.”
Lorenzo’s first instinct was to surge into the garden and tear the men apart with his bare hands. His second instinct was to leave, which he did. He waited long enough to see which way they were taking Qhora and then he ran back the way he had come and began working his way around to the right to intercept them. For two panicked minutes, he hurried through unfamiliar hallways with no way of knowing whether he was actually getting closer to them when he turned a corner and almost plowed into the two guards escorting Qhora down the passageway.
“Enzo!” she called out.
Lorenzo glanced down at the rifle between him and the first guard. He didn’t know much about rifles and he knew that combat was a poor time and place to start learning new things. But there was one part of the rifle he recognized. He wrenched the long bayonet off the barrel of the rifle, twisted the gun across the guard’s body, and plunged the blade through the trigger guard to jam the weapon and impale the soldier’s hand. The man gasped and stumbled against the wall, out of the way.
His gaze flashed over Qhora’s startled face to the second guard who was raising his rifle to his shoulder. Lorenzo slipped sideways, grabbed the rifle, and twisted it back against the man to break most of the fingers of his right hand. Unable to think of anything else to do, Lorenzo again slipped the bayonet off the rifle and jammed it through the trigger guard, impaling the man’s hand to his weapon.
He turned to find Qhora yanking the first man’s bayonet out of his hand. “Come on,” she said. “They’re going to kill the queen and her family. We need to find the old woman with the cat.”
Lorenzo blinked. “What cat?”
Chapter 46. Qhora
With a blade in her hand and Lorenzo at her side, the world felt less insane. Everything had been going so well right up until she walked into Lady Sade’s room and found the ladies in an uproar, and she followed them out, apparently in search of a boy with a cat. The rest of the last half hour had been a blur of running and shouting in Mazigh so fast and angry that she could barely understand what had happened. Sade was dead and so was the old woman in the green dress. Of that Qhora was certain, though the rest was made almost no sense. At best, she knew that the older woman from the carriage had taken the cat, and the cat was dangerous.
Whatever this queen deserves, her family should not suffer for her mistakes.
She dashed in and out of rooms, looking for doors, peering through windows, and finally she found a wide courtyard that opened out onto a vast green lawn where absolute chaos had been unleashed. Men and women lay unconscious or dead on the ground while others tried to carry or drag them toward the palace. Children ran screaming back and forth. Large and small chunks of burnt and twisted metal lay scattered across the ground. And in the distance, two flaming machines vomited twin columns of smoke into the late morning sky. High over head, a huge black cloud was expanding and fading while a shining silver balloon wobbled in the air, buffeted by the shifting mountain wind. The balloon’s skin was burning brightly and it slowly crumpled in upon itself as it hovered lower and lower over the field.
“Enzo, get those children out of here.”
“Get the…what?” He stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “Right. The children.” And he dashed away to the first group of little figures huddled beside the body of a young woman.
Qhora strode across the grassy field, scanning for the old woman with the cat.
What was her name? Chow?
Instinct drew her toward the burning wreckage at the far end of the lawn where she found a scrapheap of blackened, shredded parts of machines strewn all around her. A handful of bodies lay on the manicured grass, all impaled by broken brass rods and iron plates. One man had a long shard of glass through his neck. Qhora didn’t bother to check whether any of them were still alive.
She found the old woman kneeling a few yards from one of the smoking machines. A thin trickle of blood ran from her temple. The cat in her hands was not moving.
“Chaou!” Qhora yelled. “Put the cat down.”
Chaou stood up, one hand pressed to her bleeding head. She looked once at Qhora and then turned to the wreckage behind her. Qhora followed her stare to see a well-dressed woman lying beside two soldiers. To the left she saw a maid and five children slowly regaining consciousness a few yards from the broken machines.
Chaou held up the cat. “This is it. This is the moment. The end and the beginning!”
“Get away from them!” Qhora circled to place herself between Chaou and the children. “Put the cat down.”
“Get out of the way, girl.” Chaou inched closer to the queen, who was still motionless on the ground. One of the soldiers began to stir beside her.
“You’re not killing these children!” Qhora lifted her bayonet, ready to throw it, unsure of what might happen if she stabbed the dead cat by accident. Her best guess was the cat carried an infectious pathogen, perhaps the Mazigh equivalent of the Golden Death.
Chaou stumbled forward a few more steps, still clutching her head. Qhora yelled over her shoulder at the maid in her broken Mazigh, “Go! Take the children! Go!” The maid nodded and grabbed up the children, barking orders in a shaking voice. The group got to their feet, boys and girls from three to thirteen, all stumbling and crying. When Qhora looked back at Chaou she saw the anger in the old woman’s eyes, and Chaou started toward the children.
“No!” Qhora hurled the bayonet and the long thin blade sank into the dead cat clasped to the old woman’s chest. The cat and woman vanished into a sudden flash of light and flame and a blast of hot air shoved Qhora back onto the ground. She sat up to see the grass burning, Chaou’s body burning, and the wreckage behind them awash in fresh flames. Beneath the collapsing, burning metal and wood, Qhora saw the queen and her soldiers. The queen’s head shifted and her hand rose an inch off the ground. For a moment, the two women’s eyes met. The queen’s lips moved, her trembling hand reaching out.
Qhora stood up, brushed herself off, and walked away after the retreating children. A moment later, she heard the roar and the crush of the burning balloon falling back to earth behind her. She looked back once to see the queen’s barge hidden by curtains of flame, and then she went to find Lorenzo.
Chapter 47. Taziri
When she opened her eyes, Taziri saw her grandfather leaning over her, except his face was all wrong. It
