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.Jute was nowhere to be seen.The thing of fire standing astride the ruined wall grew taller, flaring up into the sky.It roared forth its hate, its mouth a well of darkness, and such was the terror of that sound that men stood frozen in fear.Surely there was only darkness and it was the end of all people.“Jute!” howled the thing.The air shimmered, as if it were about to burst into flame.“Thief! Give me what is mine!”The wind keened in response, gathering itself and battering against the colossus of flame.The clouds tumbled by in the sky.The sun vanished, hidden in smoke or hurried to its safety beyond the sea’s edge or perhaps blown out like a candle.And then Jute was there.He hurtled through the sky, wreathed in the icy air.Flames reached for him.Fire leapt up to pull him down.The sky was on fire.Darkness trembled in the thoughts of every soldier there.And even from the unblinking eyes of the dead, despair stared.Jute darted through the fire, quicker than light.He struck with the weapons of the wind, with the force of the gale and the hammering blows of the hurricane.Ice shards flashed through the air behind him.They shattered into steam in the heart of the fire, and the fire shrieked aloud.It called out words.It called out words of unmaking, ancient words left unspoken since Nokhoron Nozhan first saw the making of the world.The words wrote themselves in the smoking darkness of that sky.And even though no living man knew that accursed language, every man felt the truth of it in his heart.Even the dead stopped in their tracks and stood in silence for the end.For there are things even deeper than death.Giverny Farrow herself, standing with the earth under her, wavered.But Jute only flew faster.He flew faster than thought, faster than the reaching grasp of the words of the enemy.He was untouchable.He was the wind.He was the storm and the fury and the heart of the sky.Up to the stars themselves, into the vast, unbroken stretches of silence between the stars, between the awful furnaces of space—all of this was his domain.The stars paused within their prescribed courses.Their light dimmed for a moment.The music of those spheres faltered as they stopped to gaze and wonder.No one heard the dismay in their voices in all of Tormay except, perhaps, for the hawk.Look!Do not look.Look away.Hide thine eyes.And Jute struck with all the dreadful, savage power of those endless heights, the cold and silence of the sky, colder than winter's frozen heart, and more silent than the grave of death itself.He struck with the fury of the tempest and the howl of the wind that rages between the stars.He struck straight through the heart of the fire.And the fire could not stand before him.It buckled and bent.It tattered and streamed and fluttered, helpless in the wind.The towering phantasm that it had been shrank away.The darkness faded in its eyes until it was only a shadow of things once hoped for.The thing cried out.The thing that had once been the anbeorun of fire.Aeled.It was soundless now.Its mouth shaped a single word from the oldest of all languages.The language it had first spoken, long centuries before it had chosen the darkness.Master.But the sound was silent.And then the fire guttered out.On the battlefield, the bodies of the dead collapsed to the ground in honest death.The defenders of the city stood in weariness, dazed with surprise and doubt.There was only Jute now, triumphant in the sky.He was full of fury and delight and the wonder of his own power.The rightness of it.Aye, said the voice in his mind.This is how things should be.“I am the wind!” Jute shouted out loud.The sound boomed through the sky like rolling thunder.It was thunder to the cowering men far below on the battlefield.It was no longer a voice.The wind howled around him in response.It blew every which way.It dashed up into the sky to shred the clouds into tatters.It careened to the east and the west, churning the sea into foam.Walls in the city collapsed.Stones flew and shattered.The bodies of the living and the dead were strewn about like a child’s playthings.Thou art the wind, said the voice.Thou art Jute.And all this power is thine.Thou wert born for this.Thou hast conquered.Thine is the power to unravel the sky.The power to destroy.The voice was right.The thought grew within Jute’s mind and the sky darkened.Far away, far in the eastern approaches beyond the first few stars, a window in the sky seemed to appear.It slowly opened.It was only a smudge of black in the twilight sky.A tiny smudge of black an impossible distance away.No one saw it.Not even Jute.Something lay beyond that window.Something waking.Something opening up its eyes.The power to destroy is thine.The wind howled in delight.It scoured the sky clean until nothing was left except Jute and the distant stars.However, there was one other.Low over the city, a single, solitary bird struggled through the power of the wind.The hawk.But even he could not last in that maelstrom.He folded his wings and dove down to the battlefield.The hawk landed in the dubious shelter of some rubble from the city wall.Even there, the wind battered everything in sight.Shards of stone hissed through the air.Something stirred on the ground next to the hawk.“Well met, little wing.”The voice was worn thin, but the hawk would have recognized it anywhere.“My lord Aeled,” said the hawk sadly.“Nay, no longer fire.I am spent.I have fallen, old friend.” The face looked up at the bird from the ground.It seemed as if it was carved of stone, as if the flesh had been worn away by time until only bone remained.There was no sign of the duke of Mizra there, only something fading and impossibly ancient.“Perhaps I was falling all that time, when we first descended from the house of dreams.This world took hold of my heart and I wanted no other.But then, as the centuries passed, the desire grew in me to return.To go home.To return to the house of dreams.But I could not
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