Styx was still lying on my palm when someone below called for help.
The northern quarter was drowning.
The water that had broken the herd's formation burst the old pipes and swept through the streets with mud, paint and broken furniture. Doors on the lower floors would no longer open. The dyers hacked through them with axes, pulled people out through windows and lashed planks together into walkways. Nobody was celebrating the wall's survival.
The red lines on Styx's wings had almost gone dark. Only isolated pulses came through the bond: one brood had gone to the river, another was searching for the wounded, a third did not answer.
Before, I would have felt the whole swarm at once. Now every captain left a silence behind, and no command could fill it.
"Gather them?" I asked.
Styx raised her head.
"No."
Mira reached us by way of the slippery embankment. She examined Styx's wings and confirmed what we already knew: the control node had divided for good. If we tried to force the sparks back, the captains would lose their own will and some of the broods would die.
"She'll be able to restore her body," Mira said. "But the old Queen is gone."
Styx moved one wing.
"There will be another."
Below us, the wall of a house cracked, and we ran.
Taya stood knee-deep in water, holding the workshop door while two men carried an old woman out. The copper whistle hung around her neck. She saw me and immediately turned away.
"Where else are people trapped?" I asked.
"Three under the red awning. We don't know how many in the bakery cellar."
"Show me."
Taya did not move.
"You wanted to give the beasts different reasons again, but you left the water only one."
I wanted to say that otherwise the herd would have entered the city. That Taya herself had given the order to open the spillways. Those words were true, and not one of them could lift her house out of the mud.
"Yes," I said. "Where do we start?"
She looked at my hands. The dead captain's blood was still on my fingers.
"The bakery."
We broke the bars over the cellar window. Lenny lowered one of the monkeys on a rope, but the beast stopped at the black water. So he climbed down first to show the way, and the monkey followed. Cole and the fighters cleared the wreckage by the red awning. Leon forced himself not to summon the Void Dragon: the beast's damaged wing was already dragging along the ground. Instead, the heir of the Li family hauled sandbags alongside the dyers.
The father of the girl from the infirmary brought a hand pump and, wasting no time on thanks, asked where to put it.
By evening the water had stopped rising.
Salvaged belongings lay in the square outside the dyehouse: wet blankets, doors, sacks of flour, a child's bed missing one leg. People were sharing dry rooms. Several swarm captains settled on the roofs, but they were not waiting for Styx. They were watching over their own broods.
Taya brought us a tin mug of warm water. One for all of us.
"Kane has started drawing the marks towards the tower," she said. "The pipes are humming underground."
Styx flinched. The hunger of the Predator Crown passed through our weakened bond.
Almost at the same moment, Rem, the Guild assessor, entered the square. His grey cloak was torn, and he carried a metal seal in one hand.
"There's another vault in the tower," he said. "Kane has started the purge. Once the Crown finishes gathering the marks, the living archive will burn with the evidence."
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