When the vanguard cleared the southern throat of the Gorge of the Weeping Pyres, the earth opened into a nightmare of light.
There was no dawn, yet the horizon was bleached white.
Stretching forty leagues in every direction was the Plain of the Solar Mirror—a vast, dead desert where the soil had been melted three centuries ago by the birth of the Eye of the Noon into an unbroken expanse of polished, green-tinted glass. It was slick as wet ice, reflecting the bruised sky like a frozen ocean of emerald jade, reflecting every footfall of the two hundred thousand soldiers marching across its surface with terrifying, magnified clarity.
And rising from the center of that glass desert, twelve leagues away, was Heliopolis.
Seen from the open plains, the capital was a city built on the scale of gods.
The seven concentric rings of its walls were not stone; they were colossal ramparts of solid, molten-cast bronze, forty paces high and wide enough for three war-chariots to ride abreast. Each ring was elevated above the last, forming an amphitheater of fortifications that culminated at the center in the colossal, white-marble mountain of the Sun-Pyramid.
At the apex of the pyramid, perched two thousand feet above the glass floor, the Eye of the Noon rotated on its massive gantry.
It was a sphere of solid, alchemically pressurized gold fifty paces wide, glowing with such blinding, unadulterated solar fury that even twelve leagues away, the heat radiated across the plains like an open oven, crisping the edges of the soldiers' wool cloaks and turning their breath to dry steam.
"Mother of Shadows," Talia muttered, riding beside Lyra with a strip of wet linen tied over her nose and mouth to keep the glass dust from shredding her lungs. "The entire plain is a killing floor. If we march across that glass under the open sky, the Emperor only has to focus the Eye's beam once to burn the entire two hundred thousand to ash before we reach the outer ditch."
"He won't use the Eye on the army," Korvus said, riding his heavy stallion on their left flank.
Behind the general, mounted on a mule and wrapped in a thick northern blanket, rode Tarek. The young man’s skin was pale, his hands still trembling from the five winters spent in the alchemical tube, but his amber eyes were clear, fixed on the distant spires of the city that had stolen his youth.
"Why not?" Gideon asked, his massive frame hunched forward over his saddle-bow, his star-iron claymores clinking rhythmically against his armored back. "A tyrant with a weapon that burns continents doesn't hesitate to fry a few hundred thousand conscripts."
"Because the Eye does not run on magic, Lord Drake," Tarek spoke, his voice raspy, scraped raw from years of disuse. "It runs on mass. Every time the Emperor focuses the lens to incinerate a city, the mechanism consumes fifty thousand barrels of refined sun-marrow. The stores in the lower cisterns are low. My father’s requisition from the Mother-Cradle was supposed to replenish the fuel."
Tarek pointed a trembling, scarred finger toward the base of the Sun-Pyramid.
"He is saving the fire for the Queen. He knows that if she falls, the army will scatter like sheep before a wolf."
"Then we make sure she doesn't fall," Gideon growled, his hand coming down to rest heavy, warm, and possessive over Lyra’s knee.
Lyra didn't answer immediately.
She had dismounted an hour ago, walking her mare across the smooth green glass, her hide boots slipping occasionally on the slick surface.
She knelt, placing her bare, unbandaged palm flat against the cool emerald glass beneath their feet.
She closed her eyes.
Her Weave-sense sank into the ground.
What she felt through the stone made the marrow of her bones vibrate like a plucked harp-string.
Beneath the four-foot crust of surface glass, the earth was hollow.
Running from the mountains behind them all the way to the foundations of the Sun-Pyramid was an immense, subterranean river of fresh glacial meltwater—the Stygian Flue—diverted underground centuries ago to cool the massive alchemical heat-sinks beneath the city.
And swimming through that subterranean river right now, having followed the acoustic subterranean vibrations from the coast, were the four Sun Wyrms.
Lyra smiled—a slow, feral, razor-sharp smile that made the violet starlight in her left eye dance with lethal promise.
"The Emperor thinks we are coming across the glass," Lyra said, rising to her feet, wiping the green dust from her palm.
Korina Drake raised an eyebrow. "Aren't we?"
"No," Lyra replied, turning to look at General Korvus. "General, take the Two Hundred Thousand. Deploy them across the northern rim of the plain in three broad, shallow lines. Light ten thousand campfires. Pitch every tent we have in the baggage train. Keep the banners high, make as much noise as an army of five hundred thousand, and bang your spears against your shields until their sentries think the heavens are falling."
Korvus’s scarred face split into a slow, understanding grin. "A siege feint. Make them think we're preparing for a frontal assault across the mirror."
"Exactly," Lyra said. "Draw their ballistas to the northern battlements. Force their engineers to align the mirrors toward the open desert."
She turned to Gideon, Talia, and Korina.
"And while their eyes are fixed on the horizon... we go underneath."
Gideon dismounted in a single, fluid motion, his massive boots striking the green glass with a sharp, ringing crack. He stepped into her space, his scarred face inches from hers, his breath hot, ragged, and thick with that intoxicating scent of burning cedar and mountain iron that was her only true sanctuary.
"Underneath?" Gideon rumbled, his lips brushing the curve of her jaw, his amber eyes burning with fierce, possessive hunger. "Through the cooling river?"
"Through the river," Lyra whispered against his mouth, her hands rising to grip the boiled leather of his harness. "The elder wyrm is waiting for us beneath the siphon gates. We ride the water into the cisterns beneath the pyramid, breach the Searing Vaults from below, and sever the Eye's fuel lines before the Emperor can touch the lever."
Gideon let out a low, predatory growl that vibrated straight through her ribs.
He didn't argue. He didn't ask about the danger of drowning in an alchemical river two hundred fathoms beneath the earth.
He pulled her flush against his chest, his mouth crashing down onto hers in a fierce, searing kiss that tasted of salt, iron, and the eternal, unbreakable oath of their fated bond.
"You and me, little bird," Gideon growled into her hair, his arms locking around her waist like bands of forged steel. "We drown their city in their own water."
Lyra buried her face in his neck for a single, breathless heartbeat, drawing his strength into her veins, before stepping back toward the fissure in the rock where the intake vents lay hidden.
She looked up at the sky.
High above the plain, Cinder circled within the high thermals, his golden-infused scales gleaming like an omen of death over the white marble spires of Heliopolis.
"Cinder!" Lyra called out, her voice carrying the ancient, sovereign frequency of the Ash Court. "Hold the sky! When the water rises in the city... burn their gates to slag!"
The war-drake let out an earth-shattering roar that echoed across forty leagues of glass desert.
And with twenty elite Void-dancers of the Ember guard at their backs, the two monarchs slipped into the dark fissure, descending into the black water beneath the world.
Eight chapters left.
The siege had begun.