The pull grew stronger with every step.
It had started as a tug, and now it was a current. It dragged at Sumit's skin and bones and breath, trying to wring out the last of his aura through every pore. His thread of aura shook like a candle flame in a draft. Twice it slipped his grip and almost streamed out of him toward the humming dark, and twice he caught it, panting, and drove it back down into his bones.
Legs. Spine. Shoulders. Hold it.
He moved from limb to limb, round and round, the way the Cat-man had taught him. A circle with no leak in it. His knees wobbled. Sweat ran down his back. But the pull found nothing to hold on to and kept sliding off him, and he kept walking.
The tunnel ran on and on, lined with stone pillars carved with faint glowing symbols, spaced in a ring like the teeth of a jaw. He did not recognize the marks. He did not like them either.
Then, to his left, the wall opened into a side chamber.
A single lantern burned in an iron sconce, throwing long shadows across the floor, and in its light, Sumit saw the statues.
There were dozens of them. They stood in rows, shoulder to shoulder, as if they had been arranged. A traveler with a pack still on his back. A farmer gripping a scythe. Soldiers in green coats, mid-stride. A merchant caught halfway through a bow. The oldest ones wore a coat of dust like ghosts, and the newest looked as if they had only just stopped breathing.
They were all the same dull gray.
I know this stone, Sumit thought.
He had seen it in the forest, on the animals the dark tree had taken. He had seen it on the plant-monkeys, and on the beasts in the clearing. He knew exactly what it was, and exactly what it meant: nobody in this room was dead.
He walked slowly down the row. His footsteps were very loud.
At the end of the room, standing a little apart from the others, was a wolf in a stolen white robe that stopped halfway down his shins.
His claws were half drawn. His jaw was locked in a snarl. One ear was still tilted back, the way it did when he was about to say something he thought was funny.
Sumit stopped in front of him.
"Jack," he said.
Nothing. He reached out and laid his palm against the wolf's chest. The stone was cold, and there was no heartbeat in it, only a faint, patient hum, as if something far away was holding the whole room by a string.
"You're late," Sumit said quietly. It was meant to be a joke. It did not sound like one.
He took his hand away. His fingers were not shaking, and he noticed that, and wondered why.
The tree had taken what was inside these people, every drop of it. To bring them back, he would have to return it. All of it. He did not know how. He did not know how he would carry so much, or where it was kept, or whether it could be done at all.
But he knew where the tree was. It was ahead of him, down the tunnel, where the humming came from.
Wait for me, he thought, and left the lantern burning.
He had gone barely ten steps when the pull stopped.
It did not fade. It simply ended, like a hand that had let go of a rope. The hum cut off in the middle of a note, and the silence that followed was so heavy that Sumit could hear his own heart.
Then, far above, something groaned, long and low.
He began to run.
...
In the arena, the black tree stopped drinking.
Kabir felt it in his chest, the way a man feels a held breath finally let go. The branches that had been writhing overhead went still. The roots that had been crawling through the stands and the streets lay motionless on the stone. The humming faded, and for the first time since the morning, the whole great arena was perfectly quiet.
Forty thousand statues stood in their rows beneath the open sky. In the royal box, a figure in a plain red robe sat with its hands folded.
Kabir smiled.
It was the smile of a man who has been listening for a knock at the door for years, and has finally heard it.
"Finally," he whispered. "It has eaten its fill. The time has come for it to show its true form, just as the prophet told me."
The tree began to shrink.
It did not wither. It drew inward, branch by branch, as if the whole vast shape were being gathered back into a single point. The great trunk narrowed and folded. The roots slid back across the stone and under the sand, the bark flaked away like ash, and the shadow that had darkened the arena for an hour thinned and lifted.
When it was done, there was nothing in the center of the arena but a small black gem, floating a little above the sand. It turned slowly in the air, and inside it, something moved like smoke.
It was beautiful. Kabir thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He walked toward it across the sand, past statues in the shapes of his own followers, and stooped to gather the shells they had thrown away. They lay scattered across the stone like bones. One by one he picked them up, cradling them in his arms like firewood, and when he reached the gem, he began to press the pale pieces around it, carefully, tenderly, one at a time.
The shell closed around the gem and hid it, until what floated before him was an egg-shaped stone again, pale and smooth, humming softly.
Then the great gates of the arena groaned, and swung open.
"Stop right there, traitor!"
Kabir turned his head.
A crowd stood in the gateway: guards in green coats, porters, bakers, men and women who had been locked outside that morning and had run through the streets while the roots slid back into the earth. In front of them stood a leopard-woman, covered in dust, with her yellow eyes burning like lamps.
She was staring at the arena. At the forty thousand gray shapes, with their hands out and their mouths open, and at the red-robed statue on the royal platform.
Her face did not break. It tightened.
"Brother Kabir," Ishita said.
"Ishita." Kabir smiled gently. "You are too late now. The ultimate power will be mine."
He lifted the egg to his lips, opened his mouth, and swallowed it whole.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Kabir stood in the middle of the sand with his arms at his sides, his eyes closed, swaying very slightly. He looked defenseless. He looked like a priest at prayer.
"Now!" someone shouted from the crowd.
Two guards broke from the gateway, swords raised, and charged. They crossed half the sand in a heartbeat.
Kabir opened his eyes.
He did not even raise his hand. He simply turned his wrist, and the sand beneath his feet split, and a huge hand rose out of it, made of wood, with fingers as thick as tree trunks. It swatted the guards aside as if they were flies. They hit the ground hard and rolled, gasping.
"Unfortunately," Kabir said pleasantly, "I cannot draw your aura just by standing around. The tree could do that. The seed is still waking inside me, and until it does, I must touch."
Bark crawled up his sleeves, over his hands, across his throat. The wooden hand lifted him an inch off the ground.
"But I can do the same thing with a touch. For now."
He stepped forward and closed his bark-covered fingers around the arm of the nearest guard.
"Ahhhhhhh—"
Gray raced up the man's arm, across his chest, into his face, and the scream stopped as though a door had been shut. Kabir let go. The second guard crawled backward, shouting, and Kabir took him by the wrist, and then there were two statues lying in the sand.
The crowd in the gateway had gone completely silent.
"Do you see?" Kabir said. He spread his arms, and the great wooden hand spread behind him like a pair of wings. His voice rang across the arena. "I am not a follower anymore. I am not someone's subject. I am not just a normal man in a white robe who spent his life being polite. I am the strongest. I am the one who rules."
He laughed, and it sounded like a branch snapping.
"I am the king."
Ishita did not move.
"A ruler without subjects," she said.
Kabir's smile stuck.
"Look around you." She did not raise her voice, but it carried. She gestured at the sea of stone. "Forty thousand people. Children. Old men. The people who gave you their trust, who came to your Temple and let you heal their wounds. You want to be the last one standing, even if it means turning everyone who says no to you into stone." She took one step forward. "Does that make you happy?"
The smile came back.
It was a thin, quiet smile, and it did not reach his eyes.
"I will show you," Kabir said, and extended his wooden arm toward her.
Ishita vanished.
She did not dodge. She simply was not there, and a gust of wind lifted the dust where she had stood. The crowd gasped. She was a gold-and-black blur across the sand, faster than any eye could track, and a heartbeat later she was behind him, claws out, aimed at the back of his neck.
A second wooden arm burst out of Kabir's spine, swinging toward her like a flower turning toward the sun. Her aura, streaming bright behind her, was the brightest thing in the arena, and the wood had no trouble finding it.
It caught her in mid-air.
She screamed once, a short, furious sound. The wood closed around her ribs and her legs and her arms, and the gray crawled up her throat and her jaw, and she did not stop fighting until her eyes went still, and even then, they were still glaring.
Her last thought was of a wolf with a stupid grin.
Kabir held her for a moment, a leopard-woman in mid-leap, her claws a hand's width from his face.
"Yes," he said softly. "That does make me happy."
He set her gently down on the sand, among the others.
The crowd had fled. They had gone from the gateway in a stampede, without a sound. A few had stopped in the plaza outside, peering back around the gate frame with white faces, too frightened to run and too frightened to look away. Inside the arena, there was nobody left to run.
Kabir stood in the middle of the silent rows, with a wooden hand rising behind him and bark crawling across his face, and he began to laugh.
He laughed alone in the arena with the forty thousand. It rolled off the empty stands, over the stone, and out through the open sky.
Something small whistled through the air.
A rock. It arced across the sand and struck the wooden shoulder, and burst in a flash of gold.
BOOOOM
The explosion was loud. It left a scorch mark on the bark, and nothing else. Kabir did not even flinch. The wood had already closed over him, thick and smooth, and he turned his head with a slow, curious tilt, like a man looking at a fly.
At the edge of the broken floor, where the tree's trunk had torn up through the arena, a small figure stood in the shadows.
He was a human boy, thin and tired, with no aura around him at all. He did not glow. He did not press. In an arena full of strength, he was the one thing that seemed to take up no space.
Kabir stared at him, and slowly, something moved behind his eyes.
He had seen this boy before. A human who had come out of nowhere, a name on a registration scroll. On the first day of the tournament, the Temple's stones had been unable to settle on what he was: his appearance never matched their records. Kabir had noticed all of it, and then, with the arrogance of a man who had a hundred seeds to tend, he had decided that a strange person could not harm his plans.
He had ignored him. For a very long time.
"Kaali Billi," he said.