Sumit saw the leopard-woman first.
She stood on the sand in mid-leap, her claws a hand's width from nothing, her yellow eyes still burning, and for a moment he forgot to breathe.
Ishita.
He had run. He had run the moment the pull vanished, back up the tunnel, through the cavern where the tree had been, and up the splintered shaft where its trunk had torn the floor open. His lungs burned, and his legs shook. He had tried his best to arrive early, harder than he had ever tried at anything in his life.
It had not been enough.
He dragged himself out of the hole and onto the sand, and for a heartbeat, he could not make his eyes understand what they were seeing. Forty thousand gray shapes in their rows. A black stump of root where the royal platform met the floor. A little group of statues lying in the sand, and a leopard in the middle of them.
And in the center of it all, a man in a priest's white robe was laughing.
He had his head thrown back and his arms spread wide, and a huge hand of living wood rose behind him like a pair of wings. He laughed in a rolling, cracking voice, like a man who had not laughed in years and had forgotten how to stop.
A madman, Sumit thought. A madman with his back to me.
That was good enough.
He crouched, closed his hand around a stone from his pocket, and pushed everything he had into it. It was a thread, not a river, but it was enough. He threw.
The rock burst against the madman's shoulder in a flash of gold.
The man did not even flinch. Bark tore out of him. It ripped through the white robe, through the skin of his neck and arms, wet and pale and crawling, and flowed across his body in a second skin. The explosion left a scorch mark on the wood, and that was all. It was the ugliest thing Sumit had ever seen.
The man turned, with a slow, curious tilt of the head, and looked at him across the sand.
"Kaali Billi," said Kabir.
Sumit stood up slowly. His heart was pounding, but his voice came out steady. "You know me?"
"Do you think I would not take note of you?" Kabir smiled. "A boy who is strong enough to almost reach the finals, and yet has no history. No tribe. No people. Not even a name before this tournament. I notice anomalies, Kaali Billi." He tilted his head the other way. "I admit I ignored you for too long. But it doesn't matter now. You cannot defeat me. I have the power of a god."
He lifted his hand, and the wood that crawled across his body moved.
A dozen vines burst from his sleeve and lashed across the sand, straight at Sumit's chest.
Move.
Sumit threw himself sideways. The vines tore the sand where he had been standing. He rolled, came up, and reached down into himself.
For the first time since the hallway, his aura answered.
The pull was gone. The weight that had been pressing on the whole city since the morning was gone. What had cowered in his bones for a day came up like a frightened animal creeping out after a storm, trembling, but willing. He poured it down his arm and out through his fingers, and shaped it, and a gauntlet of gold formed over his hand, with long curved claws.
The next vine reached him. He cut it in half.
It dropped in two pieces and writhed on the sand. Cold ran up his arm where the gauntlet had touched it, and a little of his aura drained away through the cut. He did not care. He grinned.
"Now that horrible tugging is gone," he said, "I can finally fight properly."
He planted his foot in the sand.
Raph's technique, the one he had traded his own tricks for. He pushed his aura down through his heel and into the ground, the way the big rhino had shown him, and the ground answered. The sand rippled outward in a ring. The statues nearest him rocked on their bases. A crack ran across the arena floor, and Kabir's feet slid half a step.
Sumit charged.
Vines came at him from every side, thick and fast. He cut them left and right, the gauntlet flashing, aiming for the ones that would kill him: the throat, the heart, the gut. He cut four, five, six. Wood fell around him in pieces.
But there were too many.
Two slipped past his guard. One drove into his thigh. Another punched through his foot, pinning it to the sand.
He screamed and fell.
The pain was white and huge. He slashed the vines off with the gauntlet, then gripped each one and tore it out of his flesh, and he pushed what little aura he had into the holes to close them. His hands shook. The blood was warm on his leg.
"You think you can stop me?" Kabir walked toward him across the sand, unhurried. He did not give Sumit the time to finish. "Can you not see the power inside me? You should have left the moment you saw me. But it is too late for you now."
He spread both arms.
Across the arena, the black wood answered. It poured out of his body and into the sand and out through the stands, creeping over the rows of statues, up the walls, across the floor, and where it twisted and overlapped itself, it began to rise.
A shape stood up, and then another. Their bodies were made of knotted black wood. Some had the heads of tigers, some of apes, some of things that had no names, and each had a small black gem set in the middle of its chest like a heart.
Sumit counted twelve. Then twenty. Then he stopped counting.
"Here we go again," he muttered.
He pushed himself to his feet. The leg held, barely. He pulled three stones out of his pocket and charged each of them with a thread of gold, and when the nearest monster came at him, he threw them at its chest.
BOOM.
The monster fell in pieces. Its gem cracked and went dark.
The chest, he thought. Same as in the forest. Every gem monster he had fought had been built the same way: a heart of black glass inside a body of wood. Break the heart, and the body forgot how to stand.
He ran at the next one.
He punched it, and the punch carried a ripple of aura that went through the wood like a hammer through a barrel. The gem shattered. He formed a small glove on his off hand, claws sprouting from the knuckles, and raked it across the chest of a second monster, and a third. He jumped over a tail that would have taken his legs. He broke another with a punch that cracked his own knuckles.
Then something hit him from behind.
It was like being struck by a falling roof. He went flat on the sand with the air knocked out of him. A cold spot bloomed across his back where the thing's wooden arm had struck, and it ached, and it drained.
He got up and wiped the blood from his mouth.
He killed another.
He got hit.
He got up.
He killed another, and another, and was hit again, and again, and it became a rhythm, a dreadful, steady cycle, and every blow that landed took a little more aura away. The gauntlet flickered. The glove faded. He could feel the bottom of the well.
Then he reached for it, and there was nothing there.
He was out.
He stood in the middle of the arena with his arms hanging at his sides, his chest heaving, and watched the monsters close in. They did not rush. They did not need to.
"Enough."
The monsters stopped.
Kabir walked through them, and they parted for him like water. He stopped a few paces from Sumit and looked at him with something that was very nearly kindness.
"You are almost dead," he said. "Do you know that?"
Sumit tried to answer. His knees gave out, and he caught himself on one hand and pushed back up.
"I have wondered about you." Kabir circled slowly. "I know you are not from here. A boy with no past, no people, no home. So why fight so hard? Why spend your life on a war that is not yours?" He crouched down in front of Sumit, his bark-covered face level with his own. "Please, indulge my curiosity before I kill you. Why?"
Sumit looked at him.
His head was spinning. He thought, absurdly, of his mother's kitchen, the sound of a pan on the stove, a house where nothing had ever happened. Home. He had barely thought about it in days. He thought of the watch on his wrist, silent, and the long road back, and the very real chance that he would die on this sand and never walk that road.
Something cold twisted in his chest.
It was fear. Real, plain, ugly fear, the first he had felt since waking up in that jungle.
Then it was gone.
It did not fade. It simply stopped, like a door being shut very gently from the other side, and he was calm again, as clear and empty as before.
"Why," Sumit said slowly, "would I need a reason to help someone?"
Kabir blinked.
Then he laughed, short and genuine. "Fine, then. Die."
He laid his hand flat on Sumit's chest.
The cold came at once, a wave of it, sweeping out from the palm across his ribs, his shoulders, his throat. The gray rose up his collarbone. His fingers went stiff. Kabir watched him with a faint, tender, curious smile.
And Sumit smiled back.
"Got you," he whispered.
He moved faster than anything he had done all day. His hand shot out and closed around Kabir's wrist, and he turned the flow.
The cold had been rushing out of him, into Kabir. Now he pulled it the other way. It was like opening a dam. Aura crashed into him from the man's arm, vast and heavy and thick as a river in flood, and for one heartbeat Sumit saw it all at once: forty thousand lives, the Elders, the champions, the crowd, the children, every drop that the tree had taken, held inside one body.
He grabbed on with his other hand, too.
"What—" Kabir's face went white. He tried to rip his arm away. "Let go! Let go!"
Too much. Sumit tried to compress it, the way he had practiced, squeezing it down into a knot in his chest, and it was like trying to fit a river into a cup. His ribs creaked. His vision went white. Take everything. Take it all.
A wooden claw, thick as a tree, slammed into his side.
He flew. He hit the sand ten feet away, bounced, and lay still. The monster that had hit him stood over him, dripping splinters.
Kabir staggered back, clutching his wrist, gasping. His face was gray and furious. A wide, wet gash of fear showed through the bark.
"Kill him," he said. "Kill him now."
Sumit did not move.
He lay on his back, looking up at the sky through the broken roof of the arena. There was too much in him. It filled every vein, a hot, heavy, bursting weight that he could not hold, that would split him open in a few breaths if he did not do something with it.
And there was only one thing he could do with it.
One chance.
He could not fight the way Kabir fought. He could not take what the tree had taken and hold on to it. But he did not have to be the one to win. He only had to give it to someone who could.
He knew exactly who.
Sumit raised his hand.
The monster's claw was already coming down. He ignored it. He shaped what he had taken into a single thread of gold, thin as a whisper and bright as the sun, and he sent it out of his palm across the arena, over the sand and over the statues, past the black roots and up the steps of the royal platform.
To a man in a plain red robe, sitting very still with his hands folded.
The gold touched the statue's chest.
It did not sink in. It poured.
The gray cracked. A line ran up the statue's throat, across its jaw, and over its round, calm face, and the stone began to fall away in long, slow flakes like old paint. The whole arena seemed to hold its breath. The monster's claw stopped in mid-air.
The King's fingers moved.
He lifted his head, blinked once, very slowly, and looked down at the sand, at the monsters, at the man in bark with the god inside him, and at the small boy lying at his feet.
"Thank you, kid," the King said quietly. "I will take it from here."