—hutched under skittering claws as a spear mouth jabbed at her face—

—threw herself to rough stone and raised her hands and a shield of Craft—

—turned from the goddess’s throne to see crystal rainbows and claws approaching and—

—saw gargoyles tense and throne light flicker, Seril lose coherence as Jones dropped to one knee—

To the nine hells with order anyway. Fight.

She stabbed through her shield into demon-skin. The crystal reflected her knife, but the demon recoiled anyway, allowing Tara space to rise, cloaked in shadow.

Demons swarmed Seril’s children. Gar went down beneath the weight of two; he clutched one to his chest, shattering it, but the other stabbed him with its mouth and drank. Aev fought three at once, battered a fourth with her wings. Their chorus had broken into roars and rage. Tara closed her eyes, saw their Craft.

She shuddered.

Demons (Professor Halcyon had said, pacing before class with pointer tapping against her palm) hail from continuity neighboring our own, and as a result when brought into our realm possess whatever properties they have been assigned by negotiation. Unbound, they’re undefined—conscious singularities that warp the world until the pressure of paradox grows too great and they collapse, destroying territory they’ve tainted in the process. And that, class, is why we triple-check our summoning contracts.

The contract at these demons’ core was dreadfully simple. A few provisions listed the steps by which they might be slain: basic stuff, pressure tolerances, resistances, immunities. They could absorb others’ soulstuff. And they were bound to obey the holder of an indenture canceled by … Tara herself.

Oh, gods.

Somehow these demons were tied to the indentures Seril voided. If She fell, they’d be free—to go home, or to wreck the city, or worse.

In Tara’s voyage on foot through the Badlands, she’d crossed miles of desert that bore unbound demons’ taint: geometries that shifted to her desires as she passed, showed her palaces with tooth-lined doors. Hummingbirds hung frozen in the air, not yet dead. They would pass an age of the world in their dying.

That would happen here, if the demons ate Seril.

She called down starlight. The demon she had stabbed scuttled toward her again. She redefined the atmosphere around it. Individual particles of air were tiny, but considered as a class rather than as individuals, as a blanket shrouding the planet, air weighed a great deal. (This trick wouldn’t work against normal matter, which understood its own rules too well, but demonstuff was a stranger here.) The demon spasmed as it sawed the edges of her—admittedly specious—argument. Given time it would recover. So she stepped forward dancerlike and drove her knife through the top of its head.

The creature exploded to steaming dust.

She stumbled into the space where it had been, weak from conjuring. Not enough starlight here for proper magic, and the moon was spoken for.