But the part of him that was in control scooped up the knife from the floor, and ran to where Aket-ten was standing with her back against the wall, her hands over her head, tied at the wrist to a brass ring embedded in the wall. As he sawed through the leather thongs biting into her wrist, the screaming mercifully stopped.

But the Eye continued to spin—

There was a feeling of intense pressure as he cut through the last of the thongs, and then, a kind of dull whuff, as if something very heavy, but soft, had been dropped in the middle of the room.

As he untied the gag holding a ball of rags in her mouth, Aket-ten’s eyes went wider than he’d ever seen before. And when he turned to look, he understood.

The Eye was awake, and evidently had a mind of its own about what should be done now. That beam of light, thicker than his thigh, and too bright to look at, lanced out of the window, and was burning its way across the buildings of the Central Island. Flames rose beneath the Tower, and the sounds of screams and a terrible heat and the smell of scorched rock surrounded him.

The Eye had already incinerated the Royal Palace by the time he turned, had decimated the buildings around it, and was cutting a swathe across the Island toward the canal. When it reached the edge of the canal and kept going, water bubbled and exploded in steam where it passed.

“How do you stop this thing?” he yelled at Aket-ten over the discordant howl the thing was putting out.

“I don’t know!” she shouted back.

And just as if the situation they were in wasn’t bad enough, he felt the stone of the Tower beneath him tremble, and his stomach lurched with that all-too-familiar, sickening sensation that marked an earthshake.

No time for argument. He grabbed Aket-ten’s wrist and ran for the window—not, thank heavens, the one the Eye was aiming its light-weapon out of.

He thrust his arm out of it, and groped for the rope.

It wasn’t there.

His stomach lurched again, this time with fear. Oh, no—where’s Avatre? Did she fly off? Did the Eye frighten her? Great Hamun, is she anywhere nearby?

Panicked now, he whistled, praying she was near and could hear him, because if she wasn’t—

And Avatre swooped down out of the sky, just as the Tower shook and swayed under his feet again, and out of the window he could see the ripple of the earthshake move across the land and water, as if someone had shaken out a rug.

It flung them toward the window as Aket-ten shrieked at the top of her lungs; it tossed Aket-ten over the sill, while he shouted for Avatre and the dragon tried desperately to maneuver closer.

“Kiron!” Aket-ten screamed—the rest was undecipherable.