As the cart picked up speed, bouncing down the track faster than a horse could run, the driver made no attempt to dismount. Instead he dropped the torch into the straw piled around his feet. The flames flared high around the barrels, so that within a few more moments a great billowing blaze surrounded the little man and filled the back of the wagon. At the base of the track the unheeding giant still tore blindly at the small shape on his back, the faceless gnat who so annoyingly refused to die.

Jikuyin finally yanked Gyir free, pulling the fairy’s arm loose in its socket so that it dangled helplessly and the spear dropped from his nerveless fingers. As Jikuyin bellowed in triumph, ignoring the wagon, Barrick realized what was in the barrels.

“I WILL EAT YOU, INSECT!” the demigod roared.

You will choke on me. The skin of Gyir’s outer face had been torn away, and his strange small mouth twisted in what might have been a bloody smile. Look.

For the merest instant Barrick saw Jikuyin’s face and the way it changed, then the blazing cart crashed into the demigod and the entire cavern vanished in a howling, crackling storm of fire. Barrick felt the Storm Lantern’s last thought, a joyous curse on his defeated enemy, then the prince was flung away up the slope, skidding and rolling, and he felt the fairy’s presence in his thoughts wink out like a snuffed candle.

Barrick came to a stop in the doorway amid the shrieking Drows who had brought the wagon, awakened by Gyir’s death into this incomprehensible chaos. The stupefying concussion of the gun-flour, still echoing, was followed a moment later by the cracking, scraping sound of the cavern’s stone roof collapsing. Solid rock jumped and boomed like Heaven’s own drums. Several of the creatures who had unwittingly engineered this monstrous event scrambled over Barrick like rats in their haste to flee the doomed cavern. The prince could only cover his head and hold his breath as the impacts lifted and dropped him.

A millionweight of stone came tumbling down, burying demigod and mortals alike, sealing the open gateway to the gods’ realm for the next thousand years and more.

38

Beneath the Burning Eye

Even the gods weep when they speak of the Theomachy, the war between the clan of the three heavenly brothers and the dark clan of Zmeos the Horned One. Many of the brightest fell, and their like will never be seen again, but their deeds live on, that men may understand honor and proper love of the gods.

—from The Beginnings of Things
The Book of the Trigon

PELAYA HAD NEVER SEEN anything like it. Even in her worst childhood nightmares, chased by some hungry monster like Brabinayos Boots-of-Stone out of her nurse’s stories, she had not felt a terror and hopelessness like this.

The sky above Hierosol was black as if with a terrible storm, but it was smoke, not clouds, that had hidden the sun for three days now. On either side of the citadel much of the Crab Bay and Fountain districts were in flame. Pelaya could see the flames in particularly bright relief from the window of the family house near Landsman’s Market, a horrible and fascinating sight, as if beautiful, glowing flowers were sprouting all across the city. In the districts along the seawalls the sickly smoke of the sulfur rafts had crept over the houses in a poisonous yellow fog. She had heard her father telling one of the servants that the autarch’s burning sulfur had emptied most of the Nektarian Harbor district, that even the seaport end of the Lantern Broad was as silent as a tomb but for hurrying files of soldiers moving from one endangered part of the wall to another. Surely this must be the end of the world—the sort of thing the ragged would-be prophets in the smaller church squares were always shrieking about. Who could have guessed that those dirty, smelly men would be right after all?