The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

“The Sniper who now lives bears the skill that killed Me, and the intent to have killed Me, but not the finger that sped the bullet home. Bridger was real.” Not only Chagatai, but all within the room froze speechless. Even Jehovah, though Jehovah is never truly within rooms. It was not His words that stunned us. His black eyes, like everybody’s, shifted their focus suddenly far from this room, far from this city, to the news which rose in His lenses. “Sanctum … conrupt’est?” I saw it too, in my news feed. I saw a world away, far out of reach, the first too-tiny plumes of smoke against the spotless marble. “Ecce, Mycroft,” this foreign God called softly to me. “All material things are mortal after all.” I zoomed in on the feed. A dark wound, that’s what others have said they saw, a tight incision sliced into the side of Alexandria’s great lighthouse tower, which bled irregular bursts of black smoke, clumpy like bubbles leaking from a sinking ship. I did not see a dribble, but a deluge, filth-black blood pouring from the wounded lighthouse, an endless torrent of living—no—un-living, moving black, as if this injury at last revealed the great reservoir from which are born all the specter trails and war-cancers that Tully Mardi leaks. “Stay still and calm, all.” Rumormonger Natekari does not have to raise her voice. “Something is happening at the Sanctum Sanctorum in Alexandria.”