Published 17 July 2025

Revolving Door: Volume 3

The Great Unmaking - II

Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts graphic injury, firearms, and explosions.

For a week, Lacar and Noma had camped and slept without Liss, feverish with the fear of silence. Daily, on the western coast of the smuggler's lagoon, they had watched the patrols skim by, timing them by the shadow of a branch in the sand. Six patrols in the daylight hours. Perhaps six more at night.

There was no telling if Liss was still alive on the other side of the yawning blue. If she had failed her part, then they would be flying headfirst to their deaths tomorrow.

But Liss did not simply fail. Noma committed that certainty to her own preparations, learning from Lacar, rehearsing the motions, until the eighth night, when the fateful flight was to take place.

It began with a boat in the dead of night. Bolstered by its new sail, the stolen rowboat flew like a gull, all four oars put to use. Between them, a sack of coins, nails and nuts jangled and clattered with every gybe.

They darted through the window between the patrols, into the sulfurous swampland east of Madan. Stowing the sail, they threaded through the mangroves with their oars. Colonnades of tree roots gave way to the stone and wood of wharves, and leafy canopies parted to show the seaport’s edifices.

The Orsandin authority had made their base among the houses of the port: the governor, the admiral, and the chief of constabulary. Lacar had only walked by their gates before.

The water scattered the thin moon’s reflection into a thousand slivers, blurring them into foam against the piers. Hugging the jetties, they passed the slumbering brigantines. One, two…there were six on anchor in the harbour. Their cannons stared, their hulls lit blue by the clouded half light.

In a gentle arc, they glided to the stone ladder. It ascended from the briny sea to the esplanade, a column of thin rungs that jutted from the wharf’s sheer stone face. Noma was already studying it by the time they came to rest, bobbing unevenly at its foot. Lacar turned to nod at her. She rose to her feet.

“Ten minutes till the next patrol,” he whispered, eyes cast forward.

With a dizzying leap, Noma flung herself onto the first rung. For seconds, her whole weight hung by her aching hands, her feet scrabbling about for purchase, her heart screaming where her mouth could not. The medicine bag on her hip swung, unsettling her centre of gravity.

But she found a foothold in the stone before her fingers could slip. Then she launched herself upward to the next rung, and then the next, palms scraping against barnacles. She glanced up, briefly, at the counterspell knots fluttering in the sea breeze overhead. Her blood roared while the boat swooped away, nothing but the pounding water beneath her now.

Lacar and Kori were destined for the dockyard ramp. While they were preparing their part of this great ploy, Noma had all of the night, until the final bang, to complete hers.

Liss had learned, through the stories of elders, and then through her escape from Henkor, that the world never denied her. But it was not some divine right, never something she was granted freely.

It was that she always knew exactly what had to be done, and she had to wherewithal to do it.

Victory was earned in blood and sweat, and where most faltered before any blood was drawn, she did not stop there. She would gut the corpse, if need be. She would snap its bones to suck the marrow out.

All through the noble neighbourhood of the port, patrols of constables watched sleeplessly. Liss dove into shadows under parked carts, watching pairs of boots clack back and forth in counterpoint, catching snatches of a murmured conversation in Orsandin. How's it going with your lady? She keeps returning later than I ask her to. She ever come home with coin? Horse hooves pawed at gravel.

There was a ditch on the other side. She waited for the pair to pass her in the middle of the road, right in front of her line of sight. Then, in three breathless seconds, she darted out and rolled into the ditch. The horses made no complaint.

Through the stench of the muddy ditch she crawled, peering up now and then in search of the golden fences. When she found them, there was a guard in leather armour, their back up against the glimmering gate posts.

Liss knew, from talking to Lacar, that these nobles were too cautious to sleep with unlocked windows. She could spend hours picking at their locks, or try unlatching a window from outside. But here was the beauty of this plan: she had to draw attention for this to work.

With a deep preparatory breath, she sprang up from the drain, hands outstretched.

The guard only had a split second to begin to shout, before the fence beside them turned to pounds of explosive force, dashing their head open against the road.

As the boom that shook the street, the well-oiled machine of the Orsand constabulary kicked into action. A cavalry of thudding boots and clinking weapons stirred, shouts crossing between the streets. Spurred by the awakening buzz, Liss leapt through the smoking hole in the fence and sprinted up the feeble lawn. Locks, devised to resist human hands, human ingenuity, could do nothing against her. The admiral's front door exploded off its frame.

She kicked it down and barreled inside, plucking a nail from her pocket. His was a house with an antechamber, two staircases arcing up to the main hall on either side. But Admiral Ecata had been woken by the noise, and he was stumbling in the next hallway under his shelves of wineglasses when she found him, wearing his nightcap.

Liss flung the nail.

A boom rattled the shelves and doors. Wineglasses tumbled from the wall and smashed on the floor around the admiral while a puddle of blood pooled beneath him.

So far so good, but now time was bearing down on her. If she was ambushed on the streets too early, she would be all out of luck.

This house was strange, all hard edges. Cool, polished stone gleamed dimly beneath her feet. As she sprinted to the far end of the hall, stories burst into her mind, of kings and queens in palaces built by the hands of slaves. She had never set foot on any floor like it before.

But Liss was not here to linger. Already she could hear the clatter of the door behind her, the thunder of boots. She unlatched and threw open the arched window at the far end of that hall, clambering out to land in the backyard, beyond which was a service gate—easily unlatched once the lock was gone—and a drainage canal. The back of every house faced into this canal, which carried their stormwater and refuse away. Peering over the roofs to her right, she found the pointed turret of the town square tower and sprinted towards it, past one fenced property then another, past square compounds with gardens, all hewn of mountain stone. She leapt the gap over the canal and climbed the lattice fence of the last house before the tower.

The governor was an Orsandin woman, sent here from the homeland itself with orders to reform the city. Lacar had met the governor once, on the day of his officiation into the navy. She carries a blade at her hip, he said. Even when she sleeps. She told me she would never be caught unarmed.

When their eyes met in the doorway of her bedroom, Liss did not step forward. She saw the uncomprehending stare of a predator turned prey for the first time, before she squeezed her hand into a fist—and a blinding, bone-shattering boom tore the woman’s leg from her body and a shriek of pain from her throat.

While the Governor collapsed onto her side, Liss tackled her to the ground and shoved a coin into her throat.

Before she could choke, her head, too, was asunder in a rattling of shelves and windows.

By then, she had shot away down the hall. Through the arched windows, Liss saw constables drawn by the noise towards the ex-governor’s door. Brawls were breaking out on the streets, too.

Back out the way she came, she met the canal again, and traced its bank towards her final stop. By now she was starting to pant with the effort of running, but greater than the exertion was the thrill, goading her ever forward.

The last house was an easy find: two storeys, a stone base and a wood framed upper extension. The Chief of Constabulary had to be the last, for a few reasons.

This door went as easily as the last two. Through surly corridors she ran, searching for the path to the inner chambers, till she found the spiralling staircase that ascended to the loft. Even now, boots pounded the stones of the street. Eventually they would smoke her out, but they wouldn't have to.

When Liss found the Chief of Constabulary, he sat awake in his silk bedding with a musket over his shoulder, eyes glittering in the light from his window.

Perhaps hearing her arrival, he had thought to arm himself. But he was too slow. Before his finger had twitched on the trigger, the stock was already overheating.

She ducked back out the door as an explosion painted the room, the ball of flame setting aglow the unlit sconces outside.

The echoes settled back down, but not to silence. On the street, through his door, shouting and stomping surged to fill the hole. Liss crept back into the bedroom, past the butchered remains in the bed. There was not a window, but a balcony.

Before she emerged, she paused to take stock. They must know exactly where she was by now—lines of constables had tightened around the offending house. The roar of the wind and water was like the city drawing a breath. She calculated her path from the balcony to the fence. From the fence into the crowd.

Then, she stepped out into the open, into the last shadows of the night. Liss saw it all laid out before her like a map. The streets of Madan, now a swarm of police, thickening on the road outside their chief's stolen home. The royal tower up the road, defaced with Orsandin banners, where a lone light flashed through a lower window. The view of the port beyond the roofs of the offices. The pre-dawn beyond the roofs, starting to bleed purple.

Liss stepped up to the wooden railing and gazed down upon the milling crowd, one voice then another calling their allies attention upward, and then a cascading glint of gun barrels. Heart booming, she searched the audience for straw-gold hair…

…And there she was, waving a stick with a smouldering tip.

The moment Liss leapt over the railing and onto the creaking iron fence, twenty barrels flashed towards her. As she raced down the tightrope of the fence, towards those ranks and files, she pointed her index finger at them. Officers cried out and flung their weapons away, the stocks too hot to hold.

With every wave of her hands, guns began to detonate on the stones, blowing feet off legs and knees off thighs. Even then the ruckus brought more police, coalescing and tangling like kelp on a reddening tide. Twenty, thirty, a military in all but name—trying to retain formation even while their allies fell in the minefield of their own making.

For seconds, Liss felt euphoria roar through her. She waved her hands, and bullets exploded before they had left their barrels—and she held her position long enough for Lacar and Kori to climb up into the cart, holding their sack between them.

With a grin, she met Lacar’s eye, across that windy river of blood. She sprang along the remaining length of the fence, readying for the leap.

“Now!” she yelled, and she jumped.

With a great heave, Kori and Lacar threw the sack high into the crowd. The fabric began to open. Hundreds of coins and bolts rained over their heads. She flew from the fence, rebounded off the shoulders of a shrieking constable and cleared the last head in the crowd to land on the far bank of the street. As she sprinted to the cart, Lacar threw his arms over the side and, grabbing her wrists, boosted her up into the seat in one fluid movement.

Meanwhile, Kori had turned to face the crowd. She lifted one hand, then another, drawing a circle with them. Then, everything on that milling street—every stepping boot, every waving arm, every swirl of wind, every shout…began to slow down.

“Let’s go!” Kori shouted, safe beyond that lethargic bubble. Lacar flicked the reins. Liss pointed her open palm up the street. Slow as sunrise, slow as melting, every inch of metal—guns, bullets, nails, coins and all—began to crack open, revealing fire in their cores. In slow motion, constables tumbled apart. Beyond the horizon of the spell, the wheels whirred and the cart lurched away, up the road and away from the police.

As the crowd left the range of Kori’s magic, they were released from the thrall of her spell.

A boom like thunder shook the street. Even hurtling away, they felt the wave of heat blast over them. A ball of fire swallowed everything, mushrooming into the sky, like sunrise before sunrise.

Before the shockwave had settled, the explosion was answered by another boom from far away. Then another, reverberating from all around them.

But this was not from an explosion. It was a resonant sound, of mallet to skin, rippling through the stones of the streets.

When Noma’s shoes found dry land, she wasted no time in sprinting. She swerved around the back of the portside lavatories, two feet from the edge. In the medicine bag that bumped on her back, she had stowed a lamp, bags of herbs, cloth strips, and flasks of wine.

For all of the two minutes she was running, she neither saw nor heard any sign of humanity. She leapt at moving shadows, but it was only ever a leaf blown in the wind.

The tower loomed high above the port, an easy signpost she could follow. She ran past offices shuttered with wood, through bumpy alleys between offices. As she came under the shadow of that singular forbidding tower, she stumbled up its steps to the recessed entrance, huffing and puffing.

Lacar had said that the building had become a dumping ground for the refuse of dock workers and patrolling sailors. She smelled it before she had even wrenched open the door. Grime and rat droppings streaked the grey walls. The stench of refuse slammed bodily into her, then the skittering of rat’s feet as she nauseously strapped a herb bag over her nose.

Striking a tinder, she lit her lamp, squeaking as cockroaches and rats swirled around her feet. In her flickering firelight, she could see that the tower’s barrel tapered upward above her, stairs spiralling along its circumference to the balcony at the top.

The floor in front of her was piled with bags of decaying scraps, some split open from being tossed, and rat dung. But at the very edge, she saw that the wooden floor was split in two by a seam, two airtight sliding doors that kept the skin protected from wetness. On the opposite side of the shaft, there stood a pair of winches.

Noma began at once to shove the stacks of bags away. Fruit peels and maggoty bones cascaded onto her. She feared she would never wash the stench away. Still she pushed and shoved, ejecting pile after pile of trash out the door.

Halfway into the task of clearing the tower, an explosion cracked nearby, making her leap. That was it. Liss had begun her charge. The noise spurred her on, piles of squelching, wrinkly, wriggling trash tumbling out the door with every push. It took everything in her not to hurl.

It will be worth it in the end, she told herself with squeezed eyes. It will all be worth it, when Henkor is finally free.

Only once every bag and scrap had been swept off the doors could Noma finally proceed to the next step of her task. Almost the instant she kicked the last apple core int the drain outside did she hear another explosion, closer than the last. Gasping she shot across the circular hall to the winches. She put the lantern on the floor and snatched the wine bottle from her bag, then a rag, wiping her hands, and the leathered handles and their grey patina of mold.

Drawing a huge breath, she grasped the larger winch with both hands. The mechanism was rusted stiff and the corners of the leather tattered from years without keeping. The first rotation was the hardest. Then the ancient wood budged, with a screech so loud that Noma leapt and checked the doorway. She kept turning.

Slowly, the two semicircular planes of the floor began to groan apart. A thin shadowy mouth opened between them, rust and rot ground to dust as Noma pulled and pushed. Slowly, winch by winch, the secrets beneath the doors were revealed to her lantern’s firelight. A great fur-clad wooden mallet, its head almost as large as the girl herself, hung from a tarnished axle in the wall by a great metal swivel joint.

Beneath the mallet gleamed a moon-white drumskin, aglow in the lamplight despite the scattering of dust. This was the quarry of her search. She winched the doors fully apart, and then—

A boom—much louder than any other, loud with finality—rent the air in the tower, making her ears throb, scattering roaches. She saw light bloom in the window. She felt her own heart rattle. No mistaking it.

She let go of the first winch, flew to grab the second, and began to turn it.

It’s important, Noma, Liss had insisted. It’s more important than you could know. This won’t be the first attempt at insurgency in Madan. The difference, this time, is the drum.

What was the beat, again? What if she couldn’t drum it with the right pulse, the right spirit? Just turn the winch, Lacar had muttered. It will come to you.

Noma, who had never trusted anything to come naturally to her, began to panic as the mallet came down. The first great boom shook the tower. Shook her bones. Rats and insects scuttled away.

Throughout the occupation, despite draping the tower in their flags, the Orsandin conquerors had never understood its true use. A place of symbolic power was all they had understood it to be.

But it was also a soundbox. Tunnels radiated under the streets of Madan, carrying sound to the corners of the port. And in the basement there was a great drum, played by this very ratcheted mallet.

Even as Noma kept winching with aching shoulders, the memory of the beat, taught by Lacar hitting the countertop with his palm, began to warm her hands. He had been right; it came to her like the rhythm of a sentence. One clockwise rotation was one beat on the drum. One anticlockwise rotation was four in succession, one for every quarter-round.

It was simple arithmetic—three forward, three-quarters back.

“Come on, Noma!” she cried out. “Think of what Liss will say!”

Dum, dum, dum da-da-dum.

She eased into the rhythm of the war dance, once cycle after another. Would this really do it? She had learned it diligently, but not felt any strong way about it.

And indeed, for a minute, nothing happened.

Then the cavalcade of explosions began.

“Flawless!” Liss shouted. As they flew along the promenade, she saw the two counterspell poles that Lacar had pried up from the ground, a gaping hole that could easily be patched if not for what would come next. When her gaze returned to the front of the cart, she saw that Kori had lifted her hands again.

Beyond the bubble of their cart, every flutter of wind and flicker of fire began to flow like mud. Sound fell away. The drum grew deeper. Leaves ceased to wave. Spray hung in the air and waves dragged sluggishly to shore.

But it was not the world that was slowing: it was they who were moving faster than everyone else.

“Liss, do it,” Kori said.

Liss did not answer; she did not have to. She pointed a finger out in front of the cart, at the feet of the poles.

One by one, fireball by fireball, the poles came down, and with them, the chain of knots that strung the counterspell across the Port of Madan. Slice by slice, the stifled city cracked open to the flow of the Being once more.

Kori lowered her hands. The waves crashed. The leaves flew. The drumbeat roared through the streets.

Dum, dum, dum da-da-dum. The Madan war dance. Windows creaked open, and wakers saw a threadless sky.

The cart rolled past the last row of roofs, till the masts of the Orsand brigantines rose into view again, pricking the violet sky. They veered to a stop by a boat ramp, where their makeshift sailboat bobbed in the gleaming sea. They leapt from the cart and scrambled down the ramp into the vessel, Kori clinging to Lacar’s arm.

Lacar’s decades of seafaring showed as he ran across the deck, unmooring, setting the sails, reading the wind. He moved as if entranced, or dancing, every step and pull timed with the beat of the faraway drum. He lashed the ropes. He tacked the sail. The wind lifted them out onto the harbour. He tapped his foot and raised a fist as they skirted across the grand dock towards the moored warships.

The foremost ship was the admiral’s vessel, proud and adamant, the octopus of Orsand surmounted on its purple flag. There was a golden woman on the prow, some goddess dignifying the ship with the right to massacre. The cannon maws gaped like eyeless beasts into the amethyst morning, twenty cannons on either side—that gargantuan, godless titan, no souls there but those of the ones it had slain.

Lifting her eyes to meet it, Liss drew in the deepest breath she had taken today.

For a decade of her life, she had wondered if there was more to this explosive talent of hers than coins and hooks, pranks and vandalism. She had wondered what she must do to reach it, what she must become to be worthy of its full glory.

Then she had savoured the briefest taste of something beyond when she had fired the rocket into Ylcor’s head.

Liss stepped onto the central thwart of their unlikely little boat, and her soul reached out to the ship, across those torrents of waves. The war dance thundered on from the land. She wanted to dance. She heard Noma’s hand in every pounding beat.

Ylcor, Glena, and this.

She knew what always awakened her from her self: hatred, hatred deeper than the empire before her.

Washed by the salty ocean gale, she lifted both hands, clenched her fist, and pulled. Pulled on the link between herself and the ship. Between herself and Emperor Milaston. Pulled on the flow of the Being.

A kingdom of fire rose from the hulls, in castles of splinters and smoke. The cannons stared, and then the cannons were blooming into fireballs so bright that all three of them had to turn away. The brigantine deck collapsed into this second sun, masts and rigging, sails eagerly bowing into the blaze.

Then the next ocean breaker tore through its foundering body, and then the task belonged to the sea, as it hungrily pried the vessel in two, dragging its blood-soaked beams into its jaws.

Liss did not know if there were humans aboard that ship. But if there were, there were no survivors.

By the time they had sailed back to land, the streets were awash with light, with the people of Madan. Torrents of rebels tore through the roads, echoing the drumbeat with their shouts and their stomping, banging on empty barrels with the guns of the police. Columns of smoke rose from every street of the administrative district. Everywhere they saw fighters tearing down banners, wrestling the constables, knocking down Orsandin doors with sashes that lived and breathed again.

Upon the statue of Milaston in the city square, they had mounted the three corpses, their blood dripping down the obsidian robes. And in the tower of the port, the beat drummed ever on.

Liss was the first to sprint to its door, eyes searching the milling heads for the entrance—only for her to be tackled from the side with a hug from a familiar pair of arms.

“Noma!” Liss cried out. “I thought you were—” As they sprung apart, she pointed into the tower, at the balcony protruding from its turret.

“I was!” Noma shouted. “Did you hear it? See it? People started to come out through their doors, and then they came into the tower, and now there’s ten, fifteen people taking turns to play—they really did know the beat—I didn’t know it would be so quick—”

“Of course it was!” Lacar laughed. “We learned the beat before we learned to talk! It is like the beat of my heart, right here!” He hammered his chest to the beat as they marched them into the crowd. “Now—there is one thing left to do. We must find the king and bring him to the tower.” He pointed up at the turret. “Oi! Friends! Does anyone know where King Vicola lives these days?”

“Oh, I know! We found him!” screamed a long-haired stranger, head bobbing out of the crowd. “We tied him up at the mill!”

The crowd began to chant—the mill—and buoyed by the chanting, the group of four were ushered into the nearest constable cart. In the vigour of the chanting, and the concerted movement of feet, Liss could see the spark of Madan’s spirit being roused into a pyre by the bellows of the beating drum.