Chapter 322 - 313 — The Writ Still Stands II

Chapter 322: Chapter 313 — The Writ Still Stands II

James did not use the news version.

He went into the public register and pulled the original document, because a reporter’s summary of a thing and the thing itself had turned out to be different often enough this year.

`[CHALLENGER BLOOD WRIT — REGISTERED]`

`[CLAIMANT: CORMAC GANNER]`

`[RESPONDENT: JAMES GANNER]`

`[TERMS: NO SURRENDER]`

`[VICTORY CONDITION: DEATH OF OPPOSING CHALLENGER]`

`[OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE: PROHIBITED]`

`[OFFICIAL OVERSIGHT: REQUIRED]`

`[ENFORCEMENT: DEFERRED — PENDING RESOLUTION OF ASSOCIATED PROCEEDINGS]`

*Deferred.*

Not cancelled. Not void. Not expired.

He had known that. He had been told it at the time in a room with a solicitor in it, told plainly, that the restrictions after England did not make the writ go away and that it would sit there until pursuing it stopped being a thing that would put him in a cell.

He had heard it, and filed it, and then Floor 15 had happened, and Floor 20, and a woman with black wings on a throne room floor, and he had died and come back and buried eleven people and built a company and cleared thirty-one floors.

The line had been sitting on a public register the entire time.

---

"You were building for this," Finn said.

"Yeah."

"Before fifteen. You had a whole thing." He was looking at the register entry and not at James. "You wouldn’t shut up about it for about a month. Ice user, one-on-one, no corpses on the ground to work with, everything you were good at was going to be useless in a clean arena."

"I remember."

"You were seventeen and about Level 17 and you genuinely did not know if you’d survive it."

Neither of them said the obvious next sentence.

James had cleared Floor 31. He had a Fallen Divinity living in his mother’s back room. He had a broken scythe on his back that took Authority apart, a summon that moved under the ground, five contract slots and a stat sheet with fifteen points still sitting unspent in it because he had not been able to decide which kind of monstrous he wanted to be next.

None of that had existed when he signed.

"Don’t," said Finn.

"I didn’t say anything."

"You were about to think it." Finn turned round. "We’ve no assessment on him. None. Not one line of current data. Two years is two years for him as well, and he’s not an idiot, and he’s had every one of those days to look at what you were becoming and decide what to do about it."

"I know."

"So don’t walk into a room deciding it’s free."

James pulled the ops channel up.

"Everything on Cormac Ganner," he wrote. "Registered clears, broadcast footage, disclosed equipment, class registration, any recorded one-on-one. Public and legal only — I don’t want rumours and I don’t want anything anybody has to break a law to get. Chronological."

The acknowledgement came back inside forty seconds.

---

Ganner Corp put its statement out at ten past seven.

The difference in presentation was so complete it was almost funny. Cormac had stood on a step in the daylight with the wind moving his coat. Ganner Corp used a room — grey backdrop, even lighting, the logo placed just off-centre behind the shoulder of a woman James had never seen before who read forty seconds of prepared text.

Ganner Corp had no involvement in the Challenger Blood Writ registered between two private individuals. The matter predated current company leadership. It was not being pursued on behalf of the company, and the company would not be commenting further.

James sat back.

"That’s Adrian."

"What is?"

"All of it." He gestured at the screen. "That’s exactly what he did after Langford. The second it broke, he was out in front of it separating the company from his own father — *personal conduct, not corporate conduct*, said it about six different ways in one afternoon. It’s the only move he’s got and it’s a good one."

Maeve had her arms folded and her head tilted.

"He didn’t deny the writ exists."

"No."

"He couldn’t. It’s on a public register." She frowned at the screen. "But he could have said the family supports Cormac. He could have said nothing at all. He’s gone out of his way, before eight in the morning, to put daylight between his brother and the company."

"Yeah."

James looked at the two statements sitting beside each other on the wall.

One brother standing outside a Bureau office in the wind asking for a death match to be enforced for a missing brother.

The other one, an hour and a half later, in a controlled room, making sure everybody understood that had nothing to do with them.

The first time he had gone up against this family they had owned the money and the company and the room and most of the people in it, and he had been a teenager with a bleeding hand who had walked into the exact trap they built for him.

Now they could not agree on a single position before breakfast.

He did not enjoy it as much as he had expected to.

---

"Right," said Maeve. "The practical question, and I want a straight answer. Do you still intend to fight it?"

James opened the register entry again.

He scrolled to the bottom, past the terms, to where the two signatures sat side by side with a timestamp under them.

His own was terrible. It was the signature of somebody who had not signed many things — too fast, too big, the hand of a person who was still furious and wanted it done before anyone talked him out of it.

He put his finger next to it on the screen and left it there for a second.

"Yeah."

"That’s it? That’s the whole answer?"

"I accepted it," James said. "I’ve never once asked anybody to make it go away. I’ve had two years and about nine solicitors and I could have tried and I didn’t." He closed the file. "It’s on a register with my name on it. If it can legally go ahead, then it goes ahead."

Nobody argued with him.

Ronan did put a hand up.

"Saying yes isn’t the same as walking in tomorrow."

"No, it isn’t."

"Because we know nothing about him. Nothing. And I’ve watched you take an arm off a Level 67 and I’ve also watched you get put into a wall by an ordinary Reaver because you arrived off a Grave Step badly." Ronan shrugged. "A clean arena and one man. You’ve not done one of those in two years."

"He’s right," said Cillian, and then, pointing at the other screen, "and that’s filling up."

The ops pull had started returning.

---

Finn opened the first file, and then the list.

James watched him scroll.

He watched him scroll for longer than either of them expected, and then keep scrolling, and then stop with his hand still on the pad.

"That’s a lot," Finn said.

"How much?"

"Enough that he hasn’t been sitting in a house waiting for you." Finn turned the screen slightly. "Registered activity. A fair bit of it. Recent."

James did not read any of it over his shoulder, because reading three lines out of order was how you built the wrong picture of somebody.

"Chronological," he said. "Class registration first, then floors, then equipment changes, then anything one-on-one. And I want the habits — not what he can do, what he actually does when it’s going badly."

"That’s tomorrow’s job."

"That’s tomorrow’s job."

---

The public was already doing what it did.

It was messier than James expected, which he supposed was fair.

There were plenty of people replaying the punch and pointing out that Cormac had spent eleven minutes that night building a trap and James had walked into it in front of two hundred witnesses — and a lot of those people were saying it in Cormac’s favour, because he had been willing to bet his life on making it work.

There were people saying that allowing this fight now was not a duel, it was an execution with paperwork, and that the Bureau should not sanction it.

There were people saying, at considerable volume, that a Blood Writ was voluntary Challenger law, that two grown men had signed it knowing exactly what the terms were, and that nobody gets to sign for death and then be protected from it because the other man got better at his job.

The Ganner accounts had Derek back in the conversation inside the hour, and the phrasing was careful in exactly the way Cormac’s had been careful — *never explained*, *never accounted for*, *still missing*.

And the Guild Zero side kept putting up the same eleven seconds: Cormac on the floor, bleeding, laughing, saying *no surrender* first.

One clip was outrunning everything else. The punch, the fall, the laugh, the declaration, the acceptance, and then the registry tone over both signatures.

James turned the feed off.

He did it with one movement and did not say anything about it.

---

The legal confirmation came in the middle of the afternoon and it was four paragraphs of nothing much.

The writ remained on record. The restrictions arising from the England proceedings had suspended enforcement, not the instrument. With those proceedings concluded, either party could apply to resume, and the claimant had done so that morning.

The rest was process.

James read it twice and then told the Guild’s legal side what to send back, and made them read it to him before it went.

He was not contesting the writ. He was not applying to have it struck, delayed, reviewed or reduced. He wanted the enforcement date confirmed through the proper channel, the arena conditions specified in writing, and the full permitted-equipment schedule issued to both parties at the same time.

"That’s it?" said the solicitor on the call.

"That’s it."

"Mr Ganner, I’d be failing you if I didn’t say that there are at least three arguments available here that a court would—"

"I know there are," said James. "Send it."

The confirmation went public an hour later as a single formal line, because that was all it needed to be.

*James Ganner intends to honour the Challenger Blood Writ.*

The reaction to that was bigger than the reaction to Cormac’s statement, and James understood why. Everybody had been waiting for one of two things.

Either James Ganner had become too important to be dragged back to a family argument from before he mattered, and would let it die quietly in a legal office.

Or Cormac would come to his senses and quietly stop asking for a death match with the man who had cleared Floor 30.

Neither of them had blinked.

---

By eight in the evening the operations level had emptied out.

The daylight had gone out of the windows hours ago and nobody had put the main lights on, so the strategy room was lit by monitors, pale and blue-white, and the corridor outside the glass was dark except for the exit signs. The ops staff had gone home in ones and twos. Somebody had left a jumper on a chair.

The files kept arriving. A new line appeared on Cormac’s list about every ten minutes and James had stopped watching them arrive an hour ago.

He stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets.

There were two things on the screens in front of him.

The first was Cormac’s file, growing.

The second one, James had not opened. It had come in with the archive pull because it lived in the same records — a folder attached to his father’s estate, sitting there in the returns with a date on it from six years ago.

The Tower payout after his father died. The insurance settlement. The transfer of the estate. The names on the paperwork of the men who had handled all of it for a widow with two children and no idea what any of it meant.

His uncles.

He had not thought about that folder in a long time, and he was thinking about it now for exactly one reason, which was that a Ganner had said his name on television that morning.

He had gone from a boy who could not afford a decent set of boots to a man who had thirty-six thousand Tower Credits sitting untouched because he could not think of anything worth buying, and none of that had unhappened one single thing in that folder.

It was not about money. It had stopped being about money years ago.

James looked at it for a while.

Then he closed it.

One at a time.

---

Finn came back at half nine with a tablet under his arm and did not start explaining anything.

That was how James knew it was serious. Finn Hale had never in his life held a piece of information for longer than eleven seconds.

"There’s enough here," he said.

"Enough for what?"

"Enough that we sit down properly tomorrow. All of us, a full morning, screens up." He put the tablet on the table face down. "Not tonight. If I start now I’ll do it badly and you’ll remember the wrong half."

James looked at the count on the file list.

The Cormac who had knelt on a function room floor with blood on his teeth had been a twenty-two-year-old with a grudge and a good instinct for a trap.

That was two years ago.

Whoever was going to walk into that arena had spent every one of those days knowing exactly who he was going to have to fight, and watching him do it on television.

And the James who had signed that document with a shaking hand did not exist anymore either.

---

The registry notice came through at eleven minutes past ten.

`[CHALLENGER BLOOD WRIT — ENFORCEMENT RESUMED]`

`[JAMES GANNER vs CORMAC GANNER]`

`[TERMS: NO SURRENDER]`

`[VICTORY CONDITION: DEATH OF OPPOSING CHALLENGER]`

`[OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE: PROHIBITED]`

`[OFFICIAL OVERSIGHT: REQUIRED]`

`[DATE: 7 DAYS]`

James read it once.

The last time, Cormac had picked the room, the night, the crowd and the eleven minutes of provocation, and had chosen every single condition of the moment James put his name on it.

James closed the notice.

Then he turned round to the wall where the footage was waiting.