Chapter 127: Hostile

The man in the crow mask did not look at Yura.

He came up the lane the crowd had opened and he went past the queues and past the counter row, and his head did not turn once, not toward the woman being held eleven inches off the floor by her throat and not toward the four hundred people watching it happen.

Inside the mask, Theo was having a completely different afternoon.

’Don’t look at her. Do not look at her. If I look at her, he knows I came for her, and then he’s got something to hold.’

But he continued to walk forward.

’Oh gods, what am I doing, what am I doing—’

The boards creaked under him, and he made himself keep the same pace over every one of them. And it was the only sound in the building.

Yura, dying quietly at the top of a pale man’s arm, watched a beak of black-painted wood come on past the third queue and thought, with what she had left:

’...He’s not even stopping.’

Hostile did not turn either. He kept his grip where it was and let the newcomer come, and when the crow mask drew level with his shoulder he put his free arm out across the lane at chest height, the way a man bars a door with a broom handle.

Then he spoke, and he sounded delighted.

"You’re in the wrong building, friend."

The mask stopped.

It turned its head, finally, and looked at the arm in its way, and then at the man attached to it, and said one word in a voice Theo had spent the whole walk from the market getting wrong in his head and finally got right by accident.

"Move."

’...Oh. That came out well.’

Hostile laughed, and did not move.

Afterwards, four hundred people would give four hundred different accounts of the next second and a half, and not one of them would agree on anything except the sound.

There was no flourish. There was no light off the steel. The mask’s right hand came up and went down at about the speed a man reaches for a cup, and Raindrop went through Hostile’s forearm four inches above the wrist and came out the other side and kept going into the boards.

The hand came off.

It hit the floor palm up and lay there with the fingers still curling, and the crow mask stepped over it and carried on walking toward the counter.

Nobody in that Hall breathed.

Hostile stood in the middle of his own silence with his arm ending where it should not end and looked at the stump for a while, and there was no blood in the first second, and then there was a great deal of it.

Then he screamed.

It went up the walls and into the beams and every man in the lounge came off his bench at once, and Yura went out of his other hand and hit the boards on her side and lay there dragging air into herself in long broken whoops.

Bethe got to her before anybody. Bethe would think about that later too.

The pale man came round like something opening.

His spine unstacked itself upward with the bones going off one after another, and the hunch came out of him, and by the top of it he was a head taller than he had been and there was nothing left in his face at all.

Blood ran off the stump and did not slow him down.

"MY HAND."

’He’s not even holding it. He’s not gripping the wrist, he’s just letting it run.’

Theo let the Genesis Eyes come open behind the mask, and the ache came up, and he read the man in the two seconds it took him to cross the floor.

[STATUS]

IDENTITY

Name: Hostile

Age: 44

Race: Human

REALM

Realm: Enhanced

Rank: III

ATTRIBUTES

Strength: 171

Stamina: 190

Agility: 122

Intelligence: 66

FOUNDATION

Constitution: [Ninefold Knitting] — 100%

Circulation: [Bloodwake] — 74.20%

ABILITIES

Skills: [Ninefold Knitting — B] 88.90%, [Bone Ladder — A] 71.05%, [Grip of the Debtor — B] 62.44%

AFFINITIES

Primary

[Flesh — High]

[Note: This subject has been surgically altered]

[Note: Ninefold Knitting is regrowing the severed limb]

’It’s growing back. I can watch it doing it. That is DISGUSTING—’

The stump had already stopped bleeding and there was something pale coming out of the end of it in threads.

Hostile hit him with the good arm and Theo went over a table and through a bench and into the wall of the lounge.

Fighting as somebody else was harder than fighting.

Theo came off that wall knowing it, spitting plaster, with a bench leg lying across his shins.

’Don’t say anything. Theo would say something. Theo would have said four things by now.’

Don’t check on Yura. Don’t ask the crowd to move. Don’t apologise to the man whose table he had just gone through.

’...I really want to apologise to the man whose table I’ve just gone through.’

He got up and did not brush himself off, because the Crow Mask would not have brushed himself off, and that turned out to be the most frightening thing he did all evening.

Hostile came at him across the floor of the Hall and he was fast, and he was very strong, and Bone Ladder went up his good arm in a row of white spurs that came out through the skin at the knuckle and the elbow and the shoulder.

Theo did not use the Fragment.

He thought about it. He wanted it. And a suit of living obsidian was the one thing in this world that three people in this room had already seen on a man called Theo, and so he left it where it was and went in with four feet of steel and a market mask and nothing else at all.

He parried the first two on the angle, the way he had learned it off a Warden.

The third he did not parry. He let it come and took it across the ribs and did not move his feet, and the whole Hall heard the impact, and the man in the crow mask stood exactly where he had been standing.

’Kinetic shock. Thank you, Warden.’

Hostile’s head came down and to the side, and something went out of his face.

Then Theo used the dark.

It came up out of the boards under the lounge tables and out of the shadow of the counter row and off the underside of the postings board, and it went round Hostile’s ankles and set like cold tar, and the man’s next step did not go where he had sent it.

He came down on one knee.

Over by the wall, on the floor, with her throat swelling and her nails split back into the beds, Yura stopped breathing on purpose for a second.

’That’s the same shadow.’

Her whole chest hurt, and she went on watching it anyway.

’That’s the boy. That’s the boy who gave me a core.’

She got a hand over her own mouth and kept it there.

Theo took the second hand at the elbow.

He did it while the man was kneeling, and he did it the same way as the first, without any hurry, and the arm came off and the white spurs of Bone Ladder went out one by one along it on the floor.

Then he crouched down in front of Hostile the way he had crouched in front of Donzo Varrdia, and he made himself do it slowly, and he said nothing.

Hostile got there on his own.

"You have no idea. You have absolutely no idea what you’ve walked into, boy."

’Boy. Right. So I sound young. Note that.’

"There are nine more of me." Hostile was grinning up at the beak with his teeth full of blood and both arms ending early. "Nine, on this floor. And I am the smallest thing they own, do you understand that? I run errands. I collect."

The Hall had gone quiet in a completely different way. Nobody was watching the fight any more. They were watching the door.

"Ten floors." Hostile’s voice was going up. "Every core taken on ten floors comes to us or the party that took it stops registering. Ask your Hall. Ask the counter. Ask why the board still has Varrdia’s name painted on it this morning when the whole square knows what he is."

’He’s not wrong. That’s exactly the part I couldn’t work out.’

"Varrdia bought his paper from us. Every one of those girls carries a debt he holds and we underwrite, and that is why they came back, and that is why they will keep coming back, and it is why nobody in this room has moved."

The threads at the end of his arms were still working.

"Now." Hostile got his shoulders straight, on his knees, with no hands. "Take that mask off and tell me your name, and I will only take one thing off you when I come back."

Theo stood up.

He had a whole speech in his head and he threw all of it away, because Theo Chadwick made speeches and the man in the crow mask had said one word all evening.

’Alright. Here we go, and if this doesn’t work I’m going to have to fight the entire building.’

He said it into a Hall of four hundred people, flat, without any weight on it at all.

"Sky’s Husband."

[High Reputation has been applied]

[Towerians Likability has increased tremendously]

The building came apart.

It did not go quiet this time. It went the other way entirely, a noise coming up off four hundred people at once, benches going over, men who had spent the last minute studying their own hands standing up so fast they knocked their drinks across the boards. Somebody at the back shouted the name. Somebody else shouted it louder.

The bushy-bearded attendant behind the counter said oh and sat down.

And Hostile, on his knees with two arms ending early and nine more of him somewhere on this floor, finally stopped grinning.