Chapter 230 Judge Your Future

Malik listened for it, trying to find any part of it, but nothing was there.

Nothing watched.

The lowest drawer of his Divine Kingdom lay open and empty.

’I no longer have Him watching over me.’

It should have felt like freedom.

In some ways it did, but that freedom carried something else with it, and he made himself look at it directly.

What he looked at made him pause, for it was a wall so large that it seemed unending.

Perhaps IT was truly unending.

He shook his head slowly.

’I cannot face it alone. Not even now.’

It was a hard sentence to think. He was an Angel. He had Angel’s strength in every muscle and every Rune, all unlocked and ready for him to use.

Before this, he turned the Order’s finest to ash in minutes, but now he could do it in seconds.

And yet he knew in his bones what the thing at the end of this road looked like.

IT wore the whole world, influencing all and controlling them as it pleased.

Malik could kill Angels, but he could not kill that.

The world was far too much for him to end.

He needed help, allies, and they would have to come from beyond the Angel Class.

Anything below that line would be swept away by the first wave of what was coming.

He did not know where to find such people, at least those not influenced by IT. He did not even know whether they existed. But the thought sat in his chest, and he knew it would stay there until he did something about it.

Later.

Malik lifted his head and breathed in.

For the moment, there was a smaller question, and it was the one he could answer.

’Why here?’

The True Sultan had not sent him to this place on a whim.

He did not strike Malik as a man who did anything on a whim.

A boost to Ascension could have been delivered anywhere, on a sack of barley or a bed of ash.

There had to be another reason, something this particular floor of this particular House held that the old man wanted him to see.

Malik rolled his new shoulders and started walking.

Heaven did not make noise.

His boots touched the pearl-colored cloud and left no sound.

The fountains rose in their slow ribbons and fell without a splash.

It was a place that had been built to be looked at, and it did not seem to expect a visitor to walk through it and wonder.

He wondered anyway.

It was a strange thing to be doing.

He had spent his entire life believing that Hell was the only home that would ever have him.

It was a warm, cruel, stubborn place that kept its promises. He had walked its gates twice already.

He had pulled a sword out of its root and left a fire in its sky.

He knew its smell, its bones, and its hunger.

Heaven had never been an option.

It had always been a story, something other people got.

The kind of place that opened its doors for saints and children who died quickly. Not for a boy who had grown up on a stick for a cane. He had not even thought of it as a place.

It was a word, like mercy, that lived at the far end of a prayer he did not utter.

And here he was, standing on it.

Malik passed a terrace hung with silver flowers, a low bench carved from a single piece of white stone, and a pool of water so clear that it seemed to have no depth at all.

Nobody sat on the bench.

Nobody swam in the pool.

He walked through colonnades that had been emptied of footsteps a very long time ago.

Once, he thought he caught a movement at the edge of his vision, a flicker of white, perhaps a hem of cloth.

When he looked, there was nothing.

He did not like the feeling it gave him.

But, of course, he kept going.

It was several minutes before he saw something worth stopping for.

The colonnade opened onto a wide round plaza paved in pale stone. At the center stood a fountain with no water in it, and around the fountain was a ring of statues, each one carved with the same cold perfection as the pillars.

They were tall and slender, robed, with their faces turned toward a sky that did not seem to be looking back. Most of them were so worn by time that their features had blurred.

Malik passed them without a glance.

Then he reached the last one in the ring.

It was different.

A woman, carved in the same white marble, but the stone around her was cleaner than the rest, as though someone had polished it only yesterday.

She stood on a low plinth with her feet together and her head slightly bowed.

A long robe fell around her in folds so finely cut that he could almost see them move.

A strip of stone cloth was tied across her eyes, knotted at the back of her head, with its two ends hanging over her shoulder.

In her right hand, held out and a little below the level of her heart, she carried a scale.

It was a plain balance.

Two shallow dishes hung from a crossbar by thin chains, perfectly level, perfectly still.

Nothing rested in either one.

Light slid across the polished marble of the pans and gathered there, as if the empty dishes were waiting for something to be placed on them.

Malik stopped in front of her.

The name of what once was his Class sat in the back of his mind.

Balancer of Scales.

Malik had paid a continent’s worth of fear to claim it, and he had never once wondered where the name had come from.

He read the plinth.

Carved into the stone beneath her feet, in letters worn smooth by hands that had touched them for a very long time, was a single line:

[Judge Your Future.]