Chapter 72: The Sky Turns Red

Chapter 72: The Sky Turns Red

"Elyra!" Silas shouted.

She didn’t look back. She walked into the middle of the dead garden with her hands loose at her sides, as if she’d spotted a nice flower bed and wanted a closer look. Hunters were already pouring off the eastern tiers toward her.

Then the light changed.

The pale sky over the pit went red. Not sunset red; a deep, dense color like light through a stained-glass window, and with it came heat, sudden and dry, prickling the skin of Silas’s face. Every shadow in the sanctuary swung at once and sharpened. He looked up.

There was a bird above the sanctuary.

It hung over the open mouth of the pit, and its wings spanned the sky from rim to rim, so that the whole sunken bowl lay inside its shadow and its light at the same time. It glowed a deep, smoldering red, bright enough to hurt, like a small sun someone had pulled down out of the heavens and taught to breathe. Silas could see the long feathers at its wingtips moving in a wind he couldn’t feel.

It was a spirit. A manifestation. He knew that. His body didn’t care.

He knew it from the game, too. A red bird model, a sweep of particle effects, a skill icon. He had seen it on a screen fifty times and thought it looked nice.

It did not look nice. It looked like the end of the world.

The bird tilted one wing. A sheet of red heat rolled down across the eastern galleries like a wave breaking, and the hunters on those tiers stopped hissing. Some of them fell. Some of them were simply black shapes that had been moving and weren’t anymore.

"Don’t stare!" Leander shouted. "Slab! Now!"

Silas tore his eyes away and reached for the slab.

It was heavy. Far heavier than the balustrade block, a solid wedge of carved stone pinning the grille shut. He took hold of it with Remote Grasp and lifted, and his reserve dropped like water down a drain. The slab rose an inch. Two. Gareth and Alden got their hands under its edge and heaved with him, Gareth swearing, Alden grunting on his bad leg, and the slab came up and tipped and fell aside with a crash that shook the flagstones.

"Going," Maelin said at Silas’s left shoulder. "Inside."

She stepped into the deep shadow under the gallery and was gone. A moment later her voice came from behind the bars, calm and quick, telling someone to stay down, telling someone else to give her their hand.

Then the ground moved under Elyra.

The flagstones in the middle of the garden heaved upward and split, and something rose out of them. A shell first, wider than a house, ridged and plated like the battlements of an old fort, then a head the size of a cart, ancient and slow-eyed, then legs like pillars. Elyra was standing on the crown of the shell, right at the top, as if she’d been there all along. She didn’t even put out a hand for balance.

The turtle walked. Every step cracked the stone under it. It went straight across the garden toward the northern archway, where the thickest knot of hunters was spilling out, and it simply put itself in the way, a moving wall that the creatures broke against and slid off and could not climb.

One of them tried. It leaped from a fallen pillar onto the shell’s flank and scrabbled up toward the girl standing on top.

The red light behind Elyra threw her shadow forward down the curve of the shell, long and sharp. As Silas watched, the shadow stopped being a shadow. It went black, blacker than anything had a right to be, a hole cut in the world in the shape of a girl. When the climbing hunter crossed into it, an arm came up out of the dark: long, jointed, with fingers that ended in hooked claws. It closed around the hunter, tore it in two as easily as tearing bread, and dropped the halves.

Then it sank back into the shadow, and the shadow was flat again.

All three were using Rank One manifestations. Nim had reduced his own manifestation to enter; size alone didn’t put these spirits above the gate’s limit. Silas understood the distinction perfectly well. Watching them work together still felt like watching someone cheat.

He recognized the three from Elyra’s game arsenal. Almost half of it, brought out because she was bored.

How the fuck is an S-Rank Talent doing this at Rank One?

Across the floor, by Perrin’s column, Silas saw Isolde flinch. Just once, a half-step back, her face going very still. Then she turned and cut down a hunter that had come round the column toward Perrin.

"Tavi!" Leander was shouting. "First one out, take her to the column! Alden, the grille!"

The grille came away. The first captive, a gray-haired woman with one arm held tight against her chest, stumbled out into Tavi’s grip and was half carried, half run across to Perrin’s column. Alden went in after her.

The turtle came around in a slow, grinding curve until its flank stood between the alcove and the northern arch. It settled onto bent legs, lowering its shell beside the rescue. Elyra walked down the shell’s ridges and crouched at its edge to look at Silas below.

Her eyes were bright. Starry, almost.

"Silas," she said. "While I’ve got you. How did you kill Lydia Rooke?"

Three steps away, Gareth was fighting a hunter at the mouth of the alcove. Silas saw him flinch at the name. He grunted, took the creature’s weight on his blade, and his jaw clamped shut so hard the muscle jumped.

Elyra didn’t look at him. "From the reports, she’d planned it. Your room, in the dark, with Burst Motion. A B-Rank Talent, and she was nearly Late Rank One herself. You’d barely formed your Core. Remote Grasp is C-Rank." She tilted her head, honestly curious. "By any reasonable judgment you should have died. So how?"

Silas stared at her. She was asking about Gareth’s dead sister, with Gareth right there, in the same tone she might use to ask how he’d solved a hard exercise. As if Gareth’s grief were furniture.

And Gareth said nothing. He finished the hunter and kept his back turned and said absolutely nothing.

He knows better than to start with her, Silas thought. For once, we agree on something.

"I was lucky," Silas said.

"Lucky," Elyra repeated.

"I’m a C-Rank bearer," Silas said. "A weak one. What else could it have been?"

Elyra looked at him for a long moment. She was beautiful; that was simply a fact, like the color of the sky. Copper hair coming loose, a smudge of dust on her cheek, the kind of face people turned to look at.

"Hmph," she said.

It was a small sound. Frustrated. A little sulky.

Silas’s heart skipped, and it had nothing to do with her face.

An image from one disastrous game route flashed through his mind: Elyra walking out of a burning elven capital. He had no intention of finding out how many evasions it took to exhaust her patience.

"Is this all of them?" Elyra asked, standing up and looking around. "I want to go outside. It smells like an old cellar down here."

The turtle moved off, and her shadow went with it.

Silas let out the breath he’d been holding. When we get out, he thought, I am staying very far away from her.

Maelin’s voice came from inside the alcove. "Silas. I need your light rod. The last one’s not moving."