Chapter 185: The Radiant Blade

(James Vellaroux POV)

The cairn was exactly what she had promised: a pile of rocks, waist high, below the crest at the far end of the approved ground.

Sophie climbed onto it before either of our guards could object, faced back along the ridge toward the lookout, and waved with both arms.

"She can’t see you," I said.

"How do you know?"

"Because I can’t see her."

Sophie turned and looked properly. Where the platform should have been, there was only the shoulder of the ridge, a long fold of dry grass and stone between us and the lookout.

"Oh," she said. "The schedule’s lying."

"The schedule’s lying."

"She’ll be so pleased."

She would be. Elizabeth enjoys being right more than anyone I know, and she is right more often than anyone deserves to be. Somewhere on the other side of that fold, she was probably writing it across the map in capitals.

Sophie waved anyway, on principle.

The whistle came over the fold while she was still waving.

One long call.

Both our guards turned toward it. The nearer one put up a flat hand without looking at us. "Hold."

I held.

Two nights ago, Renn had stood at the end of a table covered in seating plans and told us that if anything happened in the signing chamber, we would stay where we were put.

Three of us had said yes at once. Alash had said it eventually. I had been one of the three.

The signing was over, and this was a ridge, not a chamber. The call meant the same thing anyway, and I had already said yes once.

From the direction of the gate, a second long call answered the first. Renn.

The first call had come from over the fold, and so had everything I cared about. Alash and Daphne were back there at a low wall, and Elizabeth was on the platform, and I couldn’t see any of them.

My father taught me to hold a position. He taught it the way he taught everything, by making me do it until I stopped asking why. A position you leave because you’re frightened is a position somebody else has to cover.

I held, and kept looking at the fold.

My hand had gone to my chest. I noticed it there and took it away. On the walk out, she had told me to stop asking my channels whether they would answer, and I wasn’t going to let her be right twice in one afternoon.

Sophie climbed down off the cairn and stood beside me. She didn’t say anything for a while, which for Sophie amounts to a speech.

"It could be anything," she said at last.

"It could."

"It could be a sprained ankle."

"Renn doesn’t hold the whole ridge for an ankle."

She didn’t argue. Sophie notices when people are tired and when they’re frightened, and she has never once pretended not to. She stood close enough that our sleeves touched and looked at the fold with me.

I counted my breaths, because my father taught me that too, and lost count somewhere past twenty.

Then two short calls came over the fold.

Regroup.

"Walk, my lord," said our guard, before I could do anything else. "Regroup is a walk."

I walked. I walked faster than he did, and he let me.

The lower path ran back along the inner side of the ridge, below the crest, toward the fork under the lookout. Sophie half ran beside me. The fold slid past on our left, and then it ended, and I could see the platform.

It was empty.

There were people at the top of the steps, five or six of them, and one of them was Renn.

He stood very straight with one arm out in front of him and his palm flat against nothing at all, like a man feeling for a wall in the dark, in the middle of the afternoon, and finding it.

We went up the steps. Our guards came with us, and nobody told us to stop.

The older guard who had walked out with Elizabeth was standing beside Renn, and his face was grey. One of the others, a younger man holding his arm stiffly against his side, was talking very fast to nobody in particular.

"...walked straight into it, sir, his lordship and Lady Spinster both, and they didn’t come out, and before that Her Highness, she was at the parapet and then she..."

I didn’t hear the rest.

I heard Her Highness, and then for a moment I didn’t hear anything at all.

I looked at the platform.

It was twenty paces of old flagstones in the afternoon light, with a low parapet at the far end and nothing on any of it. I could see every stone.

I could feel the distance between where I stood and the middle of it, the particular shape space takes when it is waiting to be folded.

I have been able to feel that for as long as I can remember. One step, and I would be standing in the centre of that platform.

I had already shifted my weight onto the foot I always jump from.

Sophie’s hand closed on my arm.

She didn’t say permanent. She had been in the room when Lena said probably, the same as me, and she knew that word had never stopped anyone.

"Worse," she said.

That was the one that stopped me, because it was the true one. Nobody could promise me anything about my channels except which way they went every time I used them.

And Elizabeth would never forgive me. She would be right not to.

I put my weight back on both feet.

"Commander."

Renn didn’t take his palm off the wall. He turned his head and looked at me, and then at Sophie, and I watched him count us.

"They walked through," I said. "Alash and Daphne. We might be able to."

"I know what they did."

He looked at the empty platform, and then at his own hand, flat against nothing. I could see him weighing it.

On one side were two students who might walk through a wall he couldn’t. On the other were three of his charges already beyond it, and one of them was the First Princess.

It took him perhaps two breaths.

"Bring her out," said Renn.

I stepped forward. Where Renn’s hand stopped, mine went on through. Sophie came through beside me.

The wind stopped.

The platform was gone. In its place stood the wreck of something I had seen exactly once before, in the old training hall at the palace. Walls folded over walls, with pillars locked into the gaps between them, and narrow corridors that had been made on purpose.

Half of it had come down. The rest leaned at every angle, scorched and cut, with dust still hanging over it.

I knew what it had cost her to build. I had caught her when it ended.

I wasn’t surprised. I was afraid, which is different, and much worse.

She was against what was left of the parapet, and Alash was kneeling over her. His hands were full of light, and the light was green.

The last time I had been that close to Alash’s light, it had turned the floor of a training hall gold under the two of us, and I knew exactly what had come after the gold.

This was green. Ordinary, healing green. I had never been so glad to see anything ordinary in my life.

Then I saw what was coming toward them.

It was longer than a horse and low to the stone, and it moved as if it had more joints than it needed. Pale lines ran under its dark hide. One foreleg dragged.

It was coming round a heap of fallen stone toward the three of them, without any hurry at all.

Daphne stood between it and the other two with her hands up, and her hands were shaking.

Every few steps one of its limbs grew suddenly too heavy to lift, and the creature lurched and dragged it. Then it hauled the limb up and kept coming, slower each time, like something wading through deep mud.

Sophie was already moving.

She has always noticed when people are about to fall over. She didn’t run at the creature. She ran to Daphne, and the flagstones went white ahead of her as she came.

Frost raced across the stone and closed under the creature’s forelimbs. Its front feet stopped as though the ground had taken hold of them, and the ice climbed its legs to the first bend and locked there.

"Let go," Sophie said. "I’ve got it. Let go."

Daphne let go. I saw her shoulders drop as she released the weight, and I saw what it cost her to trust somebody else with it.

The creature leaned against the ice. The ice cracked. Sophie put more into it, and it held, for now.

My sword was at my hip. I left it there.

At Zenith, everyone had seen my Light run along a sword. It gathers on the steel and blazes, and it cuts deep, and anyone in the hall can see it coming. This needed the opposite.

I drew the knife from my belt.

Elizabeth saw. From the ground, past Alash’s shoulder, she saw the knife in my hand, and her lips moved on my name and nothing else. She knew what came next. She had seen it once.

I didn’t let the Light run along the knife. I let it go in.

All of it, everything I could gather, went down into a few inches of steel that had no room for it, until there was nowhere left for it to go but forward.

It came out past the edge as a single line, deep gold, running a forearm’s length beyond the point.

It hardly glowed. Light pressed that small stops shining outward. It only cuts.

A sword gives Light room to spread. A knife gives it almost none, and the less room it has, the finer it gets. Nobody at Zenith had ever seen it. I had never needed it there.

It was already draining me. It pours out as fast as I can pour it in, and I had a few heartbeats of it, a few strikes at most.

The creature’s head was turned toward Daphne. It began to come round toward me, toward the centre of my chest, and by then I was inside its reach.

I put the line into its shoulder, above the frozen leg.

It didn’t cut across the hide. It went in. I felt it burn its way into the dark beneath the skin, and under my hand the pale lines flared so violently that the whole creature lit up from inside, white and branching.

The gold went in among them, and didn’t cut a single one.

***

(Alash Vortex POV)

I saw it from where I knelt. A line of deep gold, so thin I nearly missed it, went into the creature’s shoulder, and the whole body lit white around it.

I had never seen James do that. From Elizabeth’s face, she had.

[Demonic energy detected.]

’That thing is demonic?’

[Its energy is demonic. I cannot classify it.]

I had heard the System say demonic before. It had said it about Garron, years ago.

But Garron had been a bear, a beastkin like any other. The System had thought the demonic energy in him most likely came from the blood of a demonic beast, drunk after the kill, and I had never found a better answer.

Either way, the corruption had been in him. It hadn’t been what he was.

I didn’t know what this was, and neither did the System. It had found demonic energy the moment James’s Light went in, and then it had stopped there, because it couldn’t tell me what the rest of the creature was.

Back then, the System had said it was possible that low-level demonic beasts had slipped through a tear. Small, weak things, if they had come at all. The tear was mine.

This was not small.

I checked the countdown, as you check a lock you know you locked. It was still there in the corner of my status, still counting down in years and months. If the System was right, the shield was still standing.

Then a thing like this had come through it anyway.

I didn’t know how. I didn’t know whether the tear had grown, or whether something had found a better way to use it.

I only knew that when I was a child, the System had told me to stop being lazy and prepare for exactly this, and I had mostly slept.

I didn’t say any of it. There was nobody on that platform I could say it to.

The creature tore its forelimbs out of Sophie’s ice and recoiled, with smoke rising from the wound in its shoulder. The hide around the burn had begun to creep inward, and it was creeping slowly.

James stood where it had left him, with the knife still in his hand. His hand was shaking.

The creature’s head came up.

It turned to Elizabeth. It turned to me, and to Daphne, and to Sophie beside her, and to James.

Then back across all five of us, and back again, and it could not settle on any of us at all.

It was burned, and it didn’t know where to look. It was also alive, and it was still standing between us and the edge of the ridge.

I looked down at Elizabeth’s channels under my hands, raw from palm to shoulder, and thought about the one thing I knew that made a body’s own time run faster.