Foundation of Smoke and Steel

Chapter 203

DanielThe path to the man in black was made of servants, and Daniel went through them one at a time.

There were more of them than there should have been. He had counted, in the great hall, the ones that had come apart under Vivian's ice and Anmei's fire, and the count had told him the man in black was running low. The count had been wrong. The man in black had been holding a reserve. It was smart tactically, of course, and it was quickly getting on Daniel's nerves. That reserve, coupled with the oncoming demons, stood between Daniel and the gate in a loose line that re-formed every time Daniel cut through it.

That was fine.

He had said it to himself once already tonight and he said it again now, because it was true and because saying it kept his hands steady. He had spent six months on the practice ground with Nathan and the Li sword masters learning the thing he was about to need.

Manipulating the mana in the sword. Oh, and patience. He was going to have to learn some patience.

The first servant came in high. Daniel let it come. He read the line of the curved knife the way Nathan and his instructors had taught him, reading the shoulder behind the blade rather than the blade itself. He stepped inside the arc the shoulder promised and put Qinglan's Silence through the thing's middle before the knife had finished its travel. The mana that poured from Qinglan's Silence tore the servant apart. He was already moving when the halves hit the stones.

The second came low, fast, a gut strike meant to fold him. Daniel did not fold. He turned his hip out of the line, let the knife pass through the space his body had just left, and brought the blade down across the back of the servant's neck on the follow-through. He did not stop to watch it fall. There was no time to watch anything fall. The cannon fodder demons were coming in after him, two of them out in front.

He took those two together.

That was the thing he had not been able to do six months ago. Six months ago he had been a man with a sword he did not deserve, swinging it out of obligation and fear. Now he stood in the middle of a demon flood with minions closing from slightly different angles, and he did not panic, and he did not retreat, and he did not try to take them one at a time when one at a time was not on the table. He took the angle that made them a line instead of a pincer, made the nearer one screen the farther one, and cut the nearer one down into the path of the farther one so that the farther one had to break stride. The break in stride was all he needed. He stepped through the gap and ended it.

Ethan said.

It was not a small thing for Ethan to say. Ethan did not hand out approval. Ethan handed out corrections, and the absence of a correction was, from Ethan, a kind of praise Daniel had learned to hear.

Daniel said, and cut down the next one.

He was aware that the square had started to watch him. He could not afford to look, but he could feel it the way you felt sunlight on the side of your face, the shift in attention, the small clearing that opened around the white blade as the demons learned what the starforged steel did to the darkness. The demons gave him room because their bodies had decided to. The defenders gave him room because they had decided he was the part of the line that did not need help, and a fighter who did not need help was a fighter you freed up to be somewhere else. He felt the weight of being watched and set it down, because it did not help him cut, and cutting was the job.

Then, off to his left, Lucas went down.

Daniel felt it before he saw it, the way he had felt Kaelus, the small wrong note in the music of the fight. He turned his head a fraction, which was all he could spare, and he saw it in pieces. Lucas, who focused on economy in every motion, had been holding a seam between two knots of cultivators, doing the quiet surgical work that kept the two lines from getting overwhelmed. He was overextended. One of the demons had gotten a claw past his guard. Daniel saw the result but not the strike. He saw Lucas fold around his own middle, saw the dark spread fast across the front of him, saw the precise economical body stop being precise because the things that had held it precise had just been opened.

Daniel could not go to him. There were four servants and probably a dozen demons between Daniel and the gate, and a square full of people who would die if the gate stayed open, and Lucas was forty feet the wrong direction.

He did not have to go.

Gavin was already there, followed by Prince Alaric.

Daniel caught it in the edge of his vision, the part of him that tracked everything while the center stayed on the blade. Gavin, who moved, who always moved, who had been a blur at the edge of the square all night, was suddenly not a blur. He was a fixed point with his arms around his brother, hauling Lucas backward out of the line by main strength, and two Li cultivators and Prince Alaric were closing the seam Lucas had left, one of them putting his body between the brothers and the demons so Gavin could get Lucas clear.

Ethan said, reading the thing Daniel could not stop to read.

Daniel believed him because he had to. He turned back to the gate.

More cultivators and civilians, who had come out with their spears and their bravery and not much else, were falling. Things were breaking down. More and more demons were coming out. Daniel kept fighting, burning through his own mana reserves. People could not last in here. Even Nathan had gone quiet, the Badnelli's report long since fallen silent.

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They did not have to wait long. That was when the light changed.

It came from behind him, from the direction of the pathway he had come through, a warmth at his back that was not heat. The dark that had spread from the box, the dark that the man in black had made the square out of, the dark that had been pressing in at the edges of every torch and lamp all this time, began to recede. Daniel felt it go the way you felt a fever break. The pressure that had been sitting on the square lifted at one edge and kept lifting, the dark pulling back toward the gate as though something had told it that it was not allowed to be here, and the light the dark had pushed somewhere else came back into the places it had been pushed out of.

He risked the glance. He had to know what was at his back.

Yu Meishan stood in the mouth of the pathway with her hands open at her sides and her eyes open, covered with a film of bright green mana. No pupils could be seen, just the glow of magic that poured out of her, intense, and the air around her was bending toward her, thick with a presence that was not hers but traveled with her. Yu Meishan, and whatever traveled with her, was folding back the dark, pushing it away from her and the cultivators in a slow steady retreat like fire retardant spread over a wildfire. She was not alone in the way that mattered. Daniel could not see the thing beside her. He could feel it, the separate weight of it, the attention of something old and not human and entirely on her side. She breathed out, and the dark gave another foot of ground as that same great magic pierced it.

The darkness pushed back, trying and failing to keep the green magic at bay. Then that magic touched him, and Daniel suddenly felt lighter, which was a good thing, because more demons, bigger demons, were starting to come through the gate. It was expanding in size.

This was not good.

Daniel looked back toward Yu Meishan. Behind her in the pathway, he saw the others. Ryan, white-faced, a training sword in his hand and blood on his sleeve, alive. Sophie's handmaiden, Elizabeth, small and grim. Li retainers with their weapons up. With the additional forces, they were gaining ground, but more were coming through the gate.

"Daniel!"

Daniel almost froze as he heard his name. No, that couldn't be right. Nobody knew his white name.

And Marissa.

Marissa should not have been able to walk. Marissa had been in the hospital wing with the demonic corruption eating its slow way through her, too sick to be moved, but she was here, in the mouth of the pathway, on her feet, and her eyes were lit from the inside with the same gold that had been around Sophie and Alaric, the same gold he had no name for.

And she had just called his name.

She found him across the square. She found him, and her eyes locked onto him with such intensity that he was taken slightly aback despite fighting his way through the demon horde. She started toward him.

He turned back to the gate because the minions were getting larger, six, eight, ten feet tall, with huge spears and clubs.

He did not see the servant on his flank.

It was the failure of his own distraction, the anxiety of hearing his name coming through and widening the blind spot. He had both hands on the steel, all his focus on the channel, the whole of him poured into the thing in front of him, and the cost was the thing beside him. The servant came from the right, from the seam where his attention could not reach because his attention was spent, and the curved knife was already moving toward the gap under his arm where the ribs did not cover, and Daniel knew, in the cold instant the math gave him, that he was not going to get the blade back in time.

Marissa got there first.

She did not have a weapon. She did not slow down. She crossed the last of the distance between them in a motion that her broken body should not have allowed and put herself into the space between Daniel and the demon-corrupted knife, her back to the servant, her front to Daniel, and the curved knife that had been meant for the gap under his arm went into her back instead.

Daniel felt the impact through her. He had his free hand on her shoulder before he knew he had moved, the blade still in his other hand finishing the servant on pure reflex, the white edge taking it apart, and then there was nothing between him and Marissa except the fact of the knife in her and the gold in her eyes and the small surprised sound she made that was not pain, or was not only pain.

"Marissa—"

"It's all right," she said.

It was not all right. He could see that it was not all right. The knife had gone in deep and the dark of the blood was already spreading and her face had the slack quality of a body that had been asked for more than it had. But she said it the way you said a thing you had decided was true regardless of the evidence, and she put her hand on the back of his neck, a soft, intimate gesture, something completely out of place in the blood-soaked carnage of the fight, and pulled him down.

She kissed him.

It was not a kiss that asked for anything.

Daniel would understand that later, after dark nights and fevered dreams. He did not even really remember the kiss itself. In the moment it was only warm, shockingly warm, the warmth of the gold that had been in her eyes pouring out of her and into him through the single point where her mouth met his, and the warmth did not stop at his mouth. It went down. It went through. It went into him the way water went into dry ground, fast and total and without asking permission, and Daniel felt something open inside him that he had not known was a door.

The square went away.

It was the opposite of how the darkness had invaded the square. The square was still there, the demons were still there, the white blade was still in his hand. But the center of him, the part that had been Daniel-and-Ethan in one body for all these months, the part that did the math and held the blade and counted the servants, that part fell suddenly through the open door into a space that was vast in a way the square could not be vast, a space with no walls, lit gold from a source he could not find.

Ethan said, and for the first time since the dark had closed, Ethan sounded afraid.

Daniel did not know.

He did not know what the gold was. He did not know what Marissa had put into him or where it had come from or why she had been the one to carry it. He did not know that a woman in a hospital wing had been shown two men on a bridge that should not exist, or that the passage had to be reciprocal, or that a bridge had to be anchored on both ends. He knew none of the things the gold was the answer to.

He knew that Marissa was sagging against him with a knife in her back and her warmth pouring out of her into him, and that her eyes, when he pulled back to look at them, were still gold, and still finding him, and still, impossibly, certain.

"Daniel," she said. She said his name. She said the name that no one in this world used, the name only Ethan knew, the name that lived under the name Ethan wore, and she said it like she had always known it. "You have to finish it. Tell Ethan, if he's there, that I love him."

Daniel's voice cracked as the gold filled up every part of his being.

"He already knows."

Marissa went limp.

Daniel stood up, and for the first time in a very long time, he felt... rage.