Foundation of Smoke and Steel

Chapter 202

VivianShe did not know who he was.

That was the part Vivian could not stop turning over, even as she was carried through the corridors of Crescent Hyr in the grip of the man in the dark robe, whose touch drained the warmth from her body and the strength from her channels, and whose pace did not slow no matter what came at him from either side. She did not know him. Not by face, not by name, not by the cut of his robes or the school of his work. He had walked into the great hall like a problem the room had not been built to solve, and she had registered him only as a center of mass that reorganized the room's geometry around itself, and now she was in his arms and she still did not have his name.

What she knew was the sword.

Black, with a devastating aura, like black oil on skin. What she knew was the feel of what he carried, the current that ran under his work like blood under skin. She had felt it the first time he cast a bolt across the hall. She had felt it again when the rappellers came through the high windows. She had felt it most clearly when he reached the place where she had been thrown against the dais and lifted her, and the cold of his hands moved into her ribs and started hunting for the parts of her that were still warm.

Necra.

The word had come up in her education with the weight you would give an especially horrible ghost story. Necra, manifested death-mana, was one of the most dangerous variations of mana there was. It ignored the line between living and dead. It destroyed its users over the course of a lifetime, because the medium ate the very lifeblood of the person wielding it. Her teachers had spoken of Necra as they spoke of demons and the work of the deep north, with the caution educated people keep for things whose existence does not oblige you to meet them. Vivian had not met Necra before tonight. She was meeting it now. It was inside her ribs.

She could not feel her left leg below the knee.

She tried to think about her sword and could not hold the thought still. She had not been wearing Wisper tonight. Wisper had stayed in her quarters, because tonight was a reception and Wisper was a weapon for war, and the blade she had snatched up after the attack lacked the balance and the weight and the answer of Wisper, and it had sent her best techniques off by a hair. She had drawn the borrowed sword when the doors burst inward. She had cut two shadows with it. She had lost it somewhere in the second wave, when one of the deathwalkers took it from her with a strike she never saw. Then the explosion threw her, and it had been sudden and disorienting, and when she came back to her senses she had a dagger off her belt in her hand and tried to bury it in the man in the dark robe as he came within reach, and she was nowhere near landing it before the world picked her up and slammed her into the dais.

The borrowed sword had thrown off her ice. That much was clear to her. The flat of the blade was wrong for the angle she liked for crystallization strikes, the hilt did not carry her mana like her own, and the two seconds of adjustment it cost her in the first exchange never came back.

She should have brought Wisper.

She should have brought Wisper to a reception. She had been embarrassed by the idea, by what it would have said to the imperial delegation, by what it would have said to her husband on a night that was supposed to be political work. She had left the blade in her quarters. Now she was being carried out of the fortress by a man whose Necra was poisoning everything it touched, herself included.

She would not be embarrassed about Wisper at the next reception. If there was a next reception.

The man in the dark robe carried her through the corridor, and Vivian watched, with the strange clarity that came with the cold, as he cut through the people who tried to stop him. A Warden came around a corner and the man sent a bolt through him without turning his head. A pair of imperial advisors trying to evacuate down the side corridor became the second and third bodies to fall. A household servant, a man Vivian had never spoken to but who had brought tea to the lower hall twice, threw himself at the man's side in a desperate untrained attempt to slow him, and the man killed him as casually as brushing past a curtain.

The cold deepened in her ribs.

She tried to think about Anmei and could not bear to.

The last image she had of Anmei was the wave of the detonation lifting her and carrying her into the wall. The image was very clear. She remembered the angle of Anmei's body as it hit the stone, the flame around her hands going out before her shoulders landed, the cry that stopped before she finished sliding down. Vivian had been three paces away and had taken all of it in before her own injury. What she did not know was whether Anmei had drawn a breath after the slide.

She wanted Anmei alive. The wanting was sharp enough to surprise her. She wanted it even though Anmei had been the obstacle to beat not two nights ago, wanted it because Anmei was brilliant and fierce and beautiful, and because she wanted the chance to make sure Anmei knew that Ethan was hers. She did not want him to look back and never have said the things that needed saying, never have worked through feelings that were complicated and no less real for it. Two nights ago Anmei had drawn a line in the sand: the marriage, the rank order of wives, Vivian first. Anmei alive could be second wife. Anmei dead made the question pointless, and Vivian had not wanted it made pointless. She had wanted to win it.

She heard herself think that in the middle of being carried through a corridor by a man whose touch was draining her life, and she scolded herself for it.

Her family.

She could not stop thinking about her family.

Margaret would be terrified. Margaret was probably in the kitchens corridor by now, if Kaelus had moved her in-laws, and Salli Lin would be with her. The twins would be small and quiet. Robert would be fighting his wife for the right to go after the bad guys with his boys. None of them would know what had happened to her. They would not know that the woman in violet who was supposed to be working the room had been picked up by a man in a dark robe and carried out of the fortress through a corridor of bodies. The family would learn it later, as families do, when the fighting ended and someone made the count and Vivian's name landed on the wrong side of the line.

She closed her eyes a moment.

She opened them.

The man in the dark robe was not slowing.

She tried to think about her brothers and the thought came easier. Gavin would be moving. Gavin always moved. Lucas would be calculating where the man was going and working the geometry of how to get there first. Nathan would be loud about it. Her brothers had not failed her in twenty years of being her brothers, and they were not failing her now. She could feel them coming. Not literally, she had no sense for them across the fortress, but she knew it without needing proof. They were behind her.

So was her husband.

She closed her eyes again.

The man in the dark robe carried her out into the main square.

She felt the air change before she opened her eyes. The corridors of the inner fortress had been close and warm and stinking of mana and blood. The main square was cold and open and smelled of stone and of the night that had been waiting outside the walls with no awareness of what was happening within them. The streets that fed the square were oddly sparse, a few people here and there hurrying for their homes, as if they knew the night had turned complicated. The man carried her to the middle of the square and stopped.

He set her on her feet, or something close to it. Her legs held her up like a drunk's, loose in the knee and the hip and the spine. She stayed tethered to him. He turned her to face the pathway he had just carried her through, stepped behind her, drew a blackened sword, and laid the edge of it lightly against the front of her throat.

The blade was warm, which surprised her more than a little. Necra ran warm against her skin and cold against her marrow, and the small point of contact at her throat was almost pleasant, as small warmths are when you have been cold too long.

She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. She wanted to punch this asshole in the face. She liked that last one best.

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She looked around the square as her senses started to return.

The shadow constructs were already in position. They had not come running into the square as the wave in the great hall had. They were simply there, ringing the open space where the buildings met the stones, eight or ten of them standing as still as the man was holding her still, watching the doorway she faced with the same patient blankness the man watched it with through her.

He was waiting.

When he set her down, she had taken him for finished. Now she saw he was only starting, and the difference was the shadow constructs at the perimeter and how still they held.

The pursuit arrived.

Ethan came through the pathway first.

She had braced for many reactions to what was about to happen, and the one she got was the one she had not braced for. It was the flat, unhurried look on her husband's face when he saw her. She had expected panic, or rage. She got neither. He took her in, took in the man behind her, took in the sword at her throat, and his face settled into the expression of a man sizing up a problem he had already decided to solve. The whole transaction took less than a second. She had only ever seen him wear that face for laboratory work.

He stopped at the threshold.

Gavin came in behind him, then Lucas, then Nathan with the Badnelli on his shoulder and a face that was not Nathan's usual face. Karguk was somewhere behind them, and behind Karguk two Iron Tide warriors and what looked like three of Kaelus's wardens and all of the Bowcasters. Prince Alaric and a handful more of the Li cultivators brought up the rear. They spread across the square in a small wary arc, weapons up, every one of them watching the man behind Vivian and the constructs at the perimeter at once, the arc soldiers make when they cannot decide which threat to prioritize because the threats have not yet told them which is real.

The shadow constructs did not move.

The man behind Vivian did not move either.

For perhaps three full seconds, nothing happened.

Then the man behind Vivian spoke.

"Master Zhou."

The voice carried across the square without effort, pitched to reach people who were not paying attention. Vivian felt the words against her ear as much as she heard them across the square. He was speaking to her husband, not to her, but he was speaking from behind her head, and the nearness of the voice was a thing she would remember.

Ethan's posture changed.

She watched it change. He had been set for a fight, every line of him oriented toward the problem he had been about to solve. The voice changed the shape of the problem. The voice was not what he had expected. She saw it in the small shift of his weight onto his back foot: he had not planned on being addressed.

"I have a job," the man behind her said. He said it like another man might say I have a delivery. "It does not concern your wife. It does not concern your brothers. It does not concern the orcs your house has been entertaining, who interest me but sit beneath my contract. It does not concern the royal house, or the prince and princess you seem to keep at your beck and call. My job concerns you. You are a hindrance to a piece of work someone has paid me to complete. I am here to remove you from the work, which means I am here to kill you."

The square was very quiet.

Ethan did not answer. Vivian watched what little of her husband's face she could see at this angle, and watched him do the thing he did when he ran calculations under composure. His face stayed static, but she could see the sums moving. It surprised her that she could read her husband so well. She could see the whole of it happening behind the stillness.

"I will not bore you with details I do not have," the man went on. "I do not know what you are doing here. I do not know why my client wants you stopped. I know only that the work is worth a sum that brought me to this fortress through a ward mesh that should not have let me pass, and that the work ends with you. I am telling you this because I have found, over the course of my career, that the work goes faster when the target understands it is not personal. I have no quarrel with you, Master Zhou. The quarrel is between you and whoever paid me. I am only the instrument."

Vivian listened, and registered, with the cold lucidity the death-mana had left her, that the man behind her was bored. He was not enjoying himself. He was not relishing the moment. He was reciting a script he had recited many times, a professional courtesy worked out for cases where he had a target in earshot and an audience worth quieting. It was a script for closing a transaction. He was telling her husband that this was a transaction.

She decided the boredom was worse than a smile would have been.

"Let her go," Ethan said.

The voice was steady. Vivian heard the strain in it as only a wife hears strain, but she heard it. She did not let her face show what she heard.

"I will," the man said. "When you walk forward."

Ethan's eyes moved.

Vivian saw what he saw. She saw Nathan tense at her husband's left, the Badnelli still on his shoulder. She saw Gavin two paces back, hand on the hilt of a sword he had not drawn. She saw Lucas already gone from the line where he had been standing, off into the geometry of the square she could not see from here. She saw Karguk holding his Pulse at a level that made the stone hum. She watched the others fan out behind.

She saw her husband decide.

Ethan held out his hand to Nathan without turning his head.

Nathan put the Badnelli in it. The moment Ethan's hand closed on the weapon, Vivian saw he was already pumping mana into it.

The man in black raised an eyebrow. She caught it from the corner of her eye.

Ethan brought the weapon across his body like he had held it a hundred times. The barrel came up.

"You're going to let her go," Ethan said. "And you're going to do it right now."

The man behind Vivian did the small thing with his weight she had learned to read as a smile.

"No," he said.

"Vivian, now."

She moved before her mind had finished registering the command, the bad leg turning into an asset as she let it fold under her. She threw her weight backward and to the side in the same motion, and the man was suddenly holding a body that had stopped pulling against him in any direction he had prepared for. His grip slid along her arm. The sword at her throat swung away by a hand's width. She kept the momentum, rolling along the stones, graceless, her body no longer fully hers, three paces, four, the bad leg dragging, and came to rest on her side facing the doorway with the man in the dark robe somewhere behind her and the rest of the world in front.

The man in black made a small surprised sound.

Ethan did not waste it. He fired.

The shot was worse from where Vivian lay. She had been fighting and running and scared the first time Ethan used the weapon, on the Murai, and she had not underestimated its killing power then. She had felt how much magic was packed into the Badnelli, a running joke between her husband and her brothers.

It hit the man in the chest.

She felt the torrent of magic whip past where she had been standing a moment before. The force of the impact traveled through the man in black, and he came apart, all of him, blown to pieces.

A piece of something that had been the inside of his torso landed on the stones three paces to her left, with the wet weight of meat that was death and rot and something worse. She watched the piece dissolve into a fine vapor that the air took and scattered.

The man disintegrated in a shower of bone and meat and power. The destruction was total, and contained to the man alone, and the containment was the terrifying part. Vivian had been around violence most of her life. The sheer audacity of what the weapon did, and how tightly it did it, was unbelievable.

She expected it to be over. She expected the man in black to be a pile on the stones, dead, from where her husband had struck him, and good riddance to him.

She had braced for a heap of meat and blood and bone, the ordinary aftermath of a killing.

What came was not the silence of the dead. It was laughter.

The laughter started as a gurgle and steadily grew stronger. Vivian whipped around in horror.

He was knitting himself back together.

He was using his own Necra on his own body, the same way his servants were built. Vivian had read about practitioners who did this and treated the reading as theory, as one reads about people who walk on lava. Theory, because everyone who tried it died, the death-mana eating through the practitioner faster than the practitioner could feed it back. Theory, because the practice was its own ending. This man had been at it for a long time. She did not know how he was alive. He was alive. The fact of it became the central fact of the square, and she watched her husband's face take that fact in and adjust.

Ethan's hand on the Badnelli did not shake.

"Master Zhou," the man said, picking himself off the stones, the ruin of his body drawing together as though nothing had happened. His voice was unchanged, except for a small shift in pitch Vivian registered as the equivalent of another man clearing his throat. "I appreciate the demonstration. It tells me what I needed to know about the weapon you carry. And about the kind of man you are. You can put it away. We both understand what happens now."

Ethan did not put the Badnelli away.

The man in black got the rest of the way to his feet. He raised the blackened sword and leveled it at Vivian across the distance she had rolled, the point of it steady in the air, the Necra sheeting off the blade visible to her now where it had been at her back before. The threat had not changed. The geometry had. The point of the sword said she was still within his reach, and that was the only reach that mattered.

His off hand came free. Vivian heard the soft sound of cloth as he reached inside his robe, and saw him take something out.

He tossed it.

The object hit the stones halfway between him and where she lay, rolled, and came to rest. It was a small box, no bigger than his palm, made of something that did not catch the torchlight as a normal object would. Its surface was wrong, the same wrongness as the shadows. The box sat on the stones and did not move.

"Nobody in this fortress walks out tonight," the man in black said. "Congratulations, Master Zhou. You have forced me to use something I have been holding for the better part of fifty years."

He looked at the box.

"Access," he said.

The word was not loud. It was not even emphasized. He said it like a man saying the name of a tool he had carried for years and had finally needed.

The square went dark.

The dark was not the absence of light. The torches kept burning. The mana lamps kept their glow. The night sky kept whatever stars it had. The dark was a thing the square was made of now, and it spread outward from the box on the stones in a slow even wave that took the torchlight and the lamp glow and the stars and put them somewhere else.

In the last second before the dark reached her face, Vivian saw her husband.

He was looking at her.

The composure had broken. Whatever was on his face now was a thing she had not seen before, and she committed it to memory, because she did not know if she would see it again.

The dark closed.