Chapter 393 — Wrath Remembers Death I

James hit black stone shoulder first.

He hit it hard enough that everything went white for a second. When it came back he was on his side with the scythe still locked in his hand, because his fingers had not let go of it through the whole transfer, and his body was telling him very clearly that it did not want to get up.

`[HP: 239 / 2,048]`

`[AUTHORITY RELEASE — 00:19:38 REMAINING]`

*Count.*

He got his head up.

Finn was down on one knee with Ronan's arm still over his shoulder, lowering him to the floor rather than dropping him. Ciara had caught herself on one hand. Mara's staff had skidded away from her across the stone, and she lunged after it on her knees. Cillian was standing and swearing. Declan was standing and silent. Ren had landed on his feet with his hand on the scabbard, as if he had never been anything else. Maeve was already moving. Darragh had his shield up out of habit. Alice's wings were still half round James, so all eleven of them were there.

*Health.* His own was the worst on the floor. Ronan's was close behind.

*Exits.* He could not see any yet.

He started to push himself up.

"Don't," said Maeve.

She was on her knees beside him with her hand flat on his chest before he had got his elbow under him. "Lie there. You're the only one who can cut it. If you die, we've got nothing."

She did not spread it round. She put everything she had in her hands into him at once.

`[RADIANT PULSE — TARGET: JAMES GANNER]`

`[HP: 839 / 2,048]`

The light went into his ribs and the worst of it closed up. Not all of it. He still felt it when he breathed in.

Maeve was already gone, across to Ronan, putting what was left into him.

James sat up slowly and looked at where the Tower had put them.

---

It was a hall. It was the biggest hall he had ever seen, and it had been a court once.

It was all black stone now, but the pale had not quite gone out of it. Under the scorch there was white in the old carving, and in places a line of dulled gold ran along a step or the edge of a column. The columns went up into darkness he could not see the end of. Half of them had split from top to bottom, cracked by some heat a long time ago, and some had come down and lay across the floor in pieces as big as cars.

The floor was carved with channels.

There were not four or eleven of them, as on the floors before. There were hundreds, running in from every wall, all bending the same way and running the whole length of the hall to the far end. There, up a long flight of steps, stood a raised platform with a seat of judgment on it.

There were galleries up both sides of the hall, broken balconies under the columns. The middle was long and open. The air smelled of burnt metal and old ash, with something sharp under it that caught at the back of his throat every time he breathed.

Then he saw that they were not alone.

There were demons under the platform in ranks.

They did not mill about or snarl, the way things on the lower floors did. They stood in order. The heavy ones were at the front, thick-bodied and broad, with weapons like slabs. Behind them stood lines of leaner, faster shapes, perfectly still. Up in the broken galleries, winged things crouched along the edges of the balconies with their wings folded.

There were hundreds of them, and every one was facing the same way, toward the platform, waiting.

Under James's hand the channel in the floor moved.

The last of the red from Floor 39 came through. It ran past him through the stone, a thin bright current that raced away across the hall between the demon ranks and up the steps of the platform, and into the figure that was standing there.

Beside him, Alice had gone completely still.

---

It was the same face.

James had stared at that face on a screen in his mother's front room and on a dead man's stream. It had the hard clean jaw and the straight nose, and the long dark hair falling loose past the jaw.

But next to this, the Echo had been unfinished.

His wings were enormous. They were black, but it was not the clean black that had come together out of the red in the middle of Floor 39. They were old. The feathers were scarred, and their edges were burnt brown and ragged. They looked like wings that had been through a fire and kept going for a very long time.

The red did not sit under his skin like stitching. It started deeper than that. James could see it through old scars at his throat and across his chest. It came up from somewhere inside him and branched out down his arms and into the roots of his wings, as though it had grown there.

The Echo had worn a cracked dark ring. This one had the remains of the real thing. Behind his head pieces of a halo hung in the air with empty space between them. Each piece had gone dark round the edges, but there was still gold in the middle of them. It was dim and old, but it was gold.

His armour was pale metal, older than anything James had ever seen, blackened by war almost all the way across. Gold still showed along the broken edges.

The Echo had looked like something assembled out of Wrath's Authority. This looked like the place the Authority had come from.

He did not attack.

He looked across the hall at them, and James felt it pass over the raid like a hand over a table. It skimmed Finn and Ronan and Ciara and did not stop on any of them.

It stopped on Alice.

His face changed. It was a small change, but it was a real one, nothing like the Echo's.

"Lust," he said.

His voice was quiet and very clear. It carried the length of the hall without his raising it at all.

"Turiel," said Alice.

They looked at each other across two hundred metres of black stone. James had the strange feeling of standing between two people who had known each other for longer than his country had existed.

Turiel's eyes moved off her face and down, and James saw him find it. It was the bond, the thread that tied Alice to James.

Something went across Turiel's face that was very close to contempt.

"A tether," he said. "On you. On one of the Seven." He said it as if it were an obscene word. "I heard you had fallen a long way. I didn't think you had fallen *under* anyone."

"I'm standing where I mean to stand," said Alice.

"You're standing where you've been put."

"No," she said. That was all she said.

Turiel looked at her for a moment longer. Underneath the contempt there was something old and tired, the way people look at someone they used to know.

Then his eyes went to the scythe.

---

That changed him far more than Alice had.

He stood up from the seat for the first time. He came to the front of the platform and looked down at James, straight at him, as if nobody else in the hall had ever existed.

The calm was still there, but there was something harder under it now.

"Death," he said.

James did not say anything.

"I knew the one who carried that." Turiel's eyes were on the blade. "I knew him well. Heaven sent him when it had decided judgment was over. When there was nothing left to weigh, only the sentence to carry out. He was the end of the argument." His mouth moved. "And now a mortal brings him to my door, in pieces."

"I never knew him," said James.

He did not dress it up. He did not know enough to.

"The Tower gave me a class. The scythe came with it. I didn't take it off anyone. I'm not him."

"He isn't," said Alice. "I've met them both, and they're not the same."

"You carry him," said Turiel.

"I carry a weapon."

"You carry *him*. You called on Death and wielded Death, and you raised Death's blade against my likeness on the floor below. Nobody forced it into your hand. You picked it up." He tilted his head slightly. "Whoever takes up the instrument takes up what it's owed. His debt is yours. You chose it the moment you held it."

James heard it, and recognised it.

It was the logic Alice had described. If you stood beside the guilty, you were guilty. If you shielded them, you owed what they owed. If you were holding the weapon, you were the one who had used it.

`[MAIN STORY BOSS DETECTED]`

`[TURIEL — FALLEN ANGEL OF WRATH]`

`[LEVEL: ???]`

`[STATUS: ONE OF THE SEVEN]`

`[AUTHORITY TYPE: WRATH / RETRIBUTION / FALLEN DIVINITY]`

James read it and felt nothing like excitement.

He looked from Turiel down to the ranks below the platform. Floor 39 had taught them how to fight one body. Floor 40 had given that body an army.

Turiel lifted two fingers.

The whole hall moved.

---

The heavy demons came first, all at once, a wall of them walking forward. The winged ones came off the galleries in a single drop, and they did not come at the front. They came round behind, at the back of the raid, so that everybody had to move.

James did not need to think. They had drilled this for days.

"Front! Ronan, Darragh!"

Ronan was up, half-healed, and Darragh was a body's width off his shoulder with his shield locked. Finn went in beside them, short chops, working the space. Ciara's hand came up and then went down again without setting anything. She was saving her planes, and James saw her do it. Declan had a curse on the lead demon before it was ten metres away. Mara went to ice, not fire, and the stone in front of the line went white and slick. Cillian stayed back and picked targets. Ren stood with his hand on the hilt and did not draw.

Alice stood beside James with her wings half open, and her eyes stayed on the platform.

The first heavy demon hit Ronan's shield, and Ronan turned it. The second came round the side at speed, and Ciara's hand came up. This time a plane went up across its line at an angle, and the demon slid along it straight into Mara's ice. Its feet went out from under it. Finn and Ren were on it before it got up. Finn's axe went into its leg and Ren's blade came out and went back in its scabbard, a single short cut, nothing like the full draw. The demon stopped moving.

Declan's curse dragged on another one, and it was half a step slow into the gap. Darragh's mark went onto Finn as it arrived and then back off him again. Nobody called any of it. They just did it, and they held.

James found his first corpse inside thirty seconds.

On Floor 39 there had been nothing. Here they were everywhere.

He went down on one knee beside the dead heavy demon and put his hand on it.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,220 / 3,100]`

The flesh came off it all at once, and the bones stood up out of the meat. It was a heavy skeleton, broad as a door, with a slab of a weapon still in its hand. It turned to face its own side.

Up on the platform, Turiel's head turned.

James felt it. He looked up, and Turiel was watching him with something that was not quite anger and was very close to disgust. It was not the necromancy that bothered him. James was taking something that had been Wrath's and putting it on its knees in front of Death.

James sent the skeleton into the flank of the next rank. It hit a lean demon and broke it in two.

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 2,250 / 3,100]`