Chapter 395 — Wrath Cannot Judge Death III

Chapter 395: Chapter 395 — Wrath Cannot Judge Death III

The demons got up off their knees when he had passed them.

They closed in behind Turiel as he came, and spread out along the flanks, and the hall changed shape around the raid. A minute ago it had been a battlefield with a commander at the far end of it. Now it was a room with a killer walking down the middle.

James took in the new shape in one look.

Darragh was down, and Ronan was the only wall left. Ciara had lost one of her five. Maeve had spent most of what she had on James’s ribs and Ronan’s back, and she was breathing like a runner. The demon corpses on the floor were burning down into red that ran away into the channels. Every channel in the hall ran back to the one figure walking toward them.

*Later,* he told himself about Darragh. *Not now.*

Turiel did not charge.

The Echo had come in flat and fast and straight at whoever it wanted. Turiel walked into range with his wings half open, watching, and when he struck it was at Ronan, once, not to kill him. Ronan took it on the shield and slid back a metre. Turiel turned to the left, toward the gap Darragh had left, and Ciara spent a plane to close it. He touched the plane with the back of his hand and watched it crack.

Then he looked past both of them, at Maeve.

At the light coming off her hands into Ronan’s back, and at Ronan standing up straighter because of it.

James saw him work it out. It took about three seconds.

*He’s not fighting us. He’s taking us apart.*

The Echo had been a body with a mechanism in it. This was a judge looking at how a raid worked, finding the pieces that held it up, and choosing which one to pull out first.

Turiel went for Maeve.

---

Alice met him halfway.

They hit in the open between Ronan and the rear line with a sound like two cars meeting. The shock of it went across the floor and knocked the dust up off the stone in a ring. Alice went back two metres on her heels, then held. Her four wings were braced and his two huge ones were driving down on her, and for a moment neither moved.

She could contest him. James saw that, and he saw that she could not beat him.

"You stand," Turiel said, through it, "between Wrath—" he twisted, and Alice’s arm bent "—and the one carrying the blade that hunted the Seven."

"He’s not Azrael."

"He carries him."

Alice drove a knee up into his side. He took it and gave nothing back for it, which was worse.

"I knew Azrael," she said, through her teeth. "I know this one. They’re not—"

"He *drew* it." Turiel threw her off, and she went sideways across the stone and came back up. "Against me. Nobody put it in his hands. He unsealed it with his own will and raised it at my face. What the blade owes, the one who holds it owes."

James heard it, and something cold settled into place in his chest.

He was not the raid leader to Turiel, or the most dangerous weapon in the hall. He was a debt. He was the oldest one Turiel had left, and he had walked up two hundred metres of black stone and presented himself to be paid.

---

The demons kept coming down the flanks while Turiel held the middle.

"Control," said James. "Don’t kill them. Every one that dies feeds him."

They did it. Ciara bent the lead demons with planes set at angles, sending them sliding past the line rather than into it. Mara stayed in ice, laying white lanes across the floor that the heavy ones could not get their feet on. Declan spread thin curses over half a dozen at once, not deep, just enough to slow them. Finn knocked them off their lines with the flat of his axes instead of the edge, shoulder-checking one into another and stepping away before either could hit back.

It held, but only just, and every time it nearly broke James felt the shape of what was missing.

There was no Darragh. There was nobody behind the line moving protection to whoever needed it in the moment. Twice a demon got through to Cillian’s side and there was nothing between it and him but Cillian, and twice Finn had to leave the front to deal with it.

They were losing ground, a step at a time.

Turiel made sure of it. He kept Alice in front of him and Ronan beside her, giving them just enough to keep them occupied. James saw the next thing coming before it came. A pack of lean demons broke round the left of Mara’s ice and went straight for the back, for Maeve and Cillian, and nobody was free to stop them.

Mara saw it too.

James watched her decide. She looked at the pack, at Maeve, and at Turiel. She knew exactly what it would cost. She had sat in the strategy room and heard all of it.

She changed anyway.

The frost on her staff went out, and the fire came up.

She burned the centre lane open. It was a sheet of flame forty metres long, low and roaring, and it went through the pack like a scythe through wheat. Six demons died in it. Seven, eight. The pressure on Maeve was gone in a second. Cillian had a firing lane again. James suddenly had room to move.

For a few seconds it looked like the right call.

Then the red came out of the bodies.

It came out of all eight of them at once. Thin crimson threads came out of the burnt corpses and ran away across the floor, and the channels lit up along the whole left side of the hall, racing back toward Turiel.

"*Move!*" James did not know yet where it was going. "Everyone, move!"

Turiel did not let it go.

The Echo would have vented. Turiel held it. The red came up through the scars at his throat and down his arms and stayed there, bright, and he turned his head slowly and looked across the field at the people who had done it.

His eyes stopped on Mara.

Ciara saw it the same instant James did.

A plane went up between Mara and Turiel. The red came off him in a line and hit it, and the plane cracked from one end to the other, white and splitting. Ciara set a second one behind it, though she had almost nothing left after Floor 39 and the demons. Her face went grey doing it.

The second plane broke too.

Mara was already changing back. The fire went out of her staff and the frost came up, and she was building ice in front of herself as fast as she could. James saw the first sheet of it form. He saw it was not going to be in time.

What was left of the red went through.

Mara went down. She did not get up.

`[PARTY MEMBER DECEASED — MARA DOYLE]`

Ciara took one step toward her.

One. Her body did it before she did. Then she saw the demons closing again on the left where the fire had been, and she stopped dead, and her voice came out of her tight and short and flat.

"Declan. Ren. Sound off."

"Here."

"Here."

"Hold your places. Follow James."

She did not look at Mara again. James saw what that cost her and saw her pay it. Then she lifted her hand and set her next plane where he had called it.

---

James had seen something in that.

Turiel had taken in damage from eight bodies and a dozen people, and held it, and chosen. He had sent it to one person, at the time he wanted. And he had kept fighting with more still in him after.

There was no vent and open. There was no window where he went dark and safe. If they waited for him to empty, they would wait until they were all dead.

He looked at the red instead.

Every time the scythe had touched Turiel, there had been a line. The line was still there. It was a dark gap in the crimson along his forearm where James had cut it on the first exchange, and it had not closed. Turiel had not closed it. He had gone round it. The red had routed through other parts of his body, the same way the Echo’s broken network had bent its vent around the cut James made on Floor 39.

The difference was that Turiel had hundreds of routes, where the Echo had had a few.

But a route was a route.

*We can’t empty him,* James thought. *We have to close the doors he lets it out of.*

He did not know that it would work. He did not say that it would.

"I need him in one place," he said. "I need his wings where I can get at them. And I need to keep touching him with this." He lifted the scythe. "As much as you can give me."

Nobody asked why. There was no time.

Declan stopped spreading his curses across the demons and put every one of them on Turiel. Finn and Cillian took the demons nearest the centre and kept them off James’s back. Ciara stopped using her planes as shields. She started using them as she had against the Echo, setting them behind Turiel and to the side, bending every step he took back toward the middle, back toward James.

Alice understood without being told. She stopped trying to hurt him and went for his wings, for the roots of them, where James could see the red lines were thickest, braided over each other like veins in the back of a hand.

Ren had not drawn.

He had held the blade in its scabbard through the whole of Floor 40, through Darragh, through Mara, with his thumb on the guard. Whatever was building behind it was bigger now than it had been at any point since they arrived.

James watched for the moment.

It came when Alice caught Turiel’s left wing at the root and hauled on it with everything she had, and Ciara set a plane behind his right side at the same moment. For half a second Turiel could not turn cleanly either way.

James went in.

The scythe opened one of the main crimson routes along Turiel’s ribs. It was a thick braid of red, and it came apart under the blade and did not reconnect.

Turiel turned on him. Of course he did. Death’s blade mattered more to him than anything else on the floor.

That left his whole side open.

"*Ren!*"

Ren drew.

James saw it this time. It was not a cut so much as a line of light that had always been there and was only now visible. It went across Turiel from the right shoulder down toward the left hip, through armour that had survived the fall of Heaven, through flesh, and through part of the crimson structure underneath, opening it like a seam.

Turiel staggered.

He staggered for real. He went back a step with his wing dragging, and the bar over his head dropped. It was not a sliver. It was a real, visible piece, the most anyone had taken off him since they had arrived.

He could be hurt.

Ren was already sliding backward, the blade going back into the scabbard, doing exactly what he had been told to do.

Turiel looked at him.

Nothing happened.

That pause was the worst thing James had seen on Floor 40. It was not long, just a second, like a man reading a line over again to make sure he had it right.

Then a thin red line appeared across Ren’s right shoulder.

It was in exactly the place his blade had gone into Turiel.

It moved down his body, slowly, on the same angle as the cut he had just made, shoulder to opposite hip. It moved at the speed of a pen across a page.

James understood before it reached the bottom.

Turiel was not sending back force any more. He was sending back the sentence. Whatever Ren had done to him, Ren received, in exactly the same shape.

Ren died of his own perfect cut.

`[PARTY MEMBER DECEASED — REN MORI]`

James saw Ciara look once, toward where Ren had fallen.

Only once. Then she turned her head away from it deliberately, and he knew that she knew that if she looked any longer somebody else would die. She set another plane.

Of the five who had walked into Floor 39 with her, she had Declan.

---

Turiel came for James after that.

Ren’s wound had not made him careful. It had made him worse. The calm was thinning on him. James could see it in the way his wings moved, jerkier, and in the way the red was surging in him now, pushing against the routes James had cut and finding fewer ways out.

"You carry the one who judged the Seven." Turiel was speaking straight to him now. "The one Heaven sent when the argument was over. What he carried, you carry. It’s stolen, or it’s inherited, it doesn’t matter which. It’s *his*."

"I’m not him."

"You kept it." Turiel came through Finn’s swing as if it weren’t there. "You could have left it on the floor where you found it. You unsealed it. You raised it at me. You *chose*."

"He is not Azrael," Alice said. She was coming back at Turiel from the side, bleeding from somewhere under her wing. "I’ve stood in front of both of them. They are not the same—"

"And you stand in front of him now." Turiel did not even look at her. "You shield him. You put yourself between the debt and the one who owes it. Every word you say for him makes you more his. Do you understand? You are not arguing him out of it. You are arguing yourself into it."

James understood it all at once.

The man who held the weapon owed. So did the one who stood beside him, and the one who fed him and mourned him and protected him. James did not know where Turiel had learned to think like that, but he could hear that it had no bottom to it, and Alice was not going to talk it down, because every word she said in his defence fed it.

Turiel broke past her.

Then, Ronan took the line.