Chapter 397 — The Second Anathema I

Chapter 397: Chapter 397 — The Second Anathema I

The scythe was still in him.

James stood with both hands on the haft and Azrael’s broken blade buried under Turiel’s ribs, and watched the last of the red go out of the floor. Channel after channel went dark, out to the walls, until there was nothing left moving anywhere in the hall.

The pressure lifted all at once.

He had not known how much of it there had been until it was gone. It was like taking off a pack he had forgotten he was carrying. Then the ordinary sounds came back one at a time. Finn’s boot scraped on the stone. Maeve was breathing in short ragged pulls. Something among the demon corpses was still burning with a small dry crackle. Several metres to his left, Ciara’s knee hit the floor.

His head swam. He had died, and come back, twice in his life now, and the second time was not easier. It was only quicker.

He did not let go of the scythe. He watched Turiel’s face and waited.

Nothing in it moved.

*Finished,* he told himself, and believed it a second later.

`[TURIEL — FALLEN ANGEL OF WRATH — DEFEATED]`

`[FLOOR 40 CLEARED]`

`[STORY FLOOR COMPLETE]`

`[RESTORATION APPLIED TO SURVIVING CHALLENGERS]`

The light came down.

It went into James first, and his HP climbed off the floor so fast it made him dizzy.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1 → 2,048 / 2,048]`

Finn’s ribs closed, and his leg. He straightened off his axe for the first time in minutes and stood on his own. Maeve’s shoulders came up, and she stopped looking as if she were about to fall over. The burns along Cillian’s forearms smoothed out. The grey left Ciara’s face. Declan’s hands stopped shaking.

Behind James, Alice breathed in once, sharply. The light did not touch her. She was not a Challenger, and the System had nothing to restore. But the bond between them, which had come loose in his hands for those few seconds on the floor, went tight and settled and stayed settled, because he was alive again and properly alive.

The light went on across the hall.

It passed over Ronan, and Darragh, and Mara, and Ren.

Nothing happened to any of them.

It washed over them exactly as it had over the living, gold and warm, and when it was gone they were lying where they had been lying, in the same positions, with the same stillness. The Tower restored Challengers. It had never once pretended to restore the dead.

Then a different chime came, from everywhere at once.

`[WORLDWIDE ANNOUNCEMENT]`

`[WORLD-FIRST FLOOR 40 CLEAR ACHIEVED]`

`[FIRST DISCIPLE OF WRATH SLAIN]`

`[ONE OF THE SEVEN HAS FALLEN]`

Every interface on Earth had just shown that, and the six people in the hall stood and looked at it.

Nobody said anything.

Ciara was looking at three bodies. Maeve had already started walking toward Ronan, though the light had given her the answer before she took the first step. Finn stood with his axes hanging, looking at the space beside him where Ronan should have been. He kept looking at it, as if his body had not yet adjusted to there being nobody in it.

---

James turned to Alice first.

She was standing a few metres behind him with her wings folded tight, and she was looking at her own hand.

"You started to go," he said.

"Yes." She closed the hand. "For several seconds. The contract went out, and I went with it. The edges first." Her voice was level. It always was. Underneath it he could hear how angry she was. "I didn’t choose any of that. I didn’t get a say in any of it."

"I know."

"No, you don’t. You were dead." She looked at him properly. "Understand this. If you die, I don’t wait for you somewhere. I come apart. That’s true now, and it’ll be true next time."

He did not tell her there would not be a next time. He did not know that.

He did not tell her why Death had come for him faster than it had on Floor 20 either, because he had no idea.

He filed it where he filed things that mattered. If he died, he no longer died alone. He took her with him.

"Understood," he said.

Alice looked at him for a moment longer. Then her eyes went past him, and narrowed.

James turned round.

Turiel was coming apart.

---

The demons had collapsed into the floor like spilled water once they died, into thin red that ran away down the channels.

Turiel was not doing that.

He was going in layers. The crimson lines under his skin went black first, one after another, like wires burning out. Then the pieces of the broken halo behind his head began to fade at their edges, the dull gold going grey. And then the feathers came loose. They came off the great black wings one at a time and drifted down, and each turned to ash before it touched the stone.

James’s whole mind stopped for half a second.

Every part of him that was a necromancer, every instinct the Tower had built into him over forty floors, stood up and said one thing.

*There’s a window.*

He had seen this before, in a throne room on Floor 20, with a First Disciple going grey in front of him and a minute left before there was nothing to take.

He did not turn to look at Alice. He did not need to. She had already understood.

"Are you going to?" she said.

She did not ask whether he could. She asked whether he meant to.

James looked at Turiel. Then he looked at Ronan, and at Darragh by the platform steps, at Mara, and at Ren.

The timing was obscene. He knew it, and he did not try to tell himself otherwise. Four people who had come up here with him were lying on the floor, and the thing that had killed them was dissolving, and his first thought had been *window*.

But if one of the Seven disappeared because the moment was uncomfortable, it was still one of the Seven thrown away. It was something they had paid four lives to reach.

"Yes," he said.

"What are you doing?"

It was Ciara.

She was on her feet again, standing beside Ren’s body with Declan a step behind her. She had heard enough. She did not shout, and that was worse.

"James. What exactly do you think you’re doing?"

He looked at her. Three of her people were dead on this floor, and Ronan, and James himself had been dead on it ten minutes ago, all of it at that thing’s hand.

He gave her the plain answer, because she had earned it.

"If he can be made to stand on our side, so he’s never a threat to anyone again, I’m going to try."

Ciara stared at him.

"He killed Darragh. He killed Mara. Ren—"

"I know."

"You *know*."

"He’s right."

It was Alice. Everyone looked at her, and Ciara looked at her the longest.

"I’m not telling you it’s decent," Alice said. "It isn’t. I know exactly what it is to be on the far end of what he’s about to do." She lifted her chin a fraction at the dissolving body. "But I know what the Seven are. Heaven had all the power there is and it didn’t manage to finish us. If you leave that to the Tower, you don’t know what the Tower does with it. He’s holding Death in his hands. That’s the one thing in this room that can be sure where Wrath ends up."

Ciara did not answer.

She did not agree either. She stood there with Ren at her feet and her hands closed, and let James go.

---

He knelt beside Turiel and put his hand on the ruined chest.

"Reanimate."

The cold went out of him and down his arm into the body, feeling for the shape of what had lived there.

It hit something and came back up his arm hard, as though it had been slapped off a rail.

`[REANIMATE FAILED]`

`[TARGET RANK EXCEEDS CHALLENGER AUTHORITY]`

`[TARGET: FALLEN DIVINITY]`

He had expected that. It was the same wall he had hit with Alice. On Floor 20 there had been a coin, and he had no coin now.

He was already starting to stand when the scythe moved.

It was still in his other hand. It had never properly resealed after it brought him back. And before the failure panel had finished closing, black-silver light ran down the broken blade on its own and into the wound it had made in Turiel’s side, the last wound, the one that had killed him.

`[DEATH AUTHORITY INTERACTION DETECTED]`

`[SOUL CLAIM ESTABLISHED]`

`[CLAIMED SOUL: TURIEL — FALLEN ANGEL OF WRATH]`

`[CONDITION: TARGET SLAIN BY DEATH AUTHORITY]`

`[CLAIM VALID UNTIL SOUL DISSOLUTION]`

James read it twice.

This was not a coin. The Tower had not handed him a key that would open any lock he liked. Nothing here said he could reanimate whatever he wanted now.

Death had a claim on this one soul because Death had killed it. It was his because the blade in his hand had been the thing that finished him. And when the body finished dissolving, the claim went with it.

He looked at the feathers drifting down. More than half of one wing was gone.

`[INVOKE DEATH’S SOUL CLAIM THROUGH REANIMATE? Y/N]`

"Yes."

---

This time the cold did not come out of him. It came out of the scythe.

It ran through Azrael’s blade first, black and silver, and went into Turiel through the wound that had killed him, and nothing in the body pushed it away.

The dissolution reversed.

It was slow. It was slower than it had been with Alice, and it was heavier, as if the body were being dragged back against a current.

The ash came up off the floor first. Every feather that had fallen rose out of the grey dust on the stone and came back together as it rose, and found its place in the wing again, one after another.

Then the crimson paths came back under his skin. Every line James had cut, every route he had closed with the scythe, rebuilt itself from the inside out. But they were not as they had been. Around each red line ran a thin black one, close and tight, wound round it like a binding.

The wings rebuilt from the roots outward. The scorched bone came first, then the long flight feathers, then the coverts. They spread out wider and wider across the black floor of the tribunal, until they were as vast as they had been when he came down off the platform.

The broken pieces of the halo pulled themselves back into their old pattern behind his head. They were still broken, with the gaps still between them, but each piece was back in its place, and the gold in them was as dim as before.

Last of all, the flesh closed round the wound where the scythe still sat.

James drew Azrael out.

`[DEATH’S SOUL CLAIM CONSUMED]`

`[PERFECT REANIMATION SUCCESSFUL]`

`[TURIEL — FIRST DISCIPLE OF WRATH]`

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

`[UNIQUE UNDEAD DESIGNATION: ANATHEMA]`

`[REANIMATED CONTRACT ESTABLISHED]`

`[REANIMATED SLOTS: 2/5 OCCUPIED]`

`[SECOND ANATHEMA BOUND]`

Turiel opened his eyes.

---

He did not move.

Alice had come off the floor at James’s throat. Turiel lay still on his back on the black stone, and looked up into the dark above the columns, and James watched it all come back to him behind his eyes, in order.

He remembered the scythe cutting the red out of him, route by route.

He remembered putting his hand through James’s chest.

He remembered James getting up.

He remembered dying.

Then he sat up.

He did not look at James. He looked at Alice.

She stood a few metres away with her wings folded and her arms crossed, and the two of them looked at each other for a long moment. Two of the Seven were bound under the same mortal necromancer in the same ruined court.

It was an old look, older than anything James knew how to read.

"Don’t bother," Alice said. She said it drily, like somebody who had already tried every door in the house. "It doesn’t work. I’ve tested it."

Turiel did not lunge.

That was not what he did. He turned his head slowly and looked at James. His right hand lay on his knee, and red began to build in it. It was not fast. It gathered under the skin and climbed his fingers, deliberate as a pen being dipped. He was going to pass judgment.

It stopped at the skin.

The red came right up to the surface of his hand and would not cross it. It pressed there, bright, against something nobody could see.

James watched Turiel look at his own hand, and understood that something had just judged him, and that for once he could not overturn the sentence.

"Stand down," said James.

Turiel’s hand lowered. He did not lower it. His arm did it, slowly, against him, while every line of his face fought it, and the red sank back under his skin.

He did not shout or curse. His anger was very quiet, and it frightened James more than Alice’s rage had in the throne room.

Then Turiel looked at the scythe.

James watched him understand all of it.

For ages he had hated Azrael as Heaven’s executioner. Today he had killed the mortal who carried Azrael. He had failed to make it stay. Then that Authority had killed him, and now it had dragged him back, and put him under the one carrying it.

Turiel looked at Alice again.

"How long," he said, "have you put up with this?"

"Long enough to know he isn’t Azrael."

"You said that while I was killing him."

"I was right while you were killing him." Alice did not look away. "I stay for more reasons now than the contract."

Turiel looked at her the way a judge looks at a plea he has already ruled on. It was patient, polite, and entirely unconvinced.

"James."

It was Maeve. She did not say it loudly.

It was enough. James turned away from his second Fallen Angel without another word.