Chapter 157: Ember Veil

The Rackhorn came around the end of the map table with its head low.

Its horns caught the edge of the table and flipped it over. Maps, tally sticks, and a pot of ink flew across the platform. The ink splashed across the stone like black blood.

Encrid stepped back until his heels touched the top step of the stair.

He planted his feet.

This was the part of the Gannon Family Swordsmanship he had practiced every night for a year and a half.

Not the thrust. Not the parry.

The stance.

Feet planted wide. Knees bent. Weight low. So that a man could not be moved from where he stood.

The First Form of the Gannon Family Swordsmanship was called Falling Talon. At Encrid’s level, it was nothing more than a downward strike. The sword came up and came down with the whole body behind it, like a bird of prey dropping on something from above.

He had done it perhaps twenty thousand times in the dark behind the granary.

He had never done it against something that was trying to kill him.

The Rackhorn lunged.

Gus met it first.

He did not try to stop the horns. He slid to one side and cut across the creature’s foreleg. As he moved, a thin film of heat rolled off his body.

Ember Veil.

It was Gus’s Star Ability. Encrid had seen it in the training yard a hundred times. A thin layer of Vermilion heat over the skin that burned anything that touched him and turned hard blows into glancing ones.

The Rackhorn’s horn scraped across Gus’s shoulder. The Veil flared red, and the horn slid off.

The creature stumbled on its cut leg.

Its head dipped.

Encrid stepped in and brought the sword down.

-Kuk!

The blade struck the base of the horns, where the skull joined the neck.

It did not cut through. His strength was too low to behead it in a single swing. His arms were too weak, and a Rackhorn’s skull was built to break trees.

But the full weight of the strike went into that single spot.

The creature’s head slammed down onto the stone.

It lay stunned for one heartbeat.

Gus drove his sword into the back of its neck.

"Good," Encrid said.

His own voice sounded strange to him.

"Young master! The other one!"

The second Rackhorn had broken through the line. Behind it came the Grinners. A dozen. Two dozen. They poured across the platform like a spilled sack of grain.

Holt’s men fought them with spear butts and boots. A soldier went down with a Grinner on his back. Another man pulled it off and threw it over the edge.

Encrid could feel all of it.

Every movement on the platform pressed against his senses at once. It was too much. He could not follow everything.

So he stopped trying.

He followed only what was coming toward the stair.

"Left," he said.

Gus turned left and cut a Grinner out of the air.

"Low. Right."

Gus stamped down, and a pair of jaws snapped shut on nothing.

It went on like that.

Encrid called out, and Gus moved. When something got close enough, Encrid swung. His swings did not kill anything. But they knocked things back and down, so that Gus could finish them.

At some point, a long burning line opened across Encrid’s left forearm. A Grinner’s teeth. He did not remember when it happened. He only noticed later, when his sleeve had become heavy and wet.

Then the second Rackhorn came for the stair.

Gus stepped in front of it.

It was bigger than the first. It did not stumble. It did not hesitate.

Its horns caught Gus in the chest and lifted him off the ground.

For a moment, Encrid saw the boy hanging from the front of the creature’s head, his feet dangling in the air, his sword arm pinned against the horns.

The Veil burned red around him. The horns hissed where they touched it.

But the Rackhorn did not let go.

It began walking toward the edge of the parapet.

"Gus!"

Encrid ran after it. He cut at its hind leg, and the blade bounced off hide as thick as a boot sole. He cut again.

Nothing.

Gus was not screaming. His face was twisted, his teeth clenched, and his whole body was shaking.

The heat around him grew brighter.

Encrid stopped.

Through Attunement, he could feel something he had never felt before.

The energy inside Gus’s body was moving.

Not the way it flowed during cultivation, carefully, channel by channel. It was pouring. Flooding every path at once. Slamming against the walls of the channels and pushing. Pushing.

Encrid knew that feeling.

It was the same thing he had felt on the night his own Star broke through.

Only a hundred times stronger.

The Rackhorn reached the edge of the parapet.

Gus opened his eyes.

And the Veil changed.

It did not flare. It did not explode. It simply turned from red to white-gold. It stopped being a thin skin of heat over his body and became something thicker and heavier.

Like a cloak made of the air above a forge.

The Rackhorn’s horns began to smoke.

Then they began to soften.

The creature bellowed and tried to throw its head back. Gus’s pinned arm came free.

He did not strike with his sword.

He placed his open palm flat against the Rackhorn’s forehead.

And pushed the Veil into it.

-Hwaaak!

White-gold heat rolled off his hand in a wave. It swept over the Rackhorn’s head and down its back, and the creature’s hair went up in a single bright sheet of fire.

It reared back, screaming. It lost its footing at the edge.

And it went over.

Gus dropped to the stone on his hands and knees.

For a moment, no one on the Fifth Bastion moved.

Then the last of the Grinners on the platform broke and ran for the parapet. The soldiers chased them off it.

And it was over.

Encrid went to the boy.

Gus was breathing in long, ragged gasps. Steam rose from his shoulders. The stone beneath his palms had turned faintly black.

Encrid opened Appraisal without thinking.

[ Name: Gus ]

[ Age: 17 ]

[ Realm: Apex ]

[ Star Level: One Star - Vermilion Star (Apex) ]

[ Star Ability: Ember Veil (Evolved) ]

[ Talent: ▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]

[ ERROR: Value exceeds display parameters. ]

Apex.

Encrid read the word several times.

The boy was just seventeen years old.

He looked at him who was still with a Rackhorn’s horns against his chest.

Gus looked up at him.

"Young master," he said between breaths. "Did something happen? It felt like my whole body caught fire."

"Something happened."

"Is it bad?"

Encrid laughed.

It came out before he could stop it. Tired and cracked and completely out of place on a platform covered in blood.

"No, Gus. It isn’t bad. You’re stronger now."

Gus stared at him.

Then he looked down at his own hands. The Veil was still flickering around his fingers, white-gold, and he watched it the way he had once watched the soldiers train in the courtyard of House Cavel.

Like a hungry boy looking at a meal he was finally allowed to eat.

Boots came running up the stairs.

It was the Second Watch reinforcements. Twenty men with a sergeant at their head, arriving exactly ten minutes after the flag had gone up.

They stopped at the top of the stair and looked around. At the overturned table. At the spilled ink. At the dead Grinners. At the empty space by the corner, where two Rackhorns and a Talljack had come over the Wall.

"We’re here to hold the stair," the sergeant said uncertainly.

"It’s held," Holt told him. "Go help us clear the corner."

The windows appeared a moment later.

[ ✦ Emergency Quest Complete ✦ ]

[ The inner stair of the Fifth Bastion has been held. ]

[ Gannon Family Swordsmanship: E (31%) → E (47%) ]

[ Narrative Relevance: 2.78% → 2.91% ]

[ Note: A fate you bought has paid for itself. ]

Encrid stared at the last line.

He thought of a fifteen-year-old boy with a slave’s tally on his hand, eating alone beside a storage shed.

Then he closed the window, wrapped a strip of cloth around his bleeding forearm, and went to pick up the maps.

✦ ✦ ✦