Chapter 211: Earth Splitting Sword and Severing Heaven

It came straight down the road toward the bridge.

Blind. Limping on the leg Garrick Dane had broken. One tusk, one stump, both eyes ruined. And still walking, steady and slow, the way it had walked for five days, the way it had walked across the killing ground and through the stone of the Wall.

The horde did not part for it this time.

It did not need to.

The Roamers on the road climbed over each other to get out of its way, and the ones that were too slow simply vanished under its feet. It walked through them. Through the shattered remains of the ice walls. Through the scattered pieces of the Ironbacks.

Toward the Span.

Toward him.

Encrid felt the Elder’s weight through the Star. Through the stone of the bridge. It pressed down on the northern end of the Span like a mountain leaning on a table, and the deep-folk’s bindings hummed beneath his feet.

Not with strain.

With warning.

He could feel the arch of the bridge reaching out from the gorge’s edge, half a mile across the empty air. He could feel exactly how much weight it had been made to carry.

The Elder was more.

If it walked onto the Span, it would not matter whether the Grand Magus finished his spell. The Elder would cross before the spell fell. Or the bridge would break under it, and the bindings would break with it, and no one could say what would happen to the spell then.

It could not be allowed to step onto the stone.

Encrid raised the sword again.

"Fifth Form, Earth Splitting Sword."

The memory came to him plainly. A Gannon of a much older time, standing at the edge of a ravine with a river of armored riders charging at him across a stone causeway. Raising his sword above his head with both hands. Bringing it down.

And the causeway was gone.

Encrid raised the sword with both hands.

He did not aim at the Elder. He did not aim at the horde.

He aimed at the ground.

At the strip of ordinary rock at the northern end of the Span. The place where the deep-folk’s stone met the road. The place where the Elder would have to put its foot.

He brought the sword down.

The blade struck the rock.

And the rock opened.

It did not crack. It split, the way wood splits under an axe along its grain, cleanly and all at once. A line of force ran out from the sword’s edge into the ground, and the ground came apart along it. The crack ran east and west from the point of the sword, wider every heartbeat, deeper, until it reached the edges of the gorge on both sides.

The shockwave came after.

Encrid felt it leave him. It rolled out from the place where his sword had struck, through the rock, through the road, through everything in front of him, a wave of force so heavy that the air above it rippled.

It hit the horde.

And the ground under the horde fell away.

The whole wide shelf of rock at the northern end of the Span, the stretch of road where the horde had packed itself, tilted. Slowly. Then quickly. It broke from the land behind it along the crack Encrid had made, and it slid sideways toward the gorge.

Toward three hundred feet of empty air.

Dozens of Roamers went with it. Grinners and Reevers and Lopers and Talljacks, tumbling and scrambling as the ground tipped beneath them. They clawed at the rock. They clawed at each other.

It did not help.

They went over the edge into the Riven, and the white river at the bottom swallowed them without a sound.

The stone of the Span shuddered.

At its northern end, where it met the land, a long crack ran across its surface. Then a second. The deep-folk’s bindings groaned. A piece of the bridge’s edge the size of a wagon broke away and fell into the gorge.

But the arch held.

And between Encrid and the Elder, there was now a gap.

Ten paces of empty air, where the rock had been. A chasm, three hundred feet deep, between the end of the Span and the road.

The Elder stopped at the edge of it.

It stood there, blind, its great head swinging slowly from side to side, as if it could not understand why the ground had ended.

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The sky screamed.

Encrid looked up.

The Rookwings had come.

He had not seen them since the third day of the siege. He had wondered, once or twice, where they had gone. Now they came out of the red evening sky over the Riven in a single dark mass, hundreds of them, and they did not circle. They did not choose. They dove straight at the small figure standing at the end of the bridge.

The gap in the ground did not matter to them.

They had wings.

And behind them, coming over the hills, more shapes. Larger ones. Flying things that Encrid had never seen and could not name, with ragged wings as wide as sails.

They were going over the gap.

Toward him. Toward the bridge.

Toward the south side of the Riven, where nine thousand people were standing.

Encrid lowered his sword point toward the stone.

He turned his wrist.

And the Sixth Form came up out of the borrowed memories, rising, the way its name rose.

"Sixth Form, Severing the Heavens."

It was the only one of the Gannon forms that struck upward. A rising cut. The sword began low, at the stone, beside his right foot, and climbed. Up across his body. Up past his shoulder. Up over his head, in a single long curve, like the edge of a crescent moon.

He felt the Star go with it.

Into the blade. Out of the blade. Into the sky.

A crescent of white light left the sword’s edge.

It was thin. Thinner than a thread. It rose from the end of the Darwen Span into the falling mass of Rookwings, and it did not slow down.

It went through them.

All of them.

The flock simply came apart in the air. Not in pieces. In halves. Every Rookwing the crescent touched split cleanly in two along the line of the cut, and the two halves fell, separately, into the gorge. The larger flying shapes behind them went the same way. Their great ragged wings folded. They tumbled out of the sky.

The crescent kept rising.

Encrid watched it go. It went up past the last of the falling wings, up and up into the red evening sky, until it reached the low clouds that hung over the Riven.

And it cut them.

A long straight line opened through the clouds, from one side of the sky to the other. Behind it, the deep blue of the coming night showed through. The two halves of the cloud drifted slowly apart, and in the gap between them, the first stars came out.

The sky over the Darwen Span was empty.

Below him, at the edge of the chasm he had made, the Elder lifted its blind head.

It did not roar or scream.

It turned its ruined face toward the end of the bridge, toward the small figure standing there in the frost.

And Encrid felt it.

The thin cold thread that ran from somewhere far back in the horde, into the Elder’s body.

Pulling.

The Elder lowered its head.

It lowered its single tusk, the one Ulrich Vance had not been able to reach, until the point of it was level with the end of the Span. Like a wedge.

Like a battering ram.

And it gathered its legs beneath it to jump.

Sixteen seconds.

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Magic Castle bonus Chapter. Thank you @Nagii344~