Chapter 215: A Falling Star

Gus had not breathed for almost a minute.

He was standing at the southern end of the Darwen Span, at the very front of the crowd, with the young master’s things held against his chest.

He had been holding them so tightly that the edge of the lamp’s iron frame had cut into his palm. He had not noticed.

Behind him stood eight thousand people.

No one was speaking.

Half a mile away, across the gorge, at the far end of the bridge, the young master stood alone.

Gus had watched all of it.

He had watched the barrier go out and the horde pour toward the bridge. He had watched frost spread across the stone in a white circle, and walls of ice rise out of nothing, and three Ironbacks burst apart like barrels struck by a ram. He had watched the ground split and slide into the Riven. He had watched a crescent of white light cut the sky in half.

And he had watched the young master make one small movement with his sword, and the Elder’s head fall into the gorge.

Gus did not understand any of it.

He had trained beside the young master for a year and a half. He had seen him practice the same downward stroke in the dark, night after night, his arms shaking. He had seen him lose sparring matches to men who were barely Initiates.

That man was not a swordsman.

That man was the young master.

But now, Gus did not know who was standing on the other side of the bridge.

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"What is that?" Zuri said.

Her voice was very quiet.

Something small had come out of the horde and stopped at the edge of the chasm, across from the young master. From half a mile away, it was only a dark shape. A low, four-legged shadow.

"It’s hurt," Ysolde said.

She had moved to the very edge of the gorge. Her eyes were narrowed. Gus had heard that a Grandmaster’s eyes could see farther than any glass.

"It’s covered in wounds. Its neck. Its back. One of its wings is broken." Ysolde’s voice was flat and strange. "It’s limping."

Sir Gareth’s hand went to his sword.

"That’s what the old man felt? That small thing?"

Ysolde was silent for a moment.

"Something’s wrong with it," she said. "It moves like a horse that’s been whipped too long."

Nobody said anything.

Rael had gone very still beside Hask and Ilse. His good hand was white around the Cavel spear.

At the southern end of the Span, the Grand Magus was still speaking.

Gus could see him from where he stood. The old man had his walking stick planted in the stone and his eyes closed, and the words were still coming out of him in that low, heavy voice. His whole body was shaking. Sweat ran down his bald head and dripped from his beard.

It had been more than a minute.

The old man had said a minute.

Gus had seen why it was taking longer. When the small dark thing walked out of the horde, the old man’s voice had stumbled. Just for a moment. And then it had started again, a little way back, saying words Gus was sure he had already heard.

He had lost his place.

And now he was trying to catch up.

Then, across the gorge, thin and high, there came a scream.

Gus flinched. Everyone flinched.

It was not the scream of a monster. Gus had heard the Elder scream. He had heard Talljacks and Gorehorns and Rookwings.

This was different.

It sounded like something young.

It sounded like something being hurt.

Then Gus saw the light.

At first, it was only a glow. A faint white point at the edge of the chasm, so small that from half a mile away, it looked like a single star.

Then it grew.

It did not grow the way fire grows. It simply became brighter. And brighter. Until it lit the small dark shape from inside. Until it lit the end of the bridge, and the horde, and the hills, and the gorge, and the low clouds the young master had cut in half.

Until night turned to day.

The crowd behind Gus made a sound. A long, low sound, rising from eight thousand throats at once. It was not a scream. It was the sound people make when they see something they know is going to kill them, and they cannot run.

Someone near Gus fell to their knees.

Then many people did.

Gus raised his arm to cover his eyes, and the light came through his sleeve, through his skin, so that he could see the bones of his own arm, dark against the glare.

It looked like a star had come down to earth.

That was what he would remember afterward. That was what he would say, years later, when people asked him what he had seen at the Riven. A star, fallen to earth, held in the jaws of a creature no bigger than a horse.

A light meant to put out everything in front of it.

And in front of it, there was only one thing.

Gus lowered his arm.

He made himself look.

At the end of the bridge, half a mile away, between the light and eight thousand people, the young master was standing with his back to them.

He was so small.

Against the light, he was almost nothing. A thin, dark line. A single stroke of ink across a white page.

And yet-

Right in the middle of that overwhelming light, he stood like a shadow.

Small. Thin. Dark.

Standing perfectly straight.

Not moving.

And the shadow was not getting smaller as the light grew.

It was getting larger.

It stretched back across the Span toward them, long and black against the white, the way a man’s shadow stretches at sunset. It reached all the way across the gorge. It reached the southern end of the bridge. It reached the place where Gus was standing.

And all along the southern bank, eight thousand people looked up from where they knelt and saw that they were standing in it.

In the shadow of one man’s back.

And right at that moment, the light left the creature’s jaws.

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