Chapter 118: Watch How It’s Done

Donzo went past him.

The wind of it turned Theo halfway round, and by the time he had his feet under him again Donzo was standing at the treeline with both burning swords out and the three of them behind him.

“YURA.”

The spear came up before she knew she had lifted it.

Donzo kept his eyes on Theo, and his grin sat on his face like something nailed there.

“Sivvy. Bethe. Formation. You’ve done this several times. Front, flank, and the little one goes low. Now.”

Yura’s boots moved.

That was the part that got into Theo. Not the order, the boots. She had a spear in both hands and a shoulder she had put back in herself two hours ago, and she was already stepping out to Donzo’s right because a man had used that tone, and Sivvy was going with her, and Bethe had raised a bow she could not draw.

‘What does he have on them to make them react like this?’

Theo turned his head and looked at them.

The sword stayed where it was, and he said nothing at all. He simply stopped being amused, all at once, and the whole of his face went somewhere the three of them had never seen a face go.

And the darkness came with it.

It rose off the ground around his boots without being called, thick and slow and reaching a little higher than a man, and it did not move toward anybody. It stood there. It stood around him and it faced them, and every shadow in that treeline leaned in at the same time, like a room full of people turning their heads.

Yura stopped mid-step.

Sivvy dropped her dagger and did not pick it up.

Bethe went down on one knee in the ash with the bow across her thighs and both eyes on the ground, and afterwards she would say that he had not looked angry at all, and that this was the worst of it.

Turning back to the swordsman, Theo said, flatly:

“Sit down and let me finish.”

They sat down.

Donzo’s grin came apart.

“…Get UP. Get up, you useless—”

Then his head snapped round, and Theo saw the exact second the man’s whole plan changed, because it was written all over him. He was thirty-one and Enhanced and the fastest thing in that forest, and he had just watched his own party choose the floor over him.

So he took a hostage.

He was on Bethe in a blink, her collar in his fist and her off her knees, one burning sword laid flat across her throat, and he backed up two steps into the trees with her boots dragging twin lines through the ash, and he was laughing again.

Fire ran up the blade and stopped a finger’s width off her jaw.

“There. THERE we go. Put it down, Theo. Put the sword down, and put that— that whatever that is, put it AWAY, or I take her head off in front of—”

Theo was not where he had been.

Donzo’s eyes went to the empty ash, and then down, and then to the darkness underneath his own feet, which had been Theo’s for some while now.

He never got the third word out.

Theo came up out of the shadow at his back and cut the tendons behind both of his ankles, one and then the other, at a walk, the way a man cuts twine.

There was no flourish in it. There was a wet sound, twice.

Donzo Varr’s legs stopped being legs. He went straight down like a coat off a hook, and the sword came off Bethe’s throat on the way, and Theo took Bethe out of his hand by the collar and set her on her feet behind him without ever looking at her.

Then he stood over the man and let him scream for a while.

Crouching down, he turned the man’s face out of the ash so he could breathe, and he was not going to let him choke on it either.

“You’re not dying here. Get that out of your head right now. You’re going to be alive, in front of six clerks, while Yura talks.”

“My legs— my LEGS, you—”

Theo picked up one of the swords and threw it out into the deep ash, and then the other, and both of them went out.

“They’ll set. Badly. About as well as Bethe’s hand.”

Donzo got his head up, and there was nothing left in his face except an animal.

Looking down at him, Theo spoke the way he read a bill.

“Do you know what your actual problem is? It isn’t that you’re cruel. There’s a lot of cruel in this Tower and most of it can fight.”

He stood up.

“It’s that you’re thirty-one, and Enhanced, and you have got the body of a man who has never once been at the front. You built an entire life out of standing eleven feet back and shouting a girl’s name.”

He turned round.

Out in the middle of the ring, four hundred feet of packed ash with the bones swept to the edges of it, something had been standing since the shouting started.

It came up onto two legs.

Nine feet of it, a wolf’s head on a man’s shoulders, arms hanging past its knees, and black fire in the seams of its chest running in the gaps like light under a door. It took one step and the ash lifted around the foot and did not come back down for a while.

Yura’s voice came from somewhere behind him, and she had gone hoarse.

“That’s — Theo, that’s the Warden, that’s an A-rank, we have to—”

“Take the other two back to the treeline.”

“You can’t—”

Theo rolled his shoulder. There was ash and blood down the whole of one arm, drying into the sleeve in a long dark seam, and he did not appear to have noticed any of it.

“Yura. Please take them back to the treeline.”

She took them back to the treeline.

Then Theo walked out into the ring, and about halfway across it the darkness came up his body out of the floor, smoke first and then plate, obsidian closing over the shins and the ribs and the shoulders, and a dark helm shut around his head with wisps rolling off the crown like smoke in a wind nobody could feel.

He called the shadow onto Raindrop, and the blade grew out to nine feet of black.

And he did not look back at the man lying in the ash behind him when he said it.

“You’ve never gone forward in your life. So watch how it’s done.”