Chapter 211: The One Who Carries

Corran was awake before any of them.

He was still sitting in his doorway when Logan opened his eyes. He had the hand with the new cut on it held up in front of his face, turning it slowly in the red light, and he was smiling at it.

Vina saw it too. She went across the sand to him in her bare feet, and the old man held the hand out so that she could look.

"Is it from him?" she asked.

"It is from him," said Corran. "He was alive at the last sleep. That is more than I knew when I lay down."

Vina touched the cut, very carefully, with one finger. Then she came back to the spring and sat down next to Rishin.

The old man was looking at Corran too. He did not look away until Vina took his hand.

Wenna walked them to the mouth of the wide canyon.

"Stay in the centre of the canyon," she said. "Away from the walls. They lie in the cracks, and they look like the cracks."

"And if we see one?" asked Garen.

"You will not." Wenna looked at Helen. "Keep her in the middle of all of you. Keep everyone she carries close to her, and keep them from bleeding. That is the only advice I have."

She did not wish them luck. Logan did not think people in Stitch wished each other luck.

They set out down the wide canyon in a shape that Garen drew for them in the sand before they left.

Terry and Halden walked at the front. Billy rolled ahead of them, and Sonic flew above the strip of red roof. The Emberlynx went along the left wall, and the Thistlemaw went along the right.

The family walked inside that ring.

Helen walked at the very centre. Daniel walked on one side of her, and Hob had come out of his card to walk on the other, so close that his great plated shoulder nearly brushed her arm.

Vina walked ahead of her mother with Rishin. Link walked before Vina with his red flame held high, and Solveig walked behind her.

Logan walked behind his mother.

He hated it. He had led every march since the rim. Now he walked in the middle of the column with his sword sheathed, watching the backs of everyone he loved, and he hated every step of it.

Alice walked beside him. She did not say anything about it. Every so often she bumped her shoulder against his, and that was enough.

They had walked for most of the waking when Nyriel spoke.

It did not speak in words. It laid a dozen small points across Logan’s sight, the way it always did. They were in the walls on either side, ahead of the column, and they were not moving.

They were waiting.

Logan stopped. He raised his fist, the sign they had all learned in the stone forest, and everyone stopped with him.

[ Shardcat ] [ Level: 44 ] [ Rank: Epic ]

[ Attack: 2,100 ] [ Speed: 3,400 ] [ Constitution: 1,600 ] [ Arcane: 300 ]

"Twelve of them," Logan said, keeping his voice low. "Ahead, in both walls. They are not moving."

"They know we have stopped," said Isolde.

Then the walls moved.

They came out of the cracks all at once.

Logan saw at last what Wenna had meant. They were lean and long-legged, like big hunting cats, but their coats were not fur.

They were sheathed in thin plates of red glass, layered like the scales of a fish. When they were still, they were the walls.

When they moved, they glittered.

They did not go for the units at the front. They went past Terry’s reaching hands and round Halden’s halberd as if neither of them were there. They came down the canyon floor in long bounding leaps, straight down the column’s heart.

Every one of them was heading for Helen.

Isolde’s dome went up over Helen and Vina and Daniel before the first cat had covered half the distance.

The clouded light closed round the three of them. The first cat struck it at full stretch and slid down the curve of it with its glass claws screeching.

The units turned and met the rest.

Billy took one at the knees as it went past him, and it went over in a shower of red glass.

Halden’s halberd came down on another and cracked its plates from neck to tail. Terry caught a third out of the air in both hands and broke it.

Hob stood beside the dome like a wall. A cat came at him and he dropped his head and met it with his horns, and it flew back against the canyon side and did not get up.

Alice loosed. Her arrow went through the eye of a cat that was clawing at the dome.

[ Shardcat slain. ] [ Alice Rezvolt: +300 Tower Points ]

Logan stood behind the dome with his hand on his sword hilt and did not draw it.

Every part of him wanted to. He had been trained, since the first match, to step in and cut.

’Every scratch I take, she takes half,’ he thought. ’Then she is slower. Then they have her.’

He opened Sword Intent instead.

It drained the color out of the canyon and laid the fight across his sight in threads. He could see the cats as tangles of red light and the units as steady shapes moving among them.

"Halden," he said. "Left, low. Billy, behind you. Terry, the wall above the dome."

Halden swung left and low and took a cat in mid-leap. Billy spun and caught one coming at his back. Terry reached up and pulled a cat off the canyon wall just as it gathered itself to leap down onto the dome.

’I can do this,’ Logan thought. ’I can fight without drawing. I just have to see all of it.’

Garen fired twice beside him. A cat that had circled to the back of the dome went over and lay still.

[ Shardcat slain. ] [ Garen Rezvolt: +300 Tower Points ]

One of them got under the dome.

Logan did not see how. It must have gone flat on the red sand and slid in under the rim as the clouded light lifted to meet another one. It came up inside, between Helen and her husband.

Daniel threw himself in front of his wife.

[ Rooted Stance (Lv1) ]

The cat’s claws raked across his forearm. Logan saw the glass cut through Daniel’s sleeve and into the skin beneath.

And Helen cried out and clutched her forearm, in the same place.

Daniel did not move. He stood planted on the sand with his arm bleeding, and he brought his rock down on the cat’s head with the other hand.

The cat staggered. It turned. It left Daniel alone. It went round him, low and fast, toward the small figure on the far side of the dome.

Link was there first.

He swung the iron staff down across the cat’s path, and the red flame struck the glass plates of its shoulder.

The plates cracked and blackened. The cat screamed and twisted away from the fire, and it twisted straight into the old man.

Rishin had Stay out. He had stepped between the cat and Vina without a sound.

The cat’s claws went across his forearm as it passed. Then Stay came down, once, and the cat lay still on the sand.

The old man lowered his sword. He looked down at his arm.

The fight was over outside the dome.

Logan heard the last of the cats go down under Halden’s halberd. Logan let it go. He was looking at Rishin’s arm.

There was a cut across the old man’s forearm where the claws had gone in. It was bleeding. It was a clean cut, not ragged, and it ran from his wrist halfway to his elbow.

It was shallow.

Vina had grabbed both her arms and was turning them over and over, looking. There was nothing on them. She looked at her mother. Helen had the cut from Daniel’s arm on hers, and nothing else.

Logan looked at his arms. They were clean too.

He looked round the dome at all of them. He looked at Alice’s arms and at his father’s, at Garen and Isolde, at Bram and Edda.

Nobody else was bleeding.

Helen was the first to move. She knelt beside the old man with her hands glowing green.

"Let me," she said.

Rishin let her. He held his arm out without a word, and the cut closed under her fingers until it was only a thin pink line.

Then he pulled his sleeve down over it.

Logan was still looking at the place. He could not stop looking at it.

’It was half,’ he thought. ’Every cut on this layer is half. Half of it went into his arm.’

’And the other half went somewhere.’

The old man looked up and met his eyes. His face was perfectly calm. When his voice came, it was very low.

"Not now, boy," said Rishin.

He got up off the sand. He held out his hand to Vina, and she took it. Then he turned and looked away down the canyon, the way the stream ran, toward the Seam.