Chapter 117: And if i can’t?

It was a rhythm after that. A hound would lunge, I would move a little to the left, and the hound would regret it. I wasn’t being clever. They had no tactics, no pattern. They were just teeth coming down a road, and the road was narrow. But there were a lot of them.

A dozen got past my guard on the right side, spilling across the dry bed toward the slope where Captain Ru’s people were crouched. I started to turn, and then a sweep of fire went across the road like a rolled-out carpet and the dozen became ash.

"You are slow tonight," Qing Yan said from my left.

"I’m pacing myself."

"You are talking."

"Same thing."

She had come out into the road beside me and was working in the space I couldn’t cover. I should say that she wasn’t dancing the way she had in the stone hall. There was less show in it now. She moved in short steps, each fan stroke ending exactly where the next would begin, and the hounds came at her and fell apart. Dusk’s red lines opened throats. Dawn’s broad arcs swept the flanks. She had her teeth bared, and in the glare of her own flames she looked like what she was, which was somebody who had been waiting three years for this.

I caught a hound by the hind leg, spun it, and used it to knock down four more.

"Is that a technique?" she shouted.

"It’s called throwing a dog at other dogs!"

She laughed, short and breathless, and cut down another pair. For a moment, the fight felt almost easy. Then the ground began to shake.

It came around the bend slowly, because it was too large to hurry. I had expected a bigger demon. I had not expected a building. The thing was easily thirty feet tall, a slab of gray flesh and iron plating on two pillar-thick legs, with a head like a battering ram and a hide studded with spikes the size of fence posts. It carried no weapon. Every step it took drove cracks through the road, and behind it the demon infantry came in ranks, shields locked, spears bristling, letting it clear the way.

"The Breaker," Captain Ru called from the slope. "They used it on the Eastern Fort. It took the gate in one blow."

"Great," I said. "Anyone have an idea?"

"Don’t let it reach the veil," a voice come behind me.

I didn’t turn. I could hear Han Shuo’s quiet footsteps, though I couldn’t feel him at all. He had come down off the roof and walked all the way to the front without a sound. He stood a pace behind me ,looking at the Breaker .

"The veil is a thing? Not just a spell?"

"It is a promise made to the valley by the people who built it," he said. "It cannot be broken by strength alone, but a creature that large can crush the anchor stones at the pass. If those fall, it will not matter how many of them we kill."

"Where are the stones?"

"Under the road. Directly beneath you."

I looked down. "Wonderful."

"I can hold the veil for perhaps an hour," Han Shuo said. "I cannot do that and fight. Keep it away from the stones, Barry."

"And if I can’t?"

"Then we lose the valley." He said it plainly, without drama. "I do not think you will lose."

I wanted to ask a lot of things. But the Breaker had lowered its head and was starting to run.

I put my feet apart on the road, bent my knees, and called up the scales.

They came faster than they had in the tunnel. Black plates rolled out from my wrists and spread across my chest and shoulders, over my ribs, down my thighs, in a skin so smooth it looked wet. It didn’t hurt. It felt like putting on a coat that I’d been wearing my whole life and had only just remembered. My hands lengthened. My vision cleared until I could count the rivets in the monster’s plating.

Qing Yan said something behind me, frightened. I didn’t catch it. The Breaker hit me.

The impact drove me backward along the road, boots carving trenches in the stone. But the scales held. I took the head of the thing against my chest and my forearms and it did not go through, and as I slid I got both hands around one of its spikes and ’twisted’.

The spike came off in my fists with a screech of iron.

I swung it up and drove it into the monster’s left eye.

It screamed.The Breaker reared back and flailed, blind in one eye, and its foot came down a few feet from where the anchor stones were buried and the road split in a long, ugly crack.

"Barry!" Qing Yan shouted. "Down!"

I dropped. Fire went over my head, a whole wall of it, roaring and golden. Qing Yan had both fans out, wide open, and Dawn was blazing now, not just at the ribs but along its entire silk face, white-hot and spreading, as though it had finally decided to wake up. She swept it in a half circle and the fire followed, a crescent of light that rose off the road and swallowed the Breaker’s left side. Its hide blistered. Its armor glowed.

"Again!" I yelled.

"I cannot—" Her voice cracked. "It is pulling too much—"

"Then let me!" I came up out of the crouch and ran at the burning mountain. My scales were smoking and my ribs were screaming, but the thing was off balance and half blind, and I had one thing in my favor. It was too big to be fast.

I went up its leg like a ladder, using the spikes as handholds. When I reached the knee, I braced my feet against the plating, wrapped both arms around the joint, and pulled with everything my body had.