Chapter 119: Last chance to tell me your name

Asmodeus walked down the road with the long black sword dragging behind him, and every step rang off the stone like a bell. Behind him, the dark held its shape. His army stood back in it, ten thousand, none of them daring to come closer than the edge of his shadow.

"Aren’t you going to make a speech?" I said. "Everyone else does."

"I find speeches tiresome." His voice was calm. "I would rather see what you are."

He lifted the sword one-handed. It was taller than I was, a slab of black iron with a notched edge, and he swung it like a man waving off a fly.

I got my arms up and the scales came with them, black plates racing from my wrists to my shoulders. The blade hit and the world went white. My feet left the road. I flew thirty paces backward, landed on my back, and skidded into the dry streambed with stone grinding along my spine.

I lay there, looking at the sky, which was not there. There was only darkness.

"Hm," said Asmodeus, from far too close. "The scales held. That is more than most can say."

I rolled. The sword came down where my head had been, and the ground split in a line ten paces long. I got to my feet and hit him in the ribs with everything I had.

It was a good punch. It was the one that had put a nine-foot lieutenant through a wall. Golden aura rolled off my fist and Asmodeus’s armor rang, and he slid back half a step.

"Better," he said.

His left hand came around and caught me across the jaw. I didn’t see it. I heard it, a flat crack like a branch breaking, and then I was in the air again. I hit a boulder and the boulder lost.

’Okay,’ I thought, spitting blood. ’He’s a lot stronger than me.’

It was not a new thought. I’d had it the moment he stepped out of the dark. But there is a difference between knowing something and feeling it in your teeth.

"Barry!"

Qing Yan was on her knees by the boulder where I had left her, one hand clawing at the stone for support. Her fans lay in the dust. She was trying to stand and could not. Every villager on the slopes was the same, bent over their bows, faces pressed to the ground, held there by a weight that wasn’t touching them.

"Stay down!" I shouted. "Don’t fight it!"

"I—"

"Stay down!"

I turned back. Asmodeus was coming, unhurried, and the white lights in his helm followed me like two patient eyes.

I decided to stop being proud.

’System,’I thought. ’Inventory. The sword.’

[Item retrieved.]

The hilt filled my hand. I hadn’t touched it since the capital.

I took one breath, and I pulled it out of the air.

Asmodeus stopped.

"Ah," he said softly. "There it is."

The next few minutes I remember in pieces.

I remember the first clash, steel on black iron, and the shock running up my arms into my shoulders. I remember dodging a cut that would have taken me in half, and feeling the wind of it lift my hair. I remember the scales crawling across my ribs, healing the cracks as fast as he made them, and thinking that I’d never been so grateful for anything.

I remember that he fought like a man doing arithmetic. Every swing came from the angle I least expected. When I left an opening he took it, and when I didn’t, he made one. After the third exchange I understood that he had been fighting for hundred years.

I was faster. That was my one advantage. At full speed I could cross the road before the dust from my last step settled, and for a while it kept me alive. I cut his forearm and drew black blood. I cut his thigh. I slid behind him and put my blade through a gap in his shoulder plate, and he grunted and spun, and his backhand caught me full in the chest.

I went down hard. Something in my left side tore. When I tried to breathe in, it felt like swallowing glass.

"You fight well for a Meridian," Asmodeus said. He was bleeding from four places and did not seem to notice. "But you are not going to win this way, and you know it."

"I’m still thinking about it," I wheezed.

"Think faster."

He stepped in, and the sword came down.

I got my own blade up, and the impact drove me to one knee. The ground cracked under me. My arms shook. His whole weight was pressing down through that single point of contact, patient and enormous, and I felt my sword start to bend.

’It isn’t going to hold.’

That was when the blood from my split lip ran down my chin and dripped onto the road, and something in my chest woke up.

It simply rose, slow and cold, and my scales flared up my neck and across my cheeks, and my vision tilted gold. I felt my jaw ache. I felt the teeth in it lengthen. For a heartbeat, I could feel every hot pulse in Asmodeus’s body as plainly as my own.

’Let me’, said the thing behind my ribs. It was the first time it had used words, and the words were not words. It was a pressure, a sense of agreement, a hand held out. ’Let me out and he will be nothing.’

I knew it was true. That was the worst part. I could feel exactly how easy it would be.

"No," I said, through my teeth.

Asmodeus’s white eyes flickered.

"Interesting," he said.

"Shut up."

"I have seen it once before. A long time ago." His weight eased, only slightly. "Do you know what you carry, boy?"

"Nope," I said. "I Don’t care."

I shoved the thing down. It was like closing a door against a flood. My scales shuddered back to my shoulders, the gold drained from my vision, and I was left kneeling in the ground with a bent sword and shaking arms, and my own heartbeat coming back loud in my ears.

I had one move left. I’d been avoiding it for a reason. The Heaven-Splitting Sword Strike was not a trick. It took everything you had, every scrap of aura in your body, and you put it all into a single cut. If it missed, you were finished. If it hit and failed, you were finished. There was no third swing.

I looked at Asmodeus, and Asmodeus looked at me.

"Last chance to tell me your name," I said.

"I am Asmodeus."

"I know. I mean the one your mother used."