Chapter 103: The Warden

Chapter 103: Chapter 103: The Warden

Roderick Hale didn’t shout as he looked at the red lamp on the ceiling for three seconds. Then he turned to the six Guild Masters standing at the door and gave them a polite little bow.

"A fault in the lamp array, my lords," he said. "It happens when the cold gets into the stone. If you’d finish filing, I’ll see to it myself."

The Masters looked at each other. One of them shrugged. They kept filing.

Hale walked through the doors and into the Archive, alone, with his halberd resting on his shoulder.

Under the shelves of Section Nine, Sylvia watched him come.

He’s not calling for help, Sylvia thought. Why isn’t he calling for help?

Helena knew. She was staring at the box with Thomas’s initials on it, and she was very pale.

"Because if anyone finds out someone got into his vault," she whispered, "he loses his post. And if anyone opens that box, they find out what he did three years ago." She swallowed. "He doesn’t want us caught. He wants us gone."

[Doors closing in 5:40.]

Sylvia reached up, put her hand on the box, and pulled it down into her shadow. It sank and vanished.

"Got it. Hold on to me. We go out the way we came."

They moved back up the aisle, low, in the dark under the bottom shelf.

Hale stopped walking.

He raised his free hand. A ring of silver light spread out from his palm and up into the ceiling. Every lamp in the Archive went from cold white to full bright, all at once.

The shadows under the shelves disappeared.

Sylvia and Helena came up out of the floor on their knees, in the middle of the aisle, in full light. Sylvia’s speed dropped so hard she felt it in her legs.

[Shadow Sovereign: No darkness. Speed bonus lost.]

Hale was at the end of the aisle, twenty yards away. He looked at Sylvia, then at Helena. When he saw Helena, his face didn’t change. But he lowered the halberd from his shoulder into both hands.

"Mrs. Cross," he said. "I wondered whether you’d ever come for them."

"You knew Thomas," Helena said. Her voice was steady.

"I knew him for four minutes," Hale said. "He was very good. He nearly had me." He stepped forward. "I’ll make this quick. You deserve that much."

Behind him, out at the front of the Archive, his voice changed. He spoke over his shoulder, loud and calm.

"My lords. The lamp array needs resetting. I’m sealing the doors early tonight. Please file your remaining papers next month."

There was a murmur of surprise. Then footsteps. The Guild Masters were leaving.

Then a deep grinding sound came from the front of the Archive as the great stone doors began to close.

[Doors closing in 0:58.]

"He’s locking us in with him," Sylvia said.

"Yes," Helena said.

Sylvia drew her daggers.

Hale charged.

He was a Guardian, built to hold a door, and he moved like one: heavy, straight, every step planted. The halberd came down in an overhead chop that would have split Sylvia from shoulder to hip.

She wasn’t there. She had dropped low and to the right, under the swing. The halberd’s blade hit the stone floor and cracked it. Sylvia came up inside his reach and drove both daggers at the gap under his arm, where his breastplate met the shoulder plate.

The daggers stopped an inch from his armor.

A silver field had opened over his skin, flat and hard.

[Enemy Skill: Warden’s Bulwark (A-Rank). Physical damage reduced 80% inside the Archive.]

Hale brought the halberd’s shaft around and hit her across the ribs. Sylvia flew sideways into a shelf. Gray boxes rained down on her.

Behind them, the stone doors met. The sound shook the floor.

[Archive Sealed.]

Damian’s voice came through Sylvia’s ear bead, cracking with static. "Sylvia. The doors are shut. I can’t get in. The ward is solid."

"I know," she said, getting up.

Hale walked toward her through the fallen boxes.

"Inside these walls, the Archive is mine," he said. "Every lamp. Every lock. Every ward. I’m its Warden. You can’t hide from me in here, girl, and you can’t cut me."

Sylvia wiped blood from her lip. He was right. In this light she was half as fast as she should be, and her daggers couldn’t get through his Bulwark.

Then Helena spoke from behind him.

"Every lock," she said quietly. "Every ward."

Hale turned around.

Helena was standing in the middle of the aisle with her hands open at her sides. Her core was open now, completely. Blue light poured off her. The ward lamps on the ceiling all turned red at once and began to scream. She didn’t seem to hear them.

"I spent eleven years studying how locks are built," Helena said. "Gate anchors. Doorframes. Seals. Every ward in this vault is a lock, Warden. And every lock has a key."

She raised her right hand and closed it into a fist.

[Arch-Mage Skill: Unbinding (A-Rank).]

The ward lamp directly above Hale went dark.

Then the next one. Then the next. A line of darkness ran down the ceiling of the aisle, lamp by lamp, until Hale was standing in a pool of shadow ten yards long.

Hale’s eyes went wide.

Sylvia was already in the shadow.

She came up out of the floor directly behind him, at double speed. She didn’t stab. She reached into her own shadow with both hands and pulled out the heaviest thing left in it: the Abyssal containment pedestal, a block of void-iron as tall as she was.

She slammed it into the backs of Hale’s knees.

His Bulwark took most of the force, but he was a big man with a heavy halberd, and he went down hard on both knees.

"Helena!" Sylvia shouted.

Helena opened her fist.

[Arch-Mage Skill: Lockward (A-Rank).]

A circle of blue runes snapped shut on the floor around Hale’s knees, the same pattern as the seven locks on the Archive door. The runes rose up around his legs and his halberd and held them to the stone.

Hale strained against it. The runes didn’t move.

"That’s your own lock," Helena said. "Council Ward, third pattern. I copied it from the door." She walked up to stand in front of him. "It answers to the Warden’s seal. And you’re kneeling on it."

Hale stopped struggling. He looked up at her.

"So kill me," he said. "Your husband would have."

"No," Helena said. "Thomas would have hit you very hard and then handed you to the Association. So will I."

Sylvia stepped forward and hit him on the temple with the pommel of her dagger, once, cleanly. Hale slumped forward over the runes.

The ward lamps were still screaming.

"How do we get out?" Sylvia said. "Damian can’t get in, and I can’t take us through a sealed ward."

Helena knelt beside Hale. She lifted his left hand. On his middle finger was a heavy silver signet ring stamped with a key.

"The Warden’s seal," she said. She worked it off his finger and closed her hand around it. "The doors answer to this. I can open them from the inside."

---

The stone doors opened slowly, just wide enough for two people.

The round hall outside was empty. The Guild Masters were gone. Damian was standing at the bottom of the gallery stairs, his face gray, his hands shaking very slightly.

He saw them, then saw the unconscious man Sylvia was dragging by the collar.

"Is that Hale?" he said.

"He’s alive," Sylvia said. "I can’t put him in my shadow. It only keeps things and people who are willing. Anyone else, it smothers."

"I can carry him," Damian said quietly. He looked at Helena. "If you’ll let me."

Helena looked at him for a long moment.

Then she nodded.

Damian bent, took Hale’s arm over his shoulder, and sank into the floor with him.

Sylvia took Helena’s wrist. "Up," she said. "Fast. Before someone comes down to check on the lamps."

---

They came up in the Kingsgate suite at seven minutes past midnight.

Helena sat down on the floor right where she came out of the shadow. Sylvia knelt and opened her shadow, and the gray box rose out of it and settled in Helena’s lap.

Helena put her hand flat on the brass plate. On the three scratched letters.

Then she broke the Dragonheart seal and opened it.

Her papers were inside, in bundles tied with string, exactly the way she had left them. Her notes. Her proofs. The full method for turning an anchor around. She pressed her hand against them and didn’t say anything for a while.

Under the last bundle was a single sheet of paper that didn’t belong to her.

It was an order on Council paper, in a neat, small hand, signed with a crown and the number one.

Subject: Helena Cross. Not to be harmed. Keep under watch. Her research is to be kept, not destroyed. She will be needed when the anchors wake.

By order of the First Seat.

Helena looked up at Sylvia. Sylvia looked at the signature.

"Harrow," Sylvia said. "He saved her life."

"No," Helena said slowly. "He kept me. Like he kept the papers." She looked down at the last line again. "When the anchors wake. He knew, Sylvia. Three years ago, he already knew."