Chapter 80: The Song

The first sword came out on the Prince’s side.

A rider in the front rank drew it slowly, almost politely, like a man showing a blade to a friend, and he looked at it in his hand as if he didn’t know how it had gotten there. Then he turned and drove it into the chest of the King’s soldier standing across from him, and the soldier fell without a sound.

For one long breath, the whole yard stood and stared at the body.

Then three hundred blades came out at once.

Aren had been in fights, and he had been in the Abyss, but he had never heard a sound like this: steel on steel in every direction, a thousand voices shouting and nobody hearing anyone. The grey lines and the black lines didn’t really charge. They simply folded into each other like two waves meeting on a beach, and wherever they met, men started dying.

Every one of them thought the other side had started it. He could see it plainly on the faces of the ones who were still themselves. The King’s men saw a black rider cut down a soldier in grey, the black riders saw a soldier in grey cut down a rider, and nobody had time to notice that the men holding the swords had eyes like sleepwalkers.

Underneath it all, the hum went on, low and patient. Nell’s tune.

The Familiar was pulling against his ribs so hard that it physically hurt.

He looked down at himself, at a water boy’s shirt and a water boy’s bucket. His mask was hidden under three logs on the far side of the camp, a quarter of an hour away at a run, and if he threw a black crescent here, in front of two armies, Ren of Aldermere would be finished before it even landed.

’Think. Think! What can a water boy possibly do in a war?’

He kept his hands at his sides and his head down, and looked desperately for something he could actually do.

Above the fighting, the yard shook.

The Crown Prince had drawn his sword. He didn’t shout or charge. He stepped calmly down from the platform into the center of the struggle and swung once, flat, at nothing, and the air in front of him split like cloth. A line of force swept across the yard at knee height, and twenty men on both sides went down at once with their legs knocked out from under them. Nobody was cut, and nobody died. They were simply put on the ground like children.

On the other side of the platform, Duke Ashgrave raised one hand. Pale light came down out of the clear noon sky in a wide ring, and inside it forty soldiers froze where they stood, swords lifted and mouths open, held in the air like flies in honey.

Aren stared.

’So that’s what Rank B looks like.’

That was what the people at the top of the world looked like when they finally stopped pretending to be men. Either of them could have crossed this yard and killed every Rank D in it faster than it took to fill a bucket, and he had spent two weeks thinking of himself as someone who changed things.

But the Prince couldn’t be everywhere, and neither could the Duke. For every twenty men they put down, forty more were still fighting. And on the platform behind them, completely untouched, the old chaplain stood with his arms raised and his eyes closed, still blessing and still humming, while the battle kept everyone away from him.

The two strongest men in Kharn were far too busy to look at the one thing that mattered.

Aren crouched behind the water barrels at the edge of the yard and pointed.

’Eat.’

The cold slid out of his side along its thread, low and thin, too faint to see in the dust and sunlight. Ten paces out, it opened in the middle of the noise, and around him, in a ring no wider than a small room, the hum suddenly stopped.

A cook’s boy he knew by sight, Tobin, maybe fourteen, was standing two paces away with a kitchen knife in his fist, about to bury it in the back of a stable hand. He blinked and looked down at the knife, then at the stable hand, and his face crumpled.

"I didn’t... I wasn’t..."

"I know," Aren said. "Get down!"

He pulled him behind the barrels, then the stable hand, then two Imperial water boys who had been walking toward the fighting with their buckets still in their hands, as if they seriously meant to fight with those.

[Familiar of Nothing: Reach. Essence: 100% → 88%.]

It wasn’t nearly enough. It was ten paces in a yard of a thousand men, but it was what he had.

A soldier in grey came stumbling around the barrels with his sword up and his eyes empty. Before Aren could move, something heavy swung out of nowhere, caught the man across the wrist and sent the sword flying. Varro stood over him with a butcher’s cleaver in his one hand, breathing hard, his face grey and furious.

He wasn’t humming. The song had found nothing in him to hold on to.

"Behind me, all of you," the old man snapped at the boys. "Now!"

They scrambled behind him. Aren stayed where he was, pointed again, and another ring of quiet opened at the edge of the barrels.

[Essence: 88% → 76%.]

Varro glanced at the center of the yard, where the Prince was turning in a slow circle with his sword, putting men down without killing them.

"Same as his brother," the old man muttered. "Exactly the same."

Aren didn’t ask what he meant, because he was watching the platform.

The chaplain was still there, still blessing, but behind him the four priests in grey were now three. The fourth was walking down the back steps of the platform with something held carefully against his chest, wrapped in grey cloth. He didn’t run or look back. He strolled along the foot of the iron wall toward the Imperial gate like a man walking home after a long day.

He was heading for the mine.

Nobody stopped him. The Prince was busy, the Duke was busy, and every soldier who might have seen him was trying to stay alive. A priest was walking out of the yard with Kaela Voss’s blood in a silver bowl, and in a crowd of a thousand people, the only one watching was a water boy behind a barrel.

Aren stood up, and that was when he saw Vivienne.

She had come down off the platform when the fighting started. She was in the middle of the King’s side with Luna snarling at her feet, fighting as she always fought, coldly and cleanly, the silver crescent in her hand flickering out and back. Three sleepwalking soldiers were already down around her, and she hadn’t killed any of them. She was cutting tendons, wrists and knees, which was far harder than killing, and she was doing it anyway.

She was Rank D. In this yard, that meant she could hold her own against a handful of men and nothing more.

Then the rider came.

He was one of the Prince’s officers, on foot, his horse lost somewhere in the crush: a big man in black with a lance, and the air around him was heavy and bright in a way it wasn’t around the others. Rank C. He was half under the song, his eyes empty and his face calm, picking targets like a hawk.

He picked the girl in white.

Aren saw it a heartbeat before it happened. The lance coming down level, the charge, and Vivienne turning too late, her crescent rising to meet a blow it could never stop, not from a Rank C and not at that speed. Luna leaping desperately in front of her.

He was forty paces away, with no crescent he could use, no mask and no time.

He had exactly one charge, and there was nothing to decide.

"Vivienne!"

[Ward of Zero activated.][Target: Vivienne Ashgrave. Duration: 5 seconds.][Essence: 76% → 0%.]

It left him all at once, every last drop, like water from a broken jar. His knees buckled, and he caught himself on the barrel.

The lance hit Vivienne in the center of the chest, and stopped.

It wasn’t deflected or broken. It simply stopped dead, as if it had struck the side of a mountain. The officer’s arms jerked and his feet skidded in the dust. He shoved again with all the weight of a Rank C body behind it, and the point stayed exactly where it was, resting against her white dress, not even creasing the cloth.

Two seconds. Three.

Luna hit the officer at the knees, and Vivienne’s crescent went cleanly through the shaft of the lance. Then the Prince was there, out of nowhere, and the flat of his sword took the officer across the side of the head and laid him in the dust like a sack of grain.

Five seconds.

[Ward of Zero. Charges: 0/1. Cooldown: 30 days.][Investment recorded: Hidden aid. Her life.]

Vivienne stood very straight among the fallen men, one hand pressed flat to her chest where the lance had been. Then she slowly turned her head.

She didn’t look at the Prince, or at the officer. She looked across forty paces of dust and bodies and shouting, straight at the edge of the yard, at the water barrels, and at the boy standing behind them with one hand braced on the wood.

The water boy from Aldermere, the one from the woodpile, who had just screamed her name across a battlefield. Not my lady. Her name.

Their eyes met, and he saw her mouth open.

’Oh, you idiot. You absolute, complete idiot!’

He dropped behind the barrels and was gone.

[Vivienne Ashgrave. Hostility: 64% → 58%.]

He ran with nothing left in him, no essence and no Familiar, his legs heavy and his breath short, the noise of the yard falling away behind him. He ran along the stone wall and through the tents to the woodpile, where his fingers found the three logs and the mask behind them.

He was tying it on when he heard the soldiers of Kharn shouting for their captain.

He climbed onto the woodpile and looked back.

In the middle of the Imperial side, Kaela Voss had stopped fighting. She stood among her own men with her lance lowered and one hand pressed hard against her breastplate, over the dead iron heart. She wasn’t looking at the battle at all. She was staring down at the ground under her feet, as if she could hear something calling up through the stone.

Then she turned and ran for the Imperial gate, toward the mine.

Aren jumped down and ran after her.

The rope across the mine tunnel had been torn down and thrown aside, and the stool beside it lay on its side.

The old man who always slept there was lying on the stone with his eyes open and his hands folded neatly on his chest, as if someone had arranged him, very kindly, before walking on.