Chapter 212: Balancer Of Scales

They came to heal him on the third night.

Nobody wanted to be the first through the door.

The room was a windowless cellar beneath a merchant’s warehouse.

Someone had dragged in an iron slab, bolted manacles to its corners, and hung four lanterns from the rafters.

A single man lay on it.

He was a long, thin, white-haired shape with a strip of black cloth across his eyes, and he had not moved in hours.

Seven people stood at the far wall, as far from the slab as the room allowed.

"He’s not awake..."

The quick-voiced man was the first to speak.

He was a restless fellow with ink on his fingers and a habit of rubbing his thumb against his teeth.

"Look at him. He’s not moving."

"He was not moving when they brought him in."

The slow-voiced one spoke next, stout and gray, a physician by trade.

"He did not move on the road either. I do not like it."

"You don’t like it because he’s an Angel."

"I do not like it because he is that Angel."

Nobody argued.

It was a tired silence, showing how often this was said.

They had all seen what the Sultan did in the far sky, over Devil’s Maw.

They had stood in the street, with the rest of the city, and watched eight Angels turn to nothing under his fire. Then they had watched him walk into an army. A few of them had been there afterward, on a ruined hill, when an arm had been taken from a body.

It was not much of a body, in the end.

That was what frightened them.

He lay on the slab like a man made of paper, with bones that showed through his skin and a face they could hardly see under the cloth. His chest rose and fell very slowly, showing how close to death he was.

But each of them kept hearing the same sound in the back of their heads, a lion’s roar, rolling across a field.

"The chains..."

A broad-shouldered woman near the door spoke next.

"Check the chains again."

Slow-voice did as she asked and checked the chains.

He did it with a thin metal rod, edging forward one step at a time, stopping a full arm’s length from the slab to tap each cuff.

Closing his eyes, he listened to the hum inside the runes. Then, after a moment, he held a small glass bead to the iron, and the bead went cloudy as the metal drank the Rukh out of it.

"They work, alright."

"You said that yesterday."

"I said it yesterday, and I am saying it today."

He wiped his forehead.

"Every drop he makes goes into the iron. The iron holds it. He can’t call so much as a spark."

"And if the iron gets full?"

"It will not get full."

"How do you know?"

Slow-voice turned and looked at her.

"Because it cost enough to hold the sea."

That started it.

"Do you know what I paid for those?!"

Quick-voice piled on, his voice climbing as he pointed at the cuffs with a shaking finger.

"Do you know how many men I sold for those? Three caravans. Two wells. The southern salt-flat that we were able to buy only after years of worming our way in that backwater village."

He jabbed himself in the chest.

"I sold nearly the entire faction. I walked into that bastard Arcanist’s shop with a ledger and walked out with two rings of iron! The Kahin laughed at me."

"You paid too much."

"I did not pay too much."

"You paid exactly what the Kahin asked. That is what too much means. We should have just robbed him."

"That’s impossible, and you know it."

"Then we shouldn’t have bought anything."

"It’s an Angel!"

"It is a half-dead man in a cellar."

"It is the Sultan!"

Quick-voice hissed.

"It is the Sultan of Devil’s Maw, their Second Sun. It is the one who can do anything, the wielder of Spine Breaker, the Lifter of the Gate, the Flipper of Armies, the Golden-Eyed Devil who burned eight Angels in under a minute, known by all as the Sultan of Gold walking the path of Fire and Blood..."

He stopped for breath.

"Do you understand who this is? He has far too many Titles to list. Nobody has ever gotten one over him. Not once in all those years. The Order would pay a million times our weight in gold. We’ll own this planet twofold, never mind a damned salt-flat."

"If he doesn’t kill us first."

"He can’t."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it’s true."

The broad-shouldered woman grunted.

"Then why are we all standing against the wall?"

Quick-voice opened his mouth, shut it, and rubbed his thumb against his teeth.

Nobody answered her question.

They healed Malik.

It took a long while to work up to it.

Slow-voice laid out his tools one at a time on a clean cloth. He uncorked a small crystal vial, high-grade, a pale gold liquid with a faint shimmer, and held it to the lantern with both hands.

It was worth more than all of their lives combined.

"Who holds the head?"

Nobody moved.

"Someone must hold the head."

A young man with a boy’s face was pushed forward.

He took three steps, stopped, and made a small noise.

The boy was trembling so hard that his teeth clicked together.

Gathering all the courage he could, he eventually moved, creeping up to the slab.

He laid two fingers against the white hair, only to jerk his hand back as though he had touched a stove.

"He’s cold..."

"That’s good."

The woman nodded.

"Cold means he isn’t burning."

Slow-voice tilted the vial.

The gold liquid ran across Malik’s thin lips, down his throat, until a ragged breath came out of him.

For a heartbeat, nothing changed.

Then the cracks along his skin began to close.

They sealed from the edges inward, thread by thread.

Color crept back into his cheeks, his ribs filled out a little, and the shape beneath the cloth looked less like a skeleton and more like a man.

"It’s working!"

"Don’t say that so loud!"

"Whatever, he’s healing!"

"I said..."

That wasn’t enough.

A second vial.

A third.

The cellar began to smell of honey, a change unnoticed by those present as they hung far from the lantern-light, watching every flicker of a finger, flinching each time the white hair stirred in a draft.

By the end, the stump of Malik’s right arm had completely closed over with clean pink skin.

"Ah... a pity."

Slow-voice sighed.

"The hand?"

"Yes, it won’t grow back."

Others came down while he was finishing.

They filed in by twos and threes, in rough leather and dull steel.

Spellcasters, mostly, wearing the gray sashes of Arcanists, weak ones, no doubt.

There were also a few mercenaries with notched swords, and an old woman who carried a... bag of powders?

By the time Slow-voice stepped back from the slab, the cellar held more than twenty people, and nobody was talking.

They took their places in a ring.

Each caster raised a hand.

A pale grid of light unrolled from their fingers and settled over the slab, layer on layer, until the whole room hummed with it.

Weight pressed down on Malik’s body.

Gravity, bindings, a lattice of dull sigils that pinned each limb to the iron.

Another set of hands lifted.

Another dozen spells.

His chest sank under the pressure, and the slab groaned.

"Is it enough?"

Someone whispered to themselves.

"It will be enough."

"What if he..."

"He is a man..."

Slow-voice interuptted his counterpart.

"Chained, blind, and drained. He has only one hand, no sight, no Rukh. Look at him."

They looked.

The man on the slab had not moved at all.

Malik looked like a corpse that had forgotten it was dead.

"Do it!"

The woman with the axe stepped forward.

Taking her time, she wiped her palms on her trousers, rolled her shoulders, and lifted the short axe in both hands.

The blade caught the light.

It was a plain thing, with a worn handle and a sharp edge.

She held it over the pale throat with her jaw clenched.

"Quickly... before he gains consciousness."

She drew a breath.

Malik heard the breath.

He heard it as a faint pulse of air against his cheek.

He heard the hum of the spells, the groan of the iron, and the strangled sound of a young man trying not to be sick.

All of it came through the fog in pieces.

Malik could not move.

Right, he was pinned down by weight upon weight, a hundred hands pressing on his chest and arms and hips, the cuffs constantly gnawing at his wrists with their hungry little teeth.

The dark behind the blindfold was perfect.

A cold edge hovered over his throat.

He did not know what it was, and he knew exactly what it was.

The world had gone very slow.

Lying on that chopping block, about to receive his decree, he thought about nothing.

Then, from a place the cold had not reached, a single word floated up.

It was only a number.

A number that had been sitting in a shop window for a very long time.

Malik had watched it climb all week. No, no, he felt it for it could not be seen. He felt it through the roar of battle, past the dead on a long road, and he hadn’t had time to process it.

He had it now.

The fear of a world had been rising since he fell.

A billion tongues were saying his name, in whispers, in prayers, in curses.

A head on a spear.

A body in the dirt.

Every one of those voices had paid a coin into the same ledger, and the sum had finally come due.

’...Class Five.’

The words came slowly, one at a time.

’...Balancer of...’

The axe began to fall.

’...Scales.’

His Soul broke open.

It did not feel like a spell, or a Rune, or a Glyph.

It was a dam letting go.

Every drop of Rukh that had been drained into the cuffs for days came boiling back up out of the iron.

The runes burned white, shuddered, and cracked straight across.

The ring of spells flickered for one final time.

A new decree was set.

"Death to all."