Chapter 213: A Familiar Woman

The axe never landed.

It came down in a rapid arc, but halfway to his throat it met a wall of white light.

The steel simply stopped being steel. The blade turned to grit. The grit turned to smoke.

The broad-shouldered woman was still holding the handle when she understood that she was holding nothing at all.

She couldn’t hold anything at all.

There was nothing for her to hold with.

No longer did she have hands to use.

And before a moment could fully pass...

Malik’s executioner no longer existed.

She had ended.

A gate had opened.

There was no closing it.

Malik was Class Five now.

A Balancer of Scales.

The system did not tell him so.

It had gone dark; no chime rang, and no glowing script hung in front of his eyes.

Only the feeling remained, the same way a man knows the shape of his own house in the dark.

He could still reach into the shop and feel the ledger sitting in the back of his mind, vast yet cracked along its spine, still waiting to answer him whenever he called.

That was enough.

Malik bought three Peak Glyphs in the time it took to blink.

The prices did not register at all.

Slow-voice saw it first.

The stout physician was standing a little apart from the others with an empty vial in his hand, and he watched the long white shape on the slab sit up.

It sat up with the weight of many dozens of binding spells sliding off its shoulders.

"Impossible..."

The blindfold fell away.

The cloth burned, in a single bright breath, and drifted to the floor as ash.

Malik opened his eyes.

They were no longer gold.

They had gone the color of a winter moon, pale and utterly without warmth.

They moved across the cellar once from left to right.

He counted them.

Twenty-three.

None of them moved.

"Kill him..."

Quick-voice whispered.

"KILL HIM!"

Twenty hands came up.

Twenty spells flared in the lantern-light.

Malik lifted his left hand.

He did not bother with a word.

The fire came out of his palm in a bright white sheet, and it completely passed over the cellar. Grids of light went out, the casters went out with them, and the old woman with the powders had opened her mouth to say something, only for her mouth to close on ash.

It took less than a heartbeat.

When the white faded, the cellar was empty.

Eight lanterns lay melted on the floor.

A ring of scorched stone marked the place where the iron slab had once stood. Of the twenty-three people who had held him down, there was nothing left but a fine gray dust that settled slowly on his shoulders.

Malik looked at it for a moment.

He did not feel triumph.

It was a flat sort of feeling.

They had spent days making plans for his body, and he had not needed even one of them to be afraid.

They wanted to sell him.

Yet he saw them as ants.

Ants that had carried off a crumb and called it a kingdom.

He had no interest in making them suffer.

Torture was for those who wanted something from their enemies, and he wanted nothing.

He had simply brushed the ants off the table.

Then he went up.

There was no door.

Malik did not go looking for one.

He raised his remaining arm towards the ceiling; white fire poured out of his palm and tore the rock open in a single straight shaft.

The warehouse above him disappeared.

The street above the warehouse disappeared.

He rose through eighty feet of stone and broken timber on a pillar of his own light, and the sky came down to meet him in a blinding blue sheet.

Malik stopped in the air.

His hair streamed behind him in a long white rope.

His clothes hung from his thin shoulders in strips.

Wind caught the empty sleeve on his right side, snapping it like a flag, but he did not bother to look at it.

Below him lay a village.

It was a modest place, a scatter of flat-roofed houses around a dry well, with a market square and a squat stone temple.

Smoke rose from three chimneys that had no business burning. Banners hung from the rooftops, dull red and ugly yellow, the colors of the faction that had snapped him up on the road and driven him here in a cart.

His executioners had made a home of it.

Yes, they had taken the village.

Now they were fighting.

He saw it all at once.

Men in red and yellow ran through the streets with their swords drawn, and they were not looking up.

They were not looking at the pillar of white fire that had just torn a hole through their warehouse.

Too busy.

Somebody else was shooting at them.

Arrows came from the rooftops as many small knots of men in dark cloaks slid out of alleys, cut down the faction’s guards, and slid back before the others could turn around.

Malik watched.

He looked at the men in red and yellow, the ones who had paid a fortune in salt-flats and wells.

He looked at the cloaked ones in the alley, who had no idea he was there.

He looked for a long time.

Then he looked away.

Malik did not say anything.

He did not call down fire or choose a side.

There was a long road ahead of him, and a grave at the end of it.

The Sultan had not yet decided what he was going to say to the dead.

Quietly, with no flash, he turned his shoulder to the village, and the air closed over the place where he had been.

He was gone.

The very moment he vanished, a familiar woman came over the rooftops.

She ran low along the ridge of a tiled roof, wearing a similarly familiar combat uniform.

It was dark green, cut for movement, with a ginger braid tucked down the back of the collar and a faint glow at the palms.

There was no doubting who she was.

The Backbone of Devil’s Maw.

Its greatest healer.

Safira.