Chapter 169: Faster Than Saud’s Bullets

The floor trembled.

It was not an earthquake. Everything in the cave was pulled downward at the same instant, as if the whole room had been dropped.

My knees bent without my permission. I caught the wall with my palm and held on, and my teeth clicked together. Beside me, Charolette staggered and went down on one knee.

Someone gasped.

Gravity. The High Orc had its staff pointed straight at Culex, and every symbol on its robe was burning silver.

I had to look hard to find him through the haze of pressure. The floor under Culex’s boots had sunk.

A round dent, several inches deep, had formed around his feet, and stone dust fell into it. His shoulders were pushed down. His head had dipped. For one second I thought it had worked.

Then he straightened.

It was slow. His spine rose one joint at a time, against a weight that was bending the rest of us to the ground. There was no magic in it.

There was no flash or word.

He simply stood up, as if the pressure were a coat that was too heavy and he was done wearing it.

Sweat did not appear on his face. His expression did not change.

The orc screamed.

It was a raw, thin sound, nothing like the deep chanting from before. It was the sound of a creature that has just realized it has nothing left to throw.

It pushed the staff forward with both hands, and the weight in the cave doubled. Stone cracked along the walls. A captain behind me dropped to the floor with a cry. I tasted blood in my mouth where I had bitten my cheek.

Culex bent his knees.

He leaped.

The floor under him burst. He crossed the fifteen feet in a heartbeat and a half, and I only saw him again when he was in front of the orc, one arm drawn back.

The orc swung the staff like a club. Culex ducked under it, and the staff went over his head and struck the wall with a crash that sent a rain of gravel down on us.

The gravity broke at once. The weight left my back, and I fell forward onto my hands, gasping.

’He closed the distance,’ I thought. ’He did not even use the blood.’

The High Orc stumbled back. It was no longer trying to cast. It was only trying to put distance between itself and the man in front of it. Its yellow eyes darted left and right, looking for a way out, and found only the cave’s black walls.

It dropped the staff.

It fell to its knees. For a moment I thought it was begging. Then it started to chant again, low and fast, in a voice that cracked on every other word.

This was not like the curses. It was a hymn.

A slow, rolling, awful tune that rose from its chest, and each line came out heavier than the last. I felt it in my ribs.

Its body began to change.

The robe split along the seams first. Then the skin on its arms stretched, tight and shining, until I could see the veins running through it like cords.

Bones cracked inside it, loudly, with the wet snap of green wood. Its back arched. Its neck thickened. It grew past thirteen feet, past twenty, and the ground shook beneath it, and its head rose into the dark where I could no longer see the ceiling.

It stopped at about forty feet.

The giant stood up. Its robe hung from its shoulders in shreds. Its tusks were as long as my arm, and its fists were the size of wagons. It looked down at the figure at its feet, which was suddenly very small, and a slow, smile spread across its face.

It lifted one enormous foot.

Culex did not move. He stood under the shadow of that foot with the dagger of blood in his hand and his eyes half closed, and the whole cave seemed to hold its breath.

The foot came down.

Boom!

The floor split. A shock wave rolled across the cave, and a wall of dust and gravel hit us at the edge.

Sera pulled me down behind a slab of fallen rock. Charolette ducked beside us with her arm over her head. I heard Mary cry out and Lee swear, and I could not see anything.

When the dust thinned, the giant’s foot was a hand’s width from the crater it had made. The crater was empty.

Culex was on the giant’s knee.

He had jumped. I never saw it. He stood on the orc’s kneecap with his boots planted, one hand on the cloth of its robe, and the giant’s face was turning toward him, slowly, as if it could not believe what it was seeing.

The High Orc swung a fist at him.

Culex stepped off the knee.

The fist passed through the place where he had been and slammed into the giant’s own thigh. The orc roared.

Culex was already on its hip, running up its side like a man climbing stairs, and every time a hand reached for him, he was somewhere else.

He ducked. He turned. He vaulted a wrist.

A second fist swung overhead, and he slid under it with his back almost touching the floor of the air.

I could barely follow him. He moved faster than Saud’s bullets had, and with none of the show.

He reached the giant’s ribs and drove his fist into them.

Crack!

The sound rang through the cave. The orc folded around the blow, and a mouthful of black blood sprayed across the floor. Culex struck again, in the same place. Then again.

Each hit landed with a deep thud, like a hammer on an anvil, and each one pushed the giant’s body inward.

Ribs broke.

I could see the shape of them bending through the skin.

The giant tried to grab him. A huge hand closed around where he was standing, and found only air.

Culex had already moved to its shoulder. He hit the side of its neck, and the head snapped sideways. He hit its jaw, and a tusk broke and spun away across the cave, and it landed near my feet with a clang.

The orc’s knees buckled.

It went down slowly, with a long, rattling breath. One knee hit the stone, and the whole cave shuddered. Then the other. It tried to push itself up with its hands, and the arms shook, and gave out, and its chest hit the floor.

A cloud of dust rose around it and drifted toward the ceiling.

Culex stood on the back of its neck.

He did not look tired. His hair was still swept back. His hands were still, and one of them was red to the wrist, and none of it was his.

He looked down at the orc’s head, which lay turned to one side on the stone, and the yellow eye that was visible rolled up to look at him.

It was begging. I knew it by the shape of the eye. Whatever it had been, there was nothing left in it but fear.

Culex raised his fist.

He did not say anything. He did not change his expression. He lifted his arm high over his shoulder, and for the length of one slow breath the cave was perfectly still.

Then he brought it down.

Crunch!

The High Orc’s skull collapsed under the blow. The sound echoed off the walls three times and then died away. The huge body twitched once, and its fingers curled against the floor, and then they went loose.

The High Orc did not move again.