Chapter 170: After You

King Culex went down on one knee and coughed a mouthful of blood onto the stone.

It was dark and thick, and it spattered across the dead orc’s tusk. Nobody moved. The captains stood frozen along the wall, and I saw Daniel take half a step forward and then think better of it. A man who had just crushed a Nightmare’s skull was kneeling in front of us, and nobody knew what it was allowed to mean.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then, without a word, he stood up. There was no drama in it, no stagger, no hand held out for help. He simply rose, brushed the dust from his black robe, and went on as if it had been a sneeze.

I let out a breath I had not noticed I was holding.

The High Orc lay face down in the crater of its own making, and from where I stood it looked like a collapsed hill. I walked toward it. My boots crunched over gravel and broken tusk. The air still smelled of burnt hair and iron, and close up, the smell was worse.

I knelt beside its head. The skull was a ruin, but the face was turned sideways, and both yellow eyes were still there, glassy and wide. I took out my knife and took out both eyes, one after the other. They were heavier than I expected, and warm. I did not let myself think about it.

Then I looked at Sera.

She understood at once. She had been watching me since I knelt, and she did not ask a single question. She lifted her hand, and a Spiritual Bowl appeared in it, pale and plain, about as wide as two cupped palms.

I tilted the High Orc’s neck and let its blood run into the bowl. It filled slowly, thick and almost black. When it was full, I set both of the eyes inside, and they sank halfway and floated there, staring up at nothing.

Then I closed the lid.

This was basically the stuff we needed to give to Tony, so that a potion could be concocted for us, which we would then drink to have a Silver Core. I held the bowl against my chest. It was heavier than it looked, and it was cold.

"Put it inside your core," King Culex advised.

I turned to him. He was getting considerably paler with each second, and weaker too. His color had gone from pale to something like old paper. A thin line of blood was still on his chin, and he had not wiped it. It was obvious that he was struggling, and equally obvious that he was not going to say so.

"But it is not a Gift. How can I put it inside my Core?" I asked. It was an obvious question. Though, by Culex’s expression, he thought me naive.

"Pour some of your spiritual power inside it," he told me.

I did as I was told.

I held the bowl in both hands and let a thin thread of spiritual power leak from my Core into it. For a second, nothing happened. Then the lid shivered, and the bowl went warm, and something in my chest reached out and closed around it like a hand around a coin.

[You Have Acquired A New Gift!]

[Bowl of Nightmare Blood and Organs]

[Rank: Bound]

’Bound!?’ I thought, surprised.

A Bound rank Gift was worth two hundred coins in the palace. I had just made one out of a dead monster’s leftovers. I did not like how interested I was.

...

Several minutes later, the cave was full.

All of the people living inside the palace had come to the cave. The bird had made trip after trip, twenty-five at a time, and the rock ledge outside rang with landing feet. They stood crowded in the dark, whispering, and their shadows stretched long under the torches that someone had lit along the walls.

King Culex arranged them all in a line.

He did it without raising his voice. He walked down the crowd and touched shoulders, and people moved where he pointed. The weakest were to go earlier, while the strongest were to go later.

Though I did not know why he put me at the end. Close to him.

’Is he thinking that I would perhaps start another revolution?’ I thought. ’Amusing.’

I stood near the back with my hands loose and my face blank, and I found that my heart was beating faster than it had during the fight.

At the far end of the cave, the portal waited.

I had not looked at it properly until then. It stood in the rock wall, a tall oval about the height of two men, with a surface like water that had been stilled. There was no sound, and no wind came from it.

Pale light moved across its face in slow ripples. It was the loveliest and the most frightening thing I had seen since the meeting with Ouroboros.

One by one, everyone entered the portal.

First it was the kids. They went in holding each other’s sleeves, small and wide-eyed, and the woman ahead of me was crying so quietly I almost missed it. Then the eldest, leaning on each other and on sticks. Then the weak females, and then the weak males, thin and hollow-cheeked, stepping through as if they expected the floor to vanish.

After that, there were normal people like Hazel and Camila. They looked back at us, waved, smiled, and then entered the portal.

I raised my hand to wave back. It was only halfway up when they were gone.

"Where will this portal take us?" I asked Culex.

He shook his head. "I don’t know. Though I think it would be the Continent of Distances."

The Continent of Distances was the continent that consisted of Valemont and Euniscope. Whereas the Continent of Moonlight was the one that consisted of Nuesak, Zaelshak and Rumen.

There were also small islands that were independent. But most of the population resided in the continents.

So, if it was the Continent of Distances, it was well and good for me.

I stood there for a moment, thinking of Ashwell Row and the front door.

"Where are you from?" I asked King Culex. It was interesting how just some hours ago, the only thing that went through my heart was that I was going to kill this man. And now I was talking to him as if we were neighbours.

"Valemont."

Yeah, we kind of were neighbours.

"Where?"

"351 Saint Edward Street, Apartment number 11."

’I didn’t ask for that many details,’ I chuckled, inwardly.

It was a very ordinary address. I could picture the street already, the gas lamps, the grey stone, a baker on the corner. It did not seem like the address of a man who had held a mountain for eighteen years.

Soon, the only people left were Saud, Charolette, Sera, Arthur, Theodore, Mary and me.

Saud took a step inside the portal.

He did not look back. He did not say a word. He walked into the light with his hands at his sides, and the surface closed over him like a pond, and he was gone.

Charolette looked at me with a smile, small and a little crooked, and I returned it before I could stop myself. Then she stepped inside as well.

Then it was Sera, who nodded at me.

Then Theodore, with a dry glance at the ceiling. Then Arthur, one hand on his covered eye. And finally Mary, who touched my sleeve as she went by and said nothing at all.

The portal rippled and went still.

The cave was quiet. The torches had burned low, and the light was thin and red. Only the High Orc’s corpse remained, huge and dark behind us, and the two of us standing in front of a door.

I took a good look at King Culex.

He had shrunk a lot.

It was not only his color. He looked smaller, as if something inside him had been spent and the outside had caved in around it. His shoulders were narrower. His robe hung loose on his arms. The skin around his eyes had gone thin and sunken, and the red in them, with the little ball that turned around the pupil, was dim. He stood upright, but I could see what it cost him.

I did not know what to say. The man who had flattened a Nightmare some time ago looked like he would blow over in a strong draft.

I gestured toward the portal.

"After you," I said, with a smile.

"I’m not going."