Chapter 371: Sky Is Bleeding [1]

Kane’s hand burned.

"Fuck—"

The fragment in his palm went from warm to white-hot in a single pulse.

He tried to close his fist around it but failed.

The stone rejected his grip.

A particle of it, core of the core, red instead of yellow, lifted from the cracked surface and hung in the air between his fingers, spinning, throwing hard scarlet light across the quay.

Then it climbed.

Climbed, as if the sky had put a hook in it, and the column that had already scarred the cloud earlier woke again and thickened.

Ragnar, halfway to the switchbacks on his knees and one hand, stopped.

He turned his ruined body toward the water and set his shoulders as if he could still bar a door.

The Hydra’s great eye was no longer on him or on Kane.

It was fixed upward, on the red climbing into the colourless morning, pupil narrowed to a knife-cut.

The domain familiar didn’t strike the shore.

It held position, coils tense under the surface, while the light wrote itself higher.

The fragment in Kane’s scorched palm broke.

Not a clean split, an inward failure, same family as the seat in the feeder, only red this time.

Dust and sparks.

The particle that had already left didn’t fall.

It detonated upward in a violent spear that hit the low cloud and spread.

The sky took a redder shape: not sunset, not fire, but a bruise-red dome that turned the mist, the cliff-face, and the faces on the cut the colour of working iron and old blood.

Thunder moved fast under it: too fast, rolling from the open sea toward the ridge in a single continuous growl that made the quay stones vibrate underfoot.

On the cut, someone shouted.

"What is that—?"

"Stone-Mother—!"

"The posts—signal the posts—"

The sea answered the sky.

Waves that had been ordinary harbour chop climbed without wind.

Grey-green water piled against the quay, spilled over the first slabs, then the second, flooding the tide-line where Kane still stood and where Ragnar still knelt.

The Hydra’s head drew back.

Coils slid.

The black-slit eye left the red sky only long enough to regard the shore once more, then the whole bulk turned and drove into deeper water, away from the cut, away from the light, a domain tool refusing a stage that had stopped belonging to its god alone.

Rain came with the thunder.

Hard, sudden, cold as the pit’s draft and red-tinted where the sky’s bruise leaked into it.

It hammered the quay, washed black-gold and salt and Kane’s blood into the same running sheet, and turned the world into noise and distance.

Ragnar laughed.

The sound was wet and wrong and fully present under the storm.

"You rang the wrong bell, barbarian."

Kane dropped the spent shell of the fragment and closed both hands on Mjoldr.

The burn on his palm screamed. The wound on his ribs screamed louder.

Rage answered anyway: hard-working burn, not the full suicidal open, enough to keep him upright in water that was already at his calves and rising.

"Then we finish the conversation before the sky does."

Ragnar came at him on his feet.

One hand.

No hammer.

The engraved weapon still lay somewhere under the flood.

He didn’t need it.

Sixty-five years of pit-taught mass and a body that had not learned how to stay dead closed the gap in three strides.

Kane met him with the axe.

Ragnar caught the haft on his remaining forearm and drove a shoulder into Kane’s bleeding side.

They went down into the water together.

The quay vanished under knees and elbows and the shove of the next wave.

Kane lost the clean grip on Mjoldr for a second, got it back, and short-struck at Ragnar’s temple with the spike.

Black-gold mixed with rain.

Ragnar’s forehead slammed into Kane’s face hard enough to white out the world.

Kane tasted blood and kept the lock on the Elder’s ruined wrist so the stump could not find his throat.

"You opened a door in the sky," Ragnar snarled against his ear, yellow light inches away.

"The pit only waited. What answers that light doesn’t sit in a chair."

"Then it can wait its turn."

Kane drove a knee up, found something that gave, and rolled them so Ragnar’s bulk took the next wave instead of his ribs.

"You first."

They fought in the flood like animals that had forgotten weapons.

Kane used the axe when he had space, ugly cuts at the elbow, the knee, the place under the jaw where the spike had already been once.

Ragnar used weight, the remaining hand, the stump as a club, the patience of a door that refused to admit it was off its hinges.

Water rose to their waists.

Thunder stood on top of the red sky and didn’t move on.

From the cut above, the Stone-Mother’s voice came in fragments between rolls of sound:

"—get off the quay—land-walker—!"

"—Hydra’s gone under—something else is—"

"—hold the children’s paths, not the shore—!"

Kessa’s snarl cut through once, closer than the cut:

"I am coming down—"

"Stay off the water!" Kane’s shout tore his throat.

He took a hit across the collarbone that made the arm numb and answered by putting Mjoldr’s edge into the meat of Ragnar’s remaining biceps.

"This is still my debt—!"

Ragnar’s yellow eyes flared in the red rain.

"Then pay it in full."

The Elder heaved, broke Kane’s stance, and drove him back until Kane’s spine met the quay’s outer bollard under the water.

The stump pinned his axe-wrist. The living hand closed on his throat.

For a moment the only sound was rain and the wet grind of a door trying to shut on a man who would not be shut.

Kane didn’t reach for full Rage.

He reached for the burn on his palm, the place the fragment had marked, and slammed that hand into Ragnar’s face, fingers spread over the yellow sockets, and pushed every remaining scrap of the red resonance the stone had left in his skin into the contact.

"GAHHHHHH!"

Light flared between them.

Ragnar screamed the old feeder scream, shortened and furious.

The grip on Kane’s throat broke.

Kane brought Mjoldr up through the space and put the spike under the chin, the same line as the first meeting on the landing, and this time he did not stop at a score.

He drove until the yellow light in one socket went out.

Ragnar staggered.

The red sky cracked with thunder so close it felt like a fist on the skull.

Water shoved both of them sideways.

Kane kept his feet by stubbornness and the bollard.

Ragnar went to one knee in the flood, black-gold pouring from under his jaw, one eye still burning, one dark.

"The heart... still drinks. You have only... broken a hinge."