Chapter 113. She Cut Each Tether Calling the Name of Someone Behind Her

Chapter 113: 113. She Cut Each Tether Calling the Name of Someone Behind Her

I don’t think Corvane meant to hesitate. I think it was just surprise, the way you’d flinch if a chair suddenly stood up and spoke.

But for a fraction of a second, his sword hand lowered a few inches, and his visor tilted toward the man who had once been his subordinate.

And in that fraction of a second, Garrick took two quick steps, set his shoulder behind the shield, and drove it straight into Corvane’s chest.

It wasn’t a good strike.

It was the strike of a man who had been out of practice for two years and who was running on very little.

But it landed, and it knocked the knight back a full pace, and before he could recover, Garrick had planted his feet and thrown up the shield to meet the counter.

Corvane’s sword came down on the lion’s head with a crack that I felt in my own teeth.

Garrick’s knees buckled. I saw his face go gray, and I saw him put everything he had into one more shove, and I saw one knee hit the planks.

The shield sagged.

The sword came down again and again, and each blow forced him lower until he was crouched on the catwalk with his whole body wedged behind the metal and his teeth bared and a thin red line of blood running down from his nose.

He didn’t let go.

"Rabbit!" he roared, in a voice that cracked the air. "Now!"

That broke Corvane’s concentration for a moment, and in that moment, we moved.

I wasn’t thinking. I don’t think any of us were.

Alicia threw herself at his left side, with her blade low and her shoulder tucked.

Laura went high, and her sword rang off his helm.

And I drove the kingsteel into the gap between his breastplate and his arm and felt it bite.

He staggered.

A hot gush of something dark and oily spilled down his side. He swung backhand at Garrick, almost lazily, and the blow caught him across the shoulder.

I heard the bone go. It was a small, wet sound, and it made me want to be sick.

Garrick went down on his side with the shield still strapped to his arm and lay there for a second, breathing in short, broken sobs.

He turned his head and looked at me.

I knew that look. I’d seen it once before, in a tent outside Elarion, when a small girl had given him a crumpled sheet of paper and a crayon-drawn man in red armor.

It was the look of someone who had finally, after years of wrong turns, done the one thing he’d been put there to do.

There was no pride in it. And there was no fear.

It was just very... very clear.

He wasn’t fighting for the kingdom.

He had never been fighting for the kingdom. He was fighting for a nine-year-old girl who’d carved her V upside down on every door in the valley, and everyone in that chamber could see it.

"Go," he whispered to me. "I’m all right... Go!"

Laura worked it out in the middle of a fight, which is the most Laura thing I’ve ever seen.

She’d been fighting on my right with her wrist tied to mine and a cut bleeding down her thigh, and I could feel through the cord that half her mind wasn’t on Corvane at all.

It was on the pillars.

I felt it the way you feel someone reading over your shoulder.

Every few seconds her eyes flicked toward the nine columns of dark metal ringing the Core, and every time she looked, something small and cold clicked into place in her head.

"Nine tethers," she panted, between two parries. "Nine pillars!"

"They aren’t wired in a ring, but they’re wired in a sequence!"

"Each one carries the return surge for the one before it! If you cut them in the wrong order, the backlash hits a rack...!"

"And in the right order?"

"The right order bleeds the surge away down the chain, one pillar at a time... But you have to do it fast."

"Less than two seconds between cuts." She ducked a slash that would have taken her ear off. "Any longer, and the energy finds a way home through the nearest person."

"How fast is that?"

"Faster than I can run."

"Faster than I can run," Alicia said, from the left.

"Faster than anyone in this room can run," said Laura, "except one."

I knew who she meant.

I’d known since the second she said less than two seconds.

I looked across the chamber, past the swinging blades and the shrieking light, to the base of the nearest rack, where a small figure in a torn jacket was crouched with her sword in her hand and her ears flat against her skull.

Eveline hadn’t moved since the siren started.

She was staring at the nine thick ropes of light. Her hands were shaking so badly that I could see the blade tremble from forty feet away.

I knew what she was seeing.

She was seeing every tether she’d ever cut by accident, every wall she’d ever knocked down, every Corporal Tam she’d ever failed to save, and the nine people on the racks, and the nine ropes, and the clock.

Sharon had already gone to her.

She’d left the four knights she’d been holding for Holt, who had come up behind her with a groan and a shield, and she’d crossed the catwalk in six strides and dropped to one knee in front of the smaller girl.

She didn’t grab her. And she didn’t shout.

She put her good hand on Eveline’s shoulder and said something I couldn’t hear over the noise. Then she said it again, louder, and this time I caught it.

"You can do this."

It was a flat, plain, ordinary statement, delivered in the voice of a woman reading out the time. I think that’s why it worked.

"Sharon," Eveline whispered. "What if... I’m too slow?"

"You aren’t."

"What if I miss one?"

"You won’t."

"What if I trip?"

"Then you’ll fall like a professional, and you’ll get up, and you’ll keep going." Sharon’s eyes were hard and bright. "I’m right behind you..."

"I’ve got your back, and I’m not going anywhere."

"Now look at me... Do you trust me?"

She looked at her and then she nodded. "With my life."

"Then go and be fast."

Corvane had finally shaken me off.

He’d ripped himself free of Laura’s blade with a roar and was lunging for me again, and I met him with everything I had.

The blow rang down the catwalk like a gong. I didn’t want to look away.

I couldn’t afford to. But I turned my head, just for a heartbeat, and shouted across the whole cavern at the top of my lungs.

"Count them, Eveline!"

She flinched.

"Count who’s behind you!"

I don’t know whether she heard me. I’d like to think she did.

I saw her head come up, and her ears rise slowly off her skull like two stalks opening toward the sun. I saw her draw in a long breath through her nose.

I saw her lips move.

’Four.’ A slow hold.

’Two.’ A longer, slower exhale. ’Six.’

Then she was gone.

I can’t tell you what I saw next, because I wasn’t looking. I was fighting a man twice my weight with a crystal in his chest, and every instinct I had was screaming at me not to take my eyes off him.

But I could hear her.

She called the names in a clear, high, shaking voice, and every one of them came out at the same instant as a crack of steel and a flash of light.

I heard the first from somewhere near the floor.

"Sharon!"

A sharp metallic snap,snap and a spray of violet sparks. The first pillar flared and went dark.

"Roland!"

My own name, hurled across the chamber at a dead run.

It hit me somewhere under the ribs.

Another snap.

Another pillar died.

"Alicia!"

I caught a glimpse of her then, in the corner of my eye. She was in the air.

She’d taken a flying leap off the top of the nearest rack, kicked off the side of a pillar with both feet like a jumping cat, and carried the momentum straight into a slash that cut the third tether clean in two.

She came down on the next rack, turned, and went off it without slowing.

"Laura!"

Four.

I felt it through the cord, a sharp cold chime, like a bell struck in a distant room. Laura’s hand tightened on my wrist, and I heard her draw a breath that was almost a sob.

"Garrick!"

Five...

And I saw it happen.