Chapter 114. A Rabbit’s Tail Cleared the Cable When Nobody Had Told Her What to Do

Chapter 114: 114. A Rabbit’s Tail Cleared the Cable When Nobody Had Told Her What to Do

She’d hit a patch of cable that had spilled across the floor, slick with some kind of oil or condensation, and her boot had skated out from under her.

She was moving at full speed, and she was going to hit the floor like a thrown plate.

I yelled something. And I don’t remember what.

She tucked her chin.

Her arms crossed over her chest. She turned her shoulder into the fall, rolled once across the slick stone, and came up in the same smooth motion with her sword already swinging.

She didn’t lose a quarter of a second. And she didn’t even look surprised.

She just went on, as if falling were one of the steps in the dance and she’d rehearsed it a thousand times.

I’m told I made a sound. And Alicia says it was a laugh.

But to me... I think it was closer to a sob.

"Corporal Tam!"

Six. Her voice broke on it.

I heard her swallow, hard, and I felt something go through the chamber, a kind of settling, as if a great weight had shifted off a beam.

She was crying and running at the same time, and she didn’t slow down.

"Marianne!"

The seventh tether parted with a crack like a whip. The pale light in the rope went out, and the pillar at its head sagged and began to smoke.

"Father!"

The eighth was the trouble.

It had been bent in the fall of the sixth pillar, and a loop of cable had tangled itself around the base of the post, and when she swung at it, the blade slid off and bit into the floor.

For a second, I saw her stop.

I saw her look at the knot, with the sword stuck in the stone and her breath coming in short, sharp gasps.

Nobody had told her what to do about a loop.

So she spun on one foot and swept her tail through it.

I need to explain this. Eveline Whitehare has a rabbit’s tail.

It’s small and round and fluffy, and it sits about six inches below her belt, and in all the time I’d known her, I’d never seen her use it for anything but embarrassment.

But she whipped around like a cat, and the white puff caught the tangled loop of cable and flicked it clear of the post with a snap, and her sword came free and went through the tether in one flat, perfect stroke.

"Don’t tell anyone," she gasped. "Nobody saw that!"

"Everybody saw it!" Sharon bellowed, delighted.

"It was a necessary maneuver!"

"It was FANTASTIC!"

There was only one tether left.

I felt every person in the room hold their breath.

Eveline had skidded to a stop at the base of the ninth pillar, with her chest heaving and her hair plastered to her forehead, and I watched her lift her sword and look at the last rope of light, and I watched her mouth the final name.

"Duchess."

It was a joke, I think. Or half of one.

It was the last name she had, and she’d been saving it for the end.

She said it in a tiny, shaky voice, with a wet, cracked laugh in the middle, and she brought the sword down.

The ninth tether parted, and the whole chamber went white.

The sound was extraordinary.

I don’t think I’ll ever hear anything like it again.

It was a long, deep, rising groan, like the whole mountain clearing its throat, and it rolled up from the floor and out through the walls and hung in the air above us.

The Core shuddered. A hairline crack raced across the red half of the sphere, and then another, and the colors inside it, the blue and the red, began to separate and swirl in a wild, unstable dance.

The nine knights on the racks went limp.

For one dreadful second, I thought we’d killed them.

Then I saw the nearest woman’s chest rise and fall, and I heard a long, ragged, living breath.

They’d fainted, all of them, the way a body does when it’s been wrung out like a rag...

Thank god, they were alive... They were all alive.

Eveline was standing in the middle of the chamber with her sword hanging at her side and her whole body shaking.

She was covered in soot and sweat. One of her ears had folded over at the tip.

She looked around the room with huge, slightly unfocused eyes, as though she’d just woken up in a strange house.

"Did I do it?" she said, to nobody. "Did I... did I miss one?"

Nobody answered.

Nobody was able to.

I saw Sharon standing a few yards behind her, with her sword lowered and a look on her face that I will carry to my grave.

It wasn’t pride, exactly. It was something much bigger and more private.

It was the face of a woman watching a person she loved do the thing she’d been afraid they couldn’t.

"No," Sharon said, hoarsely. "You didn’t miss anything."

"Not even one?"

"Not even one."

"But I counted wrong... I did the names in the wrong order." She sighed. "I said Marianne before Father, and I meant..."

"Eveline." Sharon walked up to her, took her by the shoulders, and turned her around to face the nine pillars, every one of them dark and smoking. "Look at them."

She looked.

"You made no mistakes," said Sharon. "None... I counted too."

Eveline’s mouth opened. And then it closed.

A single tear rolled down her sooty cheek, and she lifted one hand to wipe it away and left a long black smear across her face. I don’t think she even noticed.

"Oh," she said, very small. "That’s... okay."

I would have laughed if I’d had the breath.

Corvane roared.

It wasn’t a human sound. He’d been fighting for his life, and he’d just watched his entire reason for being come apart in a flash of white light, and something in him had snapped.

He tore free of Alicia’s guard and ripped his sword out of the catwalk, and I saw his visor turn, slowly, toward the small gold shape in the middle of the floor.

"You," he said.

He moved.

He was faster than I’d ever seen him.

He bounded off the catwalk and came down on the stone floor like a falling building, and he went straight across the open ground toward Eveline with his sword held low and his teeth bared inside the helmet.

She saw him. She lifted her blade.

But she was spent, and her legs were trembling, and I knew she couldn’t dodge in time.

"Alicia! Laura!"

We went together.

The cord snapped taut between us, and the Resonance blazed up so bright that the whole chamber went gold.

I didn’t have to tell them what to do. We’d been fighting as one body for ten minutes, and the three of us hit Corvane from three directions at once, as if we were reaching for the same sword.

Alicia took the left side, low and fast, and her blade caught the back of his knee and spun him half around.

Laura came over the top, leaping off a coil of cable, and her sword found the two heavy steel clamps that held the crystal to his breastplate.

They were the same kind of clamps that had bound the boss in Blackthorn Forest, only tighter and better made.

She cut through the first one with a ringing clang.

The second one needed two blows.

She gave it three and swore, and it came away in a shower of sparks.

And I stepped in, and I drove the king steel into his shoulder.

No Aether. No flash of light.

Just a plain steel blade, held in both hands, shoved through the gap in his armor at the end of a very long fight. It went in about three inches and stopped against bone.

The crystal in his chest cracked.

A long white fracture ran from one side of it to the other, and a blue lightning bolt leaped out of it and arced across the floor.

Corvane stopped.

He stood there with the sword still in his shoulder and his arms hanging at his sides, and I watched the steady gray glow in his chest flicker and stutter and dim.

He went down on his knees.