Chapter 30: Iron Grip

Chapter 30: Chapter 30: Iron Grip

Elias felt it before he saw her.

His belt buckle jerked. The steel caps in the toes of his old porter’s boots tugged sideways, as if someone had tied ropes to them. Then his whole body slammed backward into the nearest crystal tree hard enough to make every leaf above him chime, and he was pinned there, his boots half a meter off the ground and his back flat against glass.

His dagger tore itself out of his hand and hung in the air two meters away, point toward his throat.

A young woman stepped out from behind a tree down the path. She was about his age, in a long charcoal coat with steel buttons, a black braid falling over one shoulder. Three coins orbited her left hand. Her right hand was raised, fingers slightly curled, as if she were holding something invisible.

She was. She was holding him.

"Who are you, porter?" she asked.

Elias didn’t answer.

Beside him, Aveline moved. She didn’t draw her sword. She took one step toward the stranger, and the stranger’s eyes flicked to her, and her curled fingers twitched.

Aveline’s shield wrenched sideways on her arm.

The pull was enormous. Elias could see it in the way the shield’s straps bit into Aveline’s forearm, in the way the metal of her pauldrons creaked. Anyone else would have been yanked off their feet. Aveline set her boots into the soil, leaned into the pull like a woman walking into a gale, and didn’t move.

The stranger’s eyebrows rose a fraction.

"Interesting," she said.

"Release him," Aveline said.

"You first. Put the sword on the ground."

"I haven’t drawn it."

"I know. That’s what worries me."

Elias tried to breathe against the pressure of his own belt buckle. It felt like a hand on his chest, flat and heavy. Iris Blackwood, he thought. He knew the face. Everyone in Merridan knew the face. Billboards. News footage. The Lodestar, the youngest S-rank in the city’s history.

And she had been following him. For how long?

He thought about the water tower on Larch Street. The bench across from the exchange. The hooded figure two rows back on the bus.

Three days, he realized. At least three days.

He could still move his lips.

"Marcus," he said. "Tobin."

The air folded open twice more, white and gold, lighting up the whole grove. Marcus came out of the first fold already kneeling, his rifle up and his sights on the stranger’s chest. Tobin came out of the second with a cleaver in each hand, looked around at the crystal trees, the pinned summoner, and the woman in the charcoal coat, and said, "Oh, for heaven’s sake."

Iris Blackwood looked at the three of them. For one second, something crossed her face that might have been shock. Then it was gone, buried under a calm so flat it was almost bored.

"Three," she said. "Not one. Three."

She moved her free hand.

Tobin’s cleavers ripped out of his grip, spun once, and hung in the air above his head, edges pointed down. Tobin stared up at them.

"Oi," he said, wounded. "Those were expensive."

Marcus’s rifle jerked. The barrel twisted toward the sky, and the whole weapon slid half out of his hands. He didn’t let go. He didn’t fight the pull, either. He just held the stock loosely, letting the barrel point at nothing, and looked at Iris over the top of it with an expression of complete, professional boredom.

"Lady," Marcus said, "I’ve been shot at by better."

Iris looked back at him. A muscle jumped in her jaw.

For a long moment, nobody moved. Elias hung against the tree. His dagger hung in front of his throat. Tobin’s cleavers hung over Tobin’s head. Aveline stood braced against the pull on her shield, sword still sheathed, and Marcus held a rifle pointed at the sky. The only sounds were the soft chiming of the crystal leaves and Elias’s own breathing.

"Everybody," Elias said, as calmly as he could, "please don’t do anything."

"I’m not the one who brought an army," Iris said.

"They’re not an army."

"Then what are they?"

He thought about it, really thought about it, with his back against a crystal tree and a dagger hanging at his throat. There were a lot of true answers. Summons. Contracts. People who’d died in other worlds and come here anyway.

"My friends," he said.

Iris studied him for a long moment. The coins orbited her hand, slow and steady.

"Your friends," she repeated. "Your friends cleared four D-rank bosses in five weeks under an E-rank license. Your friends sell their cores to Osgood Brill out of a duffel bag. And one of your friends," she glanced at Aveline, "stepped out of thin air in an alley behind Fifth Street and disarmed Royce Kell with a shield."

"Royce Kell was robbing a man with a head wound," Elias said. "And his son. And an old woman."

"I know." That surprised him. "I read the report. That’s the only reason you’re still talking instead of in a cell." Her eyes moved back to his face. "So talk. What are you? Who are they? Where did they come from? Who taught you to split your sales between two buyers?"

"He did," Elias said, tilting his head toward Marcus.

"And who is he?"

Nobody answered. Marcus’s rifle still pointed at the sky. Aveline still held her ground. Tobin was still looking mournfully up at his cleavers.

Iris’s jaw tightened. "I can stand here all night," she said. "The orchard’s full of iron. I won’t get tired."

"I believe you," Elias said. "But I’m not telling you anything while my friends are being held at knifepoint with their own knives."

For the first time, something like a smile flickered at the corner of Iris’s mouth. It was gone almost before it appeared.

Then the orchard started to chime.

Not softly, the way it had when the wind moved through the leaves. All at once. Every crystal tree in the valley rang together, a single high, rising note, like a thousand wineglasses struck with a thousand spoons. The sound went straight through Elias’s skull. Above them, branches shivered and snapped, raining glass.

Iris’s head jerked up. "What is that?"

"Marcus," Elias said. "Link."

Marcus’s fingers twitched on the stock, and the orchard redrew itself in thin white lines in Elias’s vision: the trees, the fences, the path, Iris in a faint grey outline the Link didn’t know how to color. And beneath them, under the ground, rising fast, a red marker so big it covered the whole grove.

Not one marker. Seven, fused together at the center like the fingers of a hand.

The ground under Iris’s feet began to bulge.

"Iris," Elias said, very quietly. "Let me down. Now."

She looked at him. She looked at the ground. For one long second, he watched her decide.

Then the earth split open.