Chapter 38: Shadowstep

Chapter 38: Chapter 38: Shadowstep

The bolt came out of the smoke at Elias’s throat.

He never saw it. He heard the thrum of the string, and then Aveline’s shield was there, swinging across in front of his face, and the bolt hit steel with a crack and spun away into the ash. It was black, barbed, and longer than his forearm. The point gleamed wet with something that wasn’t oil.

"Poison," Aveline said flatly.

Then everything happened at once.

The furnace doors finished grinding open, and the golems came out. Not one at a time, like the ones from the river. Six of them, all together, stepping out of six furnaces in a line, their molten bodies so hot that the ash on the floor in front of them curled and burned away.

From behind the casting molds on the right, two huge men came charging, heads down, heavy steel gauntlets on both fists. They moved like trains, side by side, straight at Tobin.

From the left, along the wall, a wiry man with a bandolier of knives came running low, a blade already in each hand.

"Marcus!"

"I see the big ones," Marcus said. "I can’t see the bow. She’s up in the smoke by the ladles. The Link can’t paint her."

The first gauntleted brother reached Tobin and swung a fist at his head like a sledgehammer. Tobin ducked, the fist whistled over him, and he came up with a cleaver aimed at the man’s ribs. The second brother caught the cleaver on his gauntlet in a shower of sparks and shoved, and Tobin went skidding back through the ash.

"Rude," Tobin gasped. "Very rude."

The golems reached Aveline. She met the first one shield-first and drove it back a step, fire splashing off her steel. The second and third tried to go around her. She pivoted, cut, held. But there were six, and she was one, and the bolt from the smoke had been aimed at Elias, not at her.

They weren’t here for the gate. They were here for him.

Another crossbow string thrummed. Elias threw himself sideways, and a second black bolt buried itself in the casting mold where his chest had been.

In the Link, red markers were blooming everywhere: six golems along the wall, two heavy markers locked on Tobin, one fast marker circling toward Marcus’s ladder. And grey shapes the Link didn’t know how to color, because they were people, not monsters, and the Link had never been built to mark people as enemies.

Elias counted. The brothers, the knife man, the archer in the smoke.

Four.

The fifth was standing at the side door, a young man in a cheap jacket with his hands at his sides, not moving.

And the sixth wasn’t anywhere at all.

Elias spun in a slow circle, dagger up, eyes moving across the hall.

The boot prints in the ash had started out of nothing beside a shadow. Stopped beside a shadow. So he looked at the shadows. The long black shapes thrown by the hanging ladles. The dark wedges behind each casting mold. The pools of black under the catwalk stairs.

"Marcus," he said. "There’s a sixth. He moves through shadows. Watch the dark spots."

"There are a lot of dark spots," Marcus said grimly.

The knife man had reached the bottom of Marcus’s ladder and started climbing. Marcus had to stop firing at golems and turn his rifle straight down. The golems pressed Aveline back another step. A crossbow bolt sang past Tobin’s ear.

And Elias, turning, looked down.

The furnaces behind him were blazing white now, throwing hard light across the hall. In front of him, stretched long across the ash, lay his own shadow.

It moved.

Not the way a shadow moves when you move. It rippled, like the surface of a pond when something underneath it stirs. Elias had half a heartbeat to understand what he was seeing.

Then a hand rose up out of it.

Then a shoulder, a head of close-cropped grey hair, a lean man in a plain black jacket rising out of the dark at his feet as smoothly as stepping up from a swimming pool. He came up behind Elias, already moving, and something cold and narrow drove into the small of his back, straight at his spine.

Elias felt the knife.

He felt the point press in, felt the pressure of it, the shove of a strong arm behind it.

And then he didn’t feel anything at all.

It was the strangest sensation of his life: a blade that should have gone through him simply stopping at his skin, as if something had caught it, swallowed it, and carried it away.

Across the hall, Aveline gasped.

She staggered mid-swing, her shield dropping a few centimeters, and Elias saw it happen. A dark stain blossomed through the mail at the small of her back, exactly where the knife had touched him, and spread, and began to drip onto the ash.

She was bleeding. For the first time since the cathedral, Aveline Rosier was bleeding.

She took the wound without a sound, dragged her shield back up, and kept holding the line.

Behind Elias, the man with the knife went very still.

"Interesting," said Rhett Kessler softly, close to his ear. "Very interesting."

Elias spun, slashing backward with his dagger. It cut through empty air.

Kessler was gone, sunk back down into the black at Elias’s feet like a stone into water, and a second later he rose out of the shadow of a hanging ladle fifteen meters away, wiping his knife clean on his sleeve. He studied Aveline across the hall, her blood on the ash. Then he looked at Elias, and smiled.

"So that’s your armor," he said. "Somebody else’s skin."

"Back!" Elias shouted. "Everyone back to the catwalk!"

It was the only ground that made sense: the long iron bridge over the molten river, three meters wide, with a rail on either side. One way in from the casting hall, one way out toward the far end of the foundry. If they could hold the bridge, nobody could get behind them.

They fought their way to it. Aveline walked backward with her shield up, blood running down the back of her legs, golems pressing her every step. Tobin dragged himself free of the two brothers by flinging a fistful of frost broth into the first one’s eyes and then running, cleavers flailing. Marcus kicked the knife man off his ladder, dropped six meters to the floor, rolled, and came up firing.

They made it onto the catwalk. For one breath, it worked.

Then the first golem grabbed the railing.

It didn’t attack. It just held on, wrapping both molten hands around the iron rail where the catwalk met the hall. And the iron began to glow. Red, then orange, then the dull, sickening yellow of metal about to give way. The rail sagged. The grating under Aveline’s boots dipped a few centimeters toward the river.

Then a second golem grabbed the other side.

The catwalk groaned like a living thing. Molten metal dripped from the softening iron and hissed into the river below. Heat poured up through the grates, and even through the salamander broth, Elias felt it now, hot against the soles of his feet.

Golems on one side. Assassins on the other. A melting bridge between them, and a river of liquid fire underneath.

The crossbow sang again. A bolt struck Aveline’s shield and stuck there, quivering. The two brothers had circled to the far end of the catwalk, cutting off the way out, gauntlets raised. The knife man was limping but standing, a fresh blade in each hand. The young man in the cheap jacket still hadn’t moved from the side door. He was watching Elias with an expression Elias couldn’t read.

And from the shadow of a ladle somewhere above them, Kessler’s voice drifted down, calm and almost friendly.

"I want you to know," he said, "this is nothing personal, porter."

Elias went very still.

Nothing personal, Pierce. A stone palm against his chest. A wall going up brick by brick.

He knew exactly who had sent them.

The catwalk dropped another hand’s width. Aveline’s blood was dripping through the grating now, sizzling where it struck the molten river below. His mana read thirty-eight and falling. He had no new summons to call. Nobody else was coming.

But he still had his eyes.

"Marcus," he said quietly. "Link. I need all six of them. Every single one. I don’t care if the Link wasn’t built for people. Make it mark them."

A pause. Then, very softly, Marcus said, "Copy."