Chapter 39: The Ones Who Stay

Chapter 39: Chapter 39: The Ones Who Stay

The Link fought him.

Elias could feel it, a strange, grinding resistance at the edge of his vision, like trying to turn a key in the wrong lock. Kill Zone Link had been born on a battlefield where the enemy wore uniforms. It had marked stalkers and goblins and golems without hesitation. But these were people, and something in it didn’t want to call them targets.

Marcus forced it anyway.

One by one, the grey shapes in Elias’s vision changed color. Not red. Amber, the color of a warning. The two brothers at the far end of the catwalk, gauntlets raised. The knife man limping at the near end. The young man by the side door, his hands still empty at his sides. And up in the smoke beside a hanging ladle, a shape the Link had never been able to see before: a woman crouched on a narrow maintenance ledge, a crossbow braced against her shoulder.

"Got her," Marcus said softly.

"Wait," Elias said.

Because there was one more thing the Link was showing him now, and it took him a moment to understand it. Scattered across the casting hall and the river, a dozen pools of shadow had turned faintly blue. Cold spots. Most of them were still. One of them, under the catwalk directly below Aveline, was moving. Slowly. Like something swimming beneath the surface of dark water.

"Marcus," he breathed. "Is that him?"

"Shadow temperature drops when he’s in it," Marcus said. "Link’s reading the cold. Don’t ask me how. It’s guessing."

It was enough. For the first time since the furnaces opened, Elias could see the whole field.

On the near end of the catwalk, the two golems clinging to the rails were still pouring heat into the iron, and the grating sagged lower every second. Tobin looked at them, then at his cleavers, then at the last of his frost broth sloshing in the bottom of the thermos.

"Oh, I’ve got an idea," he said. "It’s a terrible one."

He poured the frost broth over both cleaver blades. Frost spread across the steel with a crackle, white and glittering, so cold the air around the blades steamed in the foundry heat. Then he stepped up to the first golem and drove both frozen edges straight into its glowing chest.

The core screamed. The heat and the cold met, and the cleavers seared into it with a sound like a red-hot pan plunged into a sink. The golem’s light went out from the inside. It froze solid, still clutching the rail, and its hands cooled from yellow to black. The softening iron beneath them stopped glowing.

The catwalk stopped sinking.

Tobin turned to the second golem, blades still smoking with cold. "Cool ’em," he said grimly, "then crack ’em."

It went out too.

In the sudden quiet, with the golems frozen and the catwalk steady, Elias stood up straight.

He didn’t raise his dagger. He let it hang loose at his side and raised his voice instead, loud enough to carry across the whole casting hall, up into the smoke, down into every shadow.

"Garrick Holt sent you."

The brothers glanced at each other. The knife man’s eyes narrowed. Up on her ledge, the crossbow woman didn’t move.

"I know he did," Elias said. "He said those same words to me five weeks ago, in a boss room in the Drowned Cathedral, right before he shoved me back through the door and sealed it with a stone wall. Nothing personal, Pierce. He left me there for an irregular boss to burn. Then he went on the news and told everyone I volunteered."

His voice echoed off the iron walls.

"Whatever he’s paying you, he’s paying you to bury that. And I’ll tell you what he didn’t tell you. You can see what’s on this bridge. A knight who takes the wounds meant for me. A soldier who can see every one of you through that smoke right now. Ask the woman on the ledge how it feels to have a rifle pointed at her through a cloud."

On the ledge, the crossbow dipped a fraction of an inch.

"So here’s your one chance," Elias said. "Drop your weapons. Walk out the side door. Go back to Garrick and tell him the gate was too much. I won’t follow you, and I won’t hunt you, and I won’t say your names to anyone." He paused. "One chance. That’s all you get."

Nobody moved.

The furnaces hissed. Molten metal dripped from the softened rail into the river below. Aveline’s blood dripped through the grating.

Then, by the side door, something clattered on the iron.

The young man in the cheap jacket had dropped his sword. It was a short, cheap blade, and it lay in the ash at his feet. He looked up at the shadows near the ceiling, where Kessler was hiding.

"I told you," Wick said quietly. "I told you he was just a porter."

He turned and walked out the side door without looking back.

At the far end of the catwalk, the two gauntleted brothers looked at each other for a long moment. Some silent argument passed between them, the kind only brothers can have. Then the bigger one unbuckled his gauntlets, one, then the other, and let them fall with a heavy clang onto the grating. His brother did the same.

They walked past Elias without a word. One of them, passing close, met his eyes and gave the smallest nod. Then they were through the side door, and gone.

Three.

Three had stayed.

The knife man shifted his grip on his blades and smiled crookedly. Up in the smoke, the crossbow came back up to the woman’s shoulder, steady again. And in the shadow beneath Aveline’s feet, the cold blue spot stopped drifting.

It went very, very still.

"Well," said Kessler’s voice from somewhere in the dark, amused and unhurried. "That was a lovely speech."

They came all at once.

The crossbow sang from the ledge, a black bolt aimed straight at Elias’s heart. The knife man came sprinting down the catwalk at Aveline, blades flashing, aiming for the bleeding wound at her back. And in the shadow beneath the grating, the cold spot surged.

"Marcus!"

"Mine."

The rifle cracked once. The bolt never reached Elias. Marcus’s round met it in midair and shattered it into splinters, and a heartbeat later his second round found the ledge, and the amber marker in the smoke flickered and went dark. The crossbow clattered down through the ladles and fell into the molten river with a hiss.

Aveline turned to meet the knife man.

She was bleeding, slowed, her shield arm trembling. But she had taken a killing blow meant for her summoner, and Oathbearer had been storing it ever since, waiting. White fire poured down her blade. The knife man saw it and tried to stop, boots skidding on the iron, but he was already in reach.

One cut. The light went out of the second amber marker.

And the cold spot was gone.

Elias’s eyes raked the Link. Every shadow pool. Every cold patch. There, rising fast in the shadow cast by Aveline’s own body, right behind her. Kessler had learned. Elias was protected by her skin, so he wasn’t going for Elias anymore.

He was going for the knight.

Kessler came up out of Aveline’s shadow with the knife already moving, straight for the back of her neck, where the mail didn’t reach.

Elias was already there.

Quick Step, one stride. He threw his left arm across the gap between the knife and Aveline’s neck, and the blade went into his forearm instead. It was meant for her. It hit him. And the moment it hit, the echo woke.

[Oathbearer (Echo) activated.]

Pain turned to fire in his chest and came out as lightning in his legs and arms. Every one of the twelve points he’d poured into Strength surged at once.

He caught Kessler’s wrist with his bleeding left hand, pinning the knife inside his own arm so Kessler couldn’t pull it free. For one instant, they were face to face. Kessler’s patient eyes went wide, for the first and only time.

"Interesting," Kessler said.

Elias drove his dagger into his chest.

It went in under the ribs and up, all the way to the guard. Kessler stood there for a heartbeat, held up by Elias’s grip on his wrist. Then his knees gave way. Elias let go.

Kessler tipped backward over the softened rail, and fell, and the molten river took him without a sound.

The casting hall went quiet.

No windows opened. The system that announced every goblin, every rat, every golem, said nothing at all. For the first time since the cathedral, Elias was grateful for its silence.

He stood on the catwalk with Kessler’s knife still in his forearm, staring down at the river where Kessler had been. His hands were shaking. He couldn’t make them stop.

Behind him, Aveline put one hand on his shoulder, very gently, and left it there.

Nobody said anything. There was nothing to say.