Chapter 55: Mercy

Chapter 55: Chapter 55: Mercy

[Gate collapse in 4:41.]

The numbers ticked down in the corner of Elias’s vision, quiet and patient.

He got up off his knees. It was easier than it should have been. The level-ups had poured through him like warm water, knitting what they could, and the mana bar that had been scraping bottom a minute ago now sat full and bright. His ribs still ached, but he could walk, and that was all the next five minutes needed.

He put the Barrow Lord’s core in his pocket and waded over to the broken pillar.

Garrick lay in the shallows, propped against a slab of fallen stone, his left leg bent wrong beneath him. Without the granite he looked smaller than Elias had ever seen him: a tired, middle-aged man in a soaked gambeson, with the face of someone who’d just watched his whole life fall into the water in pieces.

He looked up as Elias’s shadow fell over him.

"Go on, then," he said.

Elias didn’t answer.

"Go on." Garrick’s voice cracked. "Four minutes, porter. Leave me. Nobody’d blame you. It’s what I’d do." He laughed, a wet, ugly sound. "It’s what I did. You know the count better than I do."

Elias knew the count.

Toby Tolliver, nineteen. Corey Bask, who had a little girl. And a porter named Elias Pierce, lying on the floor of the Drowned Cathedral with a wall between him and the door.

His hand had drifted to the knife at his belt. He noticed it there and didn’t move it away.

Behind him, he could feel the family waiting. Aveline with her sword lowered. Tobin with his cleavers hanging loose. Marcus at the edge of the water. Lena on the iron heap. None of them said a word. Whatever he chose, they would stand behind it.

He’d killed Kessler. He’d do it again, if he had to. He wasn’t afraid of the knife anymore.

But Kessler had come for him in the dark with a blade of his own. Garrick was a broken man on the floor of a tomb, with no stone left in him at all.

And a gate collapse was too quick. Too quiet. Too much like a report that said didn’t make it out in time.

Elias took his hand off the knife.

"No," he said. "You don’t get to disappear in here. You’re going to walk out of this gate, and you’re going to sit in a room with Toby Tolliver’s mother, and you’re going to answer for every one of them."

He turned his head. "Lena?"

"Already on it," Lena said, limping over with two straps cut from Garrick’s own fallen armor. She knelt, straightened the leg with one firm pull that made Garrick scream, and bound it to a rusted spear shaft in twenty seconds flat.

"Tobin."

Tobin sighed, bent down, and slung the guild master over his shoulder like a sack of flour.

[Gate collapse in 3:58.]

They went out the way they’d come in, through the long drowned passage.

The dead lay everywhere now, slumped in the water and sprawled across their stone shelves, nothing left in their visors but rust. Nobody said much. Sato carried Rourke, groaning his way awake, over one shoulder. Vance walked ahead with his bow, alone, and didn’t look back. Petra walked beside Elias with one hand glowing green against his side, and he felt his ribs grind slowly back to where they belonged.

"You didn’t have to," he told her.

"Yes, I did," Petra said, and didn’t explain.

Tully had both porter’s packs on his back again. Elias had offered to take one, and Tully had looked at him as if he’d suggested something indecent.

"It’s my job," Tully said. Then, quieter, a few steps on: "You were their porter. Before me."

"Yes."

"Did they tell you about tradition too? First room, bigger share?"

"No," Elias said. "They didn’t bother with a story for me."

Tully walked for a while, the packs creaking. "Thanks," he said finally. "For stepping in front."

"Do it for the next one," Elias said. "That’s all the thanks I want."

[Gate collapse in 1:52.]

On Tobin’s shoulder, Garrick lifted his head.

"Why?" he said. His face was grey with pain, swinging upside down against Tobin’s back. "You could’ve let the gate have me. Clean. Nobody would ever have known. Why?"

Elias thought about it for ten steps of cold black water.

"Because you would have left me," he said. "That’s the whole reason. That’s all of it."

Garrick stared at him. Then he let his head fall back against Tobin’s apron and said nothing else.

Ahead, the grey mist of the gate shimmered at the end of the passage.

[Gate collapse in 0:40.]

They came out into floodlights.

The night by the old reservoir was as bright as noon. White Association vans stood in a ring around the cracked mud slope, light bars flashing blue and white. Uniformed officers waited behind open doors with their hands on their belts. The kiosk was still blinking red.

Behind them, the gate made a sound like a long breath let out, folded in on itself, and was gone. The mist on the ground thinned and drifted away. Where the Sunken Barrow had been, there was only mud, dead reeds, and a faint smell of cold water.

[Gate collapsed.]

Nobody in the ring of vans moved. They were staring at the people who’d walked out: a knight in caved-in plate, a soldier with a rifle, a cook carrying a guild master like groceries, a woman in a white coat with plaster dust still in her hair. Ironfang, wet and beaten. A boy with two packs. A young man with blood on his knuckles and his scarf hanging loose.

Then something came down out of the dark.

She didn’t fall. She descended, standing upright on nothing, riding the steel frames of the vans below like a wave, her coat snapping in the wind she made. She stepped off the air onto the mud as if stepping off a curb.

Iris Blackwood. The Lodestar. S-rank.

She took them all in with one long look: the knight, the cook, the guild master hanging upside down with his leg splinted to a spear. Her eyes stopped on Elias and stayed there.

"Your license pinged a claimed gate at 22:02," she said. "I was in the car at 22:03."

"Sorry," Elias said. "I didn’t mean to ruin your evening."

"You didn’t ruin it." She glanced at the empty patch of mud where the gate had been. "You made it a great deal more interesting."

Tobin set Garrick down on the mud, gently, which was more than Garrick deserved.

Iris held out one hand. In the nearest van something rattled, and a pair of heavy black suppression cuffs flew out of an open door, across ten meters of night, and landed in her palm with a soft clack.

She knelt beside him.

"Guild Master Garrick. You’re under arrest for gross negligence in a gate, deliberate endangerment of a guild member, and the attempted murder of a civilian appraiser. The list will get longer." The cuffs clicked shut around his wrists. "Anything you say goes in my report."

Garrick didn’t fight. He looked past her at Elias, then at Lena, and his mouth twisted.

"They took it," he said hoarsely. "Ask them. My skill. That woman put her hand on my chest and took it out of me. Check my license. It’s gone."

Iris looked at Lena. Lena looked back at her, calm as a doctor reading a chart.

Then Iris looked at Elias, and for a long moment she said nothing at all.

"I’ll note that the suspect is confused," she said finally, "and in shock."

Dex came up the slope, soaked and shivering, and held out his phone in both hands as if it were made of glass. "Everything since the door," he said. "And the Appraiser logs. All three raids."

Iris took it. Behind him, Sato stepped forward, then Petra, then Tully, packs and all.

"We’ll give statements," Sato said. "All of us."

At the bottom of the slope, Vance unstrung his bow without a word and handed it to the nearest officer.

Two officers lifted Garrick onto a stretcher and loaded him into a van. The doors closed, and the light bar went on flashing, blue and white, blue and white, as it pulled away into the night.

Iris stood and brushed off her knees.

"Director Crane wants you in his office at nine tomorrow morning," she told Elias. "Bring the appraiser. And Elias?"

"Yes?"

"Next time you walk into a claimed gate," she said, "call me first."

She stepped onto the air and rose away into the dark.

Elias stood in the mud for a long time with his family around him and the Barrow Lord’s core cold in his pocket. In the corner of his vision, one quiet line glowed and waited.

[Summon slots: 4 / 5.]