Chapter 168: Meeting 10 S-ranks

"Batnac," said Garrick Dole at last, in a voice like iron. "Is he threatening you?"

"No."

"Is he holding a weapon at your head?"

"He is not holding anything. He is sitting with his hands on his knees."

"Then you are not yourself."

"I am entirely myself," Batnac said. "That is the regrettable part."

"We will talk when you land. Do not bring the transport down in the city. Bring it to the roof, and tell your machines to stay where they are." The old man paused. "And Batnac, I want you to know that I have never been so angry at a colleague in my life."

The line clicked shut.

For a few seconds, the only sound in the cabin was the hum of the engines. Batnac stared at the ceiling.

"Well," he said. "That went about as I expected."

"Then it went well."

"It went terribly." But the corner of his mouth twitched. "You are a very strange person to travel with. Are you aware of that?"

Leon didn’t respond.

The helicopter rose through a layer of cloud and came out into a clear sky. For a long while, nobody said anything. Leon watched the ground slide by far below, a patchwork of fields and roads and long gray rivers, and he thought about the room that was waiting for him.

Then the speaker clicked again.

"Batnac," said a woman’s voice, quietly this time. "The council has taken a vote."

"Already?"

"It took four minutes. I thought you would want to know."

"Tell me."

The woman hesitated.

"Eight voted no, and the answer was quite loud. I am not allowed to repeat what was said. Two members asked to see him in person before they decided." She paused, and then her voice dropped even lower. "Master Batnac, two of them broke a table."

"How very like them," Batnac sighed. "Thank you."

The line closed again, and he let his head fall back on the cushion.

"You may as well ask," he said.

"Ask what?"

"Who is in that building. I have been lying here for ten minutes waiting for you to ask." He cleared his throat, and a faint trace of color came back into his pale cheeks. "It has been such a long time since anyone has asked me a question."

Leon looked at him. Batnac looked back with an expression of such naked, hopeful dignity that it was very hard to refuse.

"Who is in the building?" Leon asked.

"I told you before... ten S-ranks." Batnac said.

Normally, he would be overjoyed, since he was leading Leon into a room with many S-ranks.

However, for some reason, he couldn’t get his mind to calm down, and was more worried about the S-ranks waiting for Leon instead of the other way around.

Through the window, Leon saw the sea come up on the horizon, a flat gray line beneath a pale sky, and below it a black tower rising from the edge of a cliff.

It was a single smooth column of glass and steel, thrust out of the rock like a blade, and smaller buildings clustered around its foot. Transports circled it in slow lines.

"There," Batnac said. "The headquarters."

"It looks like a gravestone."

Batnac ignored that comment, though it annoyed him deeply.

"Stay close to the wall once we are inside, and you will be fine."

"That is the first kind thing you have said to me all day," Batnac said. "I do not like what it means."

The transport slowed over the roof and settled onto a wide black landing pad. Nobody came out to meet them.

A few figures in uniform stood far back by the stairwell doors, and when Leon looked at them, they took another step back.

"Garrick has cleared the council floors," Batnac murmured. "He does not want an audience."

The ramp came down, and the wind off the sea rushed into the cabin.

Leon stepped out into it with his hands at his sides, and the drones lifted Batnac from the cot and carried him after him, with the procession of broken metal trailing behind.

They went down through a steel door and into a lift as wide as a small room. It dropped for a long time, and the numbers above the door fell from forty to ten without a sound.

When the doors opened, they showed a long hall of gray marble. It was empty, and their footsteps echoed from one end to the other.

At the end of the hall, a pair of black iron doors rose to three times the height of a man. The crest of the Association had been carved into them, a ring of ten stars around a single sword.

"They are electronic," Batnac said. "May I?"

"Please."

The man sighed, and the doors swung inward with a long groan.

The council chamber was a great round room with a domed ceiling of glass, and the pale light fell through it onto a floor of white stone.

In the center stood a huge table that had once been a perfect circle.

A jagged crack ran through the middle of it now, and the two halves leaned against each other at an angle, with long splinters scattered across the floor.

’So they did break a table,’ Medusa said.

’It was a big table.’

’It was a very big table.’

Ten people stood around the wreck, and none of them were sitting.

They had spread themselves out around the edge of the room, and no two of them stood close together, as if they had agreed beforehand that they did not want to get in each other’s way.

Leon took them in one by one, in the order Batnac had given them.

At the far end stood Garrick Dole, a heavy man in a dark coat with iron-gray hair and both hands folded on the head of a black cane.

The dust that drifted down from the dome fell faster around him than anywhere else in the room.

To his right was Seraphine Voss, tall and sharp-faced, with her red hair loose over a red coat and a tiny flame dancing on each of her fingertips.

She smiled at Leon the way a child smiles at a present she intends to break.

Beside her stood Ilsa Hartfrost, who was slim and pale as paper, with a long white braid over her shoulder and frost spreading around her boots in slow white ferns.

Next to her was Maelis Voren, who was lean and young-looking and the only one in the room who could not keep still.

His hair stood straight up, and blue sparks hopped between his fingers every time he moved them.

Sorin Kade leaned against a pillar with his arms folded and a bored look on his thin face, although the air in front of his hands looked faintly torn, like cloth held up to a lamp.

Lysandra Thorne wore a pale veil, so that her eyes could not be seen.

Bram Oakhart was an old man with a long beard and a moss-green cloak, and all the potted ferns and vines along the walls had turned toward Leon and begun to twitch.

Vesper Nox stood in the one dim corner, and her shadow had grown long across the floor toward him in a shape that did not match her own.

Haldor Wynn was a gray-haired man with a plain scabbard on his hip, and his thumb rested on the guard of the sword.

He was the only one in the room who watched Leon’s hands instead of his face.

The last of the ten, Orrin Stoneback, was a bald giant as tall as the doors and nearly as wide.

He stood beside them with his thick arms folded, and when the drones had carried Batnac inside, he reached out and pushed the great iron doors shut. They closed with a boom that rolled around the dome and died slowly.

Nobody spoke.

Every hand in the chamber was near a weapon, or near something that did not need one. Frost crackled. A vine creaked. The flames on Seraphine’s fingers grew a little taller.

"That is him?" Maelis said at last. His voice was high and quick. "That is the monster? He looks like a boy who got lost on the way to school."

"Be quiet, Maelis," Ilsa said, without looking at him.

"I am simply..."

"Silence," said Garrick Dole.

He did not raise his voice, but the weight of the word pressed down on the whole room, and Maelis shut his mouth so quickly that his teeth clicked together.

The old man’s eyes moved to the drones that cradled Batnac, and something in his heavy face softened.

"Batnac."

"Garrick."

"You did not mention that you would need to be carried in alongside him."

"He insisted," Batnac said gravely. "It would have been rude to refuse."

Seraphine let out a bark of laughter, and then stopped, because nobody joined her. Garrick’s eyes narrowed, and he turned them on the boy, and the pressure in the room doubled.

"Leon Allistar."

"Yes."

"You have wasted a great deal of this council’s time. Your request reached this room before you. and it was refused! Nothing that has happened since then has changed our answer."

"So I heard," Leon said. "Seems like you even broke the table, wow, you’re really angry huh?"

"That was her," Maelis said, pointing at Seraphine.

"It was him," Seraphine said, pointing back.

"It was both of them," said Garrick Dole, without turning his head. "I have forgiven neither."

The corner of Leon’s mouth twitched. Then he stepped forward, away from the drones, until he stood alone on the white stone in the middle of the chamber, and every eye in the room followed him.

"I want to join the Player Guild Association," he said.