Chapter 176: No, you’re not

Leon picked up the staff. He broke it across his knee, set the two halves gently on the floor, and put two fingers against the old man’s chest.

It was no more than a nudge. The old man sighed. The forest around him shuddered and went limp, and every leaf turned brown at once. A long breath ran through the branches, and they began to fall in slow pieces, drifting down onto the glass like autumn.

"I am too old for this," the old man said weakly.

"You were the bravest one so far."

"That is a poor thing to be told by the man who has just beaten me."

"It is true all the same."

Bram smiled faintly, and his head fell back among the roots.

"Seven," said Leon.

Along the far wall, the thick cage of green vines went slack as the old man’s power left him, and the hand of leaves that had covered Batnac’s mouth crumbled away. The giant drew a long, shaky breath.

"Seven," he whispered, in a voice of pure awe. "He is counting them. Garrick, he is counting you all."

"Be quiet, Batnac," said Garrick Dole.

The dust was settling. The brown leaves drifted down around the chamber in a soft rain, and in the quiet that followed, Leon could hear his own breathing and the faint ticking of cooling stone.

Seven of the ten lay broken around the floor. Along the far wall, a heap of withered vines still lay across a cradle of silver drones, and a man with no arms was watching the whole room from inside it with his mouth wide open.

Garrick Dole stood in the middle of the ruin with his cracked cane in both hands. His coat was soaked with sweat.

The blood from his nose had dried in dark lines down his chin. He had held himself upright through the first blow and every blow after it, and his hand on the cane trembled, but his eyes were still on the boy, and they were steady.

"Orrin," he said.

There was a long silence.

Then the floor shook.

Orrin was walking toward the center of the chamber. He did not draw a weapon, and he did not make a speech.

He simply came forward through the wreckage one slow step after another, and each step cracked the stone.

"Do not," Garrick said. "Orrin, it comes back ten times. You saw what it did to the three of them. You saw what it did to Bram’s forest."

"I know, old friend."

"Then why?"

"Because someone should find out how much ten times is." The giant’s voice was a boulder shifting in a riverbed. "I am the only one in this room who can stand to learn."

"I will not help you," Garrick said hoarsely. "If I put a single ounce of weight on your fist, it will come back to both of us."

"I did not ask you to."

The giant crossed the broken floor with his arms hanging loose. He was bald and scarred and almost three meters tall, and there was nothing on him that looked like armor.

His skin was the dull gray of a river rock. When a loose block of marble fell from the wall in front of him, he did not go around it. He walked through it, and the block broke against his shoulder like a clay pot.

Leon raised his left arm, and Orrin quickly paused in his charge, drawing back his fist.

"Forgive me," he said.

"Do not apologize yet."

The giant punched.

It was the heaviest blow that Leon had ever seen thrown, after his own punches.

The air bent around the fist, and the sound of it reached him after the fist did, like thunder after the lightning.

It struck the green shield with a sound like a church bell dropped from a cliff.

A ring of white dust blew out from the point of contact and slammed into the walls, and every remaining pane in the dome cracked from one side to the other.

The marble floor split in a star around Leon’s boots. The air shook so hard that the drones along the far wall rattled against one another like a bag of coins.

For a long moment, the two of them stood with the fist on the shield. Orrin’s eyes had gone wide. He had never in his life been stopped by anyone, and it showed in his face like a crack in a wall.

"You are strong," Leon said. He meant it. "You should be proud."

"I am... the strongest," Orrin said slowly.

"No," said Leon. "But you did your best."

Suddenly, the shield flashed, and the punch was reflected back to the sender with even greater force.

It slammed into Orrin, sending him flying like he had been struck by a train.

He struck a stone pillar, and the pillar exploded. He struck another, and it folded around his body. He plowed through the wall at the side of the room, and dust and rubble rained down on the floor, and from the hole that he had made, a long and heavy silence came back.

Then a hand rose out of the rubble and grasped the broken edge of the wall.

Orrin hauled himself to his feet. His gray skin was cracked all over like dry mud. Blood ran from his mouth, and his left arm hung at an odd angle.

He took one step, and his legs would not hold him. He sat down heavily in the dust with his back against what was left of the wall.

"Damn it..." he said, in a faraway voice. "How are we even meant to touch him at this rate..."

He couldn’t talk much, before losing consciousness.

Garrick frowned deeply at this, his teeth gnashing together in frustration.

He stood very straight, because it was the one thing that he could still choose to do. He looked at the hole in the wall where his friend lay sleeping, and something in his heavy face closed like a door.

"Haldor," he said hoarsely.

"I know."

The Sword Saint had not moved the whole time. He stood in the dust by his pillar with his thumb on the guard of his sword and his eyes on the boy’s hands, and he looked as calm as a man waiting for a train.

Behind him, the light of the broken dome fell across the wreckage in long pale bars.

"Thank you for waiting," Leon said.

"I did not wait for you," said Haldor. "I was waiting for the Mountain to finish." He drew a single inch of steel, and the light of the dome shone along it. "He has. So now I may do what I came here to do."