Chapter 179: Strange woman

"I am not asking."

"Then what are you doing?"

"I am telling you what I am," said Leon. "You may call it whatever you like."

"Why SSS?" Garrick asked slowly. "If you wish to sit at this table, there is a place for an S-rank. You could earn your way upward as the rest of us did."

"I do not need to earn it. You saw to that in the last twenty minutes." Leon shrugged. "A lower rank would put someone above me on paper, and I do not like paper that lies."

"And if we refuse?" Vesper asked quietly.

"Then I will take it anyway." Leon said it without heat. "I would prefer that you agree. It would save everybody a great deal of trouble."

He glanced at Garrick’s dead body as he spoke, sending chills down the spines of the remaining S-ranks.

"You bastard... you would bring down the entire Association?!"

"If I must."

Nobody laughed. They had all just been put on the floor by him, and none of them could find anything to say to that.

Maelis Voren opened one of his eyes. "Wait," he croaked. "Did he just say... SSS?"

"Yes, Maelis."

"Oh." He closed the eye again. "Wake me when it is over."

"It is a joke," Seraphine said, to nobody in particular. Her hands were shaking.

"It has to be a joke. A damn teenager walks in, kills one of us, and asks for the rank that the council itself has not given in thirty years..."

"It is not a joke," Haldor said.

"Haldor..."

"It is not a joke, Seraphine. Look at him."

She looked. Then she looked at the cracked floor, and the scorched pillars, and the hole in the side wall where Orrin was, and she did not say anything else.

Batnac let out a long breath from his cradle by the wall. His voice was very quiet.

"I said that it was the most arrogant thing I had ever heard," he murmured. "I was wrong, I think. I did not know yet."

Leon was no longer listening.

He had stopped looking at the nine. He had turned his head instead to the empty space above the ruined table, where the light fell in a long pillar through the broken glass.

There was nothing there. There was only dust, and light, and a faint shimmer in the air like heat above a stone.

"I know that you are there also," he said aloud.

The S-ranks stared at him. Some of them turned to follow his gaze. Haldor’s hand went to the place where his sword should have been.

"You have been standing in this room since I walked through the doors," Leon said, to the empty air. His voice was quiet and perfectly calm.

"You did not move when they attacked me. You did not move even when Garrick died. I would very much like to meet you."

Nothing answered. A piece of broken glass fell from the dome and rang on the floor.

"Won’t you show yourself?"

Then, in the middle of the light, a single point of gold opened in the air like an eye.

The point of light grew.

It spread outward in thin golden threads, each one as fine as a strand of hair, and the threads wove themselves together in the pillar of light like a loom running at impossible speed.

A shape formed in the dust. It was slender, then tall, then unmistakably human, and the light that outlined it deepened from white to gold until it was warm enough that Leon could feel it on his face.

Then the glow settled, and a woman was standing in the air above the broken table.

She was beautiful. That was the first thing anyone in the room thought, and for a moment none of them could have said anything else.

Her hair was long and golden, and it fell past her waist in loose waves that seemed to hold the light of the sun inside them.

She wore a simple white robe, belted at the waist with a plain cord, and her feet were bare. Her face was young, but her eyes were not.

They were a pale and level amber, and they looked at the boy below her with an expression of polite, delighted surprise.

"Oh, my," she said.

Her voice was soft and warm and slightly amused. She tilted her head, and the golden hair slid over one shoulder.

"You can see me."

Nobody else in the chamber moved, and were all staring with their mouth wide open.

Maelis, who had been lying flat on the floor with his eyes shut, sat up so quickly that he hit his own elbow on a rock and did not even notice.

"Who," Bram said, "is that?"

Nobody answered.

"Who is she? I asked who she is!"

"I do not know," Ilsa whispered. "I have never seen her in my life."

"Nor I," Moren said.

"She was not on the roster." Vesper had risen on one knee, and her shadow was drawing away from the woman’s light as if it were afraid. "This room was sealed. Sorin sealed it. Nobody could have come in."

"Nothing came in," Sorin said faintly. His thin face had gone gray. He was staring at the woman with the look of a man who had just discovered a hole in his own floor.

"I felt nothing. I feel every fold in this room, every breath of air that moves, and I felt nothing. She did not enter... she was already inside."

"How long?" Orrin demanded.

"I do not know." Sorin’s voice cracked. "Since before we began. Since before the doors opened. I do not know."

On the far side of the chamber, Batnac was staring too. His pale eyes had gone wide and glassy.

"Impossible," he said, in a voice that had gone quite flat.

"I control every machine in this room. There are cameras in the ceiling and sensors in the walls, and there are three hundred drones around me alone, yet... not one of them registered her. There is nothing on any of the feeds." He swallowed.