Chương 96: Cleaning

When Brace-Captain Armando woke to the blare of yells and distant horns, the first thing his hands went for was his boots. Mud-caked and stinking as they were, they were his best friends in the fen, trumping even his spear.

Blinking grit and sleep out of his eyes, full knowing he was not getting another wink for a good while yet, he jammed his feet into them and stood in the wedge-tent, his head stopping just short of the canvas as he looked over the shadowed shapes of his squad dragging on boots and buckling knives to belts.

"Stir your stumps," he snapped.

"At this rate the Unraveled'll be down your arses before you're dressed to die." He stepped for the flap, sending a lazy kick at the still-sleeping lump of their youngest. That earned him a muffled curse and an arm flung over a face before he ducked out into the day. A wash of white-gold glare near blinded him.

Midday sun speared through the high tangles of weep-crowns and hanging crook-vines, breaking apart in the wet haze, and the whole sprawl of their encampment stretched out before him among the sinkwillow trees and the dropmires. Men and women moved everywhere, weaving between cookfires gone half-cold, empty supply stacks, and lines of tents. Armando watched it all with his mouth set hard. They had spent days hunkered beneath the cover of the Blackmire Verge, but he'd always known it was too good to last.

And it was never all that good to begin with. Only a gravesent fool would call this place a blessing. Spending your days rotting in a fen plagued by insects the size of radishes, leeches like fat black fingers, and dropmires that could drag a grown man straight down into an endless dark the Wounded Sun wouldn't touch was nobody's idea of fortune. But the thick, sticky Resonance clinging to the Blackmire had been strong enough to keep the enemy back a while, and that had to count for something.

By the sound of it, though, they had just lost even that. Armando waited until his squad had finished readying themselves, then jerked his head and set off, leading them through the encampment toward their posts. Their detachment wasn't far into the Blackmire. Not even with death at their heels had they been stupid enough to push deep into its belly.

It only took a short walk of avoiding dropmires before his squad came to the edge of the fen, where their defenses ran in a long, crooked line along a steep earthen bank crowned with a hastily raised palisade of sharpened stakes. Well over a hundred men and women already manned the line, bronze, ashgray, and black all jumbled together. Armando quickly led his people to their places along one stretch of the palisade, then climbed the packed-earth step behind it and peered out across the land beyond.

His jaw tightened. Just last night, there had still been scrubland out there, thornbrush and sparse grass running at least a few leagues before it changed. Now there wasn't a trace of any of it. No sign of Resonance, no weed, no land. Just emptiness. A literal waste of nothing. Like the Unraveled had taken a knife and scraped the world clean wherever they carried the Silence.

Shouts broke out along the line as shapes emerged from that blank desolation, first no more than smudges, then figures, then people in pure white robes. Curses rolled from Armando's men, bitter and filled with malice. He joined in readily enough. Traitors to man deserved no less.

Say what you liked about the armies of the Ember Wardens, the Hollow-cursed madness of the Silent Lords, or even the crazed cults of the Chainfather—at least they hadn't turned against the very foundations of themselves, the dominions, and Resonance itself. Willing or not, the Unraveled were fools and gutless wretches both. Cowards who had thrown away sense and spine alike in some piss-weak hope that bowing their heads might spare them from a power that wouldn't have cared if they died.

Let the high flames of the Crown of Cinders judge the why of it. Armando only cared for the end of it. All along the palisade, men and women went taut. Spears lowered while shields shifted. Hands tightened on hafts and hilts and whatever else they had left to kill with. Armando's gaze dragged over his squad, and a hard knot of pride settled in his chest. The fear was there, plain as daylight, but none of them wore the look of someone about to break and run. The ones still standing here had made their peace with it.

This could well be their final day. More than a week had passed since their detachment lost contact with the Covenant, which could only mean the Unraveled had spread somewhere between them and any road out. Falling back into the Blackmire Verge had never been to truly escape. It had only ever been a way to die slower. Nothing short of the Flamebearer herself coming down in fire could save them, and how would reinforcements find them when the Covenant likely didn't even know where they were?

Armando's fingers tensed on the shaft of his spear as his Resonance stirred and rose. Maybe they could buy one more battle. One more day. Maybe they could drag enough of the white-robed bastards down with them that somebody, somewhere, might one day say their dying had been worth the bother. He didn't have no wife waiting. No children to crawl back to, no old mother praying over a cold hearth. Making this count for what little it could was reason enough to keep his feet planted.

The Unraveled advanced in slow, even steps. Resonance swelled all along the palisade, hot and sharp and ready, but no one invoked a Mark or loosed a Form. The Unraveled weren't ones you fought straight-on like that. Steel could cut them, and fire could burn them, but that was about what their detachment had. Arrows were near gone, spent days ago, and they weren't fortunate enough to have anything fancy like a Sentinel or even the most basic construct with them.

Armando leveled his spear at the first of the Unraveled heading toward his section. Its features were hidden in the depth of its hood, though he knew well enough there was nothing under there worth calling a face. From that shrouded absence he felt no answering power at all, and that was the worst part of it. The Unraveled had no pressure or push. No living weight for his senses to catch on.

But the hairs along his neck still prickled as the sounds around him thinned, until the world narrowed to him, his spear, and the thing in white coming on without hurry. Everything else was gone. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. Cinder Rush. Heat rolled through his body along with his Resonance. His heartbeat slammed loud as a war drum to drown out the silence that had enveloped him.

He drew his arm back, and the spear in his grip thrummed like a live thing straining to be loosed. Ahead of him, the Unraveled just kept walking, and its steps began to defy gravity itself as it rose gradually into the air. Iron Pike. He hurled. The spear shot from his hand like a bolt from a siege-thrower, a thread of Resonance lashed to it as it tore through the air and punched clean through the Unraveled's chest. White robes split.

The weapon passed through the space beneath it like it had pierced smoke wrapped in cloth, leaving a ragged hole that showed nothing inside at all. The Unraveled paused. For about a second. Armando already felt it—that wrong pull of its presence worrying at the edge of his Resonance, deadening it. Unraveling. He snarled and hauled the spear back by the tether of his Form. It ripped through the air and slammed back into his palm hard enough to sting. He drew back again. The Unraveled started walking. Iron Pike.

Iron Pike. Iron Pike. Three more times his spear tore through it before his Resonance thinned to such a ragged strand that one more throw might've left the weapon buried out there for good. The robes hung punched through with holes, fluttering around a body that still wouldn't stop. That was the spite of the things. You never knew how much hurt would finally put one down. There was no Resonance in them to judge by, no strain in their movements, no face to read. Just that damn white cloth.

This one had taken four strikes from a man of the Sixth Binding and kept coming. Armando could only be glad it had targeted him and not one of his squad. He shifted his footing and gave ground as the Unraveled passed above the palisade and mounted the slope in front of him. A blade of pure white bled into existence in its grip, aimed square at his throat.

"Come on, then," he muttered soundlessly. Forge Reversal— The blade flashed for his neck before the Form could finish. Armando jerked his spear across his body and caught the strike on the haft. The Resonance coiling through the wood eroded at the contact. The blow shuddered through his arms hard enough to numb his fingers to the knuckle. He staggered half a step, boots grinding into the packed earth, then stamped down, twisted, and bled the force off to one side before that dead-white edge could bite through.

The fade-blasted thing kept coming after him. Armando bared his teeth and drove in low, feinting for its middle before snapping the spear up toward the hood. It struck with what should have shattered teeth, nose, skull and all. Instead he felt damn near nothing, the tip just punching through the back of the hood like the bastard wasn't even there. His stomach gave a hard, ugly twist at the illusion that these things couldn't be put down. That they didn't bleed, didn't break, didn't die proper.

But he shoved that instinctive fear right back where it belonged and fixed his mind on the first lesson every fresh-handed greenling got taught before being sent against the Unraveled. Beneath all that cloth, there was still the recollection of flesh and blood. And that could be ruined, even if they couldn't see it. Breakstep. The Unraveled's blade whipped for him again, and Armando barely slipped the cut, turning just enough that it hissed past his ribs instead of opening them. He came back mean.

Cinder Rush flooded his limbs once more as his sagging Resonance flared through channels that were far more ragged than they should be, and this time the heat in muscle and marrow bit so deep it felt like his skin was being peeled from the inside out. He traded a flurry of blows with the thing, ripping fresh holes through its robes while taking cuts of his own across arm, side, and thigh—thin, bright wounds that leaked ember Resonance so bright that it looked for all the world like he was bleeding fire.

Then he'd had enough. His gut told him this was it, and Armando had always trusted his gut. He stepped into the Unraveled's next cut, took the blade glancing off the ashgray brace on his left forearm, and slammed his shoulder into its chest hard enough to jolt them both. Something gave with a crack. As it rocked back half a step, he locked his spear under one arm, snatched the thing's sword wrist with his free hand, and snarled through gritted teeth.

"Down." The word didn't carry, but he didn't care. Even as cold whiteness crept through his gripping hand, leeching strength out finger by finger, he forced it tighter and yanked a dagger with the other. Hammerwake. He drove the blade down with everything he had left. The Resonance packed into the dagger came apart the instant it struck the robe, fraying into nothing, and the steel itself shattered under the force. Didn't matter.

What was left of it still punched through where a throat ought to have been, leaving one more torn hole in the Unraveled's shape. For a single heartbeat, it looked up at him. Then sound came rushing back all at once, and he heard his own breath rasping in his ears. Ugly red suddenly spread through the white robes under him. A pallid face with dead eyes stared up from under the hood. Shouts broke around him. Ringing steel. Somebody screamed.

Armando lurched back to his feet and snatched up his spear in both hands, only to see two of his own sprawled in the mud with their throats opened to the spine, while another pair of Unraveled stood over them in white silence. Beyond the bank, more figures were spilling out of the scraped-clean wasteland, their robes drifting out of the emptiness in a long line. Armando's heart dropped straight into his boots. So much for their deaths being worth the bother. His gut said he wasn't taking more of these with him.

The two Unraveled turned toward him, and already the sound around him was starting to thin away again. He hauled together what tatters of Resonance he still could, then spat a mouthful of blood into the mud. If nothing else, he could leave one of them so full of holes that one of his people might steal one more breath before it was time. He raised his spear, drawing himself up for one last throw. The Unraveled stopped. Everything stopped. The world went silent so hard it felt struck.

Even his heartbeat vanished from his ears. But it wasn't their silence. Not that dead, empty wrongness that ate the sound out from between things. This was the silence of a wake. The silence of a hall. The kind that fell when something greater than fear stepped into the room and everything living knew to pay its respects. It rolled out in a tide, and where it met the Unraveled's hush, it didn't yield. It crushed it flat. Armando's eyes widened when he realized that he was already standing in an ocean of Resonance.

Not the thin, ragged scraps he'd been working with. Not the sticky fen-thickness they'd been hiding in. This was vast and deep. It flooded the space around him so completely, smothering even the Unraveled, and for the first time since he'd first laid eyes on their sort, he saw what it felt like when the world belonged to something other than them.

The two Unraveled turned, hoods shifting toward a point a little way down the bank, where a new figure had stepped into the cut-out patch of existence that had held only Armando and the things meant to kill him. Disbelief shot through him as he saw that figure, because some soft-headed little piece of his mind had already leapt ahead and named what he was seeing before the rest of him could catch up and point out how impossible it was.

With a crack like split timber, she was simply there between him and the Unraveled, silver-gray hair streaming loose behind her, sigil-scars along bare pale arms like old brands filled with power. Armando stared. … So it wasn't impossible? A pair of ash-bright eyes cut his way, steady as stone and calm in a way that had nothing to do with gentleness. There was a promise in that gaze. It held the hard, confident fact that the dead here would be remembered, and that the living would still be allowed to mourn them.

All because this power had decided so.

"You're—" he started, then broke off when his own voice actually came out. The woman looked him over, then smiled like they were meeting in some roadside inn.

"Sorry. No time to stick around for a chat. I've got somewhere to be before dark, and I want to finish here quick if I can. Makes it easier to get a bit more time with the little one before I've got to head out." Her eyes flicked once toward the Unraveled, then back to him.

"You did well. Plenty to be proud of." Then she turned away. Armando never even saw her Resonance shift. The two Unraveled just dropped where they stood. And then she was gone. He stood there staring at the place she'd been, breath sawing in and out of him like he'd forgotten how to do it proper. Sod his gut. They hadn't gotten some miracle or last-minute rescue from the Covenant or the Flamebearer. They had gotten the Ascendant herself. That wasn't the part that struck him the most, though.

Since when did the Ascendant have a kid?