Chương 89: The Space Where It Should Be

"What happened to your face," Elian said again, and Keth still had no answer ready when the cheetah-thing came out of the dark and took the question away from both of them. It didn't run so much as arrive, there and then simply somewhere else, the space between one heartbeat and the next collapsing into nothing a human eye could properly track.

Keth caught only the afterimage of it — a low, sleek shape, hide the color of old iron, and along its jaw a faint blue crawl of light that hissed audibly even over the battlefield's roar, arcing between teeth that looked built less for tearing than for stopping a heart outright. It went for the soldier nearest them, a woman half-turned the wrong way, and closed the last of the distance before her own scream had finished leaving her throat.

"I accept that it falls," Elian said. The words came out flat, absolute, the way they always did, and the cheetah-thing's next stride simply didn't land where its own legs expected it to. It stumbled — impossibly, a creature built entirely around never stumbling — directly into the space Keth had already, without deciding to, filled with barrier-light shaped low and wide and hungry across the frozen ground. The trap closed on it mid-fall. Not gently.

Not the careful, controlled geometry Wyeth had once measured in a testing yard. Two broad shimmering plates slammed together around the creature's ribs with a force that folded its whole body inward, bone giving way in a series of wet, cracking reports, hide finally failing where hide had clearly never failed before, and blood — thick, dark, sizzling faintly where it touched the barrier's edge — sprayed outward in a fan across the snow.

The soldier staggered free, alive, sobbing with the particular relief of someone who understood, distantly, that she shouldn't be. Keth didn't feel anything at all about that. He could not feel sorrow. He could not feel love. The thought arrived the way it had arrived a dozen times already tonight, clinical, unadorned, sitting in his chest like a fact read off someone else's ledger.

He looked at the ruined shape of the cheetah-thing, at the woman crying her thanks a few feet off, and felt his own face do nothing at all in response to either.

Three deer-things had a boy pinned against an overturned supply cart when Keth reached him, ribs already beginning their slow, familiar unfold, and Keth understood the shape of the moment before his body had finished deciding what to do about it. He didn't reach for the barrier this time.

He reached for the blade instead, the one his own grief had forged out of nothing an hour ago and that still, somehow, answered to his hand like it had always belonged there, and crossed the last few feet in a stride that didn't feel entirely like walking. The first head came off clean. The second followed before the first had finished falling.

The third deer-thing turned to flee and didn't manage more than half a step before Keth's blade found its throat too, economical, unhurried, nothing in the motion that resembled the desperate fury of an hour ago and nothing in it, either, that resembled anything Keth recognized as himself. The boy stared up at him from the ground, chest heaving, eyes wide with a gratitude that had nowhere to land.

"Thank you," he managed.

"Thank you, I thought—" Keth didn't answer. He was already looking past him, at the next threat, his face blank in a way that made the boy's gratitude curdle, slowly, into something closer to fear. He could not feel sorrow. He could not feel love.

He killed two more things before the thought repeated itself again, and this time it arrived with something almost like curiosity attached to it — a clinical wondering, distant and cold, about how long a person could keep doing this before the absence stopped being strange and simply became the only shape he had left.

"Keth." Elian's voice, close, careful.

"Keth, look at me a second—" Something came screaming out of the treeline before either of them could finish it, and whatever Elian had meant to say went the way of every other unfinished sentence tonight, swallowed whole by the field's ongoing appetite for interruption. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The pale thing had grown wings again by the time Lira reached firing distance, or perhaps it had never truly lost them... she'd stopped trusting her own eyes to properly track a creature this size an hour ago, and simply began trusting the results instead.

"Now," she called, and Ashcroft's volley answered before the word had finished leaving her mouth — a dozen ice-spears launched in a single collapsing spread, converging on the vast pale shape from six directions at once. Most struck. Enough struck. The creature's scream, when it finally tore loose, came out ragged around the shafts buried through one wing and along its flank, dark blood freezing mid-fall in a slow, glittering rain. Then the scream widened.

Lira felt it before she heard it, a pressure building behind her own eyes, the ground itself seeming to tilt beneath her boots, and further down the field she heard men crying out, falling, the whole visible line staggering under a wave of sound with nothing sonic left in it at all — pure vertigo, weaponized, indiscriminate. She closed her hand.

The silence that answered wasn't the narrow, tactical field she'd learned to build a decade ago in a training yard, back when Voss had first shown her what her own ruined ears were good for. This was larger. Total.

A dome of absolute stillness dropping over herself and Ashcroft both, the scream's wave striking it and simply ceasing to exist, and for one suspended second neither woman could hear anything at all, not even their own breathing, the world reduced to a held photograph with the sound scraped entirely out of it. Then the dome held. And the shriek, on the other side of it, kept screaming into nothing.

"Absolute Silence," Ashcroft said, and something in her voice, even muffled by the field's edge, carried real and startled respect.

"That's not a technique I've seen documented anywhere."

"It isn't documented," Lira said.

"I only just learned I could do it properly."

"I need a minute," Ashcroft said, already turning inward, both hands pressed flat against her own sternum, ice beginning to climb visibly up from her wrists in slow, deliberate lattice.

"Something I haven't used tonight. It isn't fast."

"Then I'll buy the minute," Lira said, and didn't wait for thanks before stepping forward, blade already rising, placing herself squarely between the pale thing and the woman kneeling behind her. The creature didn't wait either. Both wings tore free of its own body in a single motion, no hesitation in it at all, self-mutilation performed with the flat indifference of something that had never once needed those wings to define what it was.

They hung in the air a half-second, thrumming, and then came at Lira like javelins, each one singing a frequency that hurt in her teeth even through her own field's dampening. She met the first with her blade, deflecting it wide, felt the second graze her shoulder before she'd fully recovered her stance, hot pain blooming immediate and bright. The third she caught cleanly.

The fourth opened a line along her forearm she didn't have time to properly register as anything other than a fact she'd deal with later, if there was a later to deal with it in. The wolf-thing hit her from behind while she was still recovering her balance from the fifth.

She felt it more than saw it — the specific displacement of air a lunging body makes, close, committed — and let her own momentum carry her into a backflip that had nothing graceful about it and everything necessary, her blade sweeping a single continuous arc through the space where two throats had to be if the creature's charge had brought it where instinct told her it would. Both heads left its shoulders in the same stroke, the body collapsing mid-lunge into the snow behind her.

She landed with no time at all to feel good about it. The pale thing had gone airborne again, and it was already diving, claws extended, closing the distance at a speed that made a mockery of its size. Lira twisted, threw herself sideways, felt the ground where she'd stood a half-second earlier simply cease to exist under a violence the size of a house — and felt, at the same time, one talon catch her outstretched arm on the way past, opening it from shoulder to elbow in a single, catastrophic line.

She hit the ground hard. Didn't stop moving. Her right arm no longer answered the way an arm should, blood soaking fast and dark through her sleeve, but her legs still worked, and her left hand still held the sword, and that, tonight, was apparently going to have to be enough. The creature reared back for another scream. Lira didn't flinch. The dome held.

This time, when the wave broke against it, it broke against nothing at all — no vertigo, no ground tilting, just the wasted, furious effort of something that had expected the same result twice and gotten silence instead. She used the half-second its confusion bought her.

She came up under its guard in a leap that cost her whatever was left in her legs to give, blade driving up and in toward one vast, dark eye — and felt, even mid-strike, the weakness in her ruined right side rob the motion of the force it should have carried. The blade found its mark. It did not find enough of it. A shallow line opened along the eye's surface, dark fluid welling, the creature recoiling with a fury that told her plainly how close and how far that strike had actually landed.

She dropped back to the ground, breathing hard, blood running warm down one whole side of her body now, and turned toward where Ashcroft knelt. Ice had climbed to cover half of her by now — not armor exactly, something closer to a second skin grown deliberate and ornate, ridges rising along her shoulders like the suggestion of a crown, frost patterning her exposed skin in fractal lines too precise to be accidental.

She looked, kneeling there in the frozen dark, less like a soldier than like something out of an older, colder story.

"Half a minute," Ashcroft said, without opening her eyes.

The flash of wrongness hit Lira a half-second before anything else did. It wasn't sound. It wasn't sight. It was absence... the same specific, total absence she'd felt in her own bones once before, in a snowbound salt-works, her balance simply ceasing to answer her with no warning at all — except this time it went deeper, all the way down to the place where her own shard sat, the place that had been hers since a beast attack years ago cost her everything else it had cost her. It simply wasn't there anymore.

And in the space where it had been, something else happened, something Lira had no time at all to prepare for: her ears, deafened by that same Echo for a decade, opened all at once onto a world she had not properly heard since she was a much younger woman. The battlefield roared into her at full, unfiltered volume...

screaming, tearing, the wet percussion of a hundred small deaths happening at once, sound so enormous and so raw it felt, for one impossible instant, like drowning in something she'd forgotten the taste of. Then the kick landed, and there was no more time to listen to any of it.

It caught her square in the chest, and the force behind it belonged to nothing human, sending her airborne, weightless, the frozen field wheeling past beneath her in a long, silent arc before gravity remembered its business and brought her down hard, twenty feet distant, the air driven from her lungs in one ragged, useless heave. She lay there, blinking up at a sky gone white with cold and stars, and understood, distantly, that she could no longer feel the shape of her own power anywhere inside her at all.

Just a woman. Just a body. Just blood, and a ruined arm, and lungs fighting to remember how breathing worked. Past her own boots, upside down in her swimming vision, she saw Warden standing where the kick had landed from — still, composed, exactly as unhurried as she'd been in a salt-works months ago. Except her eyes weren't right.

They held open, unblinking, fixed on some point past Lira entirely, and there was a stillness in her whole posture that had nothing of patience in it and everything of a puppet whose strings had simply, for the moment, stopped requiring her own hand to hold them. Ashcroft's voice reached her from somewhere far away, cracking with an alarm Lira had never once heard from her.

"Vane—*Lira*—" Warden's head turned, slow, mechanical, toward the sound of it, and the last thing Lira saw before the dark finally, mercifully, closed over her vision was that same wrong stillness swinging to face the only other thing left standing on this stretch of field. End of Chapter Eighty-Nine