“No one has to,” the Vagabond says.
She’s dancing to the side, fighting both golems as Sir Coriand tries desperately to keep her dog from his throat. Its savage growling reminds me it’s more than just a dog.
I want to help her, but the High Saint’s demon is ready for action now, and it leaps at mine, rending and tearing and spinning like a corkscrew made of smoke, and I must write and write as I battle foes on two sides.
Mayhap if I change the geometry of the thing, I could use a double fulcrum to apply force a little more precisely. I sketch a plan out with quick strokes. I feel the sweat forming on my brow and the dull ache in my forehead. My mind is exhausted with how hard I’ve forced it to think, to draw up knowledge of everything from ancient wisdom to modern engineering, but I must succeed. I must.
The Vagabond is speaking. “We could seal this place up. We could burn it to cinders. No one ever has to use it again.”
“Burn it?” Owalan sounds aghast, even though his cry bites off his words as Brindle leaps at him. He bashes the massive dog with his gauntlet. Brindle rolls to the side, only to leap to his feet and launch again in a blur of fur and fury.
“You can’t. Be. Earnest,” Owalan says, punctuating his words with strikes. He must use his off-hand. The dog is too far under his reach for him to use his sword. “There would be no. More Saints. No more. Cup. And haven’t you seen this place? The. Art. Alone. Must. Be. Preserved.”
I can hear the strain in the Vagabond’s voice, but I can’t look at her as she speaks next. My demon is all that’s holding back the other two from ripping her and Brindle apart, and I can’t write fast enough. I can’t.
If I bend the natural order just here and insist that a flux in gravity could pull this way and a spectral power drawn in through a wind draft just here, I could possibly lengthen the reach … my thoughts tangle and jumble as I try to design the corporeal form of the demon.
I’m losing ground. I know why. I’ve shaped and pulled and formed this shadow to fight, but I’ve fed it nothing. And unless I’m willing to channel both power and wickedness into it, then it can’t stand up to real denizens of hell.
My demon is too insubstantial. It remains shadow and aping mockery while the others have crafted true horrors. I do not know what the High Saint has fed his, but it glows with a bloody fanaticism that must look like his soul in the mirror. The Engineer’s demon is as hard and set as his stone golem. There is a ripple of something at the edge of my vision that tells me its foundation is heartlessness. It will eat the unborn if it must, to fuel itself.
My stomach twists. Will I shape such a thing to save the woman below? Will I shape it to destroy the rest? I stare bleakly at it. Honor shakes its head and balks like a war stallion refusing a gate.
Beneath me, the conversation drifts up in snatches as I fight my own battle. A battle of heart and mind.
“You couldn’t have murdered them all. You must have had help. You weren’t down here when the Seer died.”
That’s my blazing Beggar. She refuses to give up, tearing every shred of flesh from this bone. Just like her half-demon dog.
“Who do you think has the power to twist a head from a body and a hand from an arm, child? Not any man I’ve ever known,” Sir Coriand says.
“It was someone here. It was no demon,” she insists.
Sir Coriand’s laughter is thready. I risk a quick glance. He’s standing on the shoulders of his golem as it shambles one-handed toward the Beggar, its one good arm scything out as if it will reap her like ripe grain.
“No, it was someone with greater power than any man.”
“A golem,” she says with certainty. “They could have snuck in later. And they wouldn’t even have to confess a sin. Like my dog, they wouldn’t be considered contestants in this terrible game.”
“Indeed.” Sir Coriand sounds pleased that she’s drawn the right conclusion.
“But why kill her?”
“She was trying to destroy the key. But she — of all people — should have known. You can’t stop fate. What will be, must be. World without end.”
I know I must make a choice very soon, or fail in this task. The other two demons have battered mine to nothing but a gasp of shadow. It’s faint and weak, a tattered curtain before an armed assault. There’s only a breath of it left.
“And Sir Kodelai? An accident? Or planned by you, also?”
“You know, I was hoping someone would ask that.” Sir Coriand sounds smug.
“It bothers me that the God would let him be wrong,” the Vagabond admits through heavy breaths. She is tiring. They’ve beat her backward steadily. She’s nearly to the wall. Her dog has given up on a limping Sir Owalan and he has backed up with her. “Bothers me enormously. Isn’t his same power given to each of us? And yet to me, it flows with goodness, to you, it flows with evil, and to the Hand, it flowed in a way that twisted in his grasp and slaughtered him.”
Sir Coriand laughs. And I do not like how his laugh makes my throat tight and my heart race.
“It’s always the most noble, the most holier-than-thou who are easiest to twist right out of the God’s own hand, my girl. The High Saint doubted you. Didn’t you, Saint?”
If the High Saint finds his words beguiling, it does not slow his attack. He seizes one seam of my fractured shadow demon and pulls.
