Chapter 239: Cassian Redmourne, the Crimson Duelist

Chapter 239: Chapter 239: Cassian Redmourne, the Crimson Duelist

The smell reached them before the light did.

It rolled down the stone passage from floor 29’s exit like a physical thing, thick and coppery and warm, and the squad slowed without being told to. Barney’s nose wrinkled. Mirei pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. Even Seraphina, who spent her days elbow-deep in glands and venom sacs, stopped walking and murmured, "That is a great deal of blood."

"Too much," said Caelen quietly. His hand had already settled on his sword.

Rowan said nothing. Beneath his new boots, the stone was faintly sticky.

The passage opened onto floor 30, and none of them moved.

It was a hall. It was the largest hall Rowan had seen inside the Tower, a vaulted circular chamber of dark red stone, wide as an amphitheater, ringed with tall columns carved in the shapes of kneeling warriors. Torches burned at every pillar, but their flames were a sullen crimson, and the light they threw lay low and heavy across the floor.

The floor was wet.

It glistened from wall to wall in a slick, dark sheen, pooled in the cracks between the flagstones, trickling in thin rivulets toward a shallow drain at the center of the room. Long, curving streaks swept across the stone as though someone had dragged a great weight through it again and again. Weapons lay scattered in the shadows: broken swords, shattered shields, a helmet split cleanly down the middle. Most were old, rusted, and brown with age. A few were not.

None of the previous challengers remained.

And in the center of the hall, alone, a man stood waiting.

He was tall, lean, and utterly still, his back to them and his head bowed as though in prayer. He wore the remains of a long coat of dark leather and plate, torn in a dozen places and stiff with dried gore. One arm hung loose at his side, bare to the shoulder and wrapped in rags. The other held a sword, a long, slender, single-edged blade that dripped steadily onto the stone with a soft, patient tap, tap, tap.

Blood ran down it. Blood ran down him. It matted his hair in dark ropes, streaked his face, gathered at his chin, and fell. His clothes were soaked through. His boots left prints that filled instantly as he shifted his weight. He looked as though he had been standing in the same place, in the same crimson rain, for a very long time.

"Is he..." Mirei whispered, and stopped.

The man lifted his head.

He turned slowly, with no sense of hurry, and his eyes found them across the length of the hall.

They were pale, almost colorless, ringed in red. There was no madness in them. That was the worst part. They were the calm, level eyes of a man who had done something many times, had grown very good at it, and saw no reason to stop. His face was handsome in a gaunt, ruined way, scarred along one cheek, with a mouth set in a faint, tired line.

A pane of pale light flickered in the air in front of Rowan, the Tower’s own appraisal, summoned without his asking.

[ FLOOR 30 GUARDIAN ]

Cassian Redmourne, the Crimson Duelist

Level 37

A swordsman who has bled for every floor he has guarded. Wields the blood of the fallen as his own.

Rowan read it twice. Thirty-seven. Three levels below any of them.

It did not feel like a comfort.

"Good evening," said the swordsman.

His voice was low, quiet, and a little hoarse, with an old, formal courtesy that did not belong in a room like this one. The sound of it carried across the hall without effort. Beside Rowan, Barney’s grip tightened on his shield.

"You are the first to arrive in some time," Cassian Redmourne went on, and he tilted his head, as though counting. "Five. Not many parties come in fives. Most come in six or seven, and leave in one or two." He lifted the sword and turned it in the crimson light, watching the blood slide down the fuller. "The floor has been quiet since the pulse. I confess I was beginning to wonder whether anyone would trouble to climb this high."

"We’re not here to talk," Caelen said, and drew his blade.

"No." The swordsman smiled, faintly, and there was something almost like sorrow in it. "No one ever is."

He did not move. He simply opened his hand and let the sword’s tip fall to touch the floor.

Where the blade met the stone, the blood on the ground answered.

It rose.

It began as a ripple, a faint tremor in the pooled red, and then every drop on the floor of the hall lifted at once, trembling, glistening, and drew itself toward him in thin, glittering threads. The torches guttered. The stone rang softly. The tide of crimson swept up around his boots, coiled along the length of his sword, and settled into the blade like water into a dry sponge, until the whole weapon pulsed with a deep, dark, living light.

[Skill Activated: Crimson Tithe]

The pressure hit them like a wall.

It was not mana alone, though there was plenty of that. It was weight, and age, and the dense, sour pressure of a hundred deaths, rolling across the hall in an invisible wave that made their ears ring. Mirei staggered a half step. Seraphina’s vial slipped in her fingers and she caught it just before it fell. Barney grunted and braced, boots sliding on the wet stone.

Rowan felt the earth beneath his feet recoil. It was a small, startled shudder, as though the ground itself disliked what it had been asked to hold.

"Formation," he said, and his voice came out steadier than he felt. "Barney, Caelen, front. Mirei, high ground, the pillars. Seraphina, stay behind the line. I’ll watch the floor."

"Understood," said Caelen. His shoulders had settled into the ready, loose-limbed stillness that Rowan had seen on a dozen fields. Barney lifted his shield. Mirei was already sprinting for the nearest column, bow in hand, an arrow flicking from quiver to string.

Cassian Redmourne watched them take their positions with something that looked, for a moment, very like approval.

"Good," he said softly. "You have done this before."

He lifted the blood-dark sword, point toward them, in a salute so precise that it might have come from a ceremonial court.

"Then let us begin."

The torches flared. The blood on the floor began to move.