Chapter 82: Eye of the Storm [pt 2]

They came out of the roll and Theo was up first, which was the only advantage he got in the next four minutes.

He cut at the head. The Inheritance was not there. It was eleven feet to the left with its hand already going into a soldier’s back, and the soldier folded around the wrist and went down and Theo had not even finished the swing, so the blade went on through empty air and pulled his shoulder round after it.

"Stop—"

It was gone again.

’It’s not fighting me.’

’It’s picking them off around me and making me watch.’

The next one it took was a woman with a sickle who had been shouting about legacy an hour ago, and it did her from behind while she was looking at Theo, and her face was still turned toward him when she went down, and it did not turn back.

Theo threw the shield.

It went through the space where the Inheritance had been and took an Inheritor’s leg off at the hip forty feet further on, and then it came down and rang once and rolled and lay flat, and the sound of the rim on the cobbles afterwards was very loud in a street where three hundred people had stopped shouting.

He got it on the fifth attempt, and he got it because he stopped chasing and stood still. Four times he had gone to where it was and arrived where it had been.

Brandy came in from behind. The shadows told Theo before his ears did. There was a thin place in the dark at his left shoulder, the way a pond goes thin when something moves under it, and Theo turned into it with the sword coming up.

The blade went through Brandy’s forearm.

The Inheritance did not make a sound. It looked at the arm, at the place where the arm stopped and the blade went on through, and then at Theo, and its face did something that was almost a smile and was mostly a mistake in the muscle.

Then it hit him.

Theo went through a shopfront, through the counter behind the shopfront, and into a wall of shelving that came down on top of him with a great deal of crockery.

He lay in it.

And nothing came.

That was the moment.

That was the moment Theolyne Chadwick stopped being a boy having a good night and became something else, and it happened lying on his back under a broken shelf with a plate on his chest.

The panel did not come.

He had been hit by everything in that city for four nights, and every single time, without fail, that golden line had arrived to tell him that his body had taken the shape of the thing that hurt him.

[CRITICAL STRAIN REACHED] [ADAPTATION HALTED] [Your body cannot process further trauma at this time]

’No.’

’No, no, you don’t get to stop now—’

[ADAPTATION HALTED]

He pushed the shelf off himself with his shoulder and got onto his knees in the wreck of somebody’s crockery, and the pieces went into his shins and he let them, and the cold went through him properly for the first time since he had come down off that first roof.

’So that’s it.’

’Everything I’ve got, I’ve got. There is nothing new coming. Whatever it does to me from here, it just does.’

He picked up the sword. The grip had crockery dust on it and he wiped it off on his thigh, and he did not look at his hands while he did it.

’Fine.’

’Then I’ll use what I already have.’

Behind him, four streets west, the frontline was not a frontline any more.

The things that had been Inheritors had finished eating each other and had started on everything else. They came up the streets as slick grey masses with too many shoulders in them, and they did not swing weapons, they simply arrived on top of people and took them inside, and went on, and were wider afterwards.

Sound was the worst part. Nobody who lived through it could describe the sound.

A man went in reaching backwards for somebody. A woman got half of herself out and did not get the rest. Two boys from the Cutler roster were taken in the same movement by the same thing, one after the other, four seconds apart, and the second one had time to see the first one go.

And out beyond them, at the eastern end of the street, the separate masses had begun to find one another.

Theo did not see any of it, because he was busy, and he would spend a long time being unable to forgive himself for that.

He fought the Inheritance for six minutes on a street with nothing living on it, and he fought it with a numbers problem.

It moved by displacement. It went from one place to another with nothing in between, and it always came out next to something it wanted to kill, and it was never in the same place for longer than the time it took to do the killing.

’Can’t hit what isn’t there.’

’Can’t out-speed it. Can’t out-reach it. Can’t learn it, because I’m not learning anything ever again tonight.’

He blocked with the flat, badly, and the shock came up the bone and took the feeling out of his forearm from the wrist to the elbow.

’So don’t hit it.’

’Make it come to a place you have already cut.’

Theo picked the widest patch of dark in that street, a doorway under a stone lintel on the north side, and he walked into it and put his back to the wall and let the shadows come up over his boots and stand where his shins were.

Then he threw the sword away.

It skidded out into the middle of the road, eleven feet from him, in plain view, and lay there.

Theo slid down the wall and sat in the doorway with his hands open on his knees and his head down, breathing like a man who had nothing left, which took no acting at all.

’Come on.’

’You have spent four nights watching me. You know what I look like when I’m finished.’

’Come and look.’

The Inheritance came.

It arrived a foot in front of him, out of nothing, already crouching to put a hand through his chest, and its face was doing the thing that was almost a smile.

Theo did not move.

He had put the cut in that doorway ninety seconds earlier and left it there, held in the dark against the stone, the way you leave a nail standing in a board.

[Sub-skill: LONG SHADOW] [The cut dissolves and resolves in the shadows]

It resolved.

The Inheritance came down onto a blade that had been waiting in the dark since before it decided to arrive, and the blade went in under the jaw and out through the top of the skull.

It hung there.

And Theo, sitting in a doorway with a dead climber a foot from his face, put both hands up, took hold of the sides of its head, and finished it.

The body fell across his legs.

For a moment there was nothing at all. No street noise, no shouting, no long roll of feet coming up the hill in step. Theo sat in a doorway with a corpse over his shins and let his head go back against the stone, hard enough to feel the stone, and laughed once, badly, with no air in it.

’Done.’

’That’s the champion. That’s the thing running it. That’s four nights.’

’It’s over.’

He was wrong, and he found out he was wrong about eleven seconds later.

The ground moved.

Not shook. Moved, the way a floorboard moves when something heavy shifts underneath it, and Theo got the corpse off his legs and got up and went out into the middle of the road and looked east.

The masses had finished finding each other.

What was coming up the tanners’ row from the eastern quarter was one thing now. It filled the street from wall to wall and it went back further than Theo could see, and it had no legs, and it moved by putting the front of itself forward and dragging the rest along behind, and where it had passed the stone was wet, and stayed wet, and steamed a little in the cold.

Somewhere inside it, in the grey, there were faces.

Not looking out. Just in there, at different depths, at different angles, the way stones sit in a wall.

It came past the doorway where Theo was standing and did not stop for him, and did not turn any part of itself toward him, and it went on west, at the pace of a slow walk, toward the Sixth Wall.

Theo stood in the road with a ruined sword in his hand and the champion of the Inheritance dead behind him and watched it go past for a full eleven seconds before he could make any part of himself work.

’...It wasn’t him.’

It was never him.