Chapter 93 — The Weapon of House Blade

Chapter 93: Chapter 93 — The Weapon of House Blade

~ Cassian ~

The air had been moving wrong for the last half mile.

Cassian followed the pull east. Inside the Ward, every current should have drifted toward the boundary and broken around it.

Instead, the air was being drawn inward, gathering along a single line that ended at a standing stone on the eastern face.

The same anchor Raven Rivers had stopped beside an hour earlier without seeming to know why.

Cassian slowed for the final thirty paces.

Nothing looked disturbed. The inscriptions remained intact, the stone housing was unbroken and the ground around it showed no sign of interference.

He stopped before the anchor and held his palm an inch from its surface.

The inward pull lifted the fine hairs along his wrist.

Something moved above him.

The iron observation ring embedded in the nearest tree turned toward him.

Cassian moved before it completed the turn. Four steps carried him around the trunk and beyond its line of sight. He came up behind it and drove the heel of his palm into the metal.

The ring tore free from the bark, cracked against the ground and went dark.

He looked at the pieces in the leaves.

The academy was still receiving the surviving feeds. Cassian had no way of knowing whether whoever had sealed the Ward was watching alongside them.

Until he did, every observation ring inside the boundary belonged to both sides.

He turned back to the anchor.

The alteration took longer than he liked to find. The inverted work hadn’t been carved over the original inscription. It ran beneath it—a second circuit laid through the same channels so precisely that both patterns appeared to be one.

Only the direction of the essence gave it away.

Cassian followed the false channel with two fingers held half an inch from the stone.

This wasn’t damage.

Nobody had broken the Ward. Someone had laid a second circuit inside the original months earlier—long enough for its essence to settle into the stone—and left it dormant until the Hunt began.

Valerius inspected every anchor twice a year.

Whoever had done this had hidden it beneath at least one inspection.

Cassian couldn’t dismantle the false circuit from here. Every Cardinal emergency procedure required a Sigil Master working from the central array, and he had neither.

But the second circuit couldn’t control the first without touching it somewhere.

There had to be a bridge.

He found the bridge low on the northern face, four strokes where the false work fed into the original array, and he sat back on his heels and looked at it for a moment.

If he cut it, the Ward would notice its own damage and start the emergency cycle it was built for. That would take time. He didn’t know how much.

If somebody restored the bridge before the cycle finished, the whole thing would fail and he would have spent his one attempt.

Cassian let his right hand shift.

Bone lengthened beneath the skin. His claws pushed through, and he drew his Lattice tight from his elbow to his fingertips. Pressure gathered along each claw until the light warped around their edges.

He slashed across the bridge.

All four connecting strokes split in a single pass.

The anchor answered immediately. Every sigil carved into its face rotated a quarter turn and stopped.

Then they turned again, slower this time.

Recalibrating.

Cassian rose.

Something whistled through the air behind his left shoulder.

The hairs at the back of Cassian’s neck rose.

He moved.

A narrow blade struck the anchor where his spine had been and threw sparks across the stone.

Four hooded figures emerged from the trees.

The first swiftly came straight for his throat.

Cassian stepped inside the swing and caught the man’s wrist. He carried the momentum past him, twisted the arm back across his chest and drove the man’s own blade up beneath his jaw.

Black blood poured down the steel and soaked into his collar.

The second attacker came from Cassian’s right.

Cassian released the first man and dropped beneath the strike. It passed over his head. He pivoted out of reach and turned—

The first man was coming at him again.

The blade remained buried beneath his jaw. Black blood streamed down his throat, but he crossed the distance without slowing.

He should have been on the ground.

Cassian caught the edge of his hood with one claw and tore it back.

Black veins spread beneath both eyes. His pupils had swallowed everything else.

Then the smell reached Cassian through the iron of the blood.

Sweet.

Rotten.

Two years ago. They are back.

Nikolai at the lectern with his hands going white on the wood.

The reports from the western incidents described the shadow wolves as rotting, mindless creatures driven toward anything alive.

These four had established a perimeter. They had waited for the observation ring to go dark, then closed on Cassian from three directions without needing to speak.

The same corruption lived inside them.

It had taken their pain, but not their ability to think.

Cassian stopped calculating how to leave them alive.

Cassian’s face went impassive.

He drew every line of the Lattice inward until it cinched tight around his bones, joints and claws.

His body grew lighter.

The man with the blade beneath his jaw reached him first.

Cassian slipped past his grasp and, without breaking stride, drove the heel of his palm into the hilt.

The blade punched through the roof of the man’s mouth and drove upward. Its point burst from the top of his skull. Black blood spilled over his face as his knees folded.

Cassian was already behind the second attacker.

His claws crossed the back of the man’s neck. Skin, muscle and bone opened together. The man’s head dropped forward while his body remained upright for one more step, then collapsed beneath it.

The third attacker managed to raise both arms.

Cassian went through them.

His claws severed one forearm, cut through the other and continued across the man’s throat. Black blood sprayed through the leaves. The severed arm landed first. The man followed a moment later, clutching at a neck that was already open to the spine.

Cassian stopped.

Nothing had changed in his face.

He turned toward the fourth attacker and took a step.

The ground tilted.

The edges of his vision went white, and the forest disappeared.

A sealed room took its place. No windows. White walls. Cold tiles beneath bare feet.

Cassian was small again, standing with his arms held away from his sides because he had been ordered not to lower them.

The door opened and his father came in smiling.

A hand came down warm on his shoulder.

"The gem of House Blade."

The smile got wider.

"The living weapon this House has been trying to make since its founding. I have such high hopes for you Cassian."

The forest crashed back into him.

Cassian’s shoulder struck a trunk hard enough to jar his teeth. He caught himself against the bark with one hand, breath coming fast and shallow, refusing to slow. His fingers shook against the wood.

He looked at them.

Closed them.

Across the clearing, the fourth man had stopped fighting and started running.

Cassian lifted his head.

The Lattice pulled tight through his calves, his spine, his shoulder, and for a fraction of a second his own weight stopped existing.

The man felt the air rise cold against his nape.

Danger hit him so suddenly his body locked. His legs froze beneath him.

His head came off first. The body ran two more steps before the legs buckled.

Cassian came to a stop beyond him in the leaves and stood there with his fist closed until the shaking stopped.

It took longer than he wanted to admit.

Then he went back to the anchor.

The sigils were still turning. Slower now, settling into the cycle, working through whatever the Ward believed it was fixing.

Nobody left here to interfere with it.

He looked south, toward the middle of the Hunt ground.

He ran.

He kept off the marked observation routes and took a second iron ring out of a trunk when it started tracking him at the stream crossing.

Not far beyond it, he found the first student.

Unconscious. Breathing.

Then another sprawled several yards away, and a third half-hidden beneath the roots of an oak.

Cassian checked each of them quickly, dragged them off the exposed path and left them together behind a shallow rise where the trees gave cover. None looked capable of waking soon, but they were alive.

He moved on.

After that, the forest gave him what it had.

Distant impacts, carried through the ground more than the air. Voices, once, cut off. Then the smell reached him.

Blood.

A great deal of it.

More than ten students should have between them.

He was still half a mile out when the pressure came through the trees.

Cassian’s stride broke.

It wasn’t the flat weight of an aura pressing down on him.

This went deeper.

Past skin. Past lungs. Past thought.

It reached straight for the animal underneath.

Cassian’s wolf surged up from the deep before he could call it, answering whatever had touched it.

What is that.

He put his head down and ran toward it.

The clearing opened in front of him through the holly and he stopped at the edge of it.

Bodies littered the clearing, Hale and Ashbourne colours tangled together through the leaves. None of them were standing.

Marchmont lay among them, motionless.

In the middle of it all, ringed by hooded operatives, one person remained upright.

Raven Rivers.

Blood covered most of her left side and had dried dark around her mouth. Her eyes were open, glowing white from somewhere behind the iris.

Essence rolled off her in waves.

Too much.

Far too much for a first-year.

She’s Nascent.

Cassian knew she was.

She was Nascent this morning.

Her aura came out across the clearing and the ring of operatives went back from her.

Then she spoke.

"Bow."

Three of them dropped where they stood.

The rest fought it. Cassian could see them fighting it, feet planted, shoulders locked, every muscle straining against the command.

Their knees bent anyway.

Their heads lowered anyway, one degree at a time.

Then it reached him at the tree line.

His wolf turned over inside him and surged for the ground with such violence that Cassian’s left knee began to fold before he had any say in it.

Alarm hit him hard.

Cassian had been trained against pressure since childhood. Forced to stand beneath stronger wolves until his legs failed, then made to stand again. House Blade had spent years teaching his body and wolf that submission was a choice.

This was not supposed to be possible.

He drove the Lattice through his legs, spine and abdomen and locked his frame upright by force.

It did nothing to the pressure.

It only gave him enough control to keep his body where he wanted it.

His thighs shook with the effort.

Cassian stared across the clearing at Raven, alarm sharpening behind his stillness.

What the hell are you, Rivers?