28. Leoric
LEORIC
The keep groans somewhere beneath my boots and I feel the sound through the soles before I hear it.
Not the upper timbers this time. Lower. The foundation stones have begun to talk to each other in the language a building uses just before it stops being one.
Varek has not been content. He's set something under us.
I cut a path back toward the inner arch because it's where the stair to the upper records still stands, and they are what I have left to defend until Corrine reaches the broadcast room.
A council ranker meets me at the threshold.
He's good. He lasts three exchanges. The fifth opens his guard and I take it.
I don't watch him drop. The smell coming up through the floor seams has changed, and the air in the arch is warmer than it should be at chest height.
Then I see him. Varek is standing in the half-collapsed audience hall as if he came down to inspect a property he already owns.
Two guards at his back. The gray coat is buttoned to the throat, and beneath the wool I can see the rectangular pressure of a case riding against his ribs.
He has not drawn a weapon. He has built the room around me.
"Leoric." The same temperature he used at the wine table. "You've made a great deal of work for everyone."
"Move aside, Senator."
"In a moment." He glances at the seam of light along the ceiling where a beam is bowing. "We have a moment. I had hoped to have this conversation in better surroundings, but you've never been generous with my schedule."
I take a step. His left guard shifts his weight. I take another. The guard doesn't move again, which tells me Varek has instructed him not to. He wants the proximity. He wants the choice to be mine.
"The fortress," I say.
"Will come down. Yes. Faster than the engineers estimated, which is on me—I told them to err toward thoroughness. You were never meant to climb out of this one either, you understand. The first attempt was thorough. You were simply unreasonable about it."
The floor under my left boot ticks once. A hair of dust comes down from the arch and lands on Varek's shoulder. He doesn't brush it off.
"Say it plainly," I tell him. "Once. While there's a witness."
"There are no witnesses left, Leoric, that's the entire structure of the morning.
But I'll grant you the courtesy." He folds his hands in front of him.
"You were the problem. Not the cells. The cells were a logistic.
You were a man whose soldiers preferred you to the senate that paid them, and that does not survive a long peace.
You'd begun to look at the lower block. You'd begun to ask the clerks the wrong questions.
I needed a fire that would take the records, the witnesses, and the commander in one accounting.
The rebellion needed a martyr. We obliged each other. "
"The gates."
"Were never going to open. No. That was the point of sealing them."
The arch above us sheds another curl of dust. Somewhere below the audience hall, a heavy thing falls onto another heavy thing, and the floor remembers it.
"You watched my men burn for a budget line."
"I watched ledger entries clear in a single evening. Yours was meant to be the two hundred and eighteenth. When you survived, the artist did better work than the fire had. The Ash King was an improvement on the original, if I'm honest. You frightened more people alive than you would have dead."
I have stood inside this knowledge for two nights. Hearing him say it does not soften the standing. It reverses something behind my eye, and what comes through is not new but newly aimed.
I cross the distance. His guard moves, but is too slow.
I take his wrist on the lift and break it against the column, and he goes down without a sound.
The second I don't bother to disarm. I put my elbow through his jaw and he folds.
Varek hasn't stepped back. He's watching me with the same measured interest he watched me with across the wine.
I take him by the front. The case is there under my knuckles.
I feel the corner of it through the wool.
I drag him off his feet and put him against the column with enough force that the breath leaves him in a sound I want to hear again.
My blade is at the underside of his jaw before I have decided to put it there.
"Leoric."
"Don't."
"Leoric."
It isn't Varek. It's behind me, low at the door, soot in it, and a rasp that wasn't there an hour ago.
I don't turn. I keep the blade where it is.
Varek's pulse is against it. His eyes have gone past me, to her, and something I would describe as curiosity moves across his face.
He's wondering, I think, whether she'll be the lever or the witness.
"He has the case," she says. Steady. Just at my shoulder now. She has come up beside me without my hearing the floor under her. "Black leather, under the coat. Gideon told me before he died."
The blade twitches against him. I feel the give of skin. A bead lifts under the edge.
"You kill him here, and the case burns. We have the marks. We don't have the originals. They die with him, in his pocket, in a fortress no one's allowed to dig out for a year. He gets one last fire."
"He earned worse than fire."
"Yes. And I want it for him. I want you to do it. I want to do it. But the people in the field don't get the truth out of his throat."
The blade does not move, nor does my hand.
The whole of me is held very still against the thing I have wanted since I dragged myself out a breach.
He's right here. He's exactly the height my arm has been measuring without permission.
Varek breathes out through his nose. He's smiling, almost. Not enjoyment. Recognition.
"She's good for you," he says, soft. "I told her so."
I almost open his throat for the sentence alone.
Corrine's hand comes to my wrist. Not pulling. Just present, warm through the soot. "Leoric. The case."
I drop him. He hits the floor, catching himself with his palm and is already turning toward the broken door beyond the column.
His second guard—I had counted two, the third was behind the column, I should have counted three—steps from the shadow with a crossbow already half raised, and the angle is not on me. It's on her.
I move quickly, getting between the bolt and Corrine and feel the strike take me at the seam above the right hip where the armor narrows for movement.
It goes deeper than a bolt should. The shaft is short.
The head is wide. I know what it is before my legs do, a council household quarrel, designed for armor at close range, and the floor changes its mind about being beneath me.
I go down on the side that hasn't been touched. Corrine catches my shoulder and my head before either reaches stone. Her face is above me, very close, soot at her temple and something in her mouth that hasn't come out yet, and for one second I can't find air.
"Leoric." Her hand is at the hip wound, pressing. "Leoric, look at me."
I listen.
"Don't you dare." It comes out of her cracked. "Don't you dare do this here."
"Case." My voice is somewhere I don't trust. "He has the case."
She doesn't turn. Her hand stays where it is, and the other comes up under my jaw to hold my face toward hers as if angle alone will keep me on the side of the room with her.
Beyond her shoulder I see Varek at the broken door, on his feet, the guard with the crossbow drawing him through it.
They go down—not out. Down. Toward the deeper stair.
Toward the lower archive, where the originals still lie behind a door my men are bleeding to hold, and the pitch under the foundations.
He's going to burn it from beneath while he carries the last of it out the back.
"Up." I get a hand under me. The wound argues. I argue back. "Corrine. Up."
"You're bleeding into your boot."
"I know."
"You can't run."
"I'm not running." I get my weight under me with her arm at my back, and the room shifts and then steadies because I will not allow it to do otherwise. "I'm going to walk. Slowly. Behind him."
Whatever she's reading in my face, she doesn't argue with it. She tucks her shoulder under my arm on the bad side and takes my weight without making a show of it.
"Then we walk," she says.
The arch above the audience hall lets go of one of its stones.
It hits the floor where I was standing and breaks into three pieces.
We are already past it. The stair to the lower archive opens at the rear of the hall, and the air coming up out of it tastes like the night I should have died in, and the man who tried to kill me twice is at the bottom of it with the thing that ends him in his coat.
"Slowly," she says again, low, against my temple.
"Slowly," I agree.
We start down.