Book 6: Chapter 42 - A Paradigm Shift

Finally, got this out of the way. 3rd time I got covid, and I am wondering what was the point of getting vaccinated was [for me, at least]. I am more worried about it being uncomfortable looking at a screen which is very annoying!

Chapter 42 - A Paradigm Shift

Knowing yourself is but the start of the battle. It is a thing that does not please us because the mirror tells us things we do not wish to hear. So that, I find, is why we must wear masks until they become the face of who we must be.

- Gilgamesh of Uruk.

Waiting is a thing we all must suffer. Yet it is the pause that gives time its meaning, the breath between events great and small. It seasons life even as it steals from its span.

Accepting Lakis’ bargain meant destiny was once more trundling toward the inevitable. I was to become an assassin; I was to become fell judgment.

All I had wanted at the beginning was a quiet life, I thought, shaking my head. Just a quiet life, a small portion of peaceful mediocrity. But Fate would have none of it. So here we were. And so, I prepared a spell.

The King returned first, followed by his chamberlain and Damien. De Savant had the look of a man who had just lost an important fight.

Like this, the voices whispered, showing me the path.

I loosed Greater Drain. Not a mass of black, hungry tentacles, but a single filament meant to pierce. The stuff of the void found the King’s life, sliding through the wards he no doubt kept. Life flowed into me. The King frowned, stumbled; the chamberlain rushed to his side.

Still, I could see it would not be enough. And here, in this place, I could not use my area of effect abilities. My spells were “smart” in that they could distinguish friend from foe, but neutral parties were another matter entirely. Killing Laksis’ allies in this hall by accident would not look good for the righteousness of my cause.

“Protect the men,” I whispered to Larynda. “Should I fall, all that I have is yours.”

Her look hovered somewhere between blankness and shock as I rose.

Surprise is only a weapon if used at once. I drew upon the skill Improved Rush Strike and cut through the distance between us. My blade, Song, came down—a stroke of sharp silver.

Against all reason, the cut stopped inches from the King. Another edge had found mine.

“Gilgamesh!” Damien shouted. “What fresh madness is this?”

“Out of my way, Damien,” I snarled, driving him back on his heels. “Now. I will explain later!”

“I cannot.” His blade slid along Song with a painful scream of metal. “I have taken the King’s contract.”

For half a heartbeat I looked at him—long enough for a heavy axe to find me.

The blow came in from the blind, a black crescent of Adamantium. I twisted, too late; the edge glanced off my cuirass with a sound like a bell being murdered. My armor of black and gold turned the bite, deflecting the blade, but the force was great enough to hammer through bone and sinew. I felt nothing, but the blow was strong enough to ring to my core.

Seventy Health points lost.

My knees dipped. The Runed Warrior behind the blow loomed—a Dwarven warrior that bloomed out of all proportions, Runes across his armor blazing in my presence. The great hall dissolved into panic around us, Dwarven notables howling to be let past the doors. Lakis the instigator did not move. She sat, hands folded across her lap, sitting on the pillows with her back perfectly straight, eyes like knives. Larynda and our soldiers surged to their feet, their weapons whispering from sheaths.

“Hold,” Larynda snapped without looking away from the melee. “You’ll only get his way.” She bit her lip before starting to cast whatever spell she had planned.

The axe came again. I brought Song across and wove my left arm up to block, summoning my Mimic Shield, that dark passenger that lived within.

Wood and metal answered, blooming out from my vambrace—living plates of protection unfurling like a carnivorous flower. The Runed’s axe slammed into the shield and stuck for a heartbeat in the flesh of my shield. I shoved, stripping the weapon free, and took Damien’s riposte on the shield’s hungry teeth.

I could not fight so many opponents like this alone, I needed a distraction at least.

So I hissed the words that would summon the shades of the dead, letting the old cold rise.

A gauntleted fist, the other Runed, caught the side of my helm and white rang for a moment. The spell Whispers of the Grave guttered out.

Damien pressed, but there was no killing intent behind his strikes. His cuts were clean, professional, meant to bind my blade and steal my angles. A play for time if anything. The bare minimum. The Runed Warriors were another matter, they were relentless, their strikes against me like the rhythm of hammers on anvils. More automata than mortal flesh. More monster.

I gave ground, drawing them into each other’s arcs. The axe whistled past my nose of my helm; a spike crashed into my shield, and living wood shrieked as my Mimic Shield suffered.

“Annoying ads,” I muttered, tasting copper. Stubbornly, I began to summon Whispers of the Grave once more.

The left Runed overcommitted on a shoulder chop. I stepped inside and drove my gauntlet into the side of his helm with all my might, enhanced with Power Strike. Adamantium met Adamantium in a great clang.

The warrior reeled, stunned, just as the other swept at my legs. I was enough to dodge, caught the follow-through on Song and rolled the weight off the blow off. In the same movement, the spell I had been calling became complete as I opened a path to the distant, cold banks of the Shallow River.  

The air turned thin. The hall’s stone remembered times before, when all was dust and ruin. Of a time before the soft thing that called itself life. Voices leaked up through the cracks, a hundred soft mouths that moaned pitifully. The stunned Runed shuddered, his armor Runes flickering where a Shade passed through.

Damien hesitated. “Gil… don’t make me—”

Water blasted at the two Runed warriors from Larynda, great spears that bowled them to the floor. Finally, I thought, the girl had decided to be useful.

“You have already chosen, disappointing. Nonetheless I will spare you,” I said, and used Improved Dash to find a new path away.

Space opened. Hissing inwardly, I marshalled one of my staple healing spells. Heal spell construct formed, correcting some of the errors my body had acquired through conflict. Some of the damage my innate regeneration could not quite keep up with.

Light washed through me, a quiet pour from a higher cup. Pain receded, bones knitting back together. My Health was restored, and once again I was glad that the spell was a percentage based heal.

The Runed swiped at the spectres, reducing a few of servants to nothingness.

But it was not just me who was affected, my Mimic, too, regained near a third of its Health. Fantastic. That was one of the advantages of having a shield that had Health instead of Durability.

I had forgotten that I was basically invincible.

Through the narrow slit of my visor, I saw that the chamberlain was still kneeling at the King’s side, fluttering like a trapped bird. The King’s face had gone gray around the eyes, the thread of Greater Drain still humming between us. Shades flocked around him, perhaps sensing that he would join them soon.

It would not be enough. 

End him soon and it ends—Lakis will speak and the rest will live. End him, the voices breathed. End the moment.

I drove back in to the fray, hungry. “Improved Frenzied Strikes.”

The world narrowed to all harsh lines and edges. The sword Song became a storm that rode on my skill—three, four, five cuts in the space of one heartbeat, my footwork impeccable in the way that a master’s should be. Fen had taught me well.

Damien barely caught the first two on his blade. The third kissed his cuirass, biting into mortal steel as a Shade distracted him momentarily, but I kept true harm from the blow. The fourth carved sparks from a Runed’s gorget, and the fifth battered the axe aside and bit into the haft. The Mimic Shield, chattered, teeth growing into a facsimile of a mouth.

Damien’s eyes were pained, not afraid. “Please!”

Behind them, I saw something old. Something that knew the endless chase of prey, the ways of the field and forest, and the call of moon.

“Don’t beg,” I said. “Defend yourself. Make this look good at least. This is too much fun by far.”

A moment of clarity cracked the red haze. I let Song fall to a low guard and my hand found the weight at my belt.

“Zariyah,” I whispered. “Dance.”

The dagger woke in my palm, eager as a falcon. I turned my shoulder and threw.

The dagger left my fingers as a curved arc. Air peeled away from it; a seam opened in the world, neat and merciless as it spun. Shades whirled about the Runed, clouding their vision even as they began nothing as Runes flared where they made contact. Damien moved—but his moves were too slow, too honest to have done anything that could stop what was coming. The chamberlain lifted his head into the line without knowing. The King’s crown caught a glint of Zajasite-blue before it clattered to the stone floor.

Zariyah sang. Zariyah screamed to all who remained of the song of my frustration. It was a declaration.

Wind shrieked once and stopped. The line of air that was not air passed through king and servant, the way a quill passes through water, and ran across their width.

For a heartbeat nothing moved.

Then the King folded strangely at the middle, the chamberlain with him. It was as if both had simply remembered they were two parts of a cut thing, blood pooling around, a votive offering to my greatness.

You have slain a Dwarf. 163 experience gained.

You have slain a Dwarf. 43 experience gained.

The life of a king, it seemed, was worth not much at all.

Silence fell like a dropped curtain.

Across the hall, Lakis rose at last like a blade rising from a sheathe. Eyes determined, her voice carried, clear as a bell. “Stand down.”

The Runed Warriors froze between one step and the next. Spears of water flying through the air, Chaos lacing across their length, splashed to the stone of the floor and became just water again. Damien’s sword lowered, frustration and fury warring behind his eyes as he turned to look at the body of the king.

With no small amount of regret, I let Song settle into its sheath to rest with a flourish as Zariyah, too, returned to her place of rest. The blade had not tasted blood. The Mimic Shield withdrew to the place it lived within my arm, wormy threads finding their way through the gaps of my armor. The Shades of the dead returned across the Shallow River.

I felt that I stood at a cusp of fate.

“Stand down,” she had said, and now she took a single, measured step into the blood-glossed center of the hall. The cushions whispered. The courtiers’ breath snagged. Even the lights of blue seemed to listen.

Her hands were empty. Her voice was not.

“Hear me,” Lakis said, and the sound traveled cleanly through stone and panic alike. “I was Lakis, daughter of now of no one, sworn to the Hold, last of the line the Kings usurped and the law forgotten. By right of the Maker’s steel, by witness of the Runes and the Earth Mother, by the consent of your own oaths—as of this breath, I am now the Nameless Queen.”

The words struck like heavy gavel falling. I felt the pulse of it roll through the hall, a pressure that made the hair along my neck lift. The Runed Warriors did not so much as glance at one another, their focus on the freshly minted queen. As one, they went to a knee. Adamantium knelt to no one lightly. The sight of it burned into everyone’s vision.

Dozens of beards in the gallery bristled in outraged disbelief. The notables who had been clawing toward the doors stopped mid-surge. One old Dwarf with silver braids found his courage.

“Blasphemy,” he spat, taking a half-step forward. “This is murder. This is—”

Lakis did not raise her voice. “This is law.” Her gaze flicked, just once, to the kneeling Runed. “Rise.”

They rose like a slow tide. The two of them moved without a word, closing the space between the silver-braids and the threshold of the dais. No blades lifted; the implication was enough. The old Dwarf swallowed whatever else he had intended to say and remembered suddenly how to be still.

Lakis pointed, and in that simple measure she drew a new map of the hall.

“Outsiders,” she said, and her eyes found me first, then Larynda and our men, then Damien with his sword half-lowered and his mouth a thin, unhappy line. “These are my guests. From this breath to the next sunrise—and should I decree, beyond—they are under full guest-right. They are not to be harried, hounded, nor harmed. To do so would shame your fathers and the fathers who forged them. An insult to the honor our ancestors. Any who set hand against them sets hand against me and the Hold.”

A murmur built, swelled, threatened to become something sharper. It broke upon the Runed like water on rock. The black-armored giants did not move, did not threaten, did not need to. Runes burned sullenly along the edges of their armored plate.

“Guest-right,” someone hissed. “After… after…”

“After trespass?” Lakis’ head tilted, and a faint smile that was not a kindness touched her mouth. “After a king who broke oaths, thinking himself above the stone? After a contract bought on fear? The ledger is long. It will be balanced—in order, with witnesses.”

She lifted one hand and an enterprising servant, a new figure, hurried, producing a cloth stamped with the sigil of the Hold. Lakis dipped her fingers into the king’s blood at her feet and drew a single, precise line across the cloth, then pressed her palm to it. When she lifted her hand, the line remained, a Rule writ in iron.

“Let this show,” she said, “that guest-right is granted and held. Runed, you have heard it. Nobles, you have witnessed it. This hall is bound.”

A dozen shoulders sagged. Others squared. Resistance did not vanish so much as remember that it wore the wrong shoes for the dance. 

I had been very quiet. That was not like me.

My breath tasted of old water and iron. The thread of Greater Drain had gone dead with the king, but the echo of it still sang faintly in my bones. The rhythm of pleasure. The Mimic Shield had withdrawn, though I could feel it sulking, an itch within my forearm.

Damien stared at the bodies and then at Lakis, then at me. “This is madness. Spent a good hour quibbling over details now moot,” he said, voice low. No accusation. An observation, like a man remarking on the weather he could not change.

“I will see to it… that the terms are met and altered in your favor,” Lakis replied. “But it will find us ordered.”

Larynda exhaled a breath she had been holding, the tension running out of her shoulders like water from a cracked jar. She didn’t look at me. She did not need to. My ward had shown that she could be trusted in a pinch. Useful girl, at last.

“Err…” one of our soldiers of the scale whispered cowardly words near Larynda’s elbow. “Are we… are we safe?”

“You heard the Queen,” the girl said, and the word settled strangely, like a coin spinning to stop. “We are guests apparently.”

Then there was a heavy, brooding silence.

Finally, we were to be treated with manners. To think the lack of it had cost the old king much. The silence after that was a living thing. It moved, lifted its head, and looked around for who would speak next.

It found me.

I laughed.