Chapter 121: Golden Lion vs. Purified Water (4)

The arm on the floor stopped mattering the moment Regulus turned.

He turned with the sword still in his remaining hand, and the expression on his face was something different from everything that had come before it. Not the cataloging attention of the tunnel.

Not the composed disappointment he’d used like a weapon all evening. This was simpler than that, and worse — the specific quiet of someone who has just decided that the conversation is finished.

Daniel didn’t wait for what came after that expression.

He drove forward with the axe still in his grip, the second one off his back and in his left hand before Regulus had completed the turn, and the strike aimed at the center of the chest with the force of someone who has spent the last several minutes above a grate calculating angles.

It landed.

Regulus didn’t move.

Not one centimeter. The axe connected with his chest and the impact ran back up the haft into Daniel’s arms, and Regulus absorbed it the way a wall absorbs a thrown stone — completely, without acknowledgment, without adjusting his footing by a single degree.

The golden energy along his remaining arm was the only thing that moved, and it moved toward Daniel with the efficiency of something that had been waiting for exactly this range.

The kick caught Daniel in the sternum and sent him upward.

Not forward. Upward — straight into the domed ceiling of the chamber with a force that cracked the stone at the point of impact, fracturing outward in three directions from where his body hit, and for a half second the sound filled the entire space before the stone dust started falling.

"(That was a lot.)" Ebony watched the crack spread across the ceiling from the channel’s edge, water still running to her knees, and the count she was running didn’t improve any. "(He’s angrier than before. Angrier is faster. Angrier is less predictable.)"

Kanary moved while Regulus was still tracking Daniel against the ceiling.

The Guardian she’d rebuilt from the channel water was smaller than the first two — less material, less concentration, the joints thinner and the chest plate less dense — but it moved quickly and it moved from behind him, and the spear it drove toward the gap between his shoulder blades had the weight of everything she had left in the water around them.

It went in.

Regulus went still.

Not from pain — or not only from pain. From something beneath pain, the specific stillness of someone processing an affront that goes beyond the physical.

He looked down at the point of the spear where it had come through the front of his jacket. He looked at the blood on it. His blood, which was a thing that had not been happening to him until tonight, and which was now happening for the third time in less than an hour.

The Guardian dissolved when he moved his remaining arm. He didn’t cast anything. He simply grabbed the spear with his hand and the pressure of his grip broke the water’s cohesion, splashing back into the channel.

He turned to look at Kanary.

"That," he said, with a quiet that was worse than volume, "you will pay for. Both of you." He exhaled, and what came out of his mouth in that exhale was not breath.

It was sound, and beneath the sound was something else — a concentration of golden magic that had been building since the moment the arm came off, held back the way pressure holds behind a wall, and the wall gave now.

The roar didn’t echo in the chamber. It replaced everything in the chamber — every other sound, every frequency, the water’s movement and the stone’s quiet and the dripping from the ceiling — it replaced all of it with itself, and the floor vibrated, and the walls vibrated, and somewhere above them, far enough up to be outside, something fell over.

The city shook. Not catastrophically. Not the kind of shaking that collapses buildings. The kind that wakes people up, that makes cups slide on tables, that sends dust from window frames and causes horses to pull against their ties. Thirty seconds later there would be voices in the streets asking what that was, and nobody would have an answer.

Kanary was on the floor.

She didn’t remember choosing to be on the floor. Her knees had decided that before she had the chance to weigh in on it, and now she was there, hands pressed against the stone, and the sweat on her face was cold.

The roar had moved through her chest like something physical, like being hit without being touched, and the part of her that had been managing fear all evening by converting it immediately into action couldn’t convert fast enough to cover the gap.

The golden light condensed back into the sword. Regulus walked toward her with the same measured step he’d used to cross her family’s courtyard, her family’s parlor, every space he’d ever moved through — the walk of someone who has decided the pace and does not adjust it for anyone else’s comfort.

The blade came up.

Ebony came out of the water.

She came out fast, without announcement, and she got between Kanary and the sword before the sword completed its arc. Both hands closed around the blade — not the flat, not the spine, the edge — and she caught it, and the edge went through both palms and through the center of her torso where it had found the angle the grip hadn’t fully covered.

The sword stopped.

Regulus looked at her. The expression on his face moved through something briefly — not surprise, not quite, because Ebony had surprised him before tonight and he’d adapted — but something adjacent to surprise, the recalibration of someone who keeps accounting for this particular person and keeps finding the accounting insufficient.

Then the expression closed, and what replaced it was a cold and measured amusement that was more honest about what he thought of the situation than anything polite would have been.

"Impressive dedication." He looked at the blade embedded in her hands and her torso, at the blood running along the fuller and dripping from the guard, at the purification fire that had gone out in both palms when the edge went through them and was now trying to relight itself with what she had left.

"Staying conscious with that in you is more than most people manage. I’ll acknowledge that before I finish this."

He pulled.

The sword didn’t move.

He pulled again — a real pull this time, a deliberate application of force with his remaining arm, with the leverage of his full weight behind it — and the sword did not come free. Ebony’s grip was not a grip anymore. It was something beyond a grip. Both hands wrapped around the blade, cutting deeper with every fraction of movement, and the muscles in her arms were doing something that didn’t look like what muscles looked like when they were working normally. They looked like they were trying to do something the body was not supposed to be able to do, and doing it anyway.

Regulus went still.

"Let go of the sword."

"In a minute." The words came out through clenched teeth, level and deliberate.

He pulled again. Nothing.

Ebony’s eyes moved to his face and the expression she found there would have been worth something, under other circumstances. Not victory — she wasn’t in a position to call anything victory right now — but the specific quality of a man who has just found something he didn’t expect to find, and doesn’t like it.

"You can’t be serious," he said. The irritation in it was real, which made it better than anything polite would have been.

"Stronger than you thought?" Her voice was controlled, with the specific effort of someone who is using control as a tool. "Can’t beat a girl in a strength contest? That’s embarrassing."

The gold energy spiked along his arm.

"Let. Go."

"No."

He braced his foot against her hip for leverage and pulled with everything and the sword moved — a fraction, a degree, not enough — and the sound that came out of Ebony’s throat was not a scream, it was a controlled exhalation that was doing the job a scream would have done while refusing to be one, and her hands tightened and the blade stopped again.

Regulus’s jaw set.

He was offended. That was the word for it, under the anger, under the concentration — offended, in the way that someone is offended when the world declines to cooperate with their understanding of how things should work.

He was stronger than this. He was objectively, measurably stronger than a half-dead healer standing in sewer water with a sword through her. And the fact that the numbers weren’t adding up was doing something to him that the pain and the missing arm and the blood on his face hadn’t managed to do.

"Fine," he said, very quietly. "Fine."

The golden energy compressed around the blade where it entered her — not to pull it out, but to push it through, to cut through the grip from the inside, to end the stalemate by removing the variable that was holding the sword in place.

Ebony closed her eyes.

She didn’t let go.

Kanary stood up. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Both arms came up, hands open, and the water in the channel around the perimeter of the chamber accelerated. Not toward one point — toward all of them, pulling from every tunnel mouth simultaneously, the residual current from the city above adding its weight to what was already there, and the circle of blue light that opened between her palms was the largest one she’d made all night.

"Shake and grind."

"{{Water Magic: Grand River — Stone-Devourer}}"

The torrent that came out of that circle was not a water attack. A water attack has a direction, a target, a beginning and an end. This was a river — a compressed, furious, deliberate river channeled through a circle the size of a doorway and aimed at a single point, and it hit Regulus with the weight of something that didn’t care what was in its way.

He went into the wall.

Not toward the wall — into it, through the outer layer of stone and partway through the second, the water grinding the entire way with the specific patient destruction of something that has been breaking rock for longer than any of them had been alive. The sound was not a crash. It was continuous, a sustained roar of water and stone that lasted for several seconds after he hit, the current keeping him there, working.

Then the water stopped.

The silence after it was the loudest thing in the chamber.

Regulus was in the wall.

Embedded was the right word — his back was in the stone, his remaining arm pinned at an angle that wasn’t comfortable, and the cuts that covered everything visible from collar to hands were the kind that didn’t come from blades. They came from velocity and stone — shallow in some places, deep enough in others to show what was underneath, and the overall picture was of someone who had just lost an argument with a river moving faster than rivers are supposed to move.

He was breathing.

His chest moved. The breath was ragged, uneven, the breath of someone operating on the portion of their system that doesn’t require decisions, but it moved.

And then he started laughing.

It was quiet at first — not the composed, controlled amusement from before, but something looser, something that had come free from whatever was holding it in place — and it built, and it kept building while the blood ran down the stone, and it was the laugh of someone who has found something genuinely funny in the middle of the worst night of their life.

"So." His head turned toward Kanary. His eyes found her with the focus of someone who still has the ability to focus. "What do you do now? If I die—" The laugh came through again, breaking the sentence. "If I die, who governs this city? Not my father. Not your mother. Not you." The amusement didn’t leave his face. "This city dies without foreign resources, without the trade agreement, without the political weight my family brings to every port it touches. Without me there’s nobody. That city you love so much dies with me, and it dies slower, and it dies uglier, and nobody will be left to remember it was ever worth saving."

Kanary looked at him.

She looked at him for a long moment, with the water still running at the chamber’s edges and the stone dust still settling from the ceiling and Ebony’s ragged breathing behind her.

"That’s a lie." Her voice came out even. "Puerto Zafiro has been a port city for three hundred years. It survived worse governors than you and worse crises than this and it will survive the removal of one man who spent two weeks here calling our food meados de campesino."

She let the sentence finish in the silence.

"This city doesn’t need your resources. It doesn’t need me on a throne. It needs people who have the courage to run it honestly, and right now you’re the only thing in this room that’s been consistently lacking both."

Regulus’s laugh died down into something that was almost a smile.

"Inspiring." He said it with genuine tiredness. His eyes were losing focus at the edges. "You almost make me believe it."

A pause.

"Brilla eternamente."

The body in the wall stopped being a body.

It happened fast — faster than the roar, faster than the lions, faster than anything he’d done all night — the flesh and bone and blood and ruined clothing dissolving inward and upward in a single continuous motion, the gold magic that had been inside him for thirty years coming out all at once the way a fire comes out when you remove the lid from something that’s been sealed.

What was left was light.

Light with a shape — not the lions, not the compressed spheres of the tunnel — a shape that was unmistakably human from the waist up and unmistakably not from the waist down, bipedal but massive, with a mane of burning gold energy around a face that was still recognizably Regulus in the structure of its features, and wasn’t recognizably anything human in its eyes.

It dropped from the wall to the floor and the stone cracked where it landed.

The figure rolled its neck. The sound the joints made in that form was like a millstone finding its seat. Then it opened its mouth and the teeth were there, every one of them, and they were not the size they had been.

It smiled.

Ebony, still on her feet by a decision that had nothing to do with what her body was currently reporting to her, let out a slow breath.

Something dropped from the ceiling.

Daniel hit the chamber floor three meters to her right, both feet down, and immediately bent forward and coughed blood onto the stone in a quantity that was not reassuring. He straightened. Spat. Ran the back of his hand across his mouth, and then looked at the blood on his hand with the expression of someone confirming a suspicion.

He licked it.

Ebony looked at him.

He looked at her.

Neither of them said anything. The thing that needed saying didn’t have a word for it — the specific agreement that forms between two people who have both just assessed the same situation and reached the same conclusion at the same time without discussing it, which is that the discussion would take longer than the situation allows.

They moved at the same time.