Chapter 77: You Don't Even Know How to Use It
They walked me between the two of them.
One in front, one behind. The one in front never turned round. The one behind had decided I was moving too slowly, and he let me know at regular intervals with the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades.
So I dragged my feet.
Not enough for it to become a provocation. Just enough that every step took slightly longer than it needed to, and that I had time to look.
"Move, you bastard!"
The hand shoved me and I took three quick steps before settling back into my pace.
Two junctions since the door. The first went left and down, so that one leads somewhere under the arena. The second went up.
Three doors on the right so far, all shut, no lock visible from this side.
A grating in the ceiling further along. Air coming down from it. That one goes outside.
How many guards? Two here. None in the corridors. They don't watch their own walls, they watch their cages.
My leg was working.
That was the real change, and I spent the whole walk noticing it. I could walk normally. I could stop, start, turn. Nobody here knew that. Nobody in this arena knew that the man who'd been dragging his leg since the first day wasn't dragging it anymore.
Keep it to yourself.
As long as they think you limp, you have something they don't.
We came to a large door.
It looked like nothing else I'd seen down here. Two tall panels, pale wood, carved with patterns that were neither demonic nor human, and that hurt my eyes when I tried to follow them.
The one in front pushed them open.
And my blood went cold.
It was physical and it was immediate. Before I'd understood what I was seeing, before I'd even crossed the threshold, my whole body clenched at once and the skin came up on both my arms.
He was there.
Lying on a low couch at the back of a room lit by low lamps, one arm folded under his head, the other hanging toward the floor. Dressed in white, as he had been in his box. Relaxed, like a man with nothing whatsoever to fear from anything.
And the wings were open.
Six of them, spread on either side of the couch across the full width of the room, that black that gave nothing back to the light. Up close, they weren't feathers. Well — they were, but there was something else between the feathers, and that something else wouldn't hold still.
The eyes.
They were everywhere. Every color, every size, some wide open, others half shut, some sliding from one feather to the next and leaving a pale trail behind that closed over. They didn't move together. Each one looked wherever it wanted. There were some on me, some on the guards, some fixed on the ceiling, and one, right at the edge of the left wing, that rolled over and over without stopping.
From a distance it was unbearable.
Up close it's something else. Up close you can see that it's wrong. That nothing in there follows any rule.
This thing is completely insane.
There were women around him.
Demonesses, dark red skin this time, tall, with slim horns swept back. And what they wore was held on by chains rather than knots — gold threads drawn tight across the skin, covering next to nothing and plainly never intended to cover anything. The metal marked the flesh where it crossed it. Over the hips, over the thighs, over the chest, it left grooves.
One of them was kneeling at the head of the couch.
She held a bunch of grapes up and pulled them off one at a time to carry to his mouth. Every time she raised her arm, everything those threads were supposed to be holding lifted, rolled, and came back down afterward, heavily, and none of it stayed where it was for more than a second. Her skin shone under the lamps. She paid no attention at all to what her own body was doing.
Another stood waiting with a carafe in her hands, and the moment he set his glass down she bent to fill it.
She bent from the front. Very low. Far lower than the height of the glass required, and she stayed there while it poured, leaning out over him, one hand on her hip to hold the pose.
He wasn't looking at her either.
The third sat cross-legged at the foot of the couch and did nothing at all. She waited. The only thing moving about her was her breathing, and that was more than enough to hold the eye.
None of them looked at me.
Don't look.
You have one thing to do in here and that isn't it.
I looked anyway. A second too long, and I hated myself for it, and I brought my eyes back up to him.
And I understood something as I did.
He doesn't see them. Not once. They're a few centimeters from him, half naked, feeding him by hand, and he hasn't put his eyes on a single one of them since I came in.
This isn't pleasure. It's furniture.
They're here like the carpets and the lamps, to fill out the room he's bored in.
"Come."
His voice crossed the room and went through me on the way.
"Come, come, what on earth are you waiting for?"
I went forward.
I crossed the room without a word, right hand open along my thigh, and stopped a few paces from the couch. The guards stayed at the door.
He looked at me. His face did, at least. The wings were doing something else.
"To what do I owe the honor of being invited here?"
He brought the glass to his lips and drank without hurrying.
"Speaking when I've asked you no question? When I haven't invited you to?"
He set the glass down and the demoness filled it immediately.
"Do humans have no culture of the strong?"
Answer badly and you die. Answer well and you might die anyway.
So it may as well be one I enjoy.
"Unfortunately not. We only have a culture of hate."
He didn't laugh straight away.
He stayed still for a moment while it went down, and I saw the exact instant he understood what was underneath it.
Then he went.
He went off into an enormous laugh, head thrown back, and the laugh didn't stop when it should have stopped. It kept going, and going, filling the entire room, until it seemed to have nothing left to do with what I'd said.
And while he laughed, one of the wings unfolded.
It swept sideways with nothing to announce it, and it caught the demoness holding the carafe full on.
She crossed the room.
She hit the far wall and dropped to the floor, the carafe burst apart around her, and one of the gold threads gave in the impact and slid down her stomach. She stayed on all fours in the spilled wine, chest hanging free a few centimeters off the ground, breathing hard, without a sound.
Nobody moved. Not the guards. Not the other two women.
She pushed herself up on one elbow, very slowly, gathered what she could against herself with one hand, and stayed kneeling where she'd fallen without daring to come back.
He was still laughing.
Then he stopped dead, and that was worse.
"Anyway."
He put out a hand and one of the women set an apple in it.
"I've seen your power. Through your chains."
My whole body went rigid.
How.
Aldranite cuts the link to the System. Completely. Nobody here has seen anything since I arrived, not even me.
"Isn't that a pleasant sort of power? Infinity?"
He bit into the apple.
I took as long as I needed before answering.
"It is."
"It is." He repeated the two words, rolling them. "How many before you do you suppose were given something like that?"
I didn't answer and he wasn't waiting for one.
"Few. Very few. And every one of them was disappointing."
He made a vague gesture with the apple.
"So here's what I'm going to do. You're going to win the Red Harvest. Or rather, if you win it, which is far from settled, you're damaged and you're not very impressive to look at. But if you win it."
He bit again.
"Then I'll take you under my wing."
The phrase went up my spine.
Under his wing.
He has six wings covered in eyes that don't look the same direction, and he's just said that to me with the face of a man offering me a seat at his table.
I stayed perfectly still.
Is this part of the script?
Is this what the tower intended, a meeting written in advance with one of the seven? Or have I just knocked something off course again, the way I did with Lamielle?
She wasn't supposed to recognize me either. She wasn't supposed to speak to me the way she did.
And either way, I don't have a choice.
"You're not saying anything," he observed.
"I'm listening."
"That's progress."
He set the bitten apple on his stomach and the woman with the grapes offered him one, which he took without looking.
"Well. Since you've amused me, you may ask me a question. One. To be going on with, before the sixth day."
My mind went off in every direction.
One question. One, to a creature that has seen heaven from the inside.
Where are the other heroes? Are they in this world, are they in this arena, are they somewhere else on this planet?
Where is Alice.
It came up my throat all at once and I swallowed it back down.
No. Not in front of him. If I say her name in this room I give him something, and I don't even know what.
The demon king, then? A masked child who drowns cities with a gesture and whose name was written nowhere in anything I read?
Or him. What he is, what he did to heaven, what he calls his sins.
Or his weakness. There has to be one.
Or the perfect creature Lazarus wanted to build.
None of them. It isn't the moment for any of those questions, and he probably knows that better than I do.
So the only one that helps me now.
He bit into the apple while he waited.
"Can I connect to the System and to mana with these chains on?"
He stopped chewing.
He bit a second time, slowly, and swallowed before speaking.
"Ridiculous."
The word landed in the room.
"You don't even know how to use your power yet. That tells me exactly how pathetic you are."
How to use my power.
I've been using it for months. I've opened that Arsenal dozens of times, I've pulled blades out of nothing, I've stood in front of things that should have killed me.
What am I doing wrong?
"Since this irritates me," he said, "I'll tell you one thing and that will be all."
He held the apple up between us.
"If you have infinity with you, then use it. Infinity contains everything."
A silence.
What?
What is he talking about? Is he doing philosophy now?
I watched him wait.
"I'd prefer a more concise answer."
Every wing stopped at the same instant.
Every eye, all of them, across all six wings, turned toward me in a single movement.
It was the only time all day I wanted to take a step back.
"Guards."
His voice had gone perfectly pleasant again.
"Get this pathetic human out of my sight."
They took me by an arm each and I didn't resist.
They turned me toward the door, and as I crossed the threshold I looked back.
He was watching me.
He was watching me over the back of the couch, with that magnificent face, the apple in one hand, and for a second there was nothing at all in his expression.
Then he burst out laughing.
It followed me the whole length of the corridor. It carried through the stone, it carried behind closed doors, it carried a great deal further than a laugh has any right to carry.
And at the first junction, they didn't go left.
They took the other corridor, the one going down.
I wasn't being taken back to the apartment.