Chapter 71: Dark Night
The street had no bottom to it.
Theo landed in it, and the dark took his legs first and then the rest of him, and for a moment he could not see his own sword. The lamps along the Sixth Wall did not reach this far in. Whatever light the sky above Alderkeep was pretending to give had died three streets back.
He stood there and let his eyes do the work.
[Shadow Movement]
[Type: Sub-skill / Movement
Description: Where the light does not reach, the distance between two points is a suggestion. Your body may take the shorter answer.
Mastery: 0.0%]
’Ah.’
’So that’s what the darkness has been trying to tell me since the rooftop.’
He thought about the snakes, and the rooftop, and the way the shadows had gathered at his feet without being asked, pooling in around his boots like something poured. He had assumed at the time that it was the Shadow Sword being dramatic.
It had been offering him a door.
***
The first Inheritor he killed that night did not know he was there.
It stood at the mouth of an alley with its back to him, one of the ordinary ones, wearing the leather coat of a city guard and most of the man who had been inside it. It was not moving. None of them moved when there was nothing in front of them, and Theo had watched that from the roof for an hour and had built his whole night around it.
He came out of the dark at its shoulder and put the sword through the base of its skull.
It dropped. It did not shriek, it did not turn, and none of the eleven others standing further up that same alley moved a single muscle.
Theo crouched over the body and breathed. The coat smelled of wet leather and old rain and nothing else at all, no rot and no blood, as if whatever had been done to the man inside it had been finished with weeks ago and hung up carefully afterwards.
’Okay.’
’They’re not linked by sound.’
He walked eleven feet up the alley and killed the next one.
The fourth one, he took badly, because the angle was wrong and the sword caught on a collarbone, and the thing spasmed and its hand came up and slapped against the wall.
Every Inheritor in that alley turned around at once.
’There it is.’
’It’s touch. It’s not sound and it’s not sight. When one of them touches the world hard enough, the rest of them feel it.’
The eight of them came at him down a corridor of stone eleven feet wide, and Theo stepped backwards into the dark and stopped being where he had been.
Shadow Movement, that first night, was not the elegant thing it would later become.
It hurt. It was like being pulled through a doorway by somebody stronger than him who did not care whether his shoulders fit. He came out of it four metres to the left with his teeth locked and his stomach somewhere behind him, and he was immediately sick down the wall, and then he had to fight anyway because the eight had already turned.
[Warning: mastery insufficient for repeated use]
’Noted. Thank you. Very helpful.’
He killed all eight. It took him four minutes and cost him a cut along the ribs and most of the skin off one knuckle, and by the end of it his arms had gone heavy in a way he did not like at all. He wiped the blade down the nearest coat, twice, and it came off the second pass no cleaner than the first.
Then he sat down on a doorstep in the dark of a dead city, with eight bodies cooling in front of him, and looked at his hands.
’That was eight.’
’There are about four hundred thousand.’
Theo was, whatever else could be said about him, a man who had spent his whole education learning to look at a number he could not beat and find the part of it that could be moved.
So he did not fight for the next two hours. He walked.
He went east along the roofline and down into the streets and back up again, and he watched the tide from six different angles, and he let the Genesis Eyes stay open until the ache behind his sockets became a real thing with a shape to it, a thumb pressing outward from the inside of his skull.
And he found four things.
The first was that they walked in step. Not roughly. Exactly. A foot came down in one street and the same foot came down in the street behind it at the same instant, all the way back, so that the sound of the tide was not footsteps at all but one long roll of noise sliding up the hill.
The second was that the step had a source. It came from the east and it moved west, the way a wave does, which meant something at the back of it was setting the count.
The third was that when he killed quietly, nothing changed. When he killed loudly, a section of the tide about forty bodies wide would slow for a moment and then correct, and the correction came from behind them, not from them.
And the fourth was the one that mattered.
[Inheritor]
[Rank: I]
[Classification: Undead / Assimilant]
[Current Rank: Mundane Realm - Early Stage]
[Threat Level: F - Individual]
[Note: This body retains nothing. Assimilation is complete.]
’Nothing.’
He put the eye on the next one. And the next. And eleven more after that, working along a street of them like a man reading spines in a library.
[Note: This body retains nothing.]
[Note: This body retains nothing.]
[Note: This body retains nothing.]
All their skills, including what he would usually find when he observed anyone closely enough, were gone. Not sealed and not dimmed and not written in some form the panel had no letters for. Gone, the way a house is gone when it has been taken apart and carried off in a cart.
Theo stood in the dark with his eyes burning gold and worked it out slowly, the way he worked out a bill.
’The skills went somewhere else. These ones are just... the hands.’
He kept scouting through the darkness, and Shadow Movement made the work both hard and easy for him at the same time.
Hard, because every crossing cost him the same lurch under the ribs and left him with a hand flat on a wall until the street stopped tilting.
Easy, because a locked door and a twelve-foot yard stopped being reasons to go the long way round. Over time he grew more familiar with the sub-skill, and he began to understand the role that Mana Circulation had to play in the use of his skills.
The sickness came slower each crossing, and then it came and went inside a single breath, and the place he arrived in stopped being four metres from where he had aimed and started being closer to two.
And that was how the mastery of the skill slowly moved.
Skills and sub-skills obviously answered to an intentional mastery, although the growth of a sub-skill had to still be tied to the original skill, Theo surmised.
Around four in the morning, Theo delved deeper into the horde and began to deal them more blows. He took a street, and then the street behind it, and the count of the tide did not so much as stumble for him.
And he might have moved so irrationally that he almost died.