Chapter 74: Pinned To The Bell Frame
It did not climb it and it did not go around it. It came off the street at a flat run and put its shoulder into the corner of a three-storey house, and the corner came out, and the whole front of the second floor folded down into the road with a noise like a hill falling over. Dust went up the street ahead of it in a grey wall. Somewhere back inside all that, a window frame was still swinging on one hinge over nothing at all.
Theo was already gone off the ridge.
He went south across the gap between roofs with the tiles going out from under his heels, and the spear came through the air where his hip had been and buried itself in a chimney stack, and the stack came apart into brick and mortar dust that he ran through blind. Grit went into his mouth on the way through and stayed there.
’Two.’
’Two of them, in the open, and it is not even dark enough yet.’
They chased him for several streets.
The spear one took the roofs. It went up the face of a warehouse in two jumps with no gather step in either of them, landed on slate that should have broken under it, and came along the ridge line at a speed that Theo could not match. It did not look like it was hurrying. That was the part he kept coming back to.
The axe one stayed down in the road and simply removed whatever was in front of it. Theo could hear it below and slightly behind, a long rolling crash of masonry that stopped and started, and every time he changed direction the crash changed with him about four seconds later.
’It can hear me.’
He came down onto a flat roof, went three steps, and threw himself sideways into the dark of a stairwell head. It smelled of cold brick and old rain and somebody’s frying oil, and it was two feet deep, and two feet was all the cover it needed to be.
The spear went through the flat roof where his shadow had been, punched out through the ceiling below, and pulled back up through the hole trailing plaster and a length of somebody’s washing line.
Theo came out of the dark forty feet away on a lower roof. He had tried for something higher than that and instantly got a flagship message.
[Warning: mastery insufficient for sustained use]
’Yes.’
’Understood.’
’Shut up.’
He learned the first useful thing at the bell tower.
He had gone up it because it was the only tall thing left in that quarter and because he needed nine seconds to think, and he got about four. The spear one came in through the louvres on the south face and the whole belfry rang like the end of the world. The slats went inward in splinters, the bell took the sound and handed it back louder, and every pigeon living in the rafters left through the gap in one body.
Theo got the sword up and the spear shaft slammed the flat of it into his own chest and put him into the bell.
He went down onto the platform with his ribs on fire and rolled through the sawdust and the droppings and the bell rope coiled there, and the spear came down through the boards between his knees.
That melted thing across the Legatee’s face lit red, half a second, and the spear came out of the boards and went for his throat.
Theo was not there.
He was not there because his body had already moved, and this time his body had moved faster than it would have been able to. It was by a hair’s breadth. A hair’s breadth was the whole of it.
[Your body has Adapted to a superior technique]
[+2 Speed]
For about ninety seconds Theo fought a spear at Elite Realm with nothing but a cheap sword, and he was tempted to say it was the closest he had ever come to enjoying himself in his life.
He took the shadows too, going down into one at the edge of the platform and coming up in the blind spot behind the thing’s shoulder, and then doing it again from the other side, and then again. The disturbing part was how the monster turned. There was no bone in it and no joint, or if there was, nothing had ever told it what those were for. It came round after him the way water finds the low side of a floor.
And sometimes it did not even need to reach him closely, because it had a spear reach that Theo only escaped the way a man escapes death’s jaw, by the skin of his teeth and nothing else.
Because of that reach, Theo always aimed to go in, and several times it cost him a cut on his side, or his neck. They were shallow. Shallow he could work with. He copied the monster and kept the movement going through them instead of stopping to feel them, and it was difficult, and it was also the only way he ever closed the distance between them.
"It seems you also have expectations as to how a human should react, don’t you?"
Leaving the Legatee frozen in shock for a brief second, Theo got inside the shaft twice and put the sword into the armour under the arm, and the second one went deep enough that the Legatee dropped a knee onto the platform to keep itself upright.
Then it stopped flaring, and a cold crimson light sat steady in the depths of its mangled face.
The next strike came with no warning at all, and it went through his left shoulder and out of his back and pinned him to the bell frame.
He hung there.
His boot tips found the frame and did not hold. The shoulder was letting go of him by degrees, a slow wet giving that he could feel more clearly than he could feel the pain of it, and his own blood went down the shaft and off the butt end and onto the boards in a steady tapping.
The Legatee did not pull the spear out. It leaned on it, hand over hand, walking its grip up the shaft, and put its weight behind it until the point ground into the oak behind him, and the melted helmet came up level with Theo’s face.
The face was a twisted amalgamation of flesh. Staring at it that closely made Theo want to retch, so instead he filled his head with the thought of his beautiful wives. Sesan’s cold beauty. Estea’s fiery gaze. Thalleria’s gentleness. Three good reasons, hung up on a spear.
Then a dark grimace formed on his face, he got his right hand up and cut at the thing’s wrist and the sword bounced off the vambrace and rang.
Below the tower, four streets away and closing, the long rolling crash of masonry stopped.