Chapter 76 — The Rooks III( Bonus)
Ewan had the polearm fighter backing up.
He had gone to the same line three times on the man’s guard and it had gone soft and grey along one edge, and the fourth one was already coming.
I did not have the distance.
> **[Snare — S activated.]**
>
> **[Mana: 18/240 → 8/240.]**
His front boot stopped belonging to him.
I know exactly what that feels like from the inside, because he watched a friend of his do it to me in a chamber that no longer exists, and I have been carrying it around for two days waiting for somewhere to put it.
His weight kept going. His foot did not.
Everything above the ankle turned about twenty degrees past where a knee goes, and Ewan Calder folded over a joint that had stopped working, exactly the way I did.
The polearm fighter did not waste it.
He put the head of that weapon through the seam under Ewan’s arm and left it there, and Ewan went down on the stone and stopped moving.
No panel came up.
No number. No card, no EXP, no line of text at all, and I stood there with eight Mana in me looking at a dead man and getting absolutely nothing for it.
That is correct. He was a person.
---
Alasdair finished it with Cormac about two minutes later.
The chamber had emptied out by then. The wounded were gone. There were nine of ours still on that floor and two Rooks left, and Cormac had run out of bodies to move between.
That is the whole of it. Talaria needs somewhere to go.
He burst left and Alasdair was already standing in it. He burst back and there were four people there. He tried to put a slab between them and Alasdair went through the slab.
The last one, he did not burst at all. He came in.
I think he had decided.
Alasdair caught the strike on his forearm and broke the arm behind it, and then hit Cormac Keane once, and Cormac went down and did not get up.
I did not do anything about that and I did not need to.
My father put that man in this Gate to walk me back out of it. That was him finishing the job.
---
Declan died about a minute before Cormac did and I was part of it.
Four of us got him against the wall on the far side where the stone was already broken, and he could not get out to the right because Erik Lind had worked out that he goes right and put an axe there twice.
He came out of Lycaon at the end. I do not know if he chose to or ran out.
What I remember is that he was on his hands and knees in his own blood, human again, with his gear in pieces and one arm not working, and he got his head up and looked for me.
He found me.
I was standing eleven metres away with no boots on and four claw wounds in my shoulder and nothing to explain any of it, and I watched Declan O’Rourke try to make sense of me with about four seconds left.
He did not manage it.
He said something. Two syllables, and I did not catch either of them.
Then Clara and two Meridian fighters finished him.
---
Søren Juel was the last one.
He was in the corner past the Dullahan’s armour with six people around him and a spear about a metre from his chest, and he had a cut down one side of his face and blood in his eye.
He looked at Cormac.
Then at what was left of Declan.
Then he opened his hand and let the blade drop, and it rang on the stone, and he put both palms out flat and went down onto his knees without anybody telling him to.
Nobody touched him.
That is what I want written down about the fourteen people in that chamber. Not one of them touched him.
They stood around him with their weapons up and their breathing loud, and Barre had a brother-in-law in the Bureau and had just watched a friend die, and he did not touch him.
Renard bound his hands himself.
---
Nine minutes on the collapse timer.
We went out in the order Renard set. Wounded first, then the people carrying them, then the dead, and Renard and Alasdair and I went last with Søren between four of us.
We brought out what we could carry of Idris and Kessler and the man with the wrapped forearm.
We left the Rooks where they were.
---
The other side of that light was an assault on everything I had.
Floodlights, four banks of them, pointed at the Gate and at us, so bright after eleven hours of dungeon that I could not open my eyes properly for about four seconds.
Cold air. Actual moving air, with a city in it, diesel and wet tarmac and something frying somewhere past the barrier.
Engines. Six ambulances with all their doors open and the engines already running.
And noise. People shouting instructions at each other about twenty metres away, boots on tarmac, a radio, a trolley wheel that needed oiling.
I stood four steps out of an Orange Gate with no boots on and my armour in pieces and could not process any of it.
Somebody put a hand on my back and moved me forward because I had stopped in the exit line.
---
The PSB reacted to Søren before they reacted to anything else.
Four officers came in fast when they saw a bound man walking out of a Gate between four armed Players, and Renard went to meet them with both hands where they could see them and started talking before they got there.
I heard about half of it.
Attempted coordinated homicide, post-clear, inside the Gate. Five participants. Four dead inside, one restrained. Fourteen surviving raiders as witnesses.
Then he gave them
One of the officers asked him something and Renard said the man had not said a word since he put his weapon down and that he would be making a formal statement within the hour.
They took him. That was all. Two officers on either side and one walking behind, across the tarmac, into the back of a vehicle.
Nobody interrogated anybody. Nobody made a speech.
A raid captain handed a prisoner to the Bureau in a freight district at four in the morning and then turned round and went back to his wounded.
---
The medics took over everything after that.
They came through the survivors in a line, splitting people off, and two of them got to me and started on the shoulder before I had finished sitting down on the back step of an ambulance.
Somebody put a blanket round me, which I did not want and then wanted very much about ten seconds later.
Meridian personnel were already moving through with cases, taking custody of everything anybody had brought out. Mana stones. Whatever came off the Dullahan. A section of that black plate that two men were carrying between them.
They tagged it in front of us, which I noticed, and I think it was deliberate.
---
Renard came over about twenty minutes later.
He had a dressing on his side that he had not had inside and he sat down on the step next to me rather than standing over me, which I also noticed.
"Materials go to appraisal in the morning," he said. "Everything from all three groups. It gets sold under the raid agreement and the split goes out to registered participants once it settles."
"How long?"
"Weeks. It is not fast and I am not going to pretend it is." He rubbed his face with the flat of his hand. "You will get a schedule. When it sells, the money moves. You do not have to do anything for that part."
"All right."
"The other thing." He looked out at the barrier. "The Bureau is going to contact you. Not tonight. In the next few days, and it will be about Eastwick and it will be about those five."
"I know."
"When they do, you tell them exactly what you saw."
He said it flatly and I did not think anything of it for about a second and a half.
Then I did.
"Exactly what I saw," I said.
"That is what I said."
He got up off the step, and put a hand on the frame of the door on the way past, and went to find the next person on his list.
---
The car came for me at twenty past four.
Alasdair Muir walked me to it across four hundred metres of closed road with a Bureau blanket round my shoulders and no boots on my feet, and neither of us said anything the whole way.
He got the door.
"Sit down before you fall down," he said.
Then he closed it, and stood there, and did not go anywhere until the car had actually pulled out.
Behind us the freight district was still lit up like the middle of the day, and there were sixteen people in it, and twenty had gone in.