Foundation of Smoke and Steel

Chapter 200

The SaintHe had expected resistance. He had not expected this.

The standards of resistance the Saint had developed over a long career had been calibrated against the opposition his work typically encountered: provincial garrisons with too many men and not enough discipline, sect cultivators trained in the wrong specialties to recognize what was about to happen to them, the occasional priest of some divine order or another who had forgotten what real power looked like before they died. Those defenders fell along predictable lines. The Saint had categorized their failure modes years ago and ranked them by how long each category took to dispatch.

The defenders in this hall did not fit any of his categories.

He cast another bolt. It traveled toward the dais with the slow-fast quality the eye registered only after the strike landed, and a Warden of the local contingent caught it across the chest in the act of moving to intercept and went down with a scream and a shower of blood. The man's cry was, to the Saint, what an ant is to a boot. He noted it and moved on. He had stopped looking at individual deaths a hundred years ago. The Shadow Bolts were a tool. The dying was an effect.

He scanned the room instead.

His prepared servants were taking damage faster than he had budgeted for. Two of the original fifty were already past recovery, not destroyed, but reduced to states the lattice could not knit back together within the timeframe of this engagement. Three more were below operational threshold. The remainder were holding, but they were holding worse than they should have been.

The reason was visible at the dais.

The woman in violet robes with silver crane embroidery was the only daughter of House Li and one of the women named in Vael's briefing. Vivian Li. The Saint had read the file twice. He had not, at the time, given the file the weight it deserved.

Her ice was clean.

Most cultivators who claimed an elemental specialty actually worked through an intermediate signature, a personal flavor of the underlying current that smoothed the casting at the cost of efficiency. Vivian Li's ice was not flavored. She projected the element directly, without intermediary, as only a cultivator in full alignment with the elemental form could. The Saint's prepared servants did not resist ice well. They had been built for durability against mana, against blade, against blunt force; the demonic force and death-aspected mana that animated them recharged through the atmosphere and through his own direct line to his demonic power. Real elemental ice, any real element, but ice above all, created problems for that regeneration. They had not been built for the cellular crystallization Vivian Li's strikes produced, and the frozen parts did not knit back together, because the lattice needed live tissue to fuse the repair and frozen tissue would not take the infusion.

Then the other woman finished what Vivian Li started.

The Emberflower Pavilion was a name the Saint knew. Their senior practitioners were a problem the Saint had been instructed to avoid wherever practical. Lu Anmei, also in the briefing, was not merely a senior practitioner of the Pavilion. She was, on the evidence of this engagement, the strongest cultivator of her generation, stronger even than Vivian Li, and her flame was less a clan technique than a second nature. Where she touched the frozen pieces of his servants, the lattice consumed itself trying to repair what could no longer be repaired, and what burned did not get up again.

True ice and true fire. The two of them had found it in under a minute.

That was the part the Saint was still adjusting to. He had encountered cultivators who specialized in elemental synergy before. He had not encountered two specialists at this tier working in tandem inside a fight that had been running for less than two minutes. That kind of coordination took years. It suggested these women had worked together before, in the field, against things that died this way.

Vael's briefing had not contained that information.

The Saint set the irritation aside and continued the engagement.

He cast another bolt. This one he routed wide of the dais, into the cluster of Iron Tide warriors at the lower tables. The orc nearest the impact point caught the bolt on a forearm guard the Saint had not expected an orc to be wearing, and the guard absorbed it with the dull, indifferent resistance of Pulse-bonded equipment, durable, made for a different physics of harm than his bolts operated on. The orc grunted, set his stance, and did not fall.

The Saint noted this. The Iron Tide was here, and here in far greater force and ferocity than he had expected. The young orc was Karguk, son of the High Fang of the Ironfang. Vael had not given the Saint a clean read on him. The Saint had taken the omission as evidence that Karguk did not matter. The Saint was now reconsidering.

He summoned three more shadow constructs from his coat. They peeled off as they were supposed to peel off and raced into the room. Two of them were in pieces within five seconds.

That was Vivian Li again.

The Saint stopped summoning shadow constructs.

His attention found the dais.

The man at the center of the dais had been moving differently for the last thirty seconds. The Saint had been registering the movement peripherally while focusing on the more immediate problems, and now he gave the man his full attention, because the man was about to do something the Saint had not yet seen him do.

Ethan Zhou.

The target. The reason for the engagement. The young scholar-husband of House Li whose existence Vael had described as a divergent issue that needed addressing. The Saint had agreed to the contract because Vael's desire had been apparent and the price had run far above his standard rate. He should have known better and asked more questions.

The engagement profile on Ethan Zhou had suggested an isolated target in a war room with minimal defensive complication.

The man on the dais was not an isolated target.

The Saint watched him even as he cut down others with the necra blade.

Ethan Zhou drew the sword at his belt.

The blade came out of its sheath without ceremony. The sound was small, the din of fighting drowning out almost everything else. The blade did not vibrate as steel is supposed to vibrate when it clears a sheath. The blade was white. Not silver. Not pale steel. White, like a star burning with fever in the heavens.

The Saint understood what he was looking at before Ethan Zhou had finished drawing it.

Starmetal.

Forged.

A starforged blade.

The Saint had encountered exactly three starforged blades in his career, and each of those encounters had been from a respectful distance, after the wielders had already done what they set out to do. The blades were not weapons in the sense the Saint understood weapons. They were stories made solid, the residue of star-fall hammered into a shape that listened to its wielder like a familiar to a witch. They were divine in the narrow sense that they had been born of something not native to the world. And they did not answer to the kind of work the Saint did.

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Ethan Zhou ran a finger along the blade.

The gesture was unhurried. He looked across the hall as he did it, and his eyes met the Saint's, and the Saint took the gesture for what it was: a message.

Then Ethan Zhou pushed his mana into the blade.

The blade answered.

The mana that flowed up the steel was Ethan Zhou's, the Saint could see it clearly, the structured circulation gushing into the formation and settling into the metal. But what came back through the blade in answer was not Ethan Zhou's. It was something else. Something the Saint could feel from across the hall, and the feeling settled across his skin like frost across a field. The blade resonated with an energy the Saint, in his career as a fully integrated Death Master, did not have a category for. He could only describe it as power, or some variation of power, and he grasped at once that whatever the variation was, his servants were going to die to it.

"Qinglan's Silence," Ethan Zhou said.

He said it almost to himself, a man checking a tool before he uses it, but loud enough that the Saint caught it across the hall. The naming was a message too. The Saint had been given the name of the blade for the same reason he had been given the gesture. The man on the dais was telling him what was about to kill his work.

The Saint exhaled.

He understood, with the clarity that came at moments like this in a career like his, that he was not killing Ethan Zhou in this engagement. The contract had failed. The target was too defended, the room held too many power users of a quality he had not been briefed to expect, and the blade he had just been shown would unmake his servants the instant they came within its reach. Continuing the primary objective would only produce losses he could not afford.

He had perhaps three minutes before the human ward mesh resealed his entry gap. He touched the seal binder in his pocket. The contingency he had carried for twenty years. Did he dare use it? Did he dare unseal it after all this time and let that power off its leash? There might be a way to salvage this, but at what cost?

Across the way, Ethan crossed the dais in three steps to the blind side of one of his servants, cut it in half, and watched it unmake itself in a flash of ruin. Two Wardens stepped in front of Ethan and absorbed most of the shock.

The Saint knew then that he had no choice. He would unleash it, but he had to reach a space where he could, and for that he needed a distraction. He scanned the hall.

The princess was the obvious imperial target. Sophie of the House. Her bloodline carried the Insight, and Vael's briefing had marked her as a variable to keep on the board as long as possible. The Saint considered her. She stood behind the man shielding her, a prince of the imperial line whose face the Saint knew from court records. Alaric, the Crown Prince. Alaric he judged a viable kill as well, but he was not on contract for that, and others were already working toward those ends. Both of them stood on the wrong side of the dais. Reaching either would mean crossing the part of the room Vivian Li and Lu Anmei were controlling.

He set the princess aside.

The orcs were too dense as a group. The High Fang was a kill the Saint would have happily attempted on a different night, but the elder orc was drawing power inward in a manner the Saint recognized as preparation for an outflow he did not want to be near when it came. Karguk stood beside him with his Pulse condensed in a way that suggested similar reserves. The Iron Tide warriors at the lower tables had locked into a formation the Saint had no counter for.

He set the orcs aside.

His attention returned to Vivian Li.

She was, on consideration, the lever.

The Saint thought through the geometry of it. Ethan Zhou had just drawn a starforged blade and spoken its name across the room as a message. A man who carried a starforged blade did not do that for an audience. He did it for a target. And still, Ethan Zhou kept glancing toward Vivian Li. A less patient practitioner of the death arts might have missed it. The Saint missed nothing. He had seen the concern cross Ethan's face. For a pair supposedly bound in a political marriage, the concern was real. It told the Saint exactly what he needed to know about the woman with the violet eyes and the cold demeanor.

She was Ethan Zhou's wife where it counted.

Remove her from the room, and Ethan Zhou would pursue. Ethan Zhou pursuing meant Ethan Zhou outside, where the Saint could exercise his contingency.

The engagement failed if he killed Ethan Zhou in the hall. It succeeded if he extracted Vivian Li and let Ethan Zhou come after her.

The math worked.

The Saint held to his calculation. He kept to the rhythm he had established, casting bolts, lashing out with the necra blade when the moment gave him one, and his servants kept to their engagement. The shadow constructs he had stopped summoning were not the limit of what he could field. He reached into the long pocket inside his robe where the smaller arrangements waited and began the work of arming what came next.

He had not used the rappellers tonight. He had brought them for contingencies of exactly this kind. Four of his original fifty had been positioned outside the great hall's high windows on the cliff side after their initial work on the northern wall, holding silent watch on the off chance the primary infiltration failed. They had held for over an hour. The Saint reached through the lattice and woke them.

They moved.

Through their awareness, the Saint felt them climb the cliff face on the silk-mana lines they had set hours ago, then drop into position above the great hall's high windows from a vector the defenders had no reason to be watching. He felt them ready. He felt the one designated for the heaviest payload settle into the stillness that preceded the action. That one had been built for this and nothing else, its lattice tuned to a different output than the others, and the Saint had carried it in reserve for fifteen years across nine engagements without once needing it.

He cast another bolt to hold his rhythm.

He looked across the hall at Vivian Li, who at that moment cut a shadow construct in half with a strike the Saint registered as the most beautiful application of cultivator swordwork he had seen in a year, and he committed.

The first rappeller came through the high window above the east gallery.

It dropped on its silk line in silence, the line ran out fifteen feet above the floor, and the rappeller swung once and landed in the wide gap between the imperial advisors and the cluster of figures around Lu Anmei. The advisors saw it first. One of them shouted. By the time the shout became words, the rappeller was already moving on Lu Anmei, and the other three were already coming through their windows.

The second rappeller came in above the kitchens corridor, dropped, and intercepted a Warden moving back toward the dais.

The third came through above the side wall.

The fourth was the heavy.

The Saint felt the heavy settle on the floor near Lu Anmei, silent, dropping just where he had built it to drop, and he watched, through the lattice, as Lu Anmei turned to engage what she took for a fifth shadow construct, and he watched her hit the rappeller with a strike that would have ended an ordinary construct, and he reached through the lattice and gave the heavy its final instruction.

The rappeller detonated.

It came apart not as a body comes apart but as a chamber being released. The lattice the Saint had built into it had held death-mana under pressure for fifteen years, layered with demonic current like powder in a shell, made for one event and one radius. The release was bright. The release was loud. It crossed five paces before anyone understood what was happening.

Lu Anmei took the heart of it.

She was the closest. She had hit the rappeller. She stood inside the five paces when the lattice released, and the heat that came off it was not the clean elemental heat she commanded but the cold heat of death-mana given motion, and the wave of it picked her up and carried her into the wall behind her. The Saint heard the impact across the hall. He heard her cry out. He saw her hit the stone and slide down it and stay down.

The wave rolled outward.

Two imperial advisors went down. A Warden moving toward Lu Anmei went down. A retainer of the Li household whose name the Saint did not know went down. Vivian Li had been three paces from Lu Anmei and turning toward the rappeller when the release came, and she was the second person inside the radius, and she took enough of the wave to be thrown against the side of the dais with force that broke something inside her. He read it in how she fell. She did not get up either.

The Saint was already moving.

He crossed the hall through the lull the detonation had produced. The lull lasted perhaps two seconds. In those two seconds the Saint reached Vivian Li. He bent, lifted her without wasted motion, and turned toward the war room corridor.

Across the hall, on the dais, Ethan Zhou shouted.

The Saint had been expecting a shout. The form of it was what he had been listening for. He registered it now and adjusted his pace.

"Nathan!" Ethan Zhou yelled. "The Badnelli!"

The Saint did not know the word. He filed it.

He carried Vivian Li toward the corridor at a pace that gave nothing away, slow enough that the defenders still recovering from the detonation read no urgency in it, and behind him the chaos of the hall closed up as they began to understand what had been done to them.

Through the lattice, he felt his remaining servants move to cover his withdrawal.

He felt the heavy's chamber finish releasing.

He felt Lu Anmei, against the wall, not moving.

He felt Vivian Li in his arms, breathing shallow, her eyes half open and finding him with a focus that should not have been possible given the wound he could feel in her ribs.

She tried to say something.

The Saint did not catch the word.

He carried her into the corridor.