Chương 107: Chapter 102

Talena Cipher's words kept getting swallowed by the drama of the room. Stop playing games. Come out. I'd heard every one of them and still couldn't tell you what he meant. Who was making a move? Toward what, exactly? Actions were louder than words right now regardless. Cipher stayed where he was, and the Prince of Ava stayed on the floor, equal parts hatred and humiliation, which I have to say was a good look on him. Ardeshir got up. Slowly, which was the only part that surprised me.

I'd expected him up fast and furious; he had never once stayed down long enough to learn patience. Instead he took his time. One knee, then standing, then straightening his attire like the room was watching and composure was the last weapon he had left. His face told a different story. The practiced warmth was gone. What sat under it was something I doubted many people had ever seen, that rage that comes from entitlement running headfirst into humiliation.

The gap between how he'd expected this to go and how it had actually gone. If I were a less measured person, I'd have started cheering right in his stupid face. I am, however, a very measured person. Mostly. I kept my mouth shut and was glad I did, because I could see exactly where this was headed. Ardeshir's eyes had gone flat, past anger and into something colder and more visceral. Davan Atame reached him before anyone else. The uncle.

As far as I could tell, the one man in the Ava delegation who'd been issued a working brain. He'd been moving since the second Cipher let go of Ardeshir's throat, crossing the floor fast and low, a man who had clearly spent years cleaning up after his nephew and could see how badly this one had gone. Perhaps fifty, the same wiry Ava build as Ardeshir, worn harder by age. He'd learned the only useful thing to do in a crisis was move toward it, and so he had.

He reached Ardeshir and put a hand on his arm and spoke in a voice low enough that the nearest guests couldn't hear, but I was close enough to catch the edges of it.

"Enough," Davan said.

"This is done. We are leaving."

"We are not leaving," Ardeshir said.

"Ardeshir." The name carried the weight of a thing he'd said too many times before.

"You brought an unsanctioned mercenary contingent into a Vera royal function without clearance or disclosure. You laid hands on the First Princess in front of her father and her brother and half the political elite of the Western Bloc. And you just got thrown across the room by a masked contractor in front of everyone you came here to impress." Davan's voice went dead.

"We are leaving. Now."

"He put his hands on me."

"Because you put your hands on her first. The hell you think was going to happen if a representative of Vera had done that to you in our own hall? Stand down."

"I will do no such thing. I am no weakling." My father's eyes had gone cold, a winter storm off Virex Caelum in the dead of the year. He wasn't in King Mode. He was in Dad Mode, and Dad Mode came with a kill switch. He stood and flared his own mana, and the room changed around him, the air going bleak and heavy. I forget sometimes that my father is a four-core expert. I don't know his limits. I know he's nobody's pushover, and right then he looked like he was giving serious thought to murder.

That version of my father was a great deal worse than the loud one. He wasn't loud, and that was the frightening part. I still kind of wanted him to yell.

"Prince Atame," my father said, addressing Ardeshir with the formal register that in his mouth meant the opposite of courtesy.

"In this Dominion, what you did to my daughter constitutes a criminal act. The title you carry is the only reason I have not thrown you in the dungeon." He looked at Ardeshir like a small administrative problem. Twenty years on the throne had handed him worse decisions than this one.

"You will compose yourself. You will offer an apology to the princess. And then you and your uncle and every member of your unsanctioned mercenary contingent will be escorted to your accommodations, where you will remain until I decide what remuneration is required for you to remedy this insult." The hall was very quiet. Ardeshir looked at my father. Then he looked at Cipher. Apparently, faced with the actual King of Vera, some small surviving part of that thick skull had started working again.

"King Cassian, I was simply trying to convey to your daughter the importance of collaboration for the coming war. I admit that my interaction with the Princess became somewhat heated, but no insult was actually offered. And I believe my father will back me on such a position. The same cannot be said for your hired help." Something crossed his face, past humiliation and past anger, and settled somewhere worse. He'd decided to burn the whole evening down and rebuild from the ash.

"You," he said, flat, like he was passing a sentence rather than giving an order.

"You are a contractor in a mask. You laid hands on the Crown Prince of Ava. In front of witnesses. In front of his family. In front of the King of Vera. In front of his fiancée." His voice climbed, as though loud enough would make it true.

"And you are going to stand there offering that insult." This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Cipher said nothing. He was looking at the Hollow. The Hollow hadn't moved since Cipher threw Ardeshir. He stood in the formation as he had all evening, still, waiting on a signal. But his attention had changed. The patient survey he'd worn since he walked in had narrowed to one thing, and that thing was the construct in his hand.

It was small and green, pulsing slow, something switched on and climbing toward a threshold. Cipher stepped forward. He went toward the Hollow without hurry, already certain of something the rest of the room hadn't caught up to. Whatever he'd seen had put a cold edge on him, the look he got when a problem was about to become a catastrophe and he meant to reach it first.

"Took me a moment," Cipher said.

"I see it now. Make your move already. You're not fooling anyone." The Hollow looked at him. Something passed between them, two professionals who understood each other's priorities and were doing the same math: whether this had already gone past the point of return. Ardeshir looked between Cipher and the Hollow. Then he laughed, short and ugly. He'd found his way out, or thought he had.

"An unknown mercenary in a matte black mask," he said, and the contempt was back, because he'd remembered he was still the Crown Prince of Ava and the Crown Prince of Ava had options. He looked at the Hollow with total confidence.

"I declare that this man is now an enemy of the Dominion of Ava. Anyone who gives him aid of any type will face the wrath of my kingdom. I will find your family, your friends, your love, and let the law exact its full punishment on them. As for you, peasant. You will not make it out of here alive. Hollow. Kill him. Kill this masked contractor and make everyone in this room understand who they are dealing with." The Hollow looked at Ardeshir.

He held it for maybe two seconds, weighing the order against a set of considerations only he could see. The indecision and the irritation didn't fit the moment, a mix of feeling that made no sense in this context. Before I understood what I was looking at, the Hollow moved, bringing out a simple black rod. He pointed his wrist toward the floor.

"Restoration." The blade flashed into existence and swept out in a single fluid arc, quick enough that no one understood what was happening until it was too late. A flash of blood and power, and Ardeshir's head hit the floor of Mirefall's main hall. I had wanted a great many things for Ardeshir Atame that evening. That was not one of them. The silence after was total, a whole room understanding at once that the night had crossed a line it couldn't come back from. Davan Atame stood very still.

My father did the same. The Royal Knights along the perimeter had weapons raised in the half-second that followed, but they were already half a second too late for the thing they were raised to prevent, and the Hollow wasn't looking at them. The Hollow rolled his neck, loose, like a man stretching after a nap.

"Finally. Done with that idiot. Cyclone, make the connection, if you please." He looked at the construct in his hand. It had reached its threshold. He activated it. Green light lit the hall like a festival, which was the last cheerful thing about it. The construct unfolded, and I felt the shape of it through my Resonance, huge and structured and premeditated, filling the room floor to ceiling in a single breath.

Arcanum and Technica braided into something so old and so rare the ward lattice had nothing in its whole architecture to answer it with. No. That wasn't it. The lattice wasn't failing. It was being rewritten. I felt the construct reach down into the Technica glyph-code under Mirefall and start turning it, and I watched our own defenses come around to point at us. Shit. This was not good. Every exit sealed, and a Nullflare suppression field went up with it.

Not a clean shutdown, more a dampening, enough to knock everything off its footing. The Royal Knights' Technica flickered. Several dropped to emergency power, their integrated systems scrambling for a protocol that didn't exist. The ones built heavy on Technica were suddenly running at half capacity, in a room where half capacity got you killed quick and without ceremony the moment a fight broke out. The hall grasped the physical problem well before the political one. The exits were gone.

The Technica was compromised, which was a special kind of disaster for a royal guard built around Technica-heavy Knights. And a top-fifty mercenary had just taken the head off the Crown Prince of Ava and then flipped a ward-lattice override that was supposed to be impossible. Supposed to be. Unless you were already inside the system. They were.

A breath later, three mercenaries came together at the center of the room and cast the most complex Arcanum I have ever seen, hands flat on a black metal box that looked like it ate light, like the light went in and decided not to come back. The box lifted off the floor. Technica glyph-script projected up from an interface I couldn't see, and Arcanum layered over the top of it, again and again, faster than I could track. I have honestly never seen anything like it. The box unfolded, and a gate tore open.

The air at the center of the hall split along a line that hadn't existed a second before. Spatial geometry bent, and the light that came through was wrong, a dense, hazy mana from somewhere beyond bleeding into Mirefall and refusing to mix. The gate held. And through it, two figures stepped into the main hall like they'd been waiting on the other side long enough that walking through was a formality. I looked at the Cipher who had been standing behind me on the dais. He was already looking at them.

The first one moved like almost no one I'd ever seen, every motion pared down to nothing wasted. You only get like that after years spent at the edge of what a body survives, until economy is the only language it has left. Tall, broad through the shoulders, in a strange armor that traced his frame more than it covered it. A casting aid, I realized, the gaps filled in with his own Aura.

It matched no house or Dominion I could place, something private, something old, the kind of outfit whose reputation walks into a room a step ahead of it and never needs colors to announce itself. His mana came off him dense and compact; I could all but smell the Aura on him, thick as garlic on the breath. Everyone who could feel it felt it at once, and the ones who felt it clearest went the stillest. I'd have known him without any of it. Calder the Threshold.

The second was a woman, quieter, the quiet that comes with the real thing and never with the imitation. Lean, in a similar cut of armor, which under any other circumstances I might have found funny. She moved less like force and more like geometry, already standing where she needed to be a beat before the rest of us worked out she'd need to be there. Same private insignia as the first. Her gaze crossed the hall once, flat and working, taking a last read before the job started. Ash Han the Still.

Calder the Threshold and Ash Han the Still. Both of them turned and looked at me. Oh, hell. That could only mean one thing. They were here for me. I knew it completely, and it helped me not at all. When Calder spoke, it was quiet. He hadn't needed volume in a long time; the situations that made him speak had learned to go quiet on their own.

"Princess Talena," he said.

"Please come with us." Cipher said nothing. He shifted his weight, barely, and it landed like tectonic plates deciding to move. He never needed much to get a room's attention. Ash Han tilted her head a fraction, her gaze moving between Cipher and the air around him, mapping him like a problem.

"That's the one," she said, quiet, to Calder and not the room.

"Top fifty. Maybe higher. His mana is strange, and I can't feel a core signature at all. The briefing was wrong."

"It does not matter," Calder said.

"It matters considerably," she said. Somewhere behind me, more of them shifted. Pieces set down earlier with the same patience as the rest, sliding now into whatever shape the next minute was going to need. I kept my eyes on the gate and the two in front of it and reached back with my mana, the same reach I'd made all night whenever I needed to know the thing I was leaning on was still there. The deep, held current of Cipher's presence pushed back against mine. He'd already decided what he was going to do.

I held my posture, and I let him.