He drags the knife up toward my ankle, trying for anything that will bring me down with him. I move first. The cut opens across his neck before the blade reaches me, and he goes still at my feet. His followers look to me as if waiting for instruction when I lift my head.
"East ridge," I tell them. "Behind the second standard. Black case. Gray coat."
He nods. They go. Above us a beam in the upper corridor gives with a sound like a long exhale, and a sheet of dust comes down through the door. The lamp gutters.
I stand alone with the drain, the chair and the man who built me. The crystal at my hip is intact. I bring it out with hands that don't entirely belong to me, and I wipe Gideon's blood from mypalm onto my own coat because I refuse to put it on the stone, and I go up.
28
LEORIC
The keep groans somewhere beneath my boots and I feel the sound through the soles before I hear it. Not the upper timbers this time. Lower. The foundation stones have begun to talk to each other in the language a building uses just before it stops being one. Varek has not been content. He's set something under us.
I cut a path back toward the inner arch because it's where the stair to the upper records still stands, and they are what I have left to defend until Corrine reaches the broadcast room. A council ranker meets me at the threshold. He's good. He lasts three exchanges. The fifth opens his guard and I take it. I don't watch him drop. The smell coming up through the floor seams has changed, and the air in the arch is warmer than it should be at chest height.
Then I see him. Varek is standing in the half-collapsed audience hall as if he came down to inspect a property he already owns. Two guards at his back. The gray coat is buttoned to the throat, and beneath the wool I can see the rectangular pressure of a case riding against his ribs. He has not drawn a weapon. He has built the room around me.
"Leoric." The same temperature he used at the wine table. "You've made a great deal of work for everyone."
"Move aside, Senator."
"In a moment." He glances at the seam of light along the ceiling where a beam is bowing. "We have a moment. I had hoped to have this conversation in better surroundings, but you've never been generous with my schedule."
I take a step. His left guard shifts his weight. I take another. The guard doesn't move again, which tells me Varek has instructed him not to. He wants the proximity. He wants the choice to be mine.
"The fortress," I say.
"Will come down. Yes. Faster than the engineers estimated, which is on me—I told them to err toward thoroughness. You were never meant to climb out of this one either, you understand. The first attempt was thorough. You were simply unreasonable about it."
The floor under my left boot ticks once. A hair of dust comes down from the arch and lands on Varek's shoulder. He doesn't brush it off.
"Say it plainly," I tell him. "Once. While there's a witness."
"There are no witnesses left, Leoric, that's the entire structure of the morning. But I'll grant you the courtesy." He folds his hands in front of him. "You were the problem. Not the cells. The cells were a logistic. You were a man whose soldiers preferred you to the senate that paid them, and that does not survive a long peace. You'd begun to look at the lower block. You'd begun to ask the clerks the wrong questions. I needed a fire that would take the records, the witnesses, and the commander in one accounting. The rebellion needed a martyr. We obliged each other."
"The gates."
"Were never going to open. No. That was the point of sealing them."
The arch above us sheds another curl of dust. Somewhere below the audience hall, a heavy thing falls onto another heavy thing, and the floor remembers it.
"You watched my men burn for a budget line."
"I watched ledger entries clear in a single evening. Yours was meant to be the two hundred and eighteenth. When you survived, the artist did better work than the fire had. The Ash King was an improvement on the original, if I'm honest. You frightened more people alive than you would have dead."
I have stood inside this knowledge for two nights. Hearing him say it does not soften the standing. It reverses something behind my eye, and what comes through is not new but newly aimed.
I cross the distance. His guard moves, but is too slow. I take his wrist on the lift and break it against the column, and he goes down without a sound. The second I don't bother to disarm. I put my elbow through his jaw and he folds. Varek hasn't stepped back. He's watching me with the same measured interest he watched me with across the wine.
I take him by the front. The case is there under my knuckles. I feel the corner of it through the wool. I drag him off his feet and put him against the column with enough force that the breath leaves him in a sound I want to hear again. My blade is at the underside of his jaw before I have decided to put it there.
"Leoric."
"Don't."
"Leoric."
It isn't Varek. It's behind me, low at the door, soot in it, and a rasp that wasn't there an hour ago. I don't turn. I keep the blade where it is. Varek's pulse is against it. His eyes have gone past me, to her, and something I would describe as curiosity movesacross his face. He's wondering, I think, whether she'll be the lever or the witness.
