Lindon rubbed his aching jaw. Maybe meeting a messenger from the heavens had used up all the good luck in his life, because since his visit from Suriel, his fortunes seemed to have gone sour.
“…Wei Shi Lindon?” Whitehall said blankly. “What…why? How did he get here?”
“He’s with the Sage’s disciple,” Deret responded, without taking his eyes from Lindon. “This one humbly requests permission to treat him as an enemy.”
“Permission? I don’t care what happens to one or two Unsouled. If there were a hundred of him, I still wouldn’t care. Kill him, leave him there, carry him back on your shoulders, just don’t bother me while I’m working.”
Yerin tilted her scarred face toward him, though she kept staring off at what must be Whitehall. “Can you bury him alone?” she asked, which sunk his heart into his stomach even further. He could have pretended he wasn’t with her, or that she had kidnapped him. Now, he only had one option.
Lindon smiled up at Deret. “I don’t need any help putting down a dog.”
Red-brown bricks, Forged out of solid madra, condensed in the air behind the Kazan disciple. They fanned out like a bird’s tail as he hopped down into the chasm, landing lightly on his feet.
“Start begging now,” Deret said, “while you can.”
Lindon let out a breath of deep relief and moved his hand down to the wooden ward key in his belt. It had been even easier than he’d hoped.
The strings of a zither filled the air with haunting music, and a transparent avalanche fell from the cliff above. It was clearly fake to Lindon’s eyes, like a portrait overlaid on reality, but Deret screamed and covered his face with his arm.
“You forgot already?” Lindon said, and Deret turned toward the sound of his voice. The White Fox boundary distorted his senses, and the Iron hurled a Forged brick straight at the wall. “It’s only been one day, and I win again with the same trick. Don’t they say that even a dog remembers a beating?”
Deret roared, flinging another brick at the wall, once again missing Lindon wildly.
Above, the sky turned gold for an instant as a beam of destructive white-gold light flashed into existence. Elder Whitehall shouted to his disciples, and someone screamed. Seconds later, a thin line of blood trickled down into the chasm.
The white-gold light blasted past again, and this time Lindon felt the wave of heat on his face. Another man’s bloody shriek told him that Yerin was holding her own.
A nearby thunderclap drew his attention back to Kazan Ma Deret. The image inside the boundary wasn’t entirely clear to Lindon, and he certainly wasn’t going to drop the ward key for a more detailed look, but it seemed as though the Iron was contending with an army of razor-clawed crabs. He screamed and scratched at his face as though the illusions were drawing blood…
But he wasn’t using his bricks against the crabs. He may have fallen for the same trick a second time, but it wasn’t as though he’d forgotten. He knew it was a dream, and he only flung Forged madra in the hopes of hitting Lindon or destroying the formation.
What do I do with him? Lindon wondered.
Setting up the White Fox boundary had been a last-minute act of desperation, and Lindon hadn’t had time to come up with a real plan. Now that he was face-to-face with an enraged Iron, he realized that he didn’t know what to do.
Last time, he’d only needed to defeat Deret in front of Elder Rahm. Immobilizing him in the boundary was just as good as beating him senseless. Now…
Lindon couldn’t leave him here. The formation was fueled by vital aura, but even that would run out eventually. Before that, Deret had good odds of hitting one of the seven banners with his randomly thrown bricks. Besides leaving him, what else was there?
When the time’s right, you shed blood.
Like lightning striking inches away, a Forged brick smashed into the rock wall beside his head with all the force an Iron could muster. Chips stung Lindon’s face, and he flinched away so wildly that he fell to the ground. His ear rang like a struck gong.
Any closer, and he would have died. For a second time.
Deret still roared in the illusion, with no idea how close he’d come to victory. But that brick caused the reality of Lindon’s situation to come crashing down.
He had almost died. His story had come within an inch of ending here. The heavens had already intervened once, a celestial messenger had reversed death and caused even time to flow backwards…and none of that would have mattered.
For reasons he didn’t understand, he reached into his pocket for Suriel’s glass marble. It was warm to the touch, and he rolled it in his fingers as he thought.
One thing was perfectly clear: with Deret sharing this chasm with him, Lindon was in mortal danger. And he couldn’t trust heaven to save him a second time.
His gaze was drawn to a spear, abandoned from Yerin’s last fight, half-buried in the snow. He kept low to avoid any potential flying bricks, crawling over to the weapon and cradling it in both hands.
You shed blood.
Before he had a chance to inspect the spear, he ran out of time. A brick struck the banner, and the field instantly blew away like mist on the wind. To Lindon, it really was like watching a cloud drift through the air, but Deret actually staggered as he was jerked from one reality to another. The banner itself wasn’t broken, but it had been knocked out of alignment with the rest of the formation. The boundary was gone. In less than a breath, Deret would regain his bearings and turn around, ready to kill.
Lindon gathered himself. No matter how he reasoned, there was only one thing to do here. He gripped cold, slick wood in shaking hands.
Then he stabbed Deret.
There was less to it than he’d expected. The first stab was basically like sinking a blade into the earth; he jammed it into Deret’s back, then quickly withdrew. The Kazan didn’t react until Lindon pulled the spear out, and then he jerked forward as though something had stung him. He didn’t look wounded at all.
Lindon panicked. Deret would turn and hurl a brick through Lindon’s head at any second, and that would be the end. So he followed the other man forward, stabbing him again and again, expecting any second to end with a missile of Forged madra through the skull.
With no art, with no skill, Lindon stabbed Kazan Ma Deret until a bleeding body fell onto the snow-covered ground. He fell with it, swallowing air as though he couldn’t get enough, still clutching the spear.
And a Remnant rose before him, and he choked back bitter tears.
Made of Mountain’s Heart power, this Remnant was like the outline of an ogre painted in dirt. It stumbled around for a while, flailing at the air with heavy hands, but it was weak and barely coherent. Lindon held his eyes open until they watered, afraid to blink, but the Remnant never gave any indication that it saw him. It pressed into the wall and oozed away, squeezing into tiny cracks like soft mud.
Lindon dropped his weapon as the spirit vanished, panting, his stomach churning. He thought he might be sick.
He’d always accepted the fact that he would kill someone someday. Combat was a part of the sacred arts, and the clans were encouraged to kill one another within reason. He knew his parents had killed people in their younger days, though they rarely talked about it.
But there was supposed to be more to it. He’d imagined standing in triumph over a blood enemy, veins pumping with the thrill of battle, proving his superiority in a final showdown. Not huddling in the cold, stabbing a blinded man.
Deret had given him no choice, and besides, the Wei elders would have given him a reward for killing a Kazan Iron. No one would blame him. If he had hesitated, even for another second, he would have certainly died.