Chapter 17 | The Fight, Astreal Verse

The right passage was not empty.

This became apparent within the first thirty seconds of entering it, when three cultists came out of the dark with the uncoordinated fury of people who had been told to hold the passage and had interpreted hold to mean throw yourselves at whatever came through. Astreal dealt with them with the efficiency that close-quarter engagement at full readiness against unprepared opponents typically produced, quickly, cleanly, and without using more than she needed to. The tomahawk moved in the tight arcs her combat style called for and the passage was clear.

Then more came.

Not in any organised capacity. Not with anything resembling tactical coordination. They came the way Sylvia's people had always come when their belief was all they had left, with the reckless desperation of the fully committed and the complete indifference to personal cost that made them, despite everything, genuinely difficult to simply walk past. Each one individually was not a serious threat. Collectively, spread across the length of the passage in a series of encounters that gave her no meaningful rest between them, they were an attrition problem. She solved the attrition problem the way attrition problems were solved: by continuing.

By the time the passage opened into the hall, she had taken five wounds. None of them were serious in the sense that serious mattered, no structural damage, nothing that threatened function. But two of them were bleeding, and the cumulative expenditure of moving at full agility through a succession of engagements with no pause had pulled the stamina reserve down to a level she noted with clinical precision and did not feel good about.

She entered the hall.

It was large, like Belial's would be, she did not know this for certain but assumed it by symmetry. The ceiling was high and the torchlight was old and unsteady, and around the perimeter, in the arrangement of someone who had built this space with specific intent, stood the statues.

Astreal stopped.

She knew the face. She had always known this face, in dreams, across centuries, in the particular way that something lives inside you when you have organised your entire existence around it. She had last seen it as stone, in Germany, in the quiet of a castle great hall, and before that in a life that was three thousand years gone. And here it was again: carved in the local stone by hands that had wanted to remember something, the face of the person whose shape her devotion had always taken.

She stood in front of it for a moment that was not a tactical decision.

Then she caught herself.

He is Matthias, she said to herself, with the precision of someone correcting a navigation error before it becomes a course deviation. He is Matthias, and Matthias is the one whom your heart belongs to now. The face on the stone is history. What walks and speaks and trains in the basement at five in the morning is the present.

She turned away from the statue.

Her breathing was even. Her expression had returned to its usual composition. If anyone had been watching, the interval would not have been measurable.

The sound came from above her.

Not a footstep, there was no footstep. That was the first thing she registered, and it was the thing that told her, before any visual confirmation, who and what she was dealing with. The specific quality of a presence arriving at a surface without the mechanical relationship between gravity and foot contact that ordinary movement produced.

She looked up.

The woman was standing on the head of the largest statue, balanced, still, with a posture that was completely at odds with both the height and the silence of her arrival. She was pale in the way that Sylvia was pale, but where Sylvia's pallor was the pallor of deprivation and neglect, this woman's had the quality of something cultivated over a very long time, maintained, deliberate, the specific whiteness of someone who had decided that paleness was a property rather than a condition. She was sickly in the bone-deep sense of someone whose particular relationship with human vitality had been, historically, a consuming one. But her posture gave off something that Sylvia's never had. Something aristocratic. Something that had learned to occupy rooms as though it owned them, across a lifetime of actually occupying rooms that it owned.

She dropped from the statue to the floor.

No sound. Not even the soft impact of a landing absorbed through bent knees. She simply arrived at floor level as though the transition had been negotiated privately between her and the space.

Astreal's teeth came together.

"Elizabeth," she said.

The name landed between them with the weight of specific history.

The woman called Elizabeth Báthory looked at Astreal with the patient delight of someone who has been looking forward to a conversation for a very long time and intends to take their time with it now that it has arrived.

"And Astreal," she said.

Her voice had a precision to it, accented, the accent of somewhere that no longer existed as it had, a sound from the sixteenth century wearing its contemporary register as a thin coat.

"I have thought of little else."

"Sylvia broke the seal," Astreal said. It was not a question.

"Sylvia is a practical woman." Elizabeth tilted her head fractionally. "She wanted her Right Guardian. I wanted my freedom. The arrangement was mutually agreeable. And she gave me considerably more than freedom." The pause was measured. "She was generous in her terms."

"The seal was designed to hold for five hundred years," she said. "It held for four hundred and fifty. I will note that as a margin of error for future reference."

"And was that the lesson Astreal thought she had taught? The steel box. The seals." The curve became something less pleasant. "I have had a considerable amount of time to develop an opinion about the lesson."

"The lesson," Astreal said, "was that certain behaviours have consequences."

"The lesson," Elizabeth said, "was incomplete." She took one step forward, and the cultivated lightness of her movement made it feel like the room had tilted rather than her moving through it. "I grew tired of other women's blood some centuries ago. They never lasted. The youth they gave me was never sufficient." The eyes, dark, deeply set, with the quality of something that had been looking at the world for a long time and had stopped finding it interesting some while ago, moved over Astreal with the specific attention of an assessor. "But yours. Astreal's blood. The blood of the woman who put me in that box." The voice softened into something that was worse than hostility. "That, I expect, would last considerably longer."

Astreal looked at her.

"You will not draw any blood today," she said.

She meant it, and said it, with the same flat certainty she used for things that were simply true.

"Astreal is injured," she said, and the delight in it was genuine. "Look at her. The passage took its toll before she arrived. She has been fighting since she entered this castle. And now she stands here, already spent, and expects to match what Sylvia has given me." The laugh wound down into something fond and terrible. "Astreal's certainty is charming. I have always found the certainty of the very capable to be the most entertaining thing to watch fail."

She rose.

Not quickly, not with any dramatic gesture, she simply left the floor, floating up with the same noiseless quality as everything else she did, until she was three metres above the stone. Her arms opened, and from the trailing darkness at her sleeves the thorns came: black roses, impossibly dense and sharp, manifesting in a cloud that orbited her like a slow, patient storm. She selected three and sent them down.

The first one hit the pillar Astreal had put between herself and Elizabeth in the first instant of motion. The explosion was not large, it was precise, concentrated, the kind of force that was designed for a specific target area rather than general destruction. Dust and stone chips. Astreal was already behind the next pillar.

She sent back a burst from the tomahawk, the energy discharge she used in place of Belial's staff work, shorter range but tighter delivery. It caught Elizabeth's shield and dispersed against it.

The second and third thorns came in fast sequence, and she was moving before both of them, covering ground in the lateral direction, reading the trajectories and putting stone between herself and them. The pillars were taking damage. She noted the rate and calculated. Four pillars. Three of them would not survive extended punishment.

The fight settled into its shape: Elizabeth floating and sending thorns in precise, patient series; Astreal moving between the diminishing cover and returning fire in the windows between incoming. It was a disadvantaged position, she knew this, and the disadvantage was growing incrementally with each pillar that took damage and provided less. The stamina that she'd entered the hall with was being asked to sustain a rate of output she had already been asked to sustain for the entire length of the passage.

The air in the hall was doing something that combat between energies at this level always did, charging, the way the air charged before a storm, the stone around them taking on the residue of things that had been discharged into it.

The last pillar took a direct hit and most of it went.

Astreal pulled herself behind what remained. The fragment was barely the width of her shoulders. Two of her wounds were actively bleeding now, the cloth over them dark and wet. She braced.

Elizabeth descended.

The sound she made landing, nothing. Still nothing. The woman arrived at the floor a metre from Astreal's pillar and the laugh came back, different now: the specific satisfaction of an outcome that has been worked toward.

"Astreal should rest," Elizabeth said. "She has fought well. She always fought well. But there is a limit..."

"Yes," Astreal said, from behind the pillar. "There is."

She placed one hand against the stone and let the restorative work she had been practising for four months move through the cost that the passage and the battle had accumulated, and the cost moved through her and out the other side and what remained was most of what she had started with.

Joseph had identified the vulnerability: sustained engagements deplete her faster than her skill level would suggest. Joseph had also provided the answer: restorative spells, built on the same holy foundation as the offensive work, different application. She had drilled it for four months at five in the morning and she had wondered, during some of those mornings, when she would need it.

She stepped out from behind the pillar.

Elizabeth was looking at her.

At the wounds, which had stopped bleeding. At the posture, which was upright and composed. At the eyes, which had the specific quality of an assessment completed and a course of action selected.

"She should..." Elizabeth began.

"She should have been exhausted by now," Astreal said, and said it in the flat register she used for obvious conclusions. "I know. You calculated incorrectly."

Elizabeth's expression did something it had not done since she'd entered the hall. Something at the back of the dark eyes that was not the satisfaction of an assessor watching something fail. Something smaller and older.

Astreal did not wait for it to develop.

She turned and walked to the nearest unbroken statue. The base was carved stone, wide and heavy, designed to hold the weight above it indefinitely. She was not designed to cleave carved stone, but the tomahawk was, in this moment, channelling the accumulated energy of the restorative work she'd just completed and the four months of training beneath it, and the cut it made at the base of the statue was clean and full-depth.

The statue tilted.

Slowly. The way very heavy things tilted when their base had been removed, with the gathering speed of something that weighed a great deal and had been given a direction.

Elizabeth looked up at it.

The shield came up without hesitation, a defensive shell, bright and dense, snapping into place above her with the reflexive speed of someone who had been empowered enough to produce it but who had produced it in panic, and the resources that produced it were the same resources that had been sending thorns in patient series for the previous six minutes, and you could not do both at the same rate at the same time.

Astreal was already beside her.

The tomahawk hooked around Elizabeth's neck, not the blade, the inner curve of the head, fitted to the angle and used as a lever, and Astreal pulled.

It was not elegant. It used the weight and the moment and the specific geometry of a move that was designed for exactly this: taking someone from upright to horizontal in the fastest possible interval. Elizabeth went down and hit the stone floor with the full heaviness of a body that had not been expecting to be on the floor, and the sound of it rang against the walls.

The statue hit the defensive shield above, which held it, which was the point. The shield held the statue. Elizabeth's attention was divided between the thing above her and what had just happened at floor level.

Astreal stood over her.

Elizabeth looked up.

The hall was still. The shield held the tilted statue at its angle, groaning with the effort. Elizabeth, on the floor, looked at Astreal from the position of someone who had just lost the significant tactical advantage of not being on the floor, and who was aware of exactly what that meant.

Astreal's dress was torn in two places, the passage's cultists and the hall's shrapnel had seen to that. Aside from those, and the cuts that had stopped bleeding, she looked much as she had when she'd entered the hall. The expression on her face was the expression she wore when she had arrived at the end of a line of reasoning and found it correct.

"No..." Elizabeth said, and the voice had lost its cultivated precision entirely. "Not the coffin. Don't put her back in the..."

"There is no coffin," Astreal said.

She reached down. The necklace at Elizabeth's throat was the same category of object as the one Belial had taken from Rungon, the vessel, the connection, the thing Sylvia had used to thread power into someone and bind them to a purpose. She closed her fingers around it and pulled.

It did not want to come.

She pulled harder, with the specific quality of someone who has made a decision and intends to see it concluded.

The necklace broke.

Elizabeth's scream went up through three octaves and then left the range of hearing and then left the range of anything, and the form on the floor dissolved from the outside in, the body losing its coherence at the edges first and then converging on the centre, and the blackness of it rose and spread and dispersed against the ceiling and was gone.

The shield above winked out. The statue resumed its fall and hit the floor and broke into three pieces.

The dust settled.

In the space where Elizabeth Báthory had been, a key lay on the floor. Simple, heavy, the same category as what Belial would have found at the other end of the castle.

Astreal looked at it for a moment.

She picked it up.

She was sweating, she could feel it, the honest cost of the work, but the restorative spell had done what it had been trained to do, and the cost was the ordinary kind rather than the depleting kind. She breathed through it, assessed the wounds again, found them settled, and walked to the right passage's lock in the wall at the far end of the hall.

The key fitted.

The mechanism engaged, deep in the stone, the same heavy shift Belial would be hearing on her side.

The right door's lock released.

Astreal turned and walked back toward the passage.

Behind her, the broken statue lay in pieces on the floor of a hall full of other statues, and the face on all of them was one she had been waiting three thousand years to see move again.

It was moving, somewhere in the passages above her.

She went to find it.