Chapter 18 | The Unbridled Rage

The central passage was the widest and the straightest.

This was, Matthias decided, either architectural honesty or a very deliberate statement about who was expected to walk through it. Probably the second thing. Sylvia struck him as someone who built symbolism into her choices. The flanking passages branched and narrowed and forced a solo fighter through the specific geometry of isolation. The central one led in a straight line toward the hall ahead, as though whoever used it was not expected to require corridors at all.

He was not alone, which helped with the geometry considerably.

The cultists who guarded the passage moved in clusters of four and five, the same committed desperation as everywhere else in the castle, but the clusters, when you had four people to angle against them, became an organisation problem rather than a survival problem. Aki read the clustering the way he read combat space generally: from the outside in, establishing the shape before engaging the centre. Yuki went straight for the largest concentration every time, using the two-handed sword in the wide, unpredictable arcs that had been giving Matthias new bruises for two months, and the cultists who tried to read her committed to the wrong anticipation and were on the floor before they could correct it. Joseph moved with the economical precision of someone who had been doing this for twenty years and had stopped being interested in doing more than was necessary.

Matthias worked the gaps. The training had turned him into something that could hold his own at the edges of the thing Aki and Yuki were doing in the centre, and holding his own at the edges proved sufficient.

By the time the passage opened into the hall, they had a functional rhythm and a low cost.

The Central Guardian was waiting for them in the middle of the hall.

It was big, not in the way that Rungon was big, not the big of a person who had been made larger than they should be. This was the big of something that had been built to specifications, assembled from steel parts that had been forged for the purpose, with the specific proportions of a thing that was designed to fill a space and make the space impassable. Two and a half metres, maybe three, with the gait of moving weight rather than moving intention. It carried a fist and a shoulder for weapons, which was, Matthias acknowledged, probably sufficient given what it weighed.

The four of them spread without discussing it. Aki went left, Joseph right, the long arms of the formation, establishing the angles. Yuki walked straight ahead, which was either remarkable courage or the natural orientation of someone whose primary relationship with opposition was that it was something to be walked at, and Matthias went left of Aki, looking for the gap in the golem's field of attention.

Golems did not have attention in the conventional sense. They had threat-recognition, which was similar but cruder, and threat-recognition struggled when the threat was distributed across four positions simultaneously. The golem turned toward the most immediate stimulus, which was Yuki walking at it, and its back was to Joseph, and Joseph's sword went into the joint at the back of its right knee with the clinical efficiency of a person who had researched exactly where joints were before the engagement.

The golem lurched.

Aki's spear found the gap that the lurching created, and Matthias's Sun Blade found the gap that Aki's spear created, and Yuki's heavy swing from the front found the gap that everything else had made between them.

The golem went down in pieces.

The silence after was the functional silence of four people confirming that it was actually down, and then Aki said, "Fast," in the satisfied way he used for outcomes that had been efficient, and Yuki said something about wanting it to have lasted longer which was very much in character, and Joseph looked at the central door and they walked toward it.

The ceiling came down.

Not all at once, that would have been a different kind of problem. It came in the way old stone came apart when it had been subjected to the kind of combat they had just run through a hall of: by degree, the first crack loud enough to make all of them look up, and then the formation went, and the rock came in quantity. Matthias moved and felt a piece of it catch his shoulder, and when the dust settled, there was a wall of debris between him and the other three that was roughly the thickness of a small house.

He could hear them through it.

"Matthias." Yuki's voice, from the other side, with the particular sharpening she used when she was assessing a situation rapidly. "I am going to cleave through this formation."

"Don't," he said.

A pause.

"She has been practising," Aki said. "The two-handed swing at load-bearing stone is actually..."

"I heard you both train," Matthias said. "I know what the swing sounds like. Don't." He put his hand against the rock wall for a moment, feeling the size of it. "You've been at it the same as I have. Conserve your strength. Sylvia is still in here somewhere."

Another pause, longer this time.

"Matthias." Joseph's voice, calm and with the quality it had when he was presenting a conclusion he had already worked through. "There is a route around the east exterior. It will take us some minutes. We will find our way to you."

"I know you will," Matthias said.

He turned and walked toward the central door.

The door opened inward.

Beyond it was a passage, short, this one, with a different quality of air than the castle's interior had, and then another door at the far end, this one steel. He was still looking at it when he heard the mechanism engage, deep in the walls, two distinct shifts from somewhere far to the left and far to the right, the unmistakable sound of heavy locks releasing the way heavy locks released when the keys were finally used for them.

The steel door swung open.

He looked at it for a moment.

Both of them, he thought, with the specific quality of relief at a conclusion you had not allowed yourself to make assumptions about.

He walked through.

He came out at the back of the castle.

The night air was different out here, colder, and carrying the distant percussion of things happening on the other side of the walls. Artillery, and small arms fire, and the lower register of something larger that he didn't try to identify by category. The Romanian forces were in contact with Sylvia's defenders, and the defenders were responding, and the perimeter was alive with that exchange in a way that made the space he had stepped into feel like the eye of it.

It had been a garden once. He could see the shape of it in the arrangement of what remained, the paths, the borders, the deliberate placement of what had grown here before the dark power that Sylvia had concentrated in this place had leached the life out of everything it touched. The trees were gray and leafless, their branches at the angles of things that had stopped reaching and simply stayed in the position they'd been in when they stopped. The ground under his feet was dry and packed in the specific way of soil that had not supported anything living for a long time.

At the centre of it stood one tree larger than the others.

Matthias walked toward it.

He saw her from twenty metres away, and the sight of her locked the processing part of his thinking down to a single point.

Belial. Suspended from the dead tree's largest branch by the wrists, the blonde hair falling forward, the posture of someone held in place by something he couldn't see. The coat he had watched her leave the house in. Her.

He walked faster.

Sylvia stepped out of the dark.

Her men came with her, six of them, forming up behind her with the practiced geometry of people who had been positioned deliberately. Sylvia looked at him the way she always looked at him: with the specific, patient hostility of someone who had been building toward this encounter in her mind for long enough that the reality of it was simply confirming what she already knew.

"Matthias," she said.

Her voice had the quality it always had, flat, contained, the delivery of someone for whom emotional inflection was an expenditure she had stopped making some time ago. But under it, tonight, there was something that was not her usual register. Something brighter.

"I am glad," she said, "that you made it here."

She raised one arm and pointed it at the figure on the tree. The gesture had the deliberateness of something rehearsed, not because she was nervous, but because she wanted to make sure he was watching before she did it.

"Witness," she said, "the consequence of opposing what must be."

The ray came from her extended fingers, blinding white at its centre with a dark edge, and it went through Belial in a straight line and out the other side.

The figure on the tree looked at him.

For a moment, a moment that had the specific duration of something he knew he would not be able to excise from memory by force of will alone, the face that looked at him was her face. The eyes found him, and stayed on him, and then the head fell forward.

The sound that came out of Matthias was not one he recognized as his own.

He was aware, distantly, that he was making it, the roar that went out across the dead garden and up against the stone walls of the castle was coming from him, from somewhere below the level at which he normally operated, from the part of him that Sylvia had always known was there and had been patient enough to wait for. The anger was real. It was not constructed or performed, it was the thing that lived at the base of everything he was and had not, until this moment, been given a thing large enough to fully occupy it.

Sylvia had just given it one.

"Pay." He heard his own voice as though it were reaching him from a distance, his own voice but with something inside it that was using it. "You will pay..."

The power came in through the rage like current through an open circuit.

He had felt it before, in pieces, in Germany, when Chaos had been pressing against the barrier of things it needed to dissolve, and he had pushed back, and the push had come from somewhere that was not quite him as he normally understood himself. Now it came in its full volume, and the volume was considerable, and the part of him that was still monitoring the situation registered that this was the mechanism Joseph had described in the basement, the thing Joseph had used the word grief for, the condition under which a dark lord stopped being a person who happened to have access to power and became something in which the power simply resided.

Sylvia was laughing.

"Yes," she said, and the flat containment of her usual register was entirely gone. "Do you feel it? Let it in. Let it consume you. This is what you are, what you have always been, and all the training and the domestication and the ordinary life that she gave you was a delay. Only a delay."

The light was very bright. He was not sure if it was coming from inside or outside.

Hate, some part of Sylvia's voice was saying, from the bright. Use it. You will be unstoppable.

And then something caught the light differently.

At his chest.

Green.

He looked down.

The pendant that Astreal had pressed into his hand the night before they left for Romania, the one she had held out to him in the kitchen at eleven PM with the expression she wore when she was giving him information she considered important and was choosing to frame it as an object rather than an explanation. If either stone goes dark, she had said, in the flat declarative of someone who was not going to say the rest of the sentence because she had decided he was capable of inferring it, you will know.

Two stones. A ruby, for her eyes. An emerald, for Belial's.

Both of them were glowing.

He stared at them.

Both of them.

He lifted his eyes from the pendant to the figure on the tree, and he looked at it, really looked at it, the way you looked at something when you were not looking at what it presented but at the edges of what it was, and the edges of what it was did not line up with the edges of what Belial was. The weight distribution was wrong. The way the coat hung was wrong. The hands were wrong, in a way he could not have articulated but registered in the place that knew her hands the way it knew all the things it had been given less than a year to learn.

Not her.

The stones were still glowing.

She was still alive, somewhere.

The rage was still there. He was not going to pretend it wasn't, the full volume of what Sylvia had triggered was still present, coursing through the same circuit it had found when she opened the door, and the dark power that had flooded in had not gone anywhere simply because he had stopped being deceived about the reason for the rage. If anything, it was larger. It had simply stopped having a direction.

He turned toward Sylvia.

She was watching him with the expression she always wore, but the brightness in it had shifted registers. He could see, even from this distance, that she was reading the quality of what was looking back at her, and that the reading was not returning the result she had expected.

He smiled.

It came out as something other than warmth, but it was genuine.

"Your cheap trick failed," he said.

Sylvia's expression moved. Something crossed it that her discipline had always kept off her face in the previous encounters, the specific quality of someone who has built a plan to exacting specifications and is watching the specifications fail to correspond with reality.

"You shouldn't..." She stepped forward, the flat voice cracking at the consonant. "The power. The dark energy in you, you can't hold it back, not at that volume, you shouldn't be able to simply stop..."

"I didn't stop," he said.

He pulled in a breath.

The dark energy that Sylvia's deception had filled him with was real. It had come in through the grief-door that Joseph had described, through the rage that had been entirely real and was still entirely real, rage at Sylvia, at the three thousand years of damage done by the thing he had been, at what Sylvia herself had done across the last year to people who had not asked to be involved in her ideology's ambitions. That rage was legitimate, and it had brought in something with a volume that wanted to go somewhere.

He gave it somewhere.

The roar went out.

The shockwave moved in all directions from the point where he was standing, not the controlled direction of a Sun Blade throw, not the targeted application of the training, something rawer than that, the full expelled volume of what he'd taken in, released outward in a single pulse that flattened the remaining dead grass flat against the soil, that shook the castle walls, that went into Sylvia and her men in a wave that took them off their feet and carried them the distance to the wall.

They hit stone.

They went down.

None of them made any sound after that.

Matthias breathed.

The exhale took longer than a normal exhale. He let it run its full course and then breathed again and found that the second one was more his own. The dark power, what remained of it, what hadn't gone out in the shockwave, had subsided to the background level where it usually lived, below the daily operating register, where it had been for the past year. He checked for it the way you checked that a door was closed. It was closed.

On the tree, the figure dissolved. The doppelganger came apart quietly, releasing from the branch and dispersing before it hit the ground, leaving the dead tree in the dead garden occupying the space where Belial had appeared to be.

He lowered himself to the ground.

He did not choose to, his legs made the decision independently, which he found difficult to argue with, because the adrenaline that had been doing the structural work for the last several minutes had completed its assessment of the current situation and reached the same conclusion: the current situation did not require being upright. He sat. The cold ground was cold. This was fine.

He was still breathing.

Footsteps came.

He heard them from two directions, from the castle wall on his left, where a secondary entrance had apparently been identified, and from the steel door behind him. He didn't turn for either. He was aware of the approaching shapes at the edge of his vision, and he verified that the shapes were the right shapes, and then he went back to the business of breathing.

Aki arrived first, at a pace that his face suggested he had considered adjusting to not-quite-running and had decided against. Yuki was beside him, and her expression had the quality it wore when she had dropped the theatrical register entirely and was simply responding to information. Joseph came two steps behind them, reading the garden's aftermath with the rapid cataloguing of someone who always needed the full picture before he started drawing conclusions.

Then, from behind him, from the direction of the steel door and the passage beyond it: footsteps that were faster.

He knew the footsteps. He'd been hearing them for less than a year.

He raised his hand and waved.

It was all he could manage. His arm found the horizontal position of the wave and lodged there, and he let it serve as the communication it was: I am here. I am intact. I cannot stand up right now but that is a temporary condition and not a structural one.

The footsteps didn't slow.