Malthane left her there, in the rubble of the wall, and the sound of his steps went down the stairwell, unhurried, floor by floor.
On the fifth floor, the stairwell door was already open.
Samuelle stood in the middle of the hall, satchel on his shoulder. At his feet, the grey-bearded soldier lay on his side, sleeping like a man in his own bed, breathing slow and deep.
Malthane stopped in the doorway and looked at the scene for a moment.
"You drew the first floor," he said. "And here you are on the fifth."
"Yes."
"Which means everyone in between is already down." Malthane came into the hall. "Is there anybody else below?"
"All of them are still below," Samuelle said. "They just can't really move."
Malthane laughed.
"A fine effort, Bane. Truly. But this is where you lose." He held out one hand. "The spheres. Hand them over."
"I don't have them."
The hand stayed where it was. "Meaning what?"
"I hid them."
"Then you'll tell me where, or I'll simply find them. There is only so much tower."
"You won't find them. Not you, and not anyone as strong as you." Samuelle said it without any challenge in it, flatly, like a man reporting the weather.
Malthane lowered his hand. "Explain."
"I have an affinity to sense enemies, I don't need to tell you more", Samuelle answered.
"How much range, exactly?"
"This tower fits. Maybe more."
Malthane was quiet for a moment.
"I assume I can never get my hands on the glass spheres."
"You could tear the halls apart and not find them all before the bell. And if anyone ever walked toward one by accident, I would feel them coming long before they got there, and the sphere would already be somewhere else."
Malthane looked at him for a long, level moment, and something moved behind his eyes, the look of a man doing sums and liking the total.
A guard who feels every hand in the building. A vault with no fixed place. A poison the enemy drinks without ever seeing his face. Malthane realized Samuelle was the absolute best candidate.
"Evelyn is on the floor above you," Malthane said at last. "Hurt. Her arm is broken." He turned for the stairs. "I have no interest in fighting you now, Samuelle Bane. It would be a waste to hurt the most competent member, especially when I have nothing to gain from it. And neither will the attackers."
Malthane paused, and started walking away from Samuelle.
"And don't waste the climb past her. The seventh is finished. The sphere is also destroyed."
What Samuelle decided not to explain to malthane was the mechanism with which resonance works. Every cursed human can feel a holder, and can feel another cursed human, if they're close enough. The reason they are capable of doing so is that the stronger the other person's presence, the more energy they constantly emit. And strangely enough, both cursed humans and Eldritch holders emit such energy, though each is slightly different. That energy could be compared to ocean waves. Those waves clash with the cursed human's resonance, which can be compared to a sensitive body of water itself, letting him detect the enemy's presence, and also estimate their strength based on the waves intensity. There are many ways to efficiently control your resonance. Different people have different affinities and tendencies, mostly related to innate talent. For Samuelle, the talent he had is that the sensitivity of his resonance is so fluid that he can detect and feel the presence of others in a much larger range. Such affinity is completely isolated from his cursed power itself, the Apothecary Curse.
He went down, and his steps faded, floor by floor.
Samuelle arrived to where Evelyn was.
Evelyn was where he had left her, sitting against the broken wall with her right arm cradled in her lap, when Samuelle came through the door.
She got the Sword of Light up with her left hand. It wavered.
He crossed the hall anyway, slow, both hands in view, and sat down on the floor an arm's length away, and set the satchel between his knees. He took out a vial of something pale gold.
He gestured for her arm.
"Don't touch it."
He tipped the vial over her forearm and let three drops fall onto the skin.
The pain went out like a fire doused. Evelyn felt the bone pull, a deep, crawling, wrong-and-right feeling, and she watched the swelling sink and the twist in her forearm straighten itself, and by the time she thought to gasp it was already over. She flexed her fingers. They worked.
"It's not fully healed," Samuelle said, corking the vial. "It will hold, but don't trust it with everything. It still needs a few days to recover completely."
She turned the arm over, then looked at him.
"Why did you help me?"
"I didn't."
His hand was already out of the satchel. A second bottle, smaller, round as a marble. He threw it at her, no wind-up, no warning.
She was gone before it landed. Resonance to one foot, the short dash, her body moving on pure reflex while her mind was still catching up. The bottle burst on the stones where she'd been sitting and a pale gas opened out of it like a flower.
Too slow. You missed—
She was already in the air, already cutting down at him with her freshly healed arm behind the blade, and that was when her body stopped listening. Her grip went first. Then her shoulders. The sword came apart into pale light above his head, and the floor never hit her, because he caught her and set her down gently on her back.
She had dodged the bottle. She had jumped straight through where the gas had been.
Samuelle sat with her a moment, two fingers on her wrist, counting. Then he untied the cloth from her belt, took the sphere out of it, and put it in his satchel.
"This gas spreads twenty meters in less than half a second, and its effect is immediate. Paralysis within two seconds. Though I haven't tested it on stronger enemies yet, since it's my latest creation. I suspect a stronger opponent, such as your father, could be immune to it."
He laid Evelyn flat on the floor. She was only paralyzed. She could still hear every word he was saying.
"As for why it doesn't work on me, well, my curse enables me to make this with my blood, after all."
By the time the bell rang noon, the rehearsal was over, and of the seven spheres, five went back into Leonard's padded case. The other two were a hundred pieces on two different floors.
They were brought back to the room at the top, where the morning had started, all seven of them in front of the great window.
"Six points," Leonard read out. "Samuelle Bane. His own sphere, and four taken." He looked up from the paper. "Everyone else: zero."
Nobody said anything. There was nothing to say.
"Bane is the solo winner," Malthane said. "During the auction, he leads the squad inside the house."
Leonard hesitated, which he almost never did. "My lord, four posts were to be filled inside, by points. But the points..." He gestured, delicately, at the paper. "Everyone has zero except him. How do you wish to proceed?"
"By my own eyes," Malthane said. "Bane, inside. Evelyn, inside. I verified her strength myself this morning, and she is to shadow Judge Alphonse Graves in any case."
His gaze went down the line and stopped on the lean woman.
"Vessa. Inside. Her curse spins iron threads out of resonance, thin as hair, strong as an anchor chain. That is exactly the kind of lethal nondestructive fighting this house needs, and she was just unlucky she ended up on the seventh floor where I started."
The lean woman inclined her head an inch.
"Ferrin. Inside." The grey-bearded soldier straightened, still a little pale from sleeping on a stone floor. "His heart is similar to a chameleon's. His skin and everything on it takes the color of whatever stands behind him, and his feet hold to walls and ceilings like flat ground."
Malthane turned to the rest.
"Everyone else, the perimeter." The giant's jaw tightened, and he said nothing, because there was nothing to say to six points against none. "You'll have company out there. The great families and clans are lending fighters of their own to us. The crown has paid for them, and paid well. And at the entrance itself there will be two guests of honor: a son of the Kleido family, who carries a Platinum Tier heart, and a daughter of the Amanai family, Emerald Tier. The state emptied a vault to borrow those two for nine days."
"And you, my lord?" Leonard asked.
"I will be inside the building," Malthane said. "You'll hold the outside."
Leonard nodded.
"This is all, no if you excuse me I have an important metting to attend.", Malthane said as he left without an additional word.
As he headed for the door, he turned and looked at everyone one last time, his gaze swept past Evelyn, and in her eyes, he's seen the same hate he always did, and it seemed like it lightly bothered him this time.
The royale palace.
Lord Zyriam sent word at noon and came at four, and Malthane had the room cleared for him.
There were three of them left in it. Malthane, the old man, and a boy of about fifteen who came in half a step behind him and stopped when he stopped.
"Lord Zyriam."
"Lord Malthane. You can call me Karim."
“As you want.”
They had written to each other for eleven years over grain tariffs and harbour rights and had met twice.
"I was sorry about your grandfather," Malthane said. "The letter reached us in May. I had it read out at the table."
"Thank you."
"He was in the crown's books before my father was born. There aren't four names on this continent that have been in them that long."
"No," Lord Zyriam said. "There aren't."
Neither of them said anything more about it.
Malthane offered him the chair by the window and he took it.
"The House has a successor," the old man said. "It's settled."
He did not turn his head when he said it.
Malthane looked past him. The boy was fifteen or near it, well made, in good clothes, and he was not looking at anything in the room.
“I thought the kid was older”, Malthane responded.
“Its not the same kid you are thinking about.”
"Then I won't ask you about it."
"No."
"I hope it goes well for you," Malthane said. "I mean that."
"I know you do."
A servant came and put three cups of coffee in front of them as they were speaking, Karim signaled them to take back the third cup away.
"I want something from you," Lord Zyriam said, "and I'd rather ask here than at the sale."
"Ask."
"Your kingdom has Utopia's ear this season. Put me in front of them. Not through your clerks."
"Two of their generals are coming to the auction," Malthane said. "They'll be in the city before the second day. I can put you in a room with both of them on the evening of the second day. I can be in that room or not be in it."
"Be in it."
"Then I will." Malthane clasped his hands behind his back. "May I know what it's for."
"Yes."
The old man sat with his back off the chair.
"There are beasts appearing on our lands. Eldritch beasts, and they are not Eldritch beasts. They have hearts, and the hearts work, a man can eat one and it does to him what a heart does. They were made. We don't know by whom, we don't know where, and in fourteen months we have not found a nest, a foundry, a ship, or a body that tells us anything.
"There have been four generations of them. Each one comes out stronger than the one before it. The fourth would grade about Platinum tier. Possibly Emerald.”
“I assume you haven’t found the source yet”, Malthane said.
"Yes, and if we don't do it soon, then on the curve we have, the southern continent and its neighbours, being yours and the eastern one housing sutra, will be dealing with a Primal-level threat inside a few months."
Malthane did not answer straight away.
"Can they cross the ocean?" he said.
"We can’t tell, that would be confirmed once one of them shows on your land or on Sutra."
"Have you considered contacting the mother of silk? If they happen to cross into sutra, she would already know"
"My wife and her servants are already headed there."
"Great," Malthane said. "Then Utopia should urgently be informed."
He went as far as the window and stood at it with his hands where they had been.
"Thank you."
"The evening of the second day," he said. "I'll have it arranged before you land at the gate, so you don't have to ask twice."