THE TWENTIETH FLOOR — A FEW MINUTES EARLIER
The spine came back in at a quarter past.
A man named Odell had it in the register before it reached the threshold — lot six, malevolent spine, grade B, sold at twenty-seven thousand to House Karrow of the north, and he waited with the pen up until the seal was pressed and the name was on it, and then he wrote the hour beside it.
"Seven," he said.
Two men went into the mouth of the safe. The guard with the key stood at the bracket beside the door.
There were nine of them in that room. Six crown men, two clerks, and Odell.
The door suddenly opened.
"Samuelle," Odell said, and went back to his book. "You're early, we've not drawn it yet."
"Take your time."
Samuelle came in and shut the door behind him with his heel.
Samuelle put his hand in his coat and took out a small round bottle. The liquid in it was blue.
"Blue Falcon," he said. Ten seconds before the speed boost effect goes off, more than double what i need.
He bit the neck off and drank it.
Odell's pen stopped.
The second bottle he grabbed immediately after was uncolored, he did not drink it. He dropped it between his own boots and stepped through the cloud before it had finished coming out of the glass.
It crossed the room faster than any of them turned. The guard at the bracket got the hand with the key as high as his chest. One of the crown men tried to shout, his mouth stopped before the sound came out.
Nine people were all still, and standing, and looking.
Samuelle drew his knife.
It was six inches and thin and there was a dull grey film on the blade.
He put it across the first crown man's cheek, about as hard as a man shaves, and was already turning before it finished.
"This could probably kill a blue whale in three seconds," he said, to the room.
The second one on the back of the wrist. The third on the throat, and that one he did not open, he only touched, and he moved with such speed that he scratched one man per second.
Behind him the first man went down.
The fourth. The fifth. He went along the line without any weight in it, one touch each, moving.
Odell was the sixth. He had the pen in his hand and the register open under it and Samuelle drew the flat of the blade across the back of his hand on the way past the desk.
Then he went for the safe.
The two in the mouth of it had been inside the doorway when the bottle broke and the cloud had gone around them. They had one second and a half to react before they were paralyzed.
A second and a half.
It was enough.
The guard had the key in the black keyhole and turned it and the slab came round on its bearings and locked.
Then he did the other thing. Beside the frame there was a steel bracket with a lever on it. They had prepared for such a scenario. He put the key into the bracket and dropped the lever with the flat of his hand and the shear went through it as the key was immediately shredded.
Samuelle stood there looking at it.
"That's fine."
He crossed the four paces and cut the guard under the jaw and turned away from him before he fell.
It went on a while longer. Every one of them was standing when it started and lying down at the end, and there was almost no noise in it at all.
When it was finished Samuelle let his arms hang and breathed out once.
Then he looked at the ceiling.
"Come down," he said. "I've known since I opened the door, I'll open you after to see why the paralyzing gas didn’t work on you."
Ferrin had been flat against the ceiling above the desk for two hours and eleven minutes.
He had watched all of it upside down with his hands and the soles of his boots holding, he was using his chameleon heart to stay invisible all along.
He did not come down.
His bladder went before he decided anything. It went while he was still holding, and it ran down the inside of his leg and along the sole of his boot and off the toe of it, and it fell four feet and started making a sound on the boards under the desk.
Samuelle looked at the puddle coming out from the corner of the desk. Then at the ceiling above it.
"You pissed," he said. "Did you just piss."
He turned the knife over in his fingers.
"I was going to give you the easy way out like the rest. You'd be gone before you finished falling." He took the satchel off his shoulder and set it on the desk. "I will make your death as painful as I can, you disgusting animal.", Samuelle was losing his temper for the first time, his face showed utter disgust.
Ferrin came off the ceiling.
He hit the boards running and he did not go for Samuelle. He went for the door, because the door was forty paces from four hundred people and all he had to do was open it and make one sound.
Ferrin got the handle.
Ferrin got the door open.
Magath Lumian was standing in it.
The little girl was half a step behind him with her hands at her sides, and the man's right arm was in a black gauntlet that came up past the elbow, and there was a mouth in the palm of it, open.
The hand came onto his face before he had finished pulling the door.
Ferrin’s life, flashed before his eyes.
The gauntlet came off.
Ferrin went down onto his hands and his knees on the boards and stayed there.
He was awake. He could see the floor, and the wet on it, and a piece of sheared metal near his hand. There was a man behind him and a man in front of him and a little girl, and he did not know why he was on the floor, or why his legs were wet, or what he had been about to do.
Magath Lumian looked down at him.
"He was told to stay in this room," he said. "On the stairs, three days ago, by Malthane himself. Nobody was to know. Including you."
"Stupid instructions."
The gauntlet came down to his side. "Malthane really doesn't know how resonance works."
He put his left hand flat against his own face and pulled it off.
It came away in one piece, like a sheet of paper that had been lying on him, and he dropped it and it went grey on the way down.
Underneath was the face of Thaumiel.
Behind him, Lilly put her palm to her cheek and pulled hers off the same way. She folded it once and put it in her coat.
Ferrin looked up from the floor.
He looked at Lilly. He looked at Thaumiel. He turned his head and looked at Samuelle standing in the middle of nine people.
He did not understand any of it.
"Make it painless," Thaumiel said.
Samuelle crouched and drew the edge of the knife an inch along Ferrin's cheek.
Ferrin went over onto his side. He was gone before his shoulder finished settling.
Lilly did not look away.
Thaumiel stepped over him and walked to the safe.
The slab was shut. The keyhole was black and did not give the lamplight back.
"As I thought," he said. "They saw what you were before you reached them, they locked it, and they broke the key."
"The one at the bracket. Two seconds, maybe less." Samuelle put the knife away. "It was well built."
Thaumiel took a folded sheet out of his coat. It had been carried a long time and it opened along creases that had been opened before.
On the upper half of it was a lock, drawn in silver-flecked ink inside a circle. On the lower half a key inside a second circle. Between them, joined to both by straight ruled lines, a third and smaller circle with a glyph in it.
He set it on the floor and asked Lilly to put her palm flat on the ink.
The key came up out of the paper.
It was pale and fine and it was not the shape it had been in the Amphitheatre. It was different, because the drawing made the emerged key match the associated lock.
He slid it inside the lock, and surely enough, it turned.
The slab came round on its bearings and the lamplight went into the dark of it and did not find a back wall.
Thaumiel held a hand out behind him without looking.
Lilly came forward with a sheet already between her fingers, knelt, put it flat on the boards, and set her palm on the ink.
What rose off the paper was a bag. Closed, grey-white, hanging from its own drawstring an inch off the floor.
Thaumiel picked it up, carried it to the mouth of the safe, put his thumb under the cord and pulled.
The bag opened, and then it kept opening.
It went out and up and it did not stop where a bag stops, and the air in the room turned and went into it, off Samuelle's coat, off the pages of the register, off Ferrin's hair.
Everything in the safe came out.
The ten lots all at once, and none of it struck the frame and none of it struck anything else, as it went in one line into the mouth of the bag and it was done in about a second.
Then the bag closed itself and shrank.
It came down through its own shape and did not crumple and did not fold, and it stopped when it was small enough to carry in one hand, and it hung off Thaumiel's finger and weighed nothing.
"LILLY." It went off the walls. "Your power truly is the greatest of all.", Thaumiel’s face was not neutral, it seemed filled, with excitement.
She did not answer.
"You're getting better. This is not what you were doing three weeks ago." He turned the bag once on his finger. "How long will this bag last?"
"About an hour."
"About an hour." He put it inside his coat. "That's more than enough."
Samuelle had come up behind him and was looking into the empty safe.
"What do we do with that chameleon? Do I destroy his heart?", Samuelle asked.
"No, just bring it, it might be of use", Thaumiel responded, he then started walking towards the exit.
"Should I go down ahead of you," Samuelle said. "I can have every floor between here and the street cleared before you reach it, Reed and Wendy will handle the outside, we should be fast before the auction room notices."
"No need."
Thaumiel stepped over Ferrin on his way to the door, and pointed upward with his finger.
"We go to the roof.
Outside the auction house — the outer ring, west face.
Pell didn't have time to think, she couldn't afford it. Reed was on top of her before she could process what was happening, and his resonance was so intense that as she jumped back two steps, she started vomiting immediately, dizziness taking over her body.
Such an intense presence, the concentrated energy of his resonance, how is this even possible. She thought while vomiting on the ground.
Reed started looking around him.
"Where are your friends? Three cursed humans and an Eldritch holder are supposed to be in the perimeter outside, I was told."
Pell looked up, her eyes blackened. The ring was completely taken over, and the Nauzians flooded inside, hundreds of them going past her on both sides, her companions somewhere in the middle of it with the crushing weight of the mob on them.
Reed sat down, crossing his legs. It looked off with how bulky he was.
"Let's bring the party here then."
He did not stand up to do it.
The dust came off the road first, all of it at once, in a ring, and stood in the air and stayed there. Then the small hairs on Pell's arms went up, and the ones on the back of her neck, and there was a taste in her mouth like a coin under the tongue. Behind her a horse started screaming and did not stop.
Reed opened his eyes.
And every cursed human in the district felt it go into their bones.
Across the canyon, on the terrace, Adam was already standing alert.
"What the fuck??"
He was half a mile from it. It had still got all the way in.
On the twentieth floor, Evelyn's hand closed on nothing at her hip.
This output. It's as if his entire power was made to be discharged.
She came off the wall and bent to Alphonse Graves' ear and said four words into it, and the judge was on his feet before she had finished saying them, and the two of them started for the stairwell door.
Fifteen rows back, Zaid stood up.
Four hundred people who had spent the last few minutes murmuring about lot seven turned and looked at him at once. He was sweating. He looked like a man who had been shaken out of a nightmare and did not yet know which room he was in.
He looked around the hall, at the block, at the curtain, at the doors.
What is this???
On the east face, Halloran had both hands on a man's shoulders and was moving him bodily back into the line when it hit him, and he stopped, and let go, and looked west.
"Leonard."
Leonard was thirty paces down the road with the list still in his hand.
"West face. An enemy is on the west face and we go now." Halloran was already walking. "I have never imagined a cursed human can carry that much energy reserves in him."
Leonard did not ask him how he knew.
He turned and shouted for the ramp, and Idris came off it at a run, and the three of them went west along the inside of the line, against the flow of the mob.
And the auction incident finally entered its boiling point.