The twentieth floor.
"Lot seven, my lords."
Nothing moved behind the curtain.
Then the horns came in through the glass, the first one thin and far off at the north end of the terrace road, and the second one under it, and then more than could be counted, and four hundred people who had spent ninety minutes being quiet all started talking at once.
Evelyn was already moving.
She had put four words into Alphonse Graves' ear a minute earlier and he had stood up without asking her a single thing. Now he was ahead of her in the aisle with his hand out flat behind him to move people aside, and the people moved, because he was who he was.
Behind them Malthane spoke.
He had not moved from the side of the room since half past nine. He had stood with his hands behind his back and faced the four hundred instead of the block for the whole morning, and raised his voice and the room listened.
"Sit down."
They sat down. Not all of them. Enough.
"There are four hundred of you in this room. There is one entrance to this building and it is twenty floors beneath you and it is held. Every man on that door was paid three months ago to stand on it today and they are standing on it. If you go down the stairwell you will be in the way of the people whose work it is to keep you alive. So you will stay where you are."
Tariq Thagirion was in his chair, and worry was clearly swallowing his face.
"It will be handled," Malthane said, and went after Evelyn and Alphonse.
The west face of the perimeter.
Reed got up off the road.
He had been sitting cross-legged in the dust for three minutes with his forearms on his knees, and when he stood the dust came up off the stone in a ring around him again and settled again, and he rolled his neck once.
"Well," he said. "They're finally here."
The crowd went past him.
That was the strange part and he watched it happen. Four thousand people out of a district that had no sky, coming up the terrace road three columns wide with coal hooks and fence iron and mining picks, carrying torches in the middle of the day because they had come up out of the dark and had not thought to put them out, and they went around him and around the four men standing across the road from him and did not touch any of them. Not one. They flowed past on both sides like water off a stone and kept going up toward the tower.
Halloran stood in the middle of the road with his sleeves pushed back off a pair of hands that had laid stone for eleven years before anything else happened to him.
Idris came off the ramp at a run and stopped beside him with his black coat still moving.
He looked at Reed for two seconds, and the fear already took him on without him realizing.
Pell stood up at last.
Get up. Get UP. You've been standing behind the line all morning telling yourself these people can't reach you and now one of them is looking at you.
She got herself up to Halloran's shoulder and made her jaw work and found the gum still in her cheek, and that steadied her more than anything else did.
Leonard walked.
He did not run. He came up the road at the pace he walked the line at, and he stopped a yard in front of the other three.
Reed pointed a finger at him.
"You. What's your name."
Leonard did not answer him. He put his weight down and brought his hands up.
So did the other three.
"All right," Reed said.
The four of them moved into a circle around him. They did not speak to each other while they did it.
Leonard stood in front of him. Pell went behind him. Idris took his left and Halloran took his right.
Reed smiled.
Then the fight started.
Halloran came first. He dashed in low and Reed lifted his right hand and opened the palm of it while Halloran was still off the ground.
What is he doing. I can't stop. I'm in the air.
Reed's hand should have reached him first, and it never got there. Something pushed it off its line and put it behind him instead — Leonard's arm, stretched the whole ten feet across the road, a punch thrown from where the man was standing. It knocked the palm out of the way, and Halloran came through the gap and landed clean in Reed's face.
Reed turned his hips and swung his left at him.
The same arm that had thrown the punch was already wrapped around his right. Leonard drew it in the way someone draws in a fishing rod, and the pull took Reed a foot off the place he had set himself, and the left swung loose and hit nothing at all. Halloran jumped two steps back with the sweat coming off him.
Reed looked at Leonard. The stretched arms were already snapping back to the length arms are supposed to be.
So his Eldritch heart makes him rubber. Reed thought.
Does that mean my lightning does nothing to him?
Before he finished the thought, something took his attention at the edge of it.
Pell was moving in a wide circle around the outside, keeping her distance, and when she came into his field of view she lifted one finger and levelled it at him like a man aiming a pistol. Reed reacted at once and brought his arm up to block, because something was coming.
Her finger and her whole arm kicked back with the shot.
Nothing came.
Nothing hit him. Nothing happened at all. Reed stood there with his guard up and the confusion plain on his face, trying to work out what she had just done to him.
A body appeared behind him.
It was Idris. Reed came round with a wide right and Idris was already under it. He put one punch into Reed's chest and Reed blocked it, and while he was blocking it a second punch he never saw hit him in the chin. Idris swung again into his stomach and again it landed twice. Reed reached to take him by the head and Idris stepped back once, and to Reed it looked like two steps.
Then all of them stopped and took their distance again, and for three seconds nobody moved.
Reed looked the other way, and Pell made the same motion with her finger, and this time he did not bother to block it.
One of them is only strong. One of them doubles everything he does, somehow. One of them stretches. And I still don't know what the woman is. What a boring squad.
"You lot are no fun," Reed said.
He turned his head toward Leonard and went straight at him, and Leonard could not react in time, because he had not expected him to be that fast.
"Lightning smash."
The punch came in with the lightning already crawling and sparking around the fist in bright yellow, and it landed square in Leonard's stomach before he could get anything in front of it. He went back off his feet and came down bringing blood up out of his mouth.
Reed straightened up. Then he smiled.
"I see. So you're immune to the lightning. But you're not durable enough to take my punch."
Leonard came down onto his knees.
He looked up at Reed, and he smiled, a bloody smile.
Reed felt them before he saw them. Both at once, one on each side, closing at the same speed.
Halloran and Idris came onto him together.
It ran for four seconds and nobody watching it could have counted the exchanges. Idris landed twice for every once he was hit, and every time Reed turned to take him, Halloran was already coming into the space he had turned out of, and every time Reed set himself against Halloran, Idris was behind him again. They did not talk to each other.
Then Reed stopped turning.
"Lightning smash."
He put it into Halloran's chest with his boots still planted, and Halloran left the road and did not come down again until he was inside the shopfront on the west side, and the front of it came down on top of him.
Idris did not stop.
Reed went for him three times and got nothing. He was there and then he was a step further than a step, and the second one arrived from a direction the first had not come from, and Reed swung into an empty place twice in a row.
Then something moved at the edge of his eye.
Pell had come round again, forty feet out, still keeping the circle. She lifted one finger and levelled it at him.
Reed did not block again. He watched her hand kick back with the recoil, and nothing came, and nothing hit him, and nothing at all happened.
She's done it at least three times now, probably more. Nothing lands and she keeps doing it.
He decided he was not going to leave her out there any longer. He changed his weight, turned his shoulders toward her.
Idris double-stepped clear of him.
The rock came in from the left.
Leonard had gone out long, one arm all the way across the road to the ruin of the shopfront, and he had a piece of the frontage the size of a barrel in his hand. He brought it round in a full circle from twenty feet away with the arm turning like a sling, and he let the whole of it in on the swing.
It took Reed across the ribs and put him three paces sideways and the big stone crumbled as it hit his body.
He came out of the stumble turning to his left.
Leonard's other arm was already past him.
Reed had time to see it and no time to understand it. The arm had gone by him on the left and fixed itself to the corner of the terrace wall behind him, and it was not there to hit anything. It was there to be a line.
Leonard let it pull.
It took him off the road and across the whole distance at once with both legs out in front of him, and he went through Reed at the chest and kept going, and Reed came off his feet and landed hard on his side on the stone.
Then something took him backward.
Not away. Back. Back to the exact place he had been standing when the impact hit him, in one motion, and it put him into the ground there.
He tried to get his arms under him.
His arms came up around his own body instead. They went round him and closed, and the pull kept coming from every direction at once, and he was lying on the road with his elbows against his ribs and his shoulders drawn in and something around his knees.
And now he could see it.
It was all over him. It had been all over him for a while. It came off his chest and his back and his shins in lengths as thick as rope, grey-white, and it ran out from him to the road and the kerb and the terrace wall and the frontage of the ruined shop, and every one of them was set into the stone.
The whole road was a frame, and he was in the middle of it.
He turned his head as far as the thing would let him and looked at the small freckled woman who chewed.
That's what she—
Pell lifted her finger and shot him in the mouth.
"Woaa—", he couldnt finish the words as her gum closer over his jaw and set.
So a curse that make he use a power that has propeties similar to a gum, its very sticky, I probably can't move now.
Halloran came out of the rubble with blood all over him, the area where he was hit with reed's smash had clothes tore off and was blue, as if the ribs there were broken. But even with the excruciating pain, he came down on him from above with both hands together over his head, and he brought them down the way a man splits a block, and it landed on Reed's skull.
Then Leonard raised his own arm above himself.
It swelled. The forearm went out and out until it was wider than the man was, and the skin of it went tight and shone, and Reed lay in the frame with his mouth shut and watched it happen, and what came into his eyes was not fear, but finally some spark of enjoyment.
Leonard brought it down.
Reed went backward along the road, and the gum took him at full stretch, and every line of it snapped him back into the place he had come from and dropped him into the stone again in an oscillating pattern.
Leonard began to swell the arm a second time.
It's holding. We've got him. There's no way for him to move now, we did it, we actually—
Lightning bolt.
It came down out of the sky.
It did not come down once. It came down and it stayed.
It came down on Pell.
It stood over her like a yellow column with no top to it, and the road under her went, and everything else went with it. The sound of four thousand people screaming on the terrace road went. The horns went. The crowd, the wind, the whole morning. There was one noise left in the world and every person on that road was inside it, and it sounded like a judgement that came down from the heavens.
It lasted seven seconds.
Halloran did not get off him. He could not get off him. Idris was on the ground eight feet back with his coat alight, and neither of them was looking anywhere except at the column, and neither of them could do a single thing about it, and both of them understood that at the same moment and went on watching anyway.
Then it stopped.
The gum came off Reed grey and slid down his chest and came apart on the road in pieces.
Where Pell had been standing there was a hole in the stone about four feet across, with the edges of it running like candle wax, and in the bottom of it there was something about the length of a child.
It was black the whole way through. The arms had drawn up in front of the chest and the hands had closed and the fingers were gone, and one side of it was set down into the rock where the rock had come up around it. The head was turned toward the road and there was nothing on it. Everything that had been Pell had gone off her in the first second, and what stayed was seized in and shrunk and still smoking, and it was smaller than she had been, and it did not look like a person had ever been inside it.
The gum was gone off the whole road with her.
Reed stood up out of it.
He shook his wrists out.
"Who's next," he said, and turned his head toward Idris.