Forty paces from the block to the purple door.
The two clerks at the arch were on the floor. Evelyn saw the first one and did not slow down, and then she saw the second one and did slow down, because there was nothing wrong with either of them.
No blood. Nothing broken. Their coats were straight. One of them had gone down with his book still under his arm and his arm still holding it.
Alphonse crouched and turned the man's chin with two fingers.
"There," he said. "A scratch. Shaving depth."
Then the corridor, and the men in the corridor, eight or nine of them, all the same. Down where they had been standing. No marks on the walls. Nothing knocked over.
Malthane had seen a great many rooms where people had been killed, and every one of them had been a mess.
Nobody fought in here.
Nobody even ran.
The purple door stood open.
Beside the frame the shear-bracket had its lever down and about an inch of key still in it, sheared flat, bright where the metal had gone.
"They shredded the key," Alphonse said. "That's procedure. That's what they're told to do — lock the slab and destroy the key. And they did it. Both of them did it while they were falling over. And then somebody opened it anyway."
Malthane came past them and went in.
The vault was a stone room the size of a barn, and it was empty. Not turned over. Not scattered. The floor stayed clean all the way to the back wall, and the racks stood in their rows with their felt still in them, and the ten lots were gone out of their sealed places along with everything that had never been shown.
Evelyn stood in the doorway and counted the racks, and the racks were fine.
Not one of them is knocked over.
You cannot take a thing that size out of a room this fast and not touch anything. You cannot. Nothing that carries can be that careful.
She looked at her father's back.
Malthane had stopped four paces in with his hands still behind him.
"Have they already left the building. This fast. Where is Samuelle."
He asked a series of questions that all had the same answer.
Evelyn closed her eyes and went down into it, and her resonance came up and settled over her body.
When she opened them she was looking at the ceiling.
"They're above us," she said. "And they aren't trying to hide it."
The west face of the perimeter.
What was left of Pell said the same thing to every man still standing, and all three of them heard it at once. It went in under everything they had trained and reached the part that decides whether to run, and it told them where they were, putting them back in their places.
Idris did not move. His mouth was open and his hands had come down to his sides.
Leonard wiped the blood off his chin, looked at the hole in the road, and then looked away and closed his eyes.
Halloran's face went white.
He felt, standing there, that he had insulted Reed. That he had insulted him by thinking they had a chance. That he had insulted him by trying at all.
His reserve. I can see it in his resonance, there's no bottom in it. It's a well you drop a stone into and never hear it land.
Reed was looking at Idris.
Halloran decided that this was the best chance he was going to get, and he took it, he decided to run away.
He had gone four paces when Reed's head snapped round the other way.
"Now, that is unacceptable."
Halloran was fourteen.
They were on the south face of a merchant's house on Cutler Street and the sun had been on them since six, and he set the last block of his course and put his hand flat on it and it was true.
"Da. Can I sit down."
"Sit down."
He got into the shade behind the barrow with his back against the new work and pulled the book out of his shirt.
He had it open across his knees for about two seconds.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING."
His father was standing over him with the sun behind him.
"WHY ARE YOU READING. I GAVE YOU A BREAK."
The book was already face down on the stone. He had put it down before the sentence finished.
He had put it down before the sentence finished every time.
His father crouched to get level with him. He was not shouting any more. That was always the worse half.
"Son. Know your place. We're masons. We don't read, we weren't born into it. What are you going to do — build machines? Write stories? Be a doctor?" He put two fingers on the boy's chest. "You're a mason. Our blood was meant for this. There's no talent in us, we're big brutes and we serve, and that's all of it, and there's no shame in it either. Know your place. People with a great deal more talent than you are allowed to do that."
A pause.
"You're not."
His father had never learned to read. He had never been able to. Halloran had known it since he was six and had never once said it out loud in his life.
The memory went.
He was face down in the road with his cheek on the stone and Reed's knee in his back and Reed's hand around the whole of his skull.
Leonard's arm came the length of the road and got him across the chest and pulled, and Reed did not move. Not a step. Not an inch.
He pressed down harder.
Halloran's jaw would not close and then would not open. Something went in the roof of his mouth and the teeth on that side turned inward against his tongue. The pressure came out where it could, and it came out at his eyes as they bled.
Halloran couldn't really remember if this memory was from the real event when it happened, or from when the devil played it back for him.
Talent. Gifts. Father.
I hope you're burning. I hope you're burning right now for what you put in me.
I hate. I hate. I ha—
"Lightning discharge."
It did not come from the sky this time. It came out of Reed, out of all of him at once, in every direction to a distance of about two meters, and it stayed for four continuous seconds.
Halloran's back came off the road. The water in him went first. It went out of his mouth and out of the sockets of his eyes as steam and kept going, and the skin over his shoulders and his forearms split along the lines of the muscle underneath the way wet timber splits in a fire, and what was under it was already cooked. His boots stayed where they were with his feet in them. His hands stayed shut.
When it stopped he came down onto the stone in the shape he had been holding, and the shape did not soften afterward.
"Two more," Reed said, and stood up.
Idris lost it.
Whatever had happened inside his skull, nobody could have described it from the outside. He came off the ground and ran straight at Reed screaming, with no plan in it and no thought behind it and nothing left of him that was deciding anything.
He threw everything he had. Doubled and doubled again, chest, ribs, jaw, chest.
And this time Reed did not try to get out of the way of any of it.
He stood and took all of it and it did nothing.
"IDIOT — GET AWAY FROM HIM—"
Leonard screamed, he was already moving and it was already too late.
Reed had not stopped moving because he was hurt. He had stopped moving so that he could read him. He watched the doubling four times and then five, and he only needed to be right about one of them.
He was right about the sixth, and he caught Idris by the wrist.
Leonard came in to take him off it.
Reed took Idris by the body and put him between the two of them, he did it so easily Idris seemed like a feather.
"Lightning smash."
His hand went into Idris's stomach and through it and came out the other side, and it landed on Leonard in the exact place it had landed the first time. Leonard went backward down the road.
Reed drew his arm back out. He threw the body aside with the lightning sparks still going through it, and it lay in the dust with its fingers moving.
Then he walked, slowly, over to Leonard.
Leonard was on his knees. His ribs had gone. He was bringing blood up with every breath he took and he could not get his chin off his chest, and he knew what this was.
"Hey. You. What's your name."
"Le— Leonard."
It was most of what he had.
"Leonard. What are you fighting for."
Leonard lifted his head, and the punch was already there. It took him in the face and put the back of his head on the road, a small crater formed below it form the impact.
"You gave away your life. Your future. For what. For who."
Another punch, in the same place. His teeth went.
"I fight… for the king."
The tears came down through the blood on both sides of his face.
"YOU HAVEN'T ANSWERED ME YET. WHAT ARE YOU FIGHTING FOR."
Reed was angry now, and it had come from nowhere. He hit him in the stomach and Leonard emptied his mouth onto the stone with endless blood.
"You did all of this so the rich could get richer. So they could have lots on top of everything they already own. What do you stand for? There's a city under your boots starving to death and you spent this morning filling the mouths of pigs, and you serve them. For what."
Another one. It broke Leonard's right hand.
"And you think you're the noble one. Defending the king. The king." He hit him again and the left arm went, and Leonard screamed. "The one who killed his own wife for the Utopians."
"I fight— I fi— AAA— UGH— GUH—"
He got it out.
"I FIGHT BECAUSE I WAS TOLD TO. Because that's the life I was born into."
Reed stopped.
He stood there over him, and he was calm again, and something in his face had settled, the look of a man who has finally been told something he believes.
"Good answer, Leonard."
He crouched down.
"At least in your last minutes, you finally became human."
He drove his hand into Leonard's chest and took the Eldritch heart out of it.
Leonard's eyes were going. The last thing in them was Reed's palm closing and the lightning coming up in it, and the heart coming apart inside his fist.
He smiled.
He smiled back.
The roof of the auction house.
Malthane, Evelyn and Alphonse stood side by side, and across from them was Thaumiel. Lilly stood on his right. Samuelle stood on his left.
"Welcome, my dear spectators," Thaumiel said, and bowed to the three of them. "How did you like the performance."
So Samuelle was a traitor. And the one in the middle is Thaumiel. But who is the cursed girl. Evelyn thought.
"Samuelle," Malthane said. "So you were one of his." His face had gone somewhere he could not pull it back from. "And you're the one who killed everyone downstairs. You traitor."
"Don't talk to me," Samuelle said.
"It doesn't matter. I don't know why you came up here, but you have put yourselves in a corner and there is no way out of it. This is where it ends."
He started walking.
Samuelle stepped between him and Thaumiel at once, and Thaumiel's bag opened along its length, and he put his hand down into it and brought out a cloth.
Malthane stopped in his tracks.
"This is one of the four that were never presented. According to the papers you wrote yourselves" — the clerks' folder had come out of the vault with everything else — "it is called the reversed cloth."
And it landed in Alphonse's head, all at once, that the man holding it and the girl standing beside him were the Lumians, that Thaumiel and the girl were disguised as the Lumians.
"I know what that is," Malthane said.
He had stopped moving. Beside him Evelyn called the Sword of Light into her hand.
"Apparently it cancels any effect produced by a cursed human or an Eldritch beast. You hold it up. It takes the energy out of the air. And you graded it B."
Thaumiel opened it out in front of himself and the wind took hold of it and worked it hard.
"This deserves an A if you were to ask me. What a stupid system you have."
Behind them somebody came up onto the roof at a run.
They turned. It was one of the guards from the auction floor, and he was blown and could not get his breath, and he had a white envelope in his hand.
"Sir. This has just arrived for you. I think you need to read it."
Malthane waved him in, and he came.
He opened it and started reading, and Alphonse and Evelyn were close enough on either side that they found themselves reading it as well, and both their eyes went wide.
Malthane's face emptied in about a second.
He raised his head and looked at Thaumiel, and what came into his face then had no name that would fit it, and his jaw was set hard enough to show the teeth.
"You fucking piece of—"
"Don't worry. You can still make it in time, and nobody will be hurt. Fake King."
Malthane went forward, unable to control himself.
Samuelle's hand went into his satchel. Thaumiel raised the cloth. Evelyn dropped into her stance.
And Malthane stopped, because Alphonse shouted at him.
"You can't."
He turned.
"He has the poisoner in front of him and he has that cloth. It will force you into the heavy work, you won't be able to do this small, and if you go heavy in here you will bring the building down with four hundred people in it. It will take time you don't have. Yes, we will definitely take them. But you will not get to your wife."
"Good mind, Judge," Thaumiel said. "My plans always work best against clever people."
Malthane stood where he was and did not move.
The decision sat in his throat.
And Evelyn looked at him, and there was nothing on her face except that she was waiting for the answer.