Chapter 58 — Same Six III (Bonus)
Declan used it immediately.
He did not stop fighting to do it, which is what made it work.
"HE KILLED HIM." Between bursts, breath ragged, entirely convincing. "Calder is on the ground. I came out and Rook was standing over him and he came at me the second I asked."
"Declan—"
"And the boy is with him."
That went into Erik like a hook.
"He was already out here, Erik. Fully dressed. Before either of you woke up." Declan came off a trunk and out of the way of a strike that took bark off it. "Ask him how long he has been standing in this clearing."
---
Neither of them moved.
That is what I want written down about Erik Lind and Clara Vogel, because it would have been very easy for them to pick a side in that first ten seconds and both of them refused to.
Their weapons stayed up.
They stayed up and they stayed pointed at nobody at all, and their eyes went around the clearing in a loop. Ewan. The fight. Me. Ewan again.
Erik’s chest was going. Clara had backed up two steps to put a trunk near her shoulder.
"Somebody," Erik said, "say something that makes sense."
---
"Ewan attacked Rook first."
"You saw that?"
"No."
"Then how—"
"Because I told Rook it was going to happen before he went out."
Clara’s head came round.
"You *what*?"
"I told him to take the first watch. I told him to keep Ewan in front of him. That is the only reason there is one body in this clearing instead of a different one."
I did not have anything better and I knew exactly how it sounded coming out of my mouth. "And Declan is not out here because he heard shouting. He was gone from the camp before there was any shouting. I followed him."
"Do not listen to him." Declan’s voice came across the clearing at full volume. "He is telling you he arranged the watch and then followed a man into the woods. Listen to what he is actually saying."
---
And the worst part is that it worked, because from where those two were standing both stories had the same shape.
They did not see Ewan draw.
They did not see Declan get up.
They did not see me follow him.
They walked into a clearing thirty seconds ago and found a dead man and four people who all knew more than they did.
Clara’s eyes came back to me and stayed there.
"You knew," she said. "Before it happened. You *knew*."
"Yes."
"How."
"I cannot tell you that."
"That is not—"
"I know it is not."
---
My jaw had gone tight and my ears had gone hot, and I had to stop for a second and get it back, because I could feel myself sliding toward the tone that has never once helped me in my entire life.
"Then think about it a different way."
"Nolan—"
"No, actually think about it." I pointed at Ewan without looking at him. "What do I get?"
Nobody said anything.
"I came into this Gate as Christopher Nolan’s son. Everybody in the freight yard knew it before I opened my mouth, and half of them hated me for it, and they were right to.
I did not sit the screening. I got a place on a telephone call."
Erik’s axe came down about ten centimetres.
"There is a Myrmidon Red Gate Player standing over there whose entire assignment is walking me back out of this dungeon in one piece. That is the situation I am in. That is what I came in here with."
I made myself slow down.
"So tell me what I gain by murdering a Meridian Player in the middle of an Orange Gate, in front of four witnesses, with a raid captain and thirteen other people somewhere in this forest and a Bureau debrief waiting on the other side.
Tell me the version where that ends well for me."
---
Erik and Clara looked at each other.
"That part," Erik said slowly, "does not actually make sense."
"It doesn’t have to make sense to be true," Clara said. "People do stupid things in Gates. Rich people do stupid things everywhere."
"I know. I am saying it does not make sense."
"And I am saying I did not see it, and neither did you, and I am not putting a blade in anybody over a story."
She had not lowered her weapons at all.
But she had moved. Not toward Declan. About a metre and a half, quietly, toward the side of the clearing I was standing on, and I do not think she noticed she had done it.
That is all I got.
I will take it.
---
Declan was losing.
He knew it. That is why he kept talking.
Every burst was buying him three metres and Gideon was taking two of them back before he landed, and the clearing was getting smaller because Gideon had spent the last two minutes quietly putting himself between Declan and every direction that was not a trunk.
Twice Declan had to go through undergrowth instead of around it.
His breathing had changed.
He was going to have to transform. I could see the moment coming from where I stood, and I had already worked out what happens after it, and my whole body had gone cold about what happens after *that*.
Because I have Lycaon now.
I have never used it. I do not know what it does to me, or how much Mana a second it eats, or whether an eighteen-year-old at Level 8 can even hold the shape.
And I cannot find out here. Not in front of these two. Not thirty seconds after telling Erik Lind that I have no idea why any of this is happening.
---
Then the ground moved.
I registered it as another impact. Gideon had put something into the base of a tree about four metres from me and the whole rise had shifted, and I took the tremor as his.
Then it happened again.
And neither of them had touched anything.
---
It came up through the soles of my boots first.
Not a shake. A single deep push, from a long way off, the kind you feel in the arches of your feet and in your back teeth before your ears report anything at all.
Then again, closer, and this time the leaf litter around my boots jumped a centimetre off the ground.
Water came down out of the canopy in a sheet.
The fire, thirty metres south, guttered flat and went sideways in air that had not been moving.
And the insects stopped.
All of them, everywhere, at once, and after seven hours of that dry rattle in every direction the silence that replaced it had a physical weight to it.
Erik’s head came round. Clara turned all the way and put her back to the trunk she had been keeping near her shoulder.
Even Declan stopped moving.
---
Something ahead of us broke a tree.
Not a branch. There is no confusing the two.
It was a long tearing crack that went on for two full seconds and finished in a crash that I felt in my chest, and it was followed immediately by another impact, and the impacts were coming at the pace of something walking.
*BOOM.*
*BOOM.*
I got my hand up toward my gauntlet strap and did not get there.
---
The trees at the northern edge of the clearing came apart.
A hand came through them first.
That is all I saw of it, and I only saw that much because it was moving across in front of the firelight, and after that everything happened faster than I could follow.
It came through the clearing in an arc at chest height, and it was travelling at a speed that had absolutely nothing to do with its size.
Gideon reacted. I saw him start to turn.
Declan reacted. He was already burning Sköll.
I got my weight onto my back foot.
None of it mattered.
The forearm took all three of us across the middle of the clearing like a bar coming through a rack of coats.
---
Gideon went sideways into the undergrowth and I lost him.
Declan went through a stand of ferns and out the other side of them.
I hit the ground on my back and my shoulders and everything in my chest went out of me at once, and for four or five seconds there was nothing in the world except the fact that I could not get air in.
My fingers dragged through wet leaf.
I got up onto one elbow with my mouth open and my ribs locked.
And then I looked up.
---
I had to keep going.
The legs first, because they were what was in front of me, and each one was thicker than the trunks it had just walked through. Then up past a waist that was above the height of Erik Lind’s head.
Then further, to a chest, and shoulders that were sitting up level with the lower branches of the canopy.
I had my head all the way back by then and I still had not reached the top of it.
I kept lifting.
Eight metres, near enough. Built like a person.
Not a slab and not a statue and not something that lumbers, because the arm that had just moved three of us was already coming back down to its side.
It came down unhurried. The way a limb comes down when it has done exactly what it meant to do and nothing more.
The canopy was still coming apart above its shoulders.
My chest finally let a breath in and it came in with a sound I did not like at all.
Behind me the argument had stopped. The fight had stopped. Nobody in that clearing was looking at Ewan Calder’s body any more.
I lay in the wet leaves with my head all the way back and I finally saw its face.
A Giant.