Chapter 57 — Same Six II
Something in my voice went wrong on that last one.
I heard it happen. I had been keeping it light because everybody was listening, and on that sentence it came out flat and low with nothing underneath it, and Gideon’s face changed.
He stopped being annoyed.
His eyes came over mine, and then went, briefly, to the four people around that fire, and then came back, and I watched him put it together with what I had said eight metres from the landing site.
"First watch," he said.
Declan turned his stick over in the coals.
"Rook and Calder, then. Second is myself and Clara. Third is Erik and the boy."
---
Ewan took the northern side and went out to it without a word.
I got Gideon by the arm before he followed.
Twelve metres from the fire, in the dark, with my back to the camp so nobody could read my mouth.
"Ewan."
"What about him."
"He is going to try to kill you tonight."
Gideon did not say anything for about three seconds.
"Say that again."
"On the watch. When you are alone with him and your back is turned and there is nobody to see it." My voice had dropped to almost nothing and I had a fistful of his sleeve.
"It will not be a fight. It will be one movement from behind and it will be over before you know it started."
"Nolan." He put his hand over mine and did not remove it, which was worse. "That man came into an Orange Gate that has killed two full teams. He came in on a Meridian screening. He has been in nine Gates."
"I know."
"So explain to me why a professional would spend eleven days getting into the most dangerous clearance operation in this region and then murder a Red Gate Player on a watch rotation in the dark."
"I can’t."
"You cannot, or you will not."
"There is no difference tonight."
---
He looked at me for a long time.
I could hear Erik laughing at something behind us, and the fire snapping, and my own breathing, and I could feel exactly how thin what I had just said was and exactly how much I was asking of him.
I have known this man for eleven days. He has known me for eleven days.
"You are not going to tell me how you know this."
"No."
"And if I say you are being paranoid and I go out there and stand next to a man who is going to do nothing at all, what happens?"
"Then I am wrong, and you have had a boring three hours, and you can be as unpleasant as you like about it in the morning."
Something happened at the corner of his mouth and did not get anywhere.
"And if you are right."
"Then you are alive because you did not let him behind you."
---
He let go of my hand.
Then he turned around and looked north into the dark, at the place where Ewan Calder had gone, and stood there for about four seconds doing it.
When he came back round his stance had changed. Feet a little wider. Hands out of his pockets.
"Sleep," he said. "Properly. And Nolan."
"What."
"When this is finished you are going to sit down with me and say the whole of it out loud."
"Yes."
"I am not asking."
"I said yes."
He went north.
---
I lay down between Declan O’Rourke and Erik Lind and did not sleep.
The trick is the out-breath.
Anybody can lie still. But a person who is awake lets air out in short pushes, and a person who is asleep lets it go long and slow and slightly uneven.
If you do not fix that, it does not matter how still you are.
So I ran my breathing on a count and kept my eyes closed to a slit and let the fire drop.
Cold came up through the leaf litter into the back plate of my armour. My cheek on the fire side stayed warm and the other one went stiff. Insects came up in the trees somewhere past the light and did not stop.
Once Erik came past on his circuit.
I let him go by.
---
At some point after the coals had gone from orange to red, leaf litter compressed three metres to my left.
Declan sat up.
He did it the way he had done it before, forearms on his knees first, and then a slow turn of the head, all the way round the ring. Clara. Erik. Me.
I kept the count going.
My heart had come up into my throat the moment his face turned my way, and a heart that fast has to be kept out of the shoulders.
I have got better at that in the last two days than I ever wanted to be.
He stood without pushing off the ground.
He went north.
---
I gave him a hundred and twenty seconds and then I got up.
The cold hit under my armour where the sweat had been sitting.
I went the way he had gone with the dying glow of the camp behind my right shoulder, checking it every ten metres, weight down through the outside edge of the boot and rolled in.
Forty metres. Sixty.
Then voices.
Not two of them.
---
I got a shoulder against a trunk and came around it until I had an angle, and what I saw stopped my breathing halfway in and held it there.
Ewan Calder was on his back in the leaves.
His sword was three metres from his hand, and there was a great deal of blood in the leaf litter under his shoulder, and there was nothing at all in his face.
And Gideon Rook was standing four metres from him.
Upright. Bleeding from somewhere on the left forearm, a shallow line, wrapped already with something torn off his own shirt. Nothing else.
My eyes went over him three times before I believed it, and my throat closed and my chest came in and out once without any air in it at all.
He is alive.
I said one sentence to a man in the dark and he took it seriously and he is standing up.
---
"—asking you again."
Declan was six metres from him and he was not standing like a man who had walked into a shock.
"He came at my back," Gideon said. Flat. Not defensive. "Two steps out of the dark on a watch he was standing with me. He did not say anything first."
"And you killed him."
"He put a sword through the air where my neck was. Yes."
"You are telling me a screened Meridian Player, nine Gates, no record of anything, decided in the middle of the night—"
"I am telling you what happened."
"That is not an explanation."
"It is not going to become one if you say it louder."
---
Declan said it louder anyway.
That is the thing I caught, and I caught it because he did it three times inside about twenty seconds, and each time his volume came up a step and each time his eyes went briefly past Gideon’s shoulder.
South.
Toward the camp.
*"You expect me to accept that a man with nine years just attacked you for nothing?"*
He is not arguing.
He is broadcasting.
He wants Erik Lind and Clara Vogel to wake up out of a dead sleep and walk into this clearing.
And find a corpse, and a man from a Red Gate outfit standing over it, and a version of events already three sentences deep in the air.
Whoever speaks first owns the body.
My hands closed inside my gauntlets.
---
I came out from behind the tree.
"Rook. He is with Ewan."
Gideon did not turn his head, and he did not ask me anything, and he did not spend a single second on whether the eighteen-year-old had got it right.
His weight came forward.
"That is convenient," Declan said, and his voice went up again. "That is extremely convenient, Nolan, because it is very hard not to notice that you are standing out here fully dressed at two in the morning."
"You got up first."
"I got up because I heard—"
> **[Adamant — S activated.]**
Gideon hit him.
---
> **[Sköll — A activated.]**
Declan was not there for the whole of it.
He came out sideways in a burst that covered five metres, and the punch caught him across the outside of the shoulder instead of the middle of his chest, and it still threw him.
He went back through the leaf litter with both boots off the ground and came down in a spray of wet mulch and rolled twice.
He was up before he had finished rolling.
Then it started properly, and it was different from two nights ago, because Declan already knew what he was fighting.
He did not stand anywhere.
Every time Gideon closed, Declan burst out of the space, sideways or backward or through the gap between two trunks, and every time he came back in it was from a different angle at a different distance.
Gideon did not chase.
He walked, and he cut the angles down.
Twice he put a reinforced fist into a tree that Declan had been leaning off a quarter second earlier, and the trunk lost a piece the size of a dinner plate, and the whole canopy shook its water down on both of them.
The ground moved under my boots when they connected.
---
Erik and Clara came out of the dark from the south about forty seconds in.
Weapons up. Erik with his short axe and Clara with both blades, and neither of them in armour, and both of them running.
They stopped hard about eight metres out.
I watched it land on them in order.
Ewan Calder on his back in the leaves, unmistakably dead.
Gideon Rook and Declan O’Rourke trying to kill each other in a clearing.
And me. Standing over there in full gear at two in the morning, with my gauntlets on, watching.
Clara’s face did something I will not forget.