Free Web NovelChapter 94: The Edge
Rapax heard what Doctor shouted, and he believed it, because he had felt it a breath before the words came.
The afterimages were spent currency. The scatter of false selves that had carried him untouchable through the whole of the fight meant nothing to the Red apostle that could now pick the true Rapax out of his own shadows, and so the trick that had kept him on edge was simply gone, taken from him by the red eyes the way the legs had been taken from her. He needed something else. He did not have the luxury of finding it slowly.
He moved, and this time it was the true Rapax that moved and only the true Rapax, no decoys to hide behind because there was no longer any point in hiding. The Apostle rushed to meet him — straight at the real one, un tricked — and their weapons met. Shadow steel on marrow-stained bone, the friction throwing small hard sparks into the dark, and they held there grinding edge to edge before they broke and came again.
A minute of it. Two.
Then Rapax flinched.
It was a small thing, a hitch in his guard while his sabers had her bone blades caught, the kind of falter that a tired warrior let slip — and the Apostle took it. Her imitated rakshasa hand rotated on the inverted wrist, the joint turning the way , and she drove a bone blade forward into the opening, into his right shoulder, the point going in clean.
Rapax had been waiting for it.
The flinch had been a door he held open. The shoulder the blade found was the part of him the Living Darkness had left incorporeal, and so the bone passed through it into nothing, through the dark where solid flesh should have stopped it — and in the instant her arm was committed and extended and her body open behind the thrust, Rapax swung the underarm saber up into her abdomen.
It bit. A long deep line opened across the red carapace, and the Apostle wrenched back off the blade.
But the black flame did not come.
Rapax saw it in the half-second she gave him. The shadow essence that coated the saber, the dark fire that had burned down into her torn hide and lit every wound he had dealt her — it did nothing. The cut bled and the cut was deep and the cut did not ignite. The carapace had eaten the shadow. She had grown the red plate over exactly the vulnerability the Choir-Eater had opened in her, sealed the torn hide under armor that drank the dark, and the one true edge Rapax had held over her was gone with the rest.
" Rapax. " Doctor again, from the dark at the perimeter, almost singing it. " The carapace, dear — it negates the shadow now. It grew the answer to your fire. You are in a real jam. "
Rapax looked at the thing in front of him and, somewhere under the cold of the fight, he marveled at it.
It had been a spider. The Choir-Eater’s feeding had cost it its hoard and its eyes and its brood, and out of that ruin it had made first the Apostle — the prey-shaped killing form, built to run down and open a humanoid. Then, hurt, it had grown the eyes that saw him true. Now, hurt again, it had grown the plate that ate his shadow. Each wound he dealt it, it spent on becoming the thing that wound could no longer be dealt to. He did not let the thought finish, but it brushed him as he moved: if this went long enough, what would it not become? The Red Widow had been an apex of the northern web, and an apex it remained, even wearing a borrowed shape and bleeding green into the moss. He would not give it the time. He could not afford to.
So he set the marvel down, and the fight became the oldest kind of fight there was.
No shadow now. No fire, no Steps that mattered, no domain trick left that the red eyes could not see through or the red plate could not drink. Only two weapons and two bodies and the long arithmetic of attrition — and that, at least, was ground Rapax knew. He was a combat master before he was anything else. Steel and bone and the reading of a body’s rhythm; he had lived for combat his whole life. It was a deadly combat now, with a thing across from him that learned and adapted to her enemy attacks ,but it was his combat to finish.
They went at it.
He landed blows. Some she took, some she turned, the saber opening shallow lines across the carapace that no longer burned. And she landed blows in return — and worse, she landed them *smarter*. She had been learning his body all this while, learning it the brutal way, by striking him and feeling which parts of the Living Darkness’s half-real form turned her blade to nothing and which parts were solid enough to cut. She built the map out of her own hurt, and then she used it. The bone blades stopped finding the incorporeal dark and started finding the flesh inside it. His left shoulder opened. His right side. His left elbow, the joint laid bare. Red rakshasa blood ran down him and spattered the moss, and her green ran with it, the two of them painting the forest floor in the colors of what they were.
" Excellent , " Doctor breathed. " Excellent. " freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
It went on, and it turned against him by inches.
Rapax kept dealing damage and the Apostle kept taking it and giving it back, and the bleeding did what bleeding did. His strength fell off a degree at a time. His movements lost their last margin of speed. He reached, once, for the thought of a healing draught from his bead — a tier-six potion that could close the worst of the lacerations — and there was no instant in which to take it. She did not give him one. The barrage came frontal and lateral and frontal again, blade after blade out of the relentless red shape, and he parried and parried and gave ground, and the giving of ground was the beginning of the end of it.
" Rapax. " Doctor’s voice changed. The delight had gone out of it and something else had come in, something almost like grief. " Go toward the edge. Get cornered. "
Rapax could not, for one cold instant, believe it.
The thought came to him whole and ugly — that Doctor wanted him dead, that the man at the perimeter had watched the whole of this with a scholar’s hunger and decided the more interesting page was the one where the grandmaster fell. Or worse: that the eye cascade had reached Doctor after all, late, and the thing giving him directions was no longer entirely the Doctor he knew.
Then he understood.
The song. The choir’s song, that had scratched all fight at the buffer of their spheres and never gotten in — the song that the Apostle had no sphere against, that should have been eating her mind since the moment she crossed the threshold, except that a thing in a killing frenzy guards its mind without knowing it guards it, and the barrier of the cage and the press of the fight had kept her at the protected heart of the zone. The edge was different. The edge was where the song reached fullest, where Rapax’s own sphere thinned to its boundary and the perimeter of the grove sang loudest. Cornered there, he would draw her there. And a thing that had spent every scrap of itself on becoming the answer to *him* had spent nothing on the answer to *that*.
Rapax went to the edge.
He backtracked toward the boundary of the web-net the Apostle herself had strung, parrying what he could and wearing what he could not, his one good arm working the saber while the lacerations wept. And the Apostle came after him, faster, the corner waking the killer in her — the prey was failing, the prey was backed against the wall of its own cage, and she threw her whole self into closing it. The attacks lost their last care. She sacrificed her own guard for the speed of the kill, blade after brutal blade, and under that barrage a bleeding, one-margin-slow the shadow grandmaster could not hold.
The blade came through his guard and took his left hand off at the wrist.
The saber fell with it. Rapax’s right hand let go its own weapon by instinct and flew to the stump, clamping over the spray of his own blood, and in that open ruined instant the Apostle drew the bone blade back over her shoulder and swung it for his head.
At the perimeter, Doctor’s eyes went wide enough to leave their sockets.
" Any moment now , " he murmured.
The blade came for Rapax’s skull, full force, the killing arc — and a hand’s breadth from his temple it stopped.
It hung there in the air, motionless, the whole red weight of her arrested at the top of the swing. And the eight red eyes, that had not lost the true Rapax since the moment they finished forming, went wrong — drifting, unfixing, looking suddenly at nothing and at everything, at things that were not in the grove at all.
The song had gotten in.
It had found the one thing she had grown no armor against, and it had walked through the front of her mind into the cellar of her, into the grief and anger she was made of — the brood, the eyes, the legs, the decades of hoard, every loss the transformation had been built on top of — and it had begun, gently, to play them back to her where she stood over the prey she had been a half-second from killing.
The Apostle’s blade trembled in the air above Rapax’s head, and did not fall.
