Chapter 5
Rooftops climb like stairs. Up on the roofs, a crimson figure runs, leaping from chimney to chimney, a black panther right behind her.
White GATE-WARDENS close in from three sides. Each carries a hammer and a bundle of long glowing stakes.
RANK PLATE ×5: GATE-WARDEN · K-II MARKED · Scalelist #180,004
WARDEN-SERGEANT · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #12,551
The stake glows white, and the air around it stiffens: shimmering lines spread across the roof like frost on glass.
Rougeina locks eyes on a chimney across the street and tries to Swap. A silver-rose spark flickers and fizzles. Nothing happens. She stumbles.
smiling under his half-helm.
More stakes go in, tang tang tang. The rooftop becomes a glittering cage of frozen space. The panther snarls and swipes and gets thrown back by two wardens with shields.
Drekk crouches with his spyglass, following a line of faint silver-rose silhouettes up a drainpipe.
The crew charges into the square below. Vigolas points up at the roofs at the top of his lungs.
looking down, deeply confused.
Marka throws her anchor straight up. The chain wraps a chimney and she climbs the chain like a ladder. She lands on the roof, smashes a warden off it, and tears an anchor-stake out with her bare hand.
climbing. The stakes are the only things on the roof glowing gold: the most expensive objects on the battlefield.
Kompis on a balcony across the street. Crack, crack, crack: Ivar's shots split stake after stake. No Subtick. Just a very good shot.
Every stake that shatters lets the frozen space thaw, and the frost-lines vanish across the roof. Rougeina feels it. She smiles for the first time in the chapter.
Rougeina unsheathes all eight blades. She dances across the roof, Swapping with every thawed tile, chimney and shield in sight. She is everywhere at once: eight blades, a dozen silver-rose ghosts and one barefoot woman spinning through the white uniforms like a red storm through snow. The sergeant stands at the centre as her circle closes on him.
Her final blade passes through the sergeant's Trisdel seal, the badge of his office, and through him.
(a) The sergeant falls.
(b) His body fades like breath on a mirror. His helmet drops and rolls across the tiles, empty.
(c) Every warden on the roof stops fighting at the same moment, blinking, confused. Why are we up here? Who gave us the orders?
landing on the roof, slowing down, looking around.
He sees it happen: a thread snaps in the air and dissolves out of every person on the roof at once, out of the wardens, out of his crew, out of him. Only one person still holds the end of it: Rougeina.
The leaderless wardens break and run down the drainpipes. The empty helmet stops rolling at Rougeina's feet.
picking up the helmet. Quiet.
looking at her for a long moment. No joke this time.
Rougeina hammers a plank to the wall with the hilt of a blade. Burned into the wood is a list of names. We see some of them clearly; the rest sit under her hand:
KATRIEL · WENDLAN · INGRITH · MEIRWEN · …
And at the very top, circled three times in red:
BALDR
reading the list over her shoulder.
Something like a smile. Not quite.
Kompis sits alone with Mingus. Rougeina drops beside him without a sound, already there.
He has no answer. Mingus rests his chin on Rougeina's bare foot, and to her own surprise she lets him.
He frowns at a report and holds his silver pen above it.
He sets the report aside and opens a new folder, labelled in neat letters: ENGAGEMENT PROTOCOL · STAGE TWO.
In the shadow behind Baldr's chair, a tall figure in elegant gloves bows low. Thin golden threads hang from his fingertips, catching the firelight like spider-silk.