Chapter 60

The Marka is moored by an anchor-chain hooked over the outermost maze wall. The crew climbs down onto the planet: red stone walls ten metres high, thorn-hedges of copper, fox-fire lanterns floating at head height. Corridors fork everywhere.

at the first fork.

nervous, sweating. Something is coming up out of him.

cheeks puffing.

in horror.

The maze moves. Walls grind sideways like the tumblers in a lock. Corridors swing shut. Hedges uncoil and re-coil. The crew is split, each of them suddenly alone in a different corridor:

Vigolas, Kompis and Mingus in one.

Smurjan with Trollmage (who is still giggling) in another.

Faceless Drekk alone.

Faceless Rougeina alone.

in a long, straight corridor of red stone. Silent. Hood back. The smooth blank of her face catches the fox-fire light. Eight blades in her hands.

At the far end of the corridor, perhaps forty metres away, a man steps out from a side passage and stops, facing her.

Tall and gaunt, dressed in a grey Bastion greatcoat with a high collar, a long iron spike in each hand. His face is calm, even kind. But his eyes are wide, lidless and fixed, the whites cracked red with burst veins, and from both of them, constantly and slowly, blood tears run down his cheeks into his collar. He has not blinked in nine years.

STILLMARK · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #2,377 · Bastion Five

She drops into a stance. She has no mouth to answer with. She doesn't need one.

She Swaps, aiming for a fox-fire lantern floating right above his head.

Nothing happens.

still standing exactly where she was. The lantern above Stillmark still where it was. She tries again, harder. Nothing.

unblinking, bleeding, fixed on her.

tightening on her blades. No Swap. No face. No voice. Just a girl with knives.

She attacks the old-fashioned way: sprinting barefoot down the corridor, blades out.

Stillmark doesn't move his feet. He doesn't need to. His iron spikes catch every blade.

She feints left and goes right. His eyes follow. She can't get out of his sight.

She throws two blades. He catches one on a spike. The other grazes his cheek, through the blood tears.

He drives a spike through her shoulder and pins her to the wall.

pinned, writhing. No sound. She can't scream.

leaning in, eyes fixed on her, bleeding.

pinned, looking at his eyes. There's something almost pitiful there. Not cruelty. Exhaustion.

She rips the spike out of her own shoulder with her free hand, drops, rolls between his legs, and is up behind him, blade to his kidney.

He doesn't turn around. He doesn't have to look at her to stop her. He just turns his eyes to the wall beside them, the one she'll have to dodge into, and it locks in place, fixed as iron.

She could fight on. She'd lose. She knows exactly what death looks like; she's handed it out for years.

She throws all three remaining blades at once, not at him but at the lanterns above his head. Three lanterns burst. Fox-fire showers down into his eyes.

half a second blinded by light he can't blink away.

In that half-second she's out of his sight, round the corner and gone, sprinting barefoot down a side corridor, leaving a trail of blood on the stone.

eyes streaming blood and fire, not angry, not hurrying. He looks down at the floor.

Faintly, glowing, the crisscrossing silver-rose ribbons of every Swap she tried and failed, every step she took: her phantom trails, the price she always pays, laid out across the stone like a map.

walking calmly after the trail, blood tears falling.