Chapter 62
Rougeina limps along it, faceless, bleeding from the shoulder, one blade left. Behind her on the red stone, glowing, her phantom trails, a map leading straight to her.
A hand grabs her from a side passage. She spins, blade up, and stops. Drekk. Faceless too, smooth-headed, his axe in his other hand.
Two faceless people in a red corridor, staring at each other with no eyes. A long beat. Then Drekk lifts his hand and waves, awkwardly. Rougeina's shoulders shake once. Not laughing. Close to it.
scratching in the dust of the wall with his axe-blade:
YOU LOOK TERRIBLE.
scratching underneath with her blade:
SO DO YOU. ONE OF THEM IS HUNTING ME. CAN'T SWAP WHEN HE LOOKS.
reading it, then scratching:
THEN WE MAKE HIM LOOK AWAY.
A crimson line draws itself down the corridor, perfectly straight, bending around corners that shouldn't bend: a Sightline. Smurjan walks along it with Trollmage clinging to the back of his coat.
scratching fast on the wall:
HE SEES MY TRAILS. HE'S COMING. EYES FREEZE WHATEVER THEY SEE.
reading, eyes narrowing. A plan arriving.
Stillmark walks calmly toward them along Rougeina's trail, blood tears running, iron spikes in his hands, the fox-fire lanterns freezing in place as his eyes pass over them.
spread across the corridor: Rougeina at the front, Drekk beside her, Smurjan behind, Trollmage at the back with his Codex open to a page marked JOKES (EMERGENCY).
clearing his throat, very loud.
deadpan.
Total silence. Even Stillmark pauses. The joke is so bad that the corridor itself seems to wince.
His face doesn't move. But from inside his shadow, a voice breaks first, sharp and loud: Kali.
with no face, shoulders shaking. Silent laughter. It counts.
The maze grinds. Every wall Stillmark isn't looking at slides sideways.
His eyes snap to the wall on his left: it freezes. The one on his right slides in behind him.
He looks right. The left one moves.
He looks at the floor. The ceiling moves.
He can only look at one thing at a time. The whole maze dances around him, and every piece he isn't watching moves.
A wall slides between Stillmark and Rougeina. Line of sight: broken.
behind the wall, out of his sight. She feels it: the Swap, alive in her again.
She Swaps with a lantern over his head. He looks up, and it freezes, but she's already Swapped again, to a thorn behind him. He spins, and she's gone again. She's a red streak in every space he isn't watching.
eyes darting, bleeding faster, the first fear we've seen on him.
Drekk hits him from the left with the axe-haft. Stillmark looks at the axe, and it freezes mid-swing, Drekk with it. Smurjan's Sightline strike hits him from the right. Stillmark looks at Smurjan, and he freezes. He can hold one, two, three things still.
eyes flicking between Drekk, Smurjan, the walls, the lanterns, trying to hold everything. He can't. Nobody can look at everything.
A blood tear wells at the corner of his left eye, swells, and runs down his cheek. Slowly. Down toward his jaw.
crouched on top of the maze wall above him, faceless, watching that one red drop.
Rougeina Swaps with the blood tear.
In an instant she's there: where the tear was, on his cheek, inches from his face, inside his guard, closer than anyone has stood to him in nine years. The tear, swapped into her place, falls harmlessly from the top of the wall far above.
Her last blade is already moving. Behind her, Drekk and Smurjan are frozen mid-strike in Stillmark's gaze. Trollmage is mid-cringe. The fox-fire lanterns hang motionless. Every frozen thing in the corridor points toward one moment: a faceless assassin, a man who cannot close his eyes, and a blade at his throat.
He doesn't fight. The spikes slip out of his hands and ring on the stone. His eyes, unblinking and bleeding, look at her blank face from an inch away.
quiet, almost relieved.
A long, long moment.
She lays it gently over his lidless eyes, so it's dark. For the first time in nine years, it's dark for him.
his breath going out of him in the dark under her hand. Something like a smile.
(We don't see it go in. Just her shoulders.)
The corridor is empty except for the crew. No body. No spikes. A few drops of dried blood on the stone that nobody can explain. Drekk and Smurjan are unfrozen, blinking. Trollmage looks around, puzzled.
Aldhrun Vesparid, Architect Ten, at his desk, frowning at a sheet of parchment headed BASTION. Four names in his own handwriting, and a fifth line beneath them, empty. He taps it with his pen, puzzled, not sure why he drew it.
Rougeina sits against the wall, faceless, her hand still open on her knee, remembering a man nobody else in the universe will ever remember. Trollmage, scratching his head, flipping through his Codex: