Chapter 83
The fight stops for one breath. Wards, crew, even Katriel at her desk, all looking at the two figures facing each other across the mirrored floor: the red braid and the black braid.
sickle up, one-armed, breathing hard.
soft.
stepping up behind her, third eye open.
glancing back at Smurjan, then at Bali. Her jaw sets.
She launches, sickle first. Bali meets her, twin mirror-sickles crossing. CLANG. And they're gone, into the mirrors.
The twins fight through the reflections:
Bali steps into one mirror and out of another behind her. Kali was waiting for him there.
Kali can't walk through mirrors, so she borrows his way of doing it: her eyes flash silver as she breathes in his Pride, and she steps into the glass after him.
Bali returns it: the silver lifts off her mid-step, and she's spat out of the mirror onto the floor.
She borrows again. He returns again. Silver, gone, silver, gone.
A ribbon of silver light whips back and forth between the twins across the room, borrowed and returned and borrowed and returned, faster and faster, and every time it passes through a mirror the mirror cracks.
looking up from her ledger, intrigued.
on Drekk's back, one eye cracking open.
The silver ribbon is now a blur, a shrieking line of light whipping between Kali and Bali hundreds of times a second, and the octagon is coming apart around it. Mirrors burst in sequence around all eight walls like fireworks, raining glass. Wards are thrown flat. Katriel's desk slides across the floor. The seven hovering sin-shapes wobble in their orbits.
At the two ends of the ribbon the twins stand braced, Kali with her one hand thrust out and Bali with his two, faces lit silver, exactly mirrored, neither one letting go.
through gritted teeth, the ribbon screaming between them.
and both start to laugh at the same moment, the same laugh, helplessly.
They let go together. The silver ribbon snaps, unspools into harmless glitter, and drifts down over the ruined octagon like snow.
The twins on their knees on the cracked mirror floor, ten metres apart, panting, glittering with silver dust. Every mirror around them is broken.
Bali gets up first. He crosses the floor to her slowly and holds out his hand.
looking at his hand. Then at her own one hand. The stump of her other arm. Then at the bowl she isn't holding.
turning her head to look behind her: Smurjan, standing with his three shadows, his face very still and very scared. Bakasura's small sad eyes peering out of his shadow. Rougeina bleeding on the floor. Vigolas grinning at her through a split lip. Kompis, powerless, holding his dog.
and for once she doesn't talk fast.
looking up at her brother.
His hand, held out, trembles. He was ready for her to fight. He wasn't ready to be asked.
steel eyes wet.
softly.
Bali steps backwards, into the one mirror on the wall that is still unbroken. The glass ripples. Halfway in, he stops.
He's gone. The last mirror holds only Kali's reflection now. She stares at it for a long beat.
back at her desk amid the broken glass, her face shifting stranger to stranger, and finally annoyed.
She stands for the first time. She dips the crystal quill and reaches toward Rougeina, down on the floor, and toward the rose script that has been inscribing up Rougeina's forearm for twenty-seven years: her Envy.
catching the edge of the rose script and pulling. The script lifts, half of it, the unwritten half, peeling up like a bandage. The written half won't come. The sin stretches between book and desk, tearing.
arching off the mirror floor, her arm a ribbon of torn rose light, mouth open in a scream that shatters the last mirror in the room.