THE KING OF NOTHING

  Chapter IX: The Night of Shattered Glass

  Midnight did not come to Oskara as a sigh, but as a dead weight. It was a starless hour, smothered under the soot of a thousand chimneys and the artificial silence of a city trembling from within. In The Silver Swan inn, that silence was dense, viscous, like the held breath of a beast crouched among the rafters.

  Irina awoke abruptly. There was no noise, no nightmare. It was an animal's awakening, the kind that precedes instinct. A steel wire tightening in the deepest part of her marrow. Her eyes opened in the absolute dark, already alert, scanning the fuzzy outlines of the room. The physiological need—a full bladder, a memory of the herbal tea from dinner—was just the excuse her conscious mind accepted. She rose from the thin pallet, her bones protesting with a dull creak. She pulled a light tunic over her underclothes, not for modesty, but to have something between her skin and the cold steel she sensed.

  She stepped into the dim hallway, where the only light was the faint moon's reflection filtered through a dirty window at the end. The floorboards creaked under her bare feet, an obscenely loud sound in the silence. She took three steps towards the common privy.

  A shadow detached itself from the wall next to the stair landing.

  It wasn't a movement. It was a transition. From absolute stillness to lethal action, without an interval. There were no words of warning, no whisper of cloth. Just the high-pitched, almost musical whistle of quality steel cutting the damp air in a perfect arc towards her throat.

  Irina reacted with the reflex forged in fire over thousands of hours of training and surviving terror. She didn't think. Her body threw itself backward, the muscles of her back contracting with brute force. The dagger passed a hair's breadth from her skin, so close she felt the metal's cold before the edge. A lock of her golden hair, faintly lit by the moon, floated in the air, cleanly severed, and fell to the floor without a sound.

  —Shit! —the cry ripped from her lungs, harsh and laden with the adrenaline now burning through her veins.

  The assassin, a compact black silhouette that seemed to absorb the light, gave no time. He lunged at her, a whirlwind of murderous intent. Irina did not have her weapon. The longsword rested beside her bed, out of reach. Her hands, empty, searched for something, anything. She grabbed the only object within reach: a heavy, rusted iron candlestick, nailed to the wall to hold candles that were never lit. She tore it from its mount with a crack of rotten wood and interposed it.

  CLANG!

  The second stab, a quick thrust towards her heart, struck the twisted iron. The sound was a dull clang that reverberated in the narrow hallway. The assassin was fast, unsettlingly fast. He didn't grapple; he recovered his weapon and launched a series of short, stabbing blows, seeking eyes, armpits, groin. Irina retreated, staggering, hitting the plaster walls with her shoulders, dodging and blocking with the candlestick that dug into her palms.

  The man, seeing her defense, changed tactics. In one fluid motion, he launched a front kick, low and brutal, straight into Irina's stomach.

  The impact was dry, a whump that emptied her lungs in one go. The air left her in a silent gasp, turning into a fist of pain that rose to her throat. The force lifted her off the ground. She flew backward, unaware of anything but the agony twisting her diaphragm, and crashed into the door of her own room. The wood, not barred from inside, gave way with a crack. She tumbled onto the plank floor, seeing stars.

  The assassin advanced towards the threshold, the black silhouette outlined against the faint light from the hall. A professional. In no hurry now. The dagger in his hand rose for a downward, final strike at Irina's exposed neck.

  But Irina was no longer helpless. Her hand, trembling from pain but guided by a glacial fury, closed around the sharkskin grip of her new longsword, which lay beside the pallet.

  —VAEL! —she roared, the name coming out like a whip-crack as she drew the blade.

  The steel sang as it left the scabbard, a clean, promising sound in the dark room.

  The door to the adjacent room opened. Not with a bang, but with a fluid, silent motion. Vael was there, in the frame. Barefoot, hair disheveled, but with his eyes open and clear, no trace of sleep. In his right hand, he held his short spear, already in a combat stance, as if he had been waiting for it.

  —Trouble? —he asked, his voice as flat and casual as if asking for the time.

  The assassin stopped dead. His eyes, invisible under the hood, must have calculated the scene in a fraction of a second: the wounded lieutenant now armed with a sword that had the reach of a short spear, and a second enemy, seemingly unprepared but with a weapon already drawn and a posture that was not that of a frightened recruit. The tactical disadvantage was clear.

  Without hesitation, without a sound, the man pivoted on his heels. Not towards the stairs, but towards the opposite end of the hall, where a high, narrow window looked out onto a side street. He ran the three steps separating him from it and, without slowing down, threw himself headfirst through it.

  The sound was an explosion of pure violence in the inn's silence: the crystalline shattering of breaking glass, the crunch of the window frame splintering, and then the dull, distant thud of a body falling (landing?) on the street below. The night rushed in through the broken window, cold and laden with sinister promises.

  Elara emerged from her room, sword in hand, face pale and eyes wide.

  —What… what happened?

  —A nocturnal friend —said Irina, getting to her feet with a groan, one hand on her stomach where the boot print promised a spectacular bruise—. With very poor manners. They know where we are. And they know which room.

  They peered through the jagged teeth of broken glass still hanging in the frame. Below, on the street lit by a solitary lamp-post, a shadow was rising from a pile of market straw and breaking into a run, limping slightly, towards the alleyways leading to the Warehouse District.

  —We can't let him go —said Vael, his voice losing all its nonchalant tone. There was a practical coldness in it—. If he escapes, he'll return. And he won't come alone. He'll bring a dozen. Or worse, he'll signal our location to something that doesn't bother knocking.

  —Armor. Whatever you have on. Weapons. Now —ordered Irina, her voice a knife in the dark—. This isn't a retreat. It's a hunt. And the prey is bleeding.

  II. The Hunt

  Five minutes later, a span that felt like an eternity, the trio exited through the inn's back door and melted into the shadows of the side streets. The city slept, or pretended to sleep, under a low, cold mist that smelled of dead coals and fear. The chase took them far from the Inn District, through alleys where garbage piled in black heaps, towards the industrial heart of Oskara: the Warehouse District.

  It was a nightmare labyrinth. Tall, windowless brick buildings rose like cliffs on either side of streets so narrow one could almost touch the opposite walls with arms outstretched. The echo of their hurried footsteps bounced off the stone, a metronome of their own recklessness. They followed dark drops on the ground, barely visible in the moonlight filtering between rooftops: the trail of the wounded assassin.

  They reached an open, unexpected square, a flagstone clearing in the forest of warehouses. In the center, an abandoned pile of barrels and crates formed a sculpture of waste. The blood trail vanished here.

  Vael stopped. He made no gesture. He just stood still, his head tilted slightly, like a dog listening to a whistle beyond human range.

  —Here —he said, his voice a whisper that barely moved the air.

  From the shadows, not one emerged.

  Five emerged.

  They didn't step out; they materialized. From behind the barrels, from a half-open door, from the hollow under an overturned cart. The wounded assassin had led them into a perfect ambush. Five figures clad in black, of the same functional, deadly cut, with curved daggers and short swords already drawn. They formed a slow, silent circle, closing off any escape route.

  —Five against three —murmured Irina, drawing her longsword with a sound of steel that rang like an oath in the silent square. The blade, pale and deadly, gleamed in the moonlight—. Positions. Back to back. Don't let them separate us.

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  The combat didn't burst forth. It was unleashed.

  Two of the assassins, coordinated like the limbs of a single predator, launched themselves at Irina. They weren't thugs. They were artists of death, moving with a chilling economy of motion, their steps silent on the flagstones.

  Irina had to dance with Death, and Death had the lead. Her longsword was a giant's staff compared to their dagas, heavy, demanding. But she wielded it not with refined technique, but with the savage fury of a cornered she-wolf. A fury that remembered every blow received, every comrade lost, every night of pain in the cold.

  The first assassin slipped past her left, under the arc of her guard, the dagger seeking with surgeon's precision her freshly healed ribs, the weak point. Irina didn't try to block. She pivoted her torso on her hip, a bullfighter's move, and the dagger's tip passed an inch from her tunic. In the same turn, she threw an elbow back with all her body's weight. The impact, dry and brutal, found the man's face. There was a satisfying crack of nasal cartilage breaking. The assassin staggered back with a choked grunt, blood already spurting between his fingers.

  But the second hadn't waited. He was already upon her, exploiting the opening. He launched a horizontal slash at Irina's neck, a motion quick as a snake's blink. Irina barely had time to interpose the strong third of her blade. Clang. The weapons clashed, and blue-white sparks, born of pure friction, leapt into the air, illuminating their faces for an instant: the assassin's, a mask of relentless concentration; Irina's, a mask of pain and savage determination.

  The force of the blow numbed her arm to the shoulder. Irina growled, a bestial sound, and instead of retreating, she charged. She kicked forward, not at the body, but at the attacker's bent knee. Her boot found the side of the joint with a precise blow. Crack. It wasn't a sound of wood. It was a sickening, deep sound of a kneecap and ligaments giving way under extreme pressure. The man screamed, a high-pitched sound that shattered in the night, and fell sideways, his leg bent at an unnatural angle.

  Irina didn't hesitate. There was no room for mercy, nor for interrogation. She seized the moment, the brief instant when pain paralyzed her enemy, and drove the point of her longsword downward. It wasn't a spectacular lunge. It was a practical, downward movement that pierced the black leather, found the gap between ribs, pierced muscle, and lodged deep in the beating heart. The blade stopped only when the guard hit the chest. Blood, warm and dark, gushed from the man's open mouth, drowning his last cry. Irina withdrew the sword with a sharp tug, and the body collapsed, already an empty sack.

  The first assassin, with his nose shattered and eyes watering in pain, recovered and lunged with a cry of pure rage, abandoning all technique. Irina pulled the sword from the corpse with a wet, sucking sound and, using the momentum of the motion, pivoted on her heels. The longsword, now bloodied, traced a wide, terrible horizontal arc.

  The blade met no resistance. It passed through the man's neck like a thought through fog. There was no chop, but a soft, definitive sshhick. The assassin's head left his shoulders and flew off, spinning slowly in the air, an expression of eternal surprise frozen on his bloody features. The body took two more steps, clumsy, absurd, as if it hadn't received the news, before collapsing to its knees and then face down, arterial blood spurting in black, glossy jets that painted the cobblestones around it.

  To her right, Elara was living her own private hell.

  Her opponent was different. Taller, leaner, and wielding a short sword with a sadistic elegance. He didn't attack to kill immediately. He toyed with her. He launched quick, precise thrusts that didn't aim for vital organs, but sliced through Elara's travel tunic, leaving thin red lines on her arms, thighs, side. Each cut was a message: You're slow. You're weak. You're mine.

  Elara parried the blows with growing desperation. Each block made the steel of her familiar sword vibrate, transmitting a chill that ran up her arms and made her grit her teeth. She retreated step by step, her breathing becoming short, sharp gasps. Panic, that old acquaintance, began to fog the edges of her vision, to numb her fingers around the hilt.

  —Come on, die with a little grace, daddy's girl! —the assassin whispered, his voice a venomous thread. He launched a thrust that grazed Elara's cheek, leaving a line of fire and a drop of blood that ran down her chin.

  Elara tripped over a piece of rotten wood and fell backward against a pile of empty crates. The air was knocked from her lungs. She was trapped, her back against the rough wood, with no room to maneuver. The assassin approached, in no hurry now, a thin, cruel smile under his hood. He raised his sword for the final thrust, aimed at the center of her chest.

  Vael had his own. A short, broad-shouldered man, armed with two long daggers, one in each hand. He was a whirlwind of steel. He didn't attack in patterns; he flowed. A high cut followed by a low stab, a sweep at the tendons followed by an uppercut to the jaw.

  Vael didn't block. He retreated. Constantly. One step back, then another. He leaned his torso left to dodge a dagger that whistled where his neck had been. He jumped sideways to avoid a sweep that would have severed his Achilles tendons. He ducked at the last instant so a horizontal cut passed over his head, cutting only air.

  His movements had a liquid, unnatural fluidity. His eyes, half-closed, didn't watch the assassin's eyes, nor his feet. They watched the center of his mass, his shoulders, hips, anticipating each intention an instant before it became action. The daggers whistled past, cutting threads from his tunic, grazing his new leather armor with tearing sounds, millimeters from his skin. Vael didn't seem to breathe hard. His face was a mask of empty concentration.

  The assassin growled, a sound of bestial frustration bubbling from deep in his throat. He accelerated the pace, his arms becoming a blur, launching a rain of blows meant to overwhelm, to find by sheer saturation that magical point where the defense would give. Slashes at the neck, stomach, eyes.

  Vael kept dodging. But his retreat had taken him to the edge of the square, near a brick wall. He had no more space.

  The assassin, blinded by the rage of not being able to touch this slippery ghost, made the mistake. With a hoarse cry, he launched a suicidal attack, crossing both daggers in a scissoring motion meant to open Vael's torso from shoulders to hips. It was a move of brute force, of total commitment, that left his own center completely exposed for a fraction of a second.

  Vael stopped his retreat.

  He planted his right foot on the ground, anchoring it on the cobblestones.

  —Got you —he said, and his voice was flat, cold, devoid of all triumph. It was a simple statement of fact.

  His short spear, which until now had been almost passive in his hand, shot out. It wasn't a thrust. It was an extension of his arm, a brutal straight line that completely ignored the daggers crossing towards him. The plain steel tip found the soft spot just below the assassin's sternum, where the leather was thinnest.

  The sound was a dull, deep thump, followed by a crack of cartilage. The blade pierced the leather as if it were paper, sank into flesh, punctured the diaphragm, and lodged in the soft entrails. The assassin froze, eyes bulging, mouth open in a silent grimace of disbelief and agony. He dropped the daggers, which clattered to the ground. Vael didn't stop. With a quick twist of his wrist, he rotated the spear inside the wound, a short, brutal movement that shredded vital organs in a radius of inches. Then he yanked it out, with a wet, repulsive sound.

  The man fell to his knees, his hands trying uselessly to stem the dark, warm tide spilling between his fingers. He looked at Vael, his eyes begging for an explanation that would not come, and then collapsed face-first onto the cobblestones, a final tremor running down his back before he lay still.

  The sound of the heavy body falling, the final thud, distracted the assassin who had Elara cornered. For a fraction of a second, less than a heartbeat, his gaze flicked towards the source of the noise, towards his fallen comrade.

  It was all Elara needed.

  The panic that had paralyzed her shattered. It didn't disappear. It transformed. It compressed into a burning core in her chest, fused with the rage from the pain of the cuts, with the humiliation of being toyed with, with the fierce, primal desire to survive. The fear didn't leave; it became the fuse.

  —NOW! —she screamed, and the cry was not of fear, but of liberation, a command issued to the universe.

  Her sword didn't just glow. It became a core of pure instability, a cylinder of white-blue light that seemed to swallow the air around it. The heat emanating from it was dry, electric, scorching the edges of her sleeve.

  Elara, from the ground, with her back against the crates, had no room for a wide swing. She launched a short, upward slash from her hip, a movement of desperation turned to art.

  BOOM!

  The lightning didn't push the assassin. It didn't hit him.

  It went through him.

  The flash of energy, concentrated and lethal, cleaved the man on a perfect diagonal from left hip to right shoulder. There was no blood. The flesh in the lightning's path was instantly carbonized, cauterized by heat so extreme it vaporized fluids and melted bone. The upper part of the body, from the shoulder up and the right arm, was blown away like a projectile and smashed against the brick wall of a warehouse ten meters away. There wasn't a solid impact; it was an explosion of gray ash, fragments of calcined bone, and bits of armor metal that had melted and solidified into grotesque shapes. The legs, still standing for a second, with the torso's cross-section showing a black, smoking circle where organs had been, collapsed afterward, inert.

  The smell that filled the square wasn't of blood. It was of ozone, of charred meat, of molten metal, and of the absolute stillness that follows a nearby thunderclap.

  The last assassin, the one who had initially fled the inn and led them here, witnessed the carnage from the shadow of a nearby arch. He saw his companions: one beheaded, his head rolling slowly to a stop; another impaled and writhing in his own blood; the last, vaporized, reduced to smoking legs and a smear of ash on the wall. Terror, pure and primitive, froze his blood. This was not the dirty, quick job they had promised.

  He dropped his dagger. It fell to the ground with a metallic clack that sounded like a gunshot in the new silence. He stumbled backward towards the black mouth of the nearest alley, his eyes, now visible and wide with terror, fixed on the trio.

  —We know… we know you have it —he managed to say, his voice trembling but charged with a desperate threat—. They… they won't stop.

  And then, before anyone could move, he turned and melted into the darkness of the alley, his hurried footsteps rapidly fading away.

  —What we have? —Elara panted, getting up shakily, looking with horror at the smoking remains of her enemy and then at her own hands, which still glowed faintly—. The book. He means the book.

  —They know it's with us —Irina confirmed, wiping the thick, black blood from her blade with a piece of cloth torn from one of the corpses' tunics. Her voice was tense, urgent—. And they know we're still alive. This isn't over. We have to get back to the inn, gather our things and…

  DONG!

  A bell rang. Not a church bell, nor the guard change bell. This one was deeper, more profound, a giant bronze heartbeat that wasn't just heard, but felt. It vibrated in the cobblestones under their feet, in their teeth, in the bones of their chests. It was the Siege Bell, hung in the highest tower of Oskara's Outer Wall. A sound not heard since the last guild rebellion seventy years ago.

  BOOM!

  The ground jumped. Literally. A seismic jolt made them stagger. It wasn't thunder. It was the impact of something massive, unimaginably heavy, striking the walls or the earth beyond.

  From the north, in the direction of the Main Gate, a column of fire and debris rose into the sky, illuminating the low clouds with a malignant orange glow. And then, the screams. Not tens, not hundreds. Thousands. A chorus of pure terror, agony, absolute chaos, that began as a distant murmur and swelled into a wave of sound that swept the city, filling every alley, every square.

  —What in the hells…? —Vael looked north, and for the first time since they'd known him, the mask of distraction and foolishness vanished completely. His face was a smooth slate of absolute attention, his green eyes reflecting the distant fire-glow.

  —To the tower! —ordered Irina, pointing to a city watch lookout post, a wooden and stone structure with an exterior spiral staircase leading to a balcony—. We need to see! NOW!

  They raced up the spiral stairs, their feet slipping on the worn stone steps. The wind, which in the square was just a breeze, was a frigid gale up here, lashing their faces and snatching their breath. Reaching the upper balcony, an open platform with a rusty iron railing, the view that unfolded before them stole their breath, their thoughts, their hope.

  Oskara, the proud northern capital, was beginning to burn. Not in one spot. In dozens. Disaster-fires dotted the city, especially near the northern and western walls. But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was the horizon.

  Beyond the walls, whose enormous gates seemed to be… wide open or simply gone, under the cold, pale light of the moon and the dancing glow of the flames, an ocean was moving.

  An army.

  Not hundreds, like the horde that had taken Grey Gorge. They were tens of thousands. An endless tide, a living tapestry of gray, black, and dark brown that stretched as far as the eye could see, advancing slowly, implacably, towards the city. The sound it produced wasn't of military marches, but a low roar, a monotonous, horrible grinding of thousands of feet dragging, of armor creaking, of a collective hunger resonating in the air.

  And within that tide, like living siege towers, like islands of pure horror, were the silhouettes. Not one. Not two. Dozens. Hundreds, perhaps. The gigantic, ungainly shapes of the Laughing Men. Some dragged entire trees used as battering rams. Others carried chains and hooks. They walked among the tide of lesser Undead like gods of butchery, their steps shaking the earth even at this distance.

  Irina gripped the iron railing, her knuckles white as snow. Her face, illuminated by the distant fire, was as pale as the marble of the Scribes' Tower busts.

  —They've come back… —she whispered, and her voice was the sound of inner surrender—. It wasn't a horde. It was the vanguard. And they've brought… the whole family.

  Vael said nothing. He stood by the railing, motionless, watching the city's end. The flames of Oskara burned reflected in his green eyes, dancing in their depths, giving him an inhuman, ancient aspect, like a statue of a forgotten god contemplating the collapse of a world it never cared for. There was no fear on his face. No surprise. Only a cold, analytical attention, and perhaps, in the faintest line of his mouth, the beginning of something that could be… boredom.