Weakness rippled through me, and I lowered the wand, meeting Levistus’s eyes. “Not effective enough,” I told him.
Levistus’s face twisted in anger, but I was already firing. The final bullet sent a shock wave along the ice wall’s major fracture and split it open. With a keening crash, a whole section of the ice wall from floor to ceiling collapsed.
Levistus tried to throw up a smaller wall of ice to block the hole. I broke into a run, firing from the hip, twisting the futures as I did. The bullets intercepted the ice as it formed, shattered it before the structure could take shape, and then I was through, with nothing between me and Levistus but empty floor.
Levistus snapped a command word. From one of the pedestals, something metal unfurled and leapt towards me. I dived and rolled, catching a glimpse of the thing as it flew overhead: a black metal chain, hooked and barbed and glowing with red light. Instead of falling, the thing arrested its forward motion, then reversed course, accelerating back towards me.
In the moment’s breathing space I dropped the MP7 and drew my dispel focus. As the chain enveloped me, I stepped in and struck. The chain was some sort of enormously powerful focus item, animated with a simple governing intelligence, and it was shielded against dispel magic. The fateweaver found a chink in the protections, and the dispel attack caused the focus spells to go wild and fail. Metal barbs lashed my back, but they were already lifeless and falling away. The chain clattered to the floor.
The seconds it had taken me to deal with the chain had given Levistus the chance to open the range. His shield was up, a translucent barrier of crystalline light, and a nimbus of blue energy glowed around him. Ice shards materialised behind and above his shoulders, hovering in the air and pointing towards my heart.
The ice shards flew at me as though fired from a gun. I leapt to one side and they shattered on the floor and against the pedestal behind. Before I’d even landed, more were materialising and Levistus was firing again, with still more after that. It wasn’t a single attack but a barrage, like a machine gun that never ran out of bullets.
I dodged, ducking and twisting under the rain of ice. The shards were thin slivers of blue energy, needle-sharp, and in the futures I saw them spear through my flesh as though it were paper. Levistus’s control was tight, directed by his iron will, but there were too many of the shards for him to focus on them all, and in that gap the fateweaver did its work, opening up safe paths through the deadly rain.
The room flashed blue, the light illuminating Levistus’s face. I didn’t watch his eyes; all my attention was on the lines of the futures, thread-thin paths of safety forking through a sea of death. An ice sliver took a few hairs off my head; another brushed my sleeve. Cold seeped into me but my armour seemed to pulse with life, holding back the chill.
Levistus was getting closer. I’d started thirty feet away; now the distance was closer to twenty. Every now and again there’d be a gap in the barrage, and I’d use the opportunity to take a step forward. Step by step, Levistus drew nearer.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see strain on Levistus’s face, mixed with concentration. He backed away, giving ground. The barrage of ice didn’t slow: shard after shard materialised and flashed out towards me, but as each attack came out, I marked it and plotted a new course so that it would miss. My path formed a zigzag, cutting back and forth but always turning towards Levistus.
Levistus came up against the wall. He tried to escape to the right and I moved to block him. Barely ten feet separated us now. The barrage intensified, growing wilder, faster, but all that did was open up more chinks for the fateweaver. The sound was a constant roar, the keening crash of ice shards striking the floor and walls, the scuff of footsteps.
A final step and I was within arm’s reach. Levistus was right in front of me, close enough to touch. His shield shimmered, a glowing barrier. I was so close now that the shield was an obstacle against the rain of shards, and I moved to use it as cover, placing it between me and Levistus each time a new icicle materialised. The paths of safety were wider now, and I was able to turn my attention away from keeping myself alive, and towards Levistus.
Levistus’s shield shone, reflecting the image of the knife in my hand. The blade glanced off the steel-hard planes, but with each strike I was probing for a weakness. Levistus was spending most of his energy on defence now; only the occasional ice shard made it around the shield to slash down. I dodged them all, searching, seeking.
Levistus tried to reinforce his shield, change his attack pattern to drive me back. The futures shifted and for an instant there was a crack in his defences.
The fateweaver drove into that crack like a wedge. The future I needed opened up, one tiny possibility amid thousands, and my divination found it.
Levistus’s shield shattered as I drove my knife through it point-first, the edge gleaming. Shards of frozen magic spun in the air as I rammed the blade into Levistus’s gut. My impact slammed him up against the wall. I saw the shock in Levistus’s eyes, felt his clothes as I gripped them with my free hand, then I twisted the knife, pulled it out, and drove it between his ribs and into his heart.
Levistus and I stared into each other’s eyes from inches away. The shock in his eyes became pain, then that familiar look of surprise that you only see on dying men. I felt Levistus shudder, warm blood oozing over my fingers, slick on the knife handle. Then those odd colourless eyes seemed to fade and the life went out of them. Levistus slid down the wall. I let him down slowly, then let him crumple to the floor.
I looked down at Levistus’s body. His face was expressionless again, blank in death as it had been in life. There was blood on his clothes, the wall, my hands.
Mechanically I wiped the knife on Levistus’s robes and sheathed it, then straightened and looked around. The shadow realm seemed suddenly very empty, half-real without its owner. Some of the pedestals and shelves had been destroyed in the battle; others were intact, their contents radiating magic.
There were enough treasures here to make any normal man rich for a hundred lifetimes, but I could sense active spells in the background, and I didn’t know what I might have triggered or what might be coming. My body was still hyped from the adrenaline but I could feel exhaustion creeping up on me. I needed to finish and get out.
I took a few things. A crystal vial, seemingly fragile, with something glowing inside. A headband of beaten copper, dull and tarnished, worked into the shape of a crown of feathers. Finally, there was a long, spear-like weapon, suspended in some kind of containment field. The haft was black, and though it had been a long time, I thought I recognised it as a Russian design called a sovnya. Both it and the copper headband were imbued items, and possibly the vial too. I held them cautiously at arm’s length, keeping a neutral mental posture, carefully not attempting to claim them, but even so I could feel them stir and uncoil as they reacted to my presence.
I gated out and through a series of staging points, jumping from continent to continent.
Night had long since fallen by the time I got back to the Hollow, and as the gate closed behind me, it was all I could do not to collapse. The aftershock of the combat was starting to hit, and I wanted to run away and fall asleep and throw up. I dumped the imbued items and my weapons, then stripped off my armour and fell into bed. I was asleep in seconds. Dimly, I was afraid of what dreams would come, but if I had any, I was too far gone to remember.
—
There’s a very specific feeling when you wake up in the morning with something hanging over you. It makes your stomach and heart sink, a mixture of anxiety over what you did and worry over what’s going to happen next. When you’re young, you get it for things like an overdue library book, or a fight with another child. As you get older, you outgrow worries like that, but you don’t outgrow the feeling at all—you just get it for different reasons. For some people, it’ll be fear of a bad grade, or an angry manager. For others, it’s money, or the police.