Episode 126 · The Keystone

Maxim stood. He had no crowbar. He could not put weight on his ankle. He stood anyway, on one leg, and put himself in the path of the limping Hunter with his arms spread, the way he had placed his truck crosswise on the bridge.

— No one passes here, he said.

The Hunter hit him. Maxim took the blow in the chest and did not move. He caught the man by the coat and stayed. He did not leave first.

Krista threw the stone past the uninjured Hunter, into the water, where one of the thin columns was rising.

— The blade! she shouted. Soles, throw it! To me!

The lie came out perfect, without an edge. The uninjured Hunter turned toward her for half a second, as the man at the pool had. Half a second was enough for Tesa. She went in the way she went in when a guard dropped in the ring: from the side, shoulder and cast, carrying both of them into the warm water.

Only Varren remained.

He stood between Soles and that place, arms open, his face wet with light.

— Me, Soles, he said. I’m here. You know exactly where.

He did know exactly where. Phenom knew too and was pushing him, without words, with the whole weight of a life in which killing had always been the cleanest solution. One step. One rising movement from below the ribs, the one he had made a hundred times in another life. And everything would end. Varren would get what he wanted. Soles would have his revenge. And both of them would remain forever on this bank, the only man who had come and the man he had come for.

Soles walked past him.

He did not go around him. He passed so close their shoulders touched, and Varren remained with his arms open, looking after him with a face Soles never saw.

He put his boot on the foot of the slab and pushed upward.

Water ran down the tilted face. His sole slipped across a carved root, and his knee struck stone. He caught himself with his left palm. The torn skin burned; the forearm Varren had struck shook beneath his weight.

Below him, Maxim grunted under another blow. Soles tried to hurry. His boot slid again.

The grooves. Put the edge in, not the sole.

He lowered his weight and set the side of his boot into the carved roots. It held. He tested it before lifting his knee, keeping the blade away from the stone in his right hand. Behind him the water splashed; Tesa was still in it with the other Hunter. He could hear her struggling for breath.

He wanted to look. He kept his eyes on the next foothold.

Three steps up the face. The roots, then the trunk. At the cut branch, the voices pressed so close that he almost put his foot where the stone ended. He felt for the edge with his toe and stopped short.

At the lip there was only water below, steaming gold, and the threads standing up out of it close enough to touch. He stayed low until his breathing settled enough to trust his hand.

He crouched on the edge and reached out with his left hand.

He could feel it beneath his palm, in the air just beyond the lip, a hand’s height above the water: the place where everything bore its weight. It was not warm and it was not cold. It was heavy, like a door held shut with your shoulder for so long you no longer know why.

He raised the blade.

In the garden, Phenom stopped pushing. He looked at what Soles meant to do, head tilted slightly. He had never used the blade this way. Then his attention let go of the hilt and left Soles’s hand there alone.

Soles cut.

There was no sound. That was what he would remember all his life. There was no sound, and then everything sounded at once, differently.

The columns of water fell, all together, with a long splash like a brief summer rain. The golden light went out. The smell of wax and salt and snow disappeared. Tesa’s bell stopped in the middle of a toll.

In the garden, the figures began to withdraw.

Not all of them. Decimus went first, upright, looking once toward the place he had left for Soles beside him. Elias’s attention followed the falling water until Soles could no longer reach it. Leonatus stayed last.

The soldier put his hand on Soles’s shoulder, as he had in the dark beneath the slab.

Still standing.

His grip was firm. Soles had known the man shaking behind a cart, the boy carrying a friend toward warmth, the soldier dying with home in his mouth. He tried to keep hold of that hand.

Then he was gone.

Phenom remained beside the low plant, his hands empty. Soles still held the blade. The man had let him make a use of it that was not a killing; he was watching where it led. Soles did not know whether he approved.

The world grew heavy. Not the stones, not the water. The whole world, all at once, like a wet overcoat. Soles felt what he had until then sensed far away draw tight around him—the city, the hill, the bridge—and leave only the bank, the garden, the street beyond the fence. There was still a great deal. But it was no longer everything.

He dropped to his knees on the stone and breathed. Krista reached him first and knelt.

— Here, Soles said.

Krista did not answer. She took his cut hand in hers and held it.

Maxim lay on his back beside the limping Hunter, hands open on the stones, and Soles heard him say softly, astonished: “Nothing else is coming.” Tesa came out of the water soaked to the waist, the shattered cast held to her chest, and stopped to listen, with a child’s confusion on her face. Krista let go of Soles’s hand and looked at her right forefinger.

The ink stain was gone.

The uninjured Hunter came out of the water and tried to pass through the bank. His shoulder struck stone like stone. He stared at his hands with a fear Soles had never seen in any of them, hauled the limping man up from beside Maxim, and the two ran for the fence like ordinary men, their clothes catching on the wire.

The first one did not run.

He had tried to withdraw into the bank where Varren had slammed him, and had made it halfway at the moment of the cut. His shoulder and right arm protruded from the stone cracked in a star, the gloved hand open. The rest of him was inside. He did not move.

No one went near him.

Varren stood beside the folding chair, his arms still slightly open. Then he let them fall. He took one step toward Soles and his knees failed. He no longer had a mountain inside him. He caught the chair back, sat down slowly, and raised his face.

He was crying. Or laughing. Soles could not tell. Perhaps Varren could not either.

— They’re gone, he said. Two of them. Diplomat and Doctor. They’re not in my garden anymore.

He looked at Soles and smiled through the wetness on his face.

— And nothing hurts anymore. I asked you for one death, Soles. You gave me silence. You don’t even know what you gave me.

Soles stood. His rib hurt, and his palm, where the stitches had torn again. He looked at the man in the folding chair, at his tired, clear eyes, and understood him. That was the worst part. He understood all of him.

He did not forgive him.

Sirens sounded from the canal. Krista took out her phone, looked at the screen, and put it away without saying anything.

Soles bent and dipped his hand into the water at the edge of the bank where the light had risen. He kept his palm beneath the surface for a moment.

The water was still warm.