They fought in the north market, because it was already ruined and there was nothing left in it to break.
Korran chose the ground and the hour and the terms, and set them out in front of the town like a man reading a contract, which was, Elliot understood by then, exactly what he was doing.
"He wins, he gets the north road. Valley, passes, and what's in them." The Bull stood with his left arm out of its strapping for the first time since the fire, testing it, wincing. "I win, he takes the east road with my men riding him to the county line and he doesn't come back. No coin changes hands. Nobody else steps in ", his eyes went over the crowd, and over Lyssara, and over Vessa Turl, and rested a moment on Adam " ,nobody, and when one of us can't stand, it's finished. Anyone got a problem with that?"
Nobody did. Two hundred people had come to watch and not one of them made a sound.
"Right," said Korran. He rolled his shoulders, and the marks that were left on him lit, dimmer than four days ago, patchier, whole stretches of forearm staying dark. "Come on, then, lad."
Understand where we are, Etreuf said. He is wounded, he is a quarter spent, he has one arm that is not working properly, and he will still probably kill you. That is not despair. That is the position.
Then what do I do?
You last, said the demon. That is all today is. You last, and you make him spend, and somewhere in it a door opens or it does not.
Elliot drew both daggers.
The first thing that happened was that nothing worked.
He gave Etreuf the fire and the demon put a burning palm into the Bull's ribs at full commitment, the black-red threads racing out, and hit a tattoo, and drained away, exactly as they had in the hall. Korran didn't even look down this time.
But the daggers were different, and both of them found that out in the same half-second.
The fire dagger went in.
Not deep, Etreuf was moving past, it was a passing cut along the outside of the arm, but the blade opened Korran Uldar's skin like ordinary flesh, six inches, and blood came out of it, and the whole square made a noise, because that was a thing that did not happen.
Korran stopped and looked at his own arm with an expression of pure academic interest.
"Well," he said. "There we are."
Then he took the fight seriously, and it got much worse.
He never let the blades near him again. That was the thing Elliot could not solve. Korran had twenty-two years of fighting things faster than himself and he simply refused the geometry, kept his damaged side away, kept his weight where he could shed a step, made Elliot come to him across open ground every time. He didn't chase. He didn't have to. He'd take a cut on the forearm to close the distance and then hit him once, and once was enough.
Elliot went down four times in the first two minutes.
The fourth time, a fist caught him under the ribs he'd already cracked and put him on his hands and knees in the ash of the market with his vision going white at the edges, and he heard Adam shouting from somewhere and Vessa telling Adam to shut up.
Stay down, said Etreuf.
No.
I am not being cruel. Stay down and take the east road. There is no version of this where,
Elliot got up.
He got up badly, in stages, using a piece of broken stall frame, and the square watched him do it in absolute silence, and Korran Uldar stood eight feet away and watched him do it too.
And something crossed the Bull's face.
Elliot saw it. He'd remember it for the rest of his life. It wasn't pity and it wasn't anger. It was recognition, the look of a man who has just watched something he used to do, a long time ago, before he was the law on the plain and had a chair built for him.
"Twenty years since I got up like that," Korran said, half to himself.
Then he hit him again.
The second thing that happened was Adam.
He came in at minute five, when Elliot was down for the seventh time and not getting up as fast, and he came in the way Adam did everything, badly, loudly, and without any thought at all for himself.
He had a piece of granary beam in both hands, about half his own weight of it, and he swung it at the back of Korran Uldar's knee, and it was the bravest thing Elliot had ever seen anybody do and it accomplished exactly nothing.
Korran turned.
He was tired. That was the thing Elliot understood afterward, when he'd had months to take the moment apart. Korran was four days off a Calamity that had spent a quarter of his life's work, he had one arm that wasn't right, he'd been hit eleven times by a boy with a blade that could actually cut him, and he was tired, and a man who is tired reaches with the arm that works and does not calibrate.
He caught Adam by the throat and lifted him off the ground one-handed.
He meant to put him aside. Elliot knew that, later, with total certainty, and it never once helped.
Because what he saw, from the ground, in that half-second, was his oldest friend's boots kicking eight inches above the dirt of a burnt market, in the hand of the man who had put him through a wall, and Adam's face going the color of a fish belly, and his hands scrabbling at fingers like bollards, and the sound he made, which was no sound at all.
Something in Elliot went absolutely quiet.
His hand was at his throat. He didn't remember putting it there. His fist had closed on the small hard shape of the coin through his shirt and he had already torn it off the cord.
Break it, said Etreuf.
One word. No argument. No pressure. He'd waited three weeks to not have to ask twice.
Elliot broke it.
It took nothing. That was the obscenity of it. Sixteen years of iron worn smooth against his skin, the only thing his mother ever put in his hands, a locked box that had made two god-forged blades come apart in their room, and it snapped between his thumb and forefinger like a dry twig.
Then the world went out.
There was no blast. Nothing was thrown. Later, when the town told the story, and Serenia would tell this story for fifty years, the thing they all agreed on was how quiet it was.
The dark came out of a boy's fist, and it did not spread like smoke or pour like water. It arrived. One instant the market was full of hard morning light and two hundred people, and the next instant it was not, and the edge of it was clean, a wall of nothing standing forty feet across the ruined square with sunlight on one side of it and no such thing as light on the other.
Every lamp still burning in the north street went out at the same moment. So did the cook fires. So did the smoulder still working in the wreck of the grain exchange, four days after anyone had been able to put it out.
Elliot stood inside it and could see perfectly.
That was the first thing, that the dark was not blindness. It had removed light from the square, and it had not removed him, and he stood in a black with no bottom to it and saw the whole market laid out in something that was not sight and worked better.
The second thing was that it was pleased.
He felt it come up his arm from the two halves of the coin and go through him and out, and it was not power the way Etreuf's fire was power, the fire was a tool, borrowed, with a temperature and a will behind it. This was not lent to him. It came out of him like a held breath finally let go, like a thing that had been folded up small in a small dark place for sixteen years, and when it unfolded it knew him, and it went where he wanted before he finished wanting it.
Elliot. Etreuf's voice was strange and very far away. Elliot, I can feel it.
So can I.
No. Listen to me. And there was something in the demon's voice that Elliot had heard exactly twice before, in a marsh and in a tomb, and did not want to hear a third time. I can feel it. It is in the body. It is in me. He reached, and Elliot felt him do it, felt the demon put out a hand toward the dark the way he put out a hand toward his own fire, expecting nothing, expecting to be refused.
The dark came to him.
...That is not possible, said Etreuf.
Across the square, in the middle of a black that had eaten the morning, Korran Uldar stood holding a boy off the ground and could not see a single thing.
Twenty-two years.
That was what Elliot took off him in the next nine seconds, and he knew it while he was doing it.
The Bull's entire craft was reading. Elliot had watched him do it for six minutes, refusing the geometry, taking the cut to close the distance, never once being where the blade was going to be. A man does not survive a hundred and forty-one hunts on open ground by being strong. He survives by seeing it coming.
Korran dropped Adam. Elliot heard him hit the dirt and cough, alive, alive, and put his back to the well and turned his head, listening, with his good arm up.
He'd never had to do that before in his life.
Elliot came in from his blind side, which was every side.
The first cut was the fire dagger across the back of the leg, and it went through the tattoo there and the tattoo did not stop it. The second was the void dagger under the arm, drinking, and where it touched, the orange-gold light of the marks around it guttered, went out, in a spreading patch, the way frost takes a window.
The dark, Etreuf said, catching it. It is not just hiding you. It is putting his out.
Korran roared and swung at the place the cut had come from and hit nothing, because Elliot had already stepped through the space where the blow was going to be, and he had not calculated it, and Etreuf had not driven him, and afterward he could never explain it except to say that in the dark he could feel where things weren't.
He came up inside the Bull's guard with both blades crossed.
Fire in the right. Void in the left. And around them both, running down his arms and off the edges of the steel, the dark, braided into them, filling the space the blades moved through, unmaking the distance between the cross of the daggers and the middle of a man's chest.
He drove them in.
Korran Uldar went off his feet, across nine feet of burnt market, and through the standing back wall of the grain exchange.
The dark went out.
Morning came back all at once and it was appalling. Elliot stood in a square full of shocked light with two hundred people staring at him and his ears ringing and no idea, for a second, which way was up.
Adam was on his hands and knees six feet away, retching, breathing.
Alive.
Elliot's legs took him across the market to the hole in the wall on their own. He got to the edge of it and looked down.
Korran lay in the wreck of his own grain exchange on his back among the broken brick, and he was bleeding from the chest in two places in a cross, and he was looking up at the sky, and he was laughing.
It was a terrible sound, wet, and short, and entirely genuine.
"You..." He coughed. Blood came. "You bastard."
Elliot stood over him with both daggers in his hands.
And the dark came up.
It came without being called. It came up the backs of his arms and off the blades and pooled in the broken bricks around the Bull's body, and it wanted.Elliot felt it want, felt it lean, felt the whole simple appetite of it, and it would have been so easy, easier than breathing, easier than getting up the seventh time.
Do it, said Etreuf.
The demon's voice was very quiet and very reasonable.
He is the strongest man on this plain and he will heal, and in a year he will be strong again, and he will remember this square for the rest of his life. Do it now while he is on his back. There is no better moment and there will never be another one. A pause. And there is a hundred and forty-one of him lying there, Elliot. Twenty-two years of it. It comes loose when they die. All of it, all at once, and it would go into you, and the canyon would be gone.
Elliot's hands were shaking.
He wanted it. That was the part he never told anybody, not Adam, not Lyssara, not for years. Standing over a bleeding man in a broken wall with something new and enormous singing in his arms, he had wanted it, and the wanting had not felt foreign, and he could not tell, then or ever. How much of it was the dark and how much of it was him.
"No," he said.
Elliot
"No."
The dark went out of the bricks like water going down a drain.
Elliot dropped to one knee, because his legs had stopped negotiating, and put both daggers down in the rubble beside him, and looked at Korran Uldar.
"Fine," said the Bull. He was still smiling. It was the worst smile Elliot had ever seen and there was no malice in it at all. "Fine. You win."
They got him out of the wall on a door, because there wasn't a stretcher in Serenia big enough, and it took nine men.
Elliot sat down in the ash of the north market and stayed there a while.
His ribs had gone past hurting into a kind of loud hum. His hands were black to the wrist with something that wasn't soot and came off on his trousers as ordinary dirt. Somewhere behind him Vessa Turl was giving orders about the wounded in a voice that could have been describing a cart of turnips, and Lyssara was standing about four feet away not saying anything at all, which was, from her, a considerable statement.
Adam sat down next to him with a mark coming up around his throat like a collar.
"Don't," Elliot said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to say thank you."
"Yeah," said Adam hoarsely. "I was."
They sat there.
After a while Elliot opened his right hand.
Two pieces of iron lay in his palm. Small. Dull. The break was clean and dead flat, and the worn signs that no one in Hollowmere had ever been able to read ran off both edges into nothing, and whatever had been in it was not in it any more.
He turned them over twice, looking for something. There wasn't anything. It was two halves of a coin.
His other hand went up to his throat, to the cord that wasn't there.
Elliot, said Etreuf.
His voice had none of it, none of the dryness, none of the contempt, none of the three hundred years.
Yes?
I want to say something, and I want to say it now, because in an hour I will have thought better of it. A pause. I told you to break it. I have wanted it broken since the second night. And I want you to know that when it opened, the thing that came out of it came to me as well, it did not ask, it did not test me, it simply came, as though I had a right to it. Another pause, longer. That is the second time something in this world has answered you and included me without asking my permission, and I have no explanation for either, and I am your enemy's enemy and nothing more, and I do not understand why your inheritance keeps handing me things.
Elliot closed his fist around the two halves.
Maybe it can't tell us apart any more, he said.
Etreuf was quiet for a long moment.
Yes, he said. That is what frightens me.