SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Kesh put his free hand flat against the wall plate.

[Deepwater Press]. The air in the chamber thickened and everything in it gained weight. Trafalgar’s arms slowed as though he were swinging them through water, and the loose paper on the floor stopped drifting and lay flat.

Then the interior bulkhead came down between them.

It dropped out of the ceiling with a single hydraulic slam, cutting the chamber in half, and Trafalgar was on the wrong side of it with the furnace and the ledger on the other.

”He knows this building better than the engineers who built it,” Zafira said.

”He designed half the protocol.” Trafalgar hit the plate on his side and got nothing. ”Get him off the furnace. I need the cabinet.”

Zafira opened both hands and the chamber changed colour.

[Red Loom]. Crimson light spread out from her across the floor, the ceiling, the shelving and the sealed bulkhead, and inside that zone her threads stopped being lines she placed and became lines already waiting.

Kesh turned to face her.

She sent nine threads at once and he cut four out of the air with the spear, which told her what she needed about his reflexes. [Widow’s Stitch]. One took his left wrist, another sank in above his knee, and his next step came out crooked.

He corrected inside half a pace, and then his spear came around faster than a man his size had any business moving and took the shelving apart where she had been standing.

She was not there. [Marionette Grace]. Her own threads pulled her sideways and up, and she landed on the cabinet run with her weight already moving again.

”He’s Apex, Trafalgar, I can hold him and that’s all.”

”That’s all I need.”

On the other side of the bulkhead, Trafalgar had run out of options with the plate. Rhosyn put a hand on his shoulder.

She opened a passage two metres across and stepped him through into the far corner of the chamber, behind the cabinet run, and the crossing took less than a second.

’The barrier stops her going outside. Inside she can put me anywhere she can see.’

Kesh noticed. He hit the wall plate again and a second bulkhead dropped, cutting the cabinet run away from the furnace, and then he opened a service hatch in the floor and gave himself a route behind Zafira that had not existed a moment earlier.

[Sounding Line]. He thrust from six metres out and the strike arrived anyway, the pressure running ahead of the spear point and hitting Zafira in the sternum without the steel touching her.

She went off the cabinets and into the wall.

Rhosyn was already crossing. She came out of a fold on Kesh’s flank and put a fist into his ribs, [Blood Knot] taking hold on his shoulder as Zafira marked him from the floor.

Kesh turned into the punch rather than away from it, which was correct and cost Rhosyn her angle.

Trafalgar came off the cabinet run with Maledicta already moving.

[Godstep]. He arrived inside the spear’s reach and cut for the elbow, and Kesh brought the shaft across in time. Maledicta crashed against the dark steel, [Ruin Pulse] going through the contact a fraction after the metal met, and the shock reached the arm behind it.

That one landed properly. Kesh’s hand came off the shaft.

For about a second and a half his left hand did not close again.

He fixed it with his right, took the spear in a single-handed grip and drove Trafalgar back with a sweep that would have opened him from hip to shoulder if [Origin Guard] had gone anywhere else.

”Better,” Kesh said. ”Your commander friend never landed that one.”

…

Outside, Ithanne arrived at the landing with eleven of her own people and a writ in her hand.

”Lord Corvyn. The material behind that door relates to the death of Nyssara di Myrrhvale and I am entering under the authority of this office.”

”You’ll have to get through the lockdown first.”

”I’m aware. I want your order on the record before I do.”

Corvyn turned to the Tide captain. ”You told me the admiral holds admiralty authority for this facility.”

”He does, my lord.”

”Granted by whom?”

The captain said nothing. Corvyn had signed the deployment himself and knew exactly what was written on it, and a facility lockdown against a Myrrhvale magistrate was nowhere in those lines.

”He took it,” Corvyn said. ”He took it and put my name under it.”

Ithanne waited.

Corvyn looked at his own soldiers on the landing, and at the doors, and made the decision in about four seconds.

”Fleet withdraws from every access on this level. Now. All units off the doors and behind the line, weapons grounded, and Lady Ithanne’s people go through.”

Half the landing moved at once.

The other half looked at the Tide captain first.

They were still looking at him when the household guards behind Corvyn began to spread out, and for a moment the landing had Myrrhvale soldiers on two sides of one door with their hands on their weapons and nobody willing to speak first.

Corvyn stepped into the middle of it.

”Every man here swore to the house before he swore to the fleet. If anybody’s forgotten which order that goes in, say it now and I’ll hear it, and then I’ll have you off this landing in irons.”

Nobody said it.

The Tide captain lowered his hand and stood aside, and the rest of them followed him, and the engineers went back to the release.

…

Inside, Kesh was breathing heavily. It was small and it came and went. A catch at the top of each breath, a half-beat where his chest did not do what he asked, and he covered it by talking.

Zafira came off the wall and put four threads across the furnace mouth. [Crimson Sever]. The lines went hard and one opened Kesh’s forearm to the bone as he turned through them.

He barely looked at it. What he looked at was his own hand.

Trafalgar caught that much through the visor. Kesh glanced at the fingers of his left hand for about a quarter of a second, and what crossed his face registered a fact rather than a wound.

’He’s fought for eleven minutes against three of us. Of course his hands are going.’

Trafalgar filed it as fatigue and went back to work.

Kesh wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and there was blood on it. Nobody in that chamber found it strange, because Zafira had just opened his arm and Rhosyn had hit him twice in the ribs.

Then Kesh reached for the plate again and had to choose. The ledger under his arm, or the hand he needed for the controls.

He chose the controls.

The ledger went onto the table so he could work the plate with his good hand. A third bulkhead started down, and Rhosyn looked across the chamber at Trafalgar and did not need to be asked.

She opened the passage in front of him.

Trafalgar came out of it at the cabinet run, reached past the four ledgers Kesh had left behind, and put his hand on the original.