The Lawless Man With A Thousand Chains

005 Above the Ceiling

Four minutes later the door opened again, and this time it came off one of its hinges.

The man who came through it wore white from his collar to his shoes. Broad, thick-necked, heavy mutton-chop whiskers.

Twenty enforcers filled the corridor behind him.

This was the Iceman, and he ran most of Dorne City's underworld. The white suits were famous.

The name came from how many people turned up in the harbor every winter.

He took the room in with one sweep of his eyes.

Two men folded on the carpet and two more in a hole in the wall.

Lila crying, and one young stranger sitting in a chair without a mark on him.

The Iceman had walked into a hundred rooms like this one. Cheap muscle, too stupid to have asked whose city he was standing in.

He priced the young man at nothing and stopped thinking about him.

Then he walked over to Daryl and put a boot into his ribs.

"Your stupid games again."

"Apologies, Mr. Iceman. Lila wanted a new car."

The Iceman turned his back on him and looked at Damon, who hadn't moved.

"These idiots ran a scam on you. That's their business, and they'll bleed for it on their own time."

The friendliness went out of his voice completely.

"But you put hands on my crew in my city, and that has a price. Here's my generosity.

"Break both your own wrists and walk out of here alive. Refuse, and you don't walk out at all."

Damon wasn't listening. He was reading, and it took him three seconds.

The big man's weight sat wrong on his heels. His hips turned half a degree short, in a way twenty years of swagger had been built to cover.

There was a pallor at two points on his throat, where certain channels ran shallow.

Eight years in Tartarus had taught Damon to read a body across a room.

"You were born impotent," he said.

Every man in the corridor stopped breathing at once.

"Nobody treated it because nobody ever diagnosed it. Every doctor you hired was looking in the wrong system, and you've paid a great many of them."

Damon tilted his head, mildly curious about the answer.

"Does the price change if I fix it?"

The Iceman's neck went dark red, and then darker.

Specialists on three continents had failed to put a name to that secret. It had cost him a marriage and eleven years of silence.

A boy in prison clothes had said it out loud, in front of every man who worked for him.

He lunged.

The right hook came in with two hundred and forty pounds behind it and a lifetime of finished arguments. Damon caught it in his left palm without standing up.

The fist stopped dead. Nothing in Damon's arm moved at all.

Every man in that corridor had watched the Iceman finish arguments with that hand. Two of them had seen it go through a car door.

It had just been caught by somebody who hadn't bothered to stand up.

His right hand blurred. Five strikes walked down the big man's middle too fast to count.

Then one open palm took him in the chest and lifted him off the floor.

The Iceman crossed the room in the air. He hit the wall hard enough to bring the curtain rail down on top of him.

He slid down the wall to the carpet, gasping.

Damon rolled his sleeve back down and looked at him.

"Congratulations. Your condition is cured."

He glanced at the hole in the wall and the two men lying in it.

"That'll be a hundred grand. For the medical services."

Twenty enforcers went rigid. Their boss was on the floor, and the man who put him there had just billed him for it.

Hands went inside jackets.

"STOP."

The Iceman was on his feet with one hand pressed low against his own body.

His face was doing something none of his men had ever seen it do.

The most feared man on the docks stood there with tears in his eyes.

"I can feel it," he said. "It's working. It's working."

He looked at Damon, and every fact he had about this young man rearranged itself around a new one.

The strength made sense, and so did the speed.

The insolence made the most sense of all. A man who could do that had no reason on earth to be polite to a gangster.

"You're not a doctor."

His voice dropped.

"You're an arcane master. A true one.

"Master, I apologize for the room and the misunderstanding and all of it. If I had known who was sitting in here, I'd never have come up those stairs."

"Enough."

Damon dropped into the armchair by the window and put his feet up.

"Pay the hundred grand, take your people, and go. I'm using this room tonight and I've had a long day."

The Iceman produced a black debit card and held it out with both hands, bent over it like a man laying something on an altar. It was the particular black that bank managers are trained to recognize on sight, and never to question.

"I wouldn't dare call it payment, Master. Call it a gift."

Daryl's survival instinct finally caught up with him. He went down on his knees and dragged Lila down with him.

"Forgive us, sir. Never again, I swear it on my mother."

Damon dropped the card on the nightstand and closed his eyes.

"Don't run that scam on anybody else. Now get out, all of you."

They were almost through the door when he spoke again without opening his eyes.

"One more thing. I lost a canvas bag at the airport tonight. Find it."

"Consider it done, Master. If my people fail you, you can have my head as an apology."

The door shut behind them without a sound.

In the corridor the Iceman pulled his crew in close. He dropped his voice so low they had to lean in.

"Everything. I want everything about that man.

"Where he came from, what he wants in Dorne, who he answers to. I want it by morning."

Lila was still shaking.

"Mr. Iceman, is he really so important? He's only one man."

"Only."

The Iceman turned on her, and there was pity in it.

"You fools have no idea what you walked into tonight."

He held up one thick finger.

"You've heard me talk about the ceiling. Tempered Force, my level, and there's a handful of us in this city.

"Above that is Inner Illumination. I've met two such men in my life, and I poured drinks for both of them with both hands."

A second finger.

"What that man used tonight is above the ceiling. Above both ceilings.

"The old lineages have a name for it. I heard it exactly once, from a dying master who said it like a priest talking about God."

He looked back at the closed door of Room 256.

"Sovereign arts. And a birth defect that no hospital on earth could even find, undone in five seconds, as an afterthought."

His voice dropped again.

"There have been whispers this past week. About the North Pole facility.

"About a man they kept in there that even the monsters obeyed. They call him the Phantom."

He straightened his white jacket with both hands.

"Find out where that young man came from. Quietly, and respectfully. Because if he is who I think he is, then as of tonight the sky over Dorne City has a new owner, and we are the only people in it who know."