The Lawless Man With A Thousand Chains

010 Rampage

Damon used perhaps a twentieth of what he had.

The punch met the Porsche's nose at the exact instant the bumper reached him.

The sound was a single enormous boom, thunder made at ground level. It rolled out across the ridge and put birds up out of the trees for half a kilometer.

A shockwave went down the road. Every window in the gatehouse a hundred meters uphill hummed in its frame.

And the car stopped.

Not slowed. Not skidded. Stopped, as if the mountain had reached out and taken hold of it.

The hood crumpled inward around his fist like foil closing over a stone.

The engine block folded, and the frame buckled in a long ripple back through the doors.

The rear wheels came off the ground. The whole chassis stood vertical for a full second, then slammed back down.

The front end had buried itself thirty centimeters into the asphalt.

Damon lowered his smoking fist and rolled the shoulder once. He had not moved his feet.

The driver's door came off its hinges with one pull.

A young woman lay slumped over the wheel. The airbag never fired, because the car had died faster than its own sensors.

White blouse, tailored skirt, red heels against the pedals. The watch on her wrist cost more than the car.

Damon pressed two fingers to her throat.

Her heart was racing and her skin was cold and damp.

Even unconscious, there were tension lines around her eyes.

"Weeks," he said. "You've been walking around with this for weeks."

He laid his palm flat over her heart, and went very still.

Something was moving in her chest.

Not the heart. Something wrapped around it, wound into her like wire through a wreath.

Cold as deep water. Vicious as acid.

It recoiled from his touch, then pressed back against it with appetite.

Rampage energy.

He had felt it once before, in a training hall on the roof of the world. Periander Fox had held a thread of it between two fingers, no bigger than a candle flame.

"This is the other path. Not a corrupted version of what I teach you. Its equal, and its opposite."

"What does it do, Master?"

"Where sovereign force restores and holds, this one unmakes. It can't be tamed and it doesn't serve anybody. It only ever gets aimed."

"Then who uses it?"

"Men who want a thing gone and don't care what's standing next to it."

He let the thread gutter out between his fingers.

"Four people alive can work it well. One of them can do more than that, and if you ever see his work you'll know it on sight."

Damon knew it on sight.

This was no wild strike.

Somebody had folded it and wound it and worked it down until it would sit quiet inside a living person for days. Then they gave it a schedule.

Kronos had been out for three weeks.

Under Damon's palm, the woman made a small sound.

"The meeting," she said. "Tell them I'm coming."

The thing in her chest heard her voice and pulled itself tighter.

Then again. Faster.

Damon counted the gaps. Each was shorter than the last.

It was winding up to go off, and it had seconds left, not minutes.

When it did, everything inside a hundred meters of this road would stop existing. The car, the trees, the woman, and the road itself.

Damon moved.

He lifted her clear of the wreck in one motion. She weighed nothing, she was burning with fever, and her heart was going faster than a body can stand for long.

He couldn't do this on a public road, and the nearest hospital was forty minutes down the mountain.

Turner Mansion's outer wall stood four meters high, thirty paces up the slope.

Damon set his feet and jumped.

He cleared the wall with her held against his chest and landed on the lawn without a sound. A second bound took him across the gardens and in through the open rear doors.

He laid her on the bed in the nearest room.

"Hold still. This won't take long."

She was worse in the light. Her lips had gone blue at the edges and the blouse was soaked through.

Under the fabric, a shadow was sliding around beneath the skin above her heart, and it had got fast.

One technique takes rampage energy out of a living person without killing them on the way out.

Periander Fox had taught it to him across a single winter.

"Soul Binding isn't medicine. It's a trade. You take what's killing them into yourself and you hold it."

"And nothing else can hold it?"

"Nothing else in this world. That is precisely why I built you."

The old man had closed the book in his lap.

"One day something will come along big enough to test that. When it does, you'll already know what to do."

Damon rolled his sleeves to the elbow and put his hand over her heart.

The shadow stopped moving.

It was about to blow, and it would take the whole mountain with it.