The Iron Revolution Chapter 66: No Witnesses

Chapter 66: No Witnesses

The bolts hit the floor.

Not halfway to their targets, not even close. They dropped at the feet of the n who had fired them, iron heads dragging the shafts down before they had gone three feet. The impacts ca in a ragged series against the wood, uneven because the shots had co from different directions and each bolt had fallen on its own path.

Then the n followed.

Those in the doorways went sideways first, their bodies catching and twisting them before they could strike the floor. The ones who had stepped farther into the room slamd down at broken ankles. One took the blow on a shoulder, one on a knee.

The weight of the fall pressed through them unevenly, and what ca next was the sa in every case. The sound of air forced out of lungs that had no room left to breathe.

The lamps were still burning on the low table.

Aestrith reached up and threw back her hood in one motion.

Her face had gone pale, the kind of white that ca on all at once after a hard exertion. Beorn had seen it before, after the mine drainage, after the wall, and it was the sa now, only faster. She looked at the room, then at him, and the expression on her face was not one for conversation. It was the look of soone checking a result.

"Leave Wulfric," he said.

She held the field a mont longer.

Then it changed.

What followed was not sothing Beorn watched in full. He was already moving toward Eadric, who lay face-down on the wooden boards with one arm bent under him and his chest working hard just to keep him alive under the pressure still crushing him.

The sounds from the other side of the room were specific enough that he did not need to see them to know what was happening.

First the sharp cracks buried under weight. Bone giving way under pressure it was never ant to take. Then the wet sounds that followed, softer but worse, the compression of things inside the body as the force continued to press down.

Then the the next part. Short, broken grunts forced out of crushed lungs, each one smaller than the last as the pressure reduced what air they could pull in. So tried to shout, yet their voices were stretched thin and cut off halfway, turning into raw, animal sounds that had nothing left to them.

The boards took the blood.

The room emptied of noise over the space of half a minute, until only the lamps remained, and Wulfric’s thin, broken sounds, and Eadric’s strained breathing.

Beorn crouched beside Eadric and lowered himself to the man’s level because that was how he spoke to people.

Eadric’s eyes were still alive. The rest of him had only what the crushed chest permitted, which was very little. His face was pressed to the floorboards, one cheek flattened in the lamp light.

"It’s a sha, really." Beorn said.

He kept his gaze on the man’s eyes.

"I could’ve used your knowledge of Ashmark. If only you had made the right decision."

He drew a knife from his coat.

With one motion, he pushed it through fabric, skin and muscle, puncturing Eadric’s heart.

Then he crossed the room to Wulfric and crouched again.

Wulfric had fallen against the side of the table, his face turned down at an ugly way, his eyes tracking Beorn with the look of who had exhausted every trick he had and found none of them worth anything.

The warmth had gone out of him. What was left was terror, bare and exposed, the kind he had managed to hide in every eting before this.

Beorn let the silence sit for a mont.

"I don’t know whether Coss expected

to co here without planning for a trap."

He tilted his head, "Or whether he sent you because he wanted to see what I would do when it happened."

He shifted his weight and kept Wulfric pinned under his stare.

"Whether you were supposed to live and report, or whether he was willing to sacrifice you for the chance. It doesn’t matter."

He reached down, fast and hard.

"You’re alive because you know things I need. That is the only reason."

He struck Wulfric hard enough to drop him cleanly, then stood.

Aestrith released the field.

The exhale that followed was loud, rougher, the sound of a power pushed too far and snapping back toward rest.

She braced one hand on the table and kept it there. Her shoulders stayed level, but the steadiness took effort.

"How are you?" Beorn said.

Aestrith glanced at him, then down at the blood on the boards.

"Fine," she said.

A pause followed, shorter than a breath.

"Don’t worry about ," she said, quieter this ti.

He looked at her. She looked at the room they were standing in.

The blood had spread across the boards, gathering in the low gaps, threading along the wood, finding the wall. Both lamps still burned on the table. The nearer one threw its light across the floor at a glow that caught the pooling blood and turned it into broken reflections, red and shifting, with the room’s bodies bent inside them.

Beorn’s own outline was there sowhere, caught in the dark shimr, but not cleanly enough to make out.

He stared at it. She was looking too, or at so part of the room that ant the sa thing.

When their eyes t, there was nothing left in the warehouse for either of them to perform for. Neither spoke. The mont was exactly as it was, and what it had made of the room was plain in the blood on the boards.

Then Beorn said, "You should go before I bring the militia in."

Aestrith gave him a flat look.

"How are you going to explain what this room looks like?" she said.

Beorn did not look away from the blood.

"I am not," he said.

She studied him one more ti.

Then she pulled her hood up, drew her coat tight around herself, and crossed to the entrance without looking back at the bodies or the blood. The door opened and shut behind her.

Beorn looked down at the floor.

The lamp on the table still burned. Its light lived in the blood, warm and amber, like tallow at night, and in the pooled, shattered shine his own reflection stood there without turning away.