The Unfinished Form

Vale's next blow struck the broken rail.

Mali had moved it across her body with both hands, too slow to catch the blade where she wanted. Steel bit into the wood, slid and tore through the skin at the base of her thumb. She kept holding until the point went past her shoulder.

Then the rail split.

Vale wrenched his blade free. Deren was on the paving behind her, one hand pressed to his mouth. Anet had got two students beneath the open gallery. The court no longer moved as one body, but enough of its learned violence remained to make every yard dangerous.

The disc's branches contracted again.

Vale stopped.

At first Mali thought he had heard something. His head turned, not toward her but toward his own right hand. The short sword moved across his chest. He tried to correct its path.

It went on turning.

The return path was gone. The teacher who had supplied the most complete local sequence was still offering it a way to finish. The disc did not need to hate him. It needed an available conductor, and he had given it his next movement again and again until the difference between giving and being taken had disappeared.

He stared at the point.

The blade touched his robe above the heart.

Mali caught his wrist.

He was stronger. Her injured hand slipped. She set her forearm across his and felt the cut at her shoulder reopen. Steel pressed through grey cloth. A spot of blood widened beneath it.

Vale made a sound she had heard at the ferry, before Teren found breath enough to cry.

“Tell me to stop it,” she said.

“You can't.”

“Tell me.”

His left hand reached for her arm, trying to pull her away. Whether that was the arrangement defending itself or Vale wanting the last thing his body did to remain his, she could not tell. She did not have time to settle which person she was fighting.

“Tell me what you want.”

The point went deeper.

“Stop it,” he whispered.

She could not make his hand open. She could not complete a counter-form powerful enough to take the lesson away. He knew how she broke a grip. The local model had seen her kick, turn, abandon a clean guard for a fall. Another clever departure would become another thing it could anticipate.

She did the clumsy thing she could still do with the strength left in her.

She kicked behind his knee and fell with him.

The blade cut across his ribs instead of entering his chest. His head struck her shoulder. They hit the paving hard enough to empty her lungs. For a moment she could not see. Her hands remained around the wrist because letting go would be easier and she had not yet decided it was safe to be easy.

He still held the sword.

Anet knelt beside them.

“What?” she asked.

“His fingers.”

“Which?”

“One at a time.”

Deren came down on the other side, bleeding from his mouth. He reached for Vale's thumb. Vale screamed.

“Stop,” Mali said.

They stopped.

Vale shook his head desperately. Not at the pain, she realised. At the pause that let the blade begin its inward turn again.

“Keep going,” he said.

Deren looked at him. Vale repeated it. The words were ragged, unmeasured, nothing like the patient assurances he had offered a mason an empty cup over.

They worked the thumb free. Anet controlled the edge with a fold of her heavy sash, keeping it away from skin. Mali braced the wrist against the paving. Deren moved the next finger and had to stop when his own hand trembled too badly to hold it.

“Anet,” he said.

She took his place without waiting for an apology. It was not forgiveness. It was the position from which she could help.

The sword came free.

Mali pushed it beyond reach with her boot. It scraped across the stone and stopped under a bench. Nobody picked it up.

Vale lay looking at the sky. His right hand had not relaxed. The fingers curled against his palm, injured and empty. Blood seeped across the robe at his side.

“Hold there,” Mali told him, pointing with her chin because she could not lift a hand. He did not understand at first. Anet folded cloth against the wound and asked him to keep pressure on it. He managed with his left.

Above them, the disc's light narrowed to one hard point.

A dry crack passed through the glass.

Mali flinched. Nothing exploded outward. The branches folded into the disc as if a drawing were being pulled through the place it had begun. Then the surface shattered inward, fragments dropping through the gap around its collar into the chamber below.

Ember stayed where he was.

He heard glass strike stone, felt it against one forearm and held the bronze ends apart until the last pale current left them. When Boon said it was clear, he waited for the word to be repeated. Then he let the metal fall.

He sat beside it because his legs had begun to shake. The hammer lay within reach. He could not close either hand around its handle.

Across the city the crystalline wafers split.

Some people stopped in doorways, unable to explain why they were standing there. Some released a grip. Others could not. A sleeping woman woke and called for her daughter, who had never left the bedside. Meret continued moaning. Tovan stayed with her. No measure taken in the central court could make the separate injuries of thirty beds complete at once.

At the north gate, Hesh's short spear half gave way.

Wood cracked beneath the bar. She felt the weight drop and shouted. By then the porters had got a new support under one end, and three students stood where only she had been. The gate descended a hand's breadth, stopped, rose again under their combined effort.

Hesh pulled the broken ashwood free. The iron-headed half remained against the wall, useless for holding this weight but still hers. She looked at the split end, then at the last trolley going through.

“All right,” she said to no one in particular, and went to help the person pushing it.

At the cue desk Rin kept the feed disconnected. Sena returned with the child set safely beside her mother and took a turn watching the switch. Sori was standing on a bench, asking people to leave the lanes clear for healers. Mae had gone below for those who had chosen to remain and might now choose otherwise.

The performance had not resumed. The work did not need it to.

Mali lay beside Vale until she could breathe.

Anet asked whether she could move. Mali tried and nearly blacked out. Deren told someone to fetch Adra, then stopped giving orders long enough to ask the nearest student whether she had been hurt. The student nodded and began to cry.

Vale turned his head.

“Will it come back?”

“The hand?” Mali asked.

“The whole thing.”

She looked toward the broken disc. Above the roofs the rift remained, a narrow wound in the morning sky. The reserve had lost its local instrument. Nothing in the sound of shattering glass had promised the intelligence beyond it would die. The twelve shards had not fallen silent. People still hurt, and someone would still learn to offer certainty in a form a frightened body wanted.

“Not this arrangement,” she said. “We'll have to take the pieces out.”

“And then?”

She could not give him the future as payment for having asked them to keep bending his fingers.

“I don't know.”

He closed his eyes. For once he did not tell her that was insufficient.

Adra arrived with two attendants and found more patients than she had hands for. She gave Anet a task, sent Deren for water and told Mali to stop trying to sit before her breath had returned. The instruction was ordinary, limited and possible to question. Mali obeyed it anyway.

Across the court, a man asked what had happened.

Mali answered as much as she knew. Not who to blame first. What the glass had done. Which doors were open. Where a person could ask about someone missing. Sori heard her and sent another student to keep the growing crowd from turning one injured woman's account into the only place answers could be found.

The Assembly had promised an end to uncertainty.

On the paving beneath its broken platform, people began making a record of what they did not yet understand.