**POV: Jace**
---
Renard said it into a chamber that had gone completely quiet.
"Five."
He was standing about twelve metres from me with his hand still flat against his own ribs, and he had not moved since Alasdair’s forearm made that noise.
His eyes went along them.
Cormac, eight metres out with his arm hanging wrong. Rhodri with three people around him and his strike still buried in a raised guard. Søren stopped mid-stride with a spear across his path.
And then the two who had come up off the floor forty metres from any of it.
Renard’s head turned back and did the whole line again, slower, and something went out of his face on the second pass.
"You are the Rooks."
---
Nobody in that chamber reacted to the name.
I looked round while it was landing and there was nothing on any of them, not on Erik, not on Clara, not on the healer with the shaved head, and every one of them was still looking at the five men instead of at Renard.
Fourteen people who had never heard it.
Cormac did not deny it. He did not do anything with his face at all, which is the same thing he has done every time somebody has said anything true to him.
"I have had that name in three separate conversations in two years," Renard said. "Never with enough behind it to put in writing."
He was talking to Cormac and he was pitching it at the room.
"An independent crew. Five, six, nobody is sure, because you do not register together and you do not sit the same screenings. And every mixed raid any of you turns up on comes back short."
---
"Come back short how?"
That was Erik, and his axe had not come down.
"Casualties." Renard did not turn round. "Nothing that ever looks wrong on the report. A Gate is a Gate. People die in them."
He shifted his weight.
"But you get a pattern. Somebody’s guild loses four on a Blue that should have cost them one. Somebody’s independent applicant does not come out of a Green.
And when you go back through the roster afterward, there is always one or two names on it that nobody can quite account for."
"And you let them onto my raid."
"I let ten outsiders onto this raid because I could not fill twenty from my own roster and I had thirty-nine hours." Renard’s voice went hard for the first time. "They registered separately.
They have no convictions. There is no file. There is a word that gets said quietly at industry things by men who are not going to put their name to it."
He looked at Cormac again.
"Black crew. That is the word. And I have been saying for two years that somebody is going to have to prove one eventually."
---
Cormac spoke for the first time.
"You are not going to prove anything today either."
"I have fourteen witnesses."
"You have fourteen people standing inside a Gate with a collapse timer on it." He rolled the damaged shoulder once and it went round. "None of that is worth anything on this side of the door."
And that is when I understood what he had actually just said, and my whole stomach went cold.
He is not negotiating. He is doing arithmetic out loud, the same as he did about the fund, and he has reached the only line in it that still balances.
Nobody walks out.
---
"WOUNDED. EXIT. NOW."
Renard did not wait for anything else.
"Anyone who cannot fight goes through that door and does not stop. Everybody else between them and these five. Do not chase, do not spread, hold the lane."
Boots started moving behind me.
A man with his leg opened got hauled up by two people and went for the light with his arm across somebody’s shoulders. The healer with the shaved head got both hands under a patient’s harness and dragged.
Somebody’s shield was still on the floor where he had put it down twenty minutes ago and he did not go back for it.
Nineteen of us in that room. Five of them.
Fourteen against five, and eight of the fourteen could barely stand up, and all five of them had come through the same Giant and the same Dullahan we had.
Their whole plan was fifteen seconds of nobody understanding what was happening.
I had taken those fifteen seconds off them, and now, I had no idea whether it was going to be enough.
—
They came at us.
All five, inside the same second, because a crew that has just been named in front of witnesses has nothing left to protect.
> **[Level: 10.]**
>
> **[EXP: 955/1,000.]**
>
> **[Health: 251/350.]**
>
> **[Mana: 118/240.]**
I stopped thinking about what people would see me do at about the same time Ewan Calder started walking.
---
He went at the Meridian fighter with the polearm.
The man was good. He had held the shield line for eleven minutes and he took Ewan’s first two cuts on the haft, high, in the same place both times.
Which is the correct thing to do with a polearm, and the correct thing to do against anybody except this man.
Third cut, same place.
The haft went to about half its thickness and the fighter did not notice, because there is nothing to notice yet. It looks like wear.
The fourth one took his hands off.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
—
I crossed nineteen metres and arrived badly.
My heel skidded and I had to put a hand down and I lost about a third of a second getting my hips back under me, and it did not matter, because I was inside the arc.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 118/240 → 112/240.]**
I put my gauntlet into the flat of the blade and drove the whole line off its path.
The cut went into the stone about a metre from where the haft had been and took a piece out of it, and Ewan’s shoulders came round at me with his weight already changing.
"NOT THE SAME PLACE." I did not have time for more than that. "HE CUTS THE SAME LINE TWICE. NEVER LET HIM HAVE IT TWICE."
The polearm fighter looked at his own haft.
Then he looked at me.
Then he swore, once, and turned the weapon in his hands so a fresh section was forward.
---
Somewhere behind me, about eleven metres, Alasdair’s fist went past Cormac’s head into a slab of broken stone and I heard the crack of it.
And I heard Cormac stop.
Not stumble. Stop, for about a fifth of a second, in the middle of a fight with a Red Gate Player who does not give anybody a fifth of a second.
Because he had been looking at me when I crossed those nineteen metres.
> **[Adamant — S activated.]**
Alasdair put him through the stone he had just cracked.
I did not see it. I heard the second impact and also something come out of Cormac that was not a word, and I didn’t have the time to turn round and enjoy it.
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