Nobody answered.
Malthane hadn't waited for an answer anyway. He walked past them to the great window, and below, the city lay small in the morning light, and he let them all look at it for a moment before he spoke.
"Seven floors," he said. "One of you to each floor, drawn by lot. On every floor there is a pedestal, and on every pedestal, Leonard will place a sphere of glass."
Leonard had come in behind them with a padded case, and he opened it, and inside, set in cloth, were seven spheres the size of a fist, thin gilded glass, so fine that Evelyn took them for gems at first.
"For the rest of this morning, that sphere is your lot. Treat it as if it were worth more than your life, because in nine days, what stands in its place will be. Keep it on the pedestal, or carry it with you. That choice is yours to make." He turned back to face them. "At noon, the bell rings. If your own sphere is unbroken and still in your keeping, that is two points. Every sphere you take from another, one point. Three points earns you a post inside this house. The rest will hold the walls and the doors outside."
He let that settle.
"Break a sphere, you are done. Break anything in my building, you are done."
The shaven giant looked down the room, at the smooth black floor and the pale walls, and rubbed one huge hand over his scalp.
"Seven of us hunting each other through these halls, the halls won't survive the morning. And that's us holding back. When the real attackers come, if a true fight breaks out in here, this auction house won't last minutes."
"No," Malthane said. "Because the men who are coming will take the same care you're about to. This building must stand for five days of sales, and each lot arrives only one day before it sells. If they bring the house down, there is nothing left inside it to steal. Whoever comes will fight compact, clean, attacks meant to kill men, not walls." He looked at the giant. "So today, you learn to fight small."
Leonard came around with a bag of folded paper slips. Evelyn drew the sixth floor. Samuelle drew the first.
"One more thing," Malthane said. "I will walk the seven floors once myself, top to bottom. Consider me a wild card. Anyone I find, I will incapacitate. I will not use my roots. Hands only."
He said it the same way he said everything, flat, like a man reading a delivery list, but doubt showed on every face in the line.
"The bell rings at noon. Go."
The sixth floor was one wide hall wrapped around the tower's core, with the pedestal standing alone near the middle, and her sphere already waiting on top.
Evelyn picked it up, wrapped it in the cloth Leonard had handed each of them, and tied it to her belt.
Then she learned the building. Her master had drilled that into her too: before anything else, learn the ground. The halls were bare and smooth and her boots made no sound on them, but the central stairwell was stone, and stone talked. Standing in the stairwell door she could hear everything the tower did, boots far below, a door, a voice, all of it rising up the shaft like smoke up a chimney.
She went back to the middle of the hall, and stayed.
Top to bottom. He'll reach this floor second. There was no point in hunting spheres. The one she wanted to kill was already on his way down to her.
The second floor was quiet, and the giant hated quiet.
He had left his own sphere sitting in plain view on its pedestal, let someone try, and for half an hour he had paced his hall, listening to the tower, waiting for somebody to be stupid enough to come to him. Nobody came. So he rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and took the stairs up to the third floor.
The gaunt man in the black coat was waiting near his pedestal with his sphere in one hand, and to his credit, he fought. He was quick. For a few exchanges his footwork kept him alive, slipping punches that would have taken a door off its hinges. But quick only delays a big man, it doesn't stop him. The giant ate a hit to his jaw without slowing, caught the gaunt man by the collar, and threw him.
The gaunt man went into his own pedestal. The sphere flew out of his hand, glittered once in the air, and broke on the floor into a hundred gilded pieces.
The giant looked at the pieces, and shrugged.
"We aren't supposed to break the glass." The sound came from behind him. He turned to see who was there.
Samuelle stood in the stairwell door, satchel on his shoulder.
"His glass. His problem." The giant stepped over the gaunt man and came on, in no hurry at all. "Mine is downstairs, all in one piece. And yours is about to be mine too. Just hand it over, medicine man. I'll even carry you upstairs after, so you get some sleep in there."
He backed Samuelle toward the inner wall, far from the pedestal, and reached out for the satchel.
Samuelle caught his hand.
Caught it, and held it. The giant's own weight came forward onto that grip and stopped. For a moment neither of them moved. A thin, unslept man was holding back a man three times his weight with one arm, and his face didn't even change.
Then the giant growled and put his whole shoulder into it, driving a punch with his other hand toward Samuelle's face. Samuelle dodged it easily, then caught that hand too, so both men had their hands occupied. Even so, Samuelle slid back a step, then another, boots dragging on the smooth floor.
Then Samuelle opened his mouth and drew his tongue out, and on top of it sat a small glass capsule with a liquid inside, shown to the giant as if to declare his victory. He cracked it with his teeth, and drank it along with the shattered glass.
Three seconds later, Samuelle's grip tightened, much harder, immediately cracking the bones in the giant's hands, and the giant started screaming in pain. Samuelle let go of them, then stepped inside and drove a punch into his stomach. It was so strong that the giant simply folded around it, dropped to his knees, his eyes turning white, and was unconscious before his face reached the floor.
"My curse is called the Apothecary. I use my blood to brew potions, each with a different effect. You ar—" He stopped midway, realising the giant was no longer listening.
Evelyn was still in the middle of the sixth floor, waiting, when she sensed it, his presence, coming down the stairs toward her.
The stairwell door opened and Malthane came through it with his hands loose at his sides. He looked at the empty pedestal, then at her belt.
"Carried," he said. "Your mother would have left it on show, and dared the whole city to come take it."
The Sword of Light was in her hand.
Her heel slid back a step. Then another one.
"Good," Malthane said. "You've learned fear."
And the fear burned up all at once, then she launched herself at him. She swung wide, too wide, cuts her master would have stopped thirty times in a morning, one after another, fast and furious and empty, and Malthane moved his head and his shoulders letting every one of them pass, and on the ninth cut his hand came up and caught her wrist out of the air.
Evelyn jumped, using his own grip on her wrist as an anchor, and pivoted her whole body in the air, legs to the ceiling, head below, dismissed the sword from her trapped hand and re-summoned it in the free one, already cutting toward his head.
He let go of her wrist, ducked his head under the slash, and hopped back several steps. Evelyn landed and came after him at once, swinging harder.
"It seems the training under your master is wasted. These attacks are barbaric. I am truly disappointed."
She was losing her temper completely, and it showed in every cut. Malthane kept slipping them without effort, then one swing came close to his face. He caught the blade itself with his bare hand, and held it firmly in place.
It broke into pale light in his grip, and she was already gone.
It was a technique that had taken her months to refine: resonance gathered into a single foot while the rest of her body let go of everything for a fraction of a second, one short dash so quick it looked like she had teleported. The movement itself was flawless, and the resonance application behind it was the rarer half of the feat. Quickly and efficiently concentrating resonance into one part of the body, a foot, a hand, the blade itself, was a feat all trained cursed humans could perform, but it came easier and better to Evelyn than to most. It was a talent she had.
She reappeared behind his shoulder, the sword re-forming mid-swing, falling toward his neck.
A root burst out of the floor, cracking the stone. It was thin and small, made for precision, and it had farther to travel than her sword did, from the ground all the way up to Malthane's neck. And it still arrived first. It caught the blade mid-swing and held it there, and against that speed her sword might as well have been frozen in the air.
The moment the blade stopped, Malthane turned and threw a single punch. She got her right arm up in time, resonance rushing to the point of impact immediately to reduce the damage. It changed nothing. The blow broke her arm and threw her ten meters across the hall, through the wall, into the room behind it.
The sphere rolled out of its cloth and crossed the floor.
It stopped. Unbroken.
Malthane crossed the hall, unhurried, and stood over her. For a long moment he said nothing at all.
"Evelyn. Do you know the classification the Utopians gave my heart?"
She was on her knees in the rubble, leaning on the Sword of Light like a cane to stay upright. Her right arm hung twisted at her side.
"Why... wo... would I care."
"Apex Tier. Of the four bishops, I was the only one to receive a heart of that rank."
She was breathing heavily now, the pain taking over.
"Do you know the criteria for ranking a heart? The ones the Utopians use?"
Evelyn didn't answer. She was trying to stand, and her legs failed her, and she dropped back to her knees.
"Five measures. Destructive Yield. Utility. Adaptability. Survivability. Dueling Capacity. Every heart is weighed on those five, and given its rank." He came closer, slowly. "But there are two techniques that sit above all else. Two things that make a fighter more dangerous than any measure can say. Eldritch holders and cursed humans alike can develop them."
He stopped in front of her.
"True Defense. And True Damage."
He looked down at her, and went on in the same flat voice, as if the wall behind her weren't broken.
"Say you are a Diamond Tier entity. Strong enough to overwhelm an army of ordinary men on your own. And yet one surprise attack with enough force behind it can still drop you dead where you stand. All of that power, undone by a moment of inattention. An Apex Tier fighter is one who has closed that door. One who developed an automatic defense system, a response that does not wait for its owner to notice the threat. That is True Defense. In my case, any attack that comes close enough to harm my body is met by my roots on their own. I do not command them. I do not need to see it coming." He paused. "I told you I would not use my roots. I kept my word. That one moved without me. I just didn't expect you to get close enough to trigger them."
He straightened.
"My heart did not come with the technique. I built it myself, with instruction from Utopia. The previous owner of this heart had developed the very same True Defense technique, which proved the heart was capable of it. That is why they classified it Apex. Though True Defense is not invincible, and an experienced or genius fighter can find ways to bypass it."
Evelyn seemed out of it, but she had heard every word, and understood all of it. And because she had, she couldn't stop the question from coming out of her mouth.
"What about... True Damage?"
"True Damage is damage that passes through every defense its target has. Armor, techniques, True Defense itself can't stop it, all of it. It is far, far rarer than True Defense. The reason it is considered superior is not only because it's much rarer and much more difficult to develop. It's because contrary to True Defense techniques that can still be bypassed by strong and experienced fighters, if they manage to find a way around it, there is no amount of wits or strength that can block a True Damage technique, making it a sure win once it lands. Only those at the very pinnacle of power and mastery in this world have ever developed it."