Chapter 550: Every Head In The Room

Light woke up angry, which was at least familiar.

He came off the ground in one motion with his hand already closing on the sword he’d gone down holding, and I let him keep it, because I have discovered over the years that taking anything off this man is the fastest way to make him want it.

He got halfway upright, found the wall with his shoulder, and stayed there.

I stayed sitting. The last few times this man had been on his feet he had tried to open my throat, and then, once, he hadn’t, and I had not finished deciding what to do about that.

“You knocked me out.”

“Twice.” I spat blood onto the stone between my boots and watched it not go anywhere. “You’re welcome.”

He put a hand to the back of his neck where I’d chopped him and worked his jaw around, and even filthy, even with his hair hanging in strings and a knee I’d put a dagger through, he still found a way to do it elegantly. That is the single most irritating thing about Light. He is elegant while losing.

Then he looked down at his own collar, and the elegance went out of him all at once.

The lines were still there. Dark and thin under the skin, branching the way frost branches across glass, running up out of his shirt and stopping just under his jaw.

He touched one with two fingers. His hand was steady, which told me more about him than any amount of shouting would have.

“How long.”

“Since I found you? Hours. Since it got you?” I shrugged, which hurt. “Your friend here has been waiting on you a lot longer than that.”

The wyvern lifted its head off the ground at the word. One eye, no wings worth the name, a back leg that had been chewed open again in the dark, and it still hauled itself over and put its nose against Light’s chest hard enough to knock him back into the wall.

He put a hand flat on its skull. Neither of them made a sound about it.

I looked away, because there are things you do not watch, and let the silence run for a while.

Then he broke it, and he did not break it where I expected.

“You swung at the wall to keep it off me.”

“I swung at the wall because it was closer than you.”

He turned his head and looked at me properly for the first time since he’d woken, and I kept my eyes on the middle distance and my face doing nothing, because I was not about to have this conversation on a floor covered in somebody else’s blood.

“Cade.”

“I’m aware of what happened.” I picked at the wrap on my forearm, which did not need picking at. “You went at it. I went at it. Nobody has to make a speech.”

He let it go. That is the one genuinely good quality Light has. He always knows exactly when to stop, which makes it so much worse that he almost never does.

‘Wren.’

Yes.

‘The lines. Are they the same as before?’

Wren took her time, the way she does when she is being careful with me.

Shorter. Two fingers lower on his throat than they were when you were sitting on that lizard with him draped over its back.

‘…’

‘They went back.’

They went back when you put a sword in the thing that made them.

And there it was. The whole shape of the next few hours, handed to me by a talking sword in a cave full of bodies.

The mark was not a curse sitting in Light. It was a leash, and the other end of it was in something that had crawled off through a hole in the wall bleeding, and every inch you took out of that thing, the leash gave back.

“Hey.” I got my feet under me and immediately regretted every part of it. “Good news. You’re not dying.”

Light watched me sway. “That is not what this feels like.”

“You’re not dying, you’re owned. Completely different problem.” I found the wall with one hand and stayed there until the cave stopped moving. “The good part about being owned is there’s somebody to kill.”

He worked that through. I saw the exact moment he got there, because his hand came off the wyvern’s head and closed into a fist.

“It weakened when you wounded it.”

“Wren says two fingers’ worth.”

“Then we finish it.”

‘We.’ I hate that word out of his mouth. He says it like a man doing you a favour by including you in his plan, and it has been that way since the first time I met him.

I decided to let it go, mostly because I did not have the energy to have an opinion about anything.

Then Ilse arrived in my head all at once, the way she does, and I stopped moving.

Because I had done the sum without meaning to.

The dying man had told me the rule before he stopped talking. The closer we are to the creature’s lair, the stronger the stench gets. And the stench does one of two things to you. It kills you, or it marks you, and it had gone at Ilse hard enough to bring blood up out of her and it had not marked her, so I knew exactly which of the two it had picked.

It had been trying to kill her.

And I had carried her out to the lake and laid her down where the smell did not reach, and then I had turned around and gone the other way, deeper, toward the source, and I had been walking toward it ever since.

Every step I took was a step further from her.

‘She’s alone.’

She is.

‘She was bringing up blood, Wren.’

She was.

‘And I left her by a lake in a cave full of things I have not met.’

Wren did not say anything to that, which is the closest she comes to kindness.

Light shifted his weight off the ruined knee. “You want to go back.”

I had not said a word out loud. He read it off my face anyway, which is another thing about him I have never enjoyed.

“There’s a woman at the lake.” I hauled myself off the wall. “She breathed a lot of that stench before I got her clear. She was alive when I left. That’s the last honest thing I know about her.”

“Then go.”

“That’s what you’d do?”

He got a fistful of the wyvern’s neck ridge and pulled himself the rest of the way up, testing the knee, and it held, barely. “No. But I am not the one who was asked.”

‘…’

‘That’s actually quite good, damn him.’

Here is the thing, though.

I ran it twice and it came out the same both times, and I want to put the second run down honestly, because the second run is the one that let me do it.

Going back to the lake got me a woman who was either alive or not, in a cave that still had a thing in it that put out a killing smell for kilometres in every direction. It fixed nothing. The stench would keep coming and it would keep reaching, and eventually it would find its way to the water, and I would be sitting beside her when it did with nothing to fight it with.

Killing the thing stopped the smell.

Killing the thing took the lines out of Light’s throat.

Same errand. Both women. One walk.

And underneath all of that, quiet, sitting where it always sits now, was the arithmetic I have been carrying since the field. Every hour I did not spend, Brunhilde got cheaper. Every hour I did, she went back up. She had told me to survive and be poor and let her come down in price, and she had told me to stop trying to be a hero about it, and she had been extremely clear that those were the same instruction.

Going back to the lake was the hero’s walk. It cost everything and bought nothing.

Going forward was the cheap one.

‘…Yeah,’ I thought. ‘And how convenient that the cheap one is also the one I wanted.’

I noticed that. I want it recorded that I noticed it, and that I went anyway, and that I have not decided yet whether that makes me a strategist or something considerably worse.

“We go down.” I got Wren up off the stone. “But we go fast, because I am on a clock and the clock is a woman.”

We followed the veins.

That was the whole method, and it was the only method available. The dark wet lines in the rock got thicker the deeper we went, and where they got thicker the stone went soft, and where the stone went soft I could push a thumb into a cave wall and leave a print in it, which is not a thing walls should permit.

The wyvern would not walk on the soft stretches. It picked its way along the hard seams like a cat crossing a wet floor, and after the third time it refused a perfectly good piece of ground I stopped arguing with it and started going where it went.

Light walked. Badly, and without one word of complaint, which frankly ruined my whole picture of him and I resented it.

Around what I think was the second hour, he tried again.

“You did not answer me.”

“I answered you fine.”

“You told me the wall was closer.”

I stepped over a vein as thick as my arm and kept my eyes on it. “Aetheria. The Plains. That mess with the gate.” I counted them off without looking at him. “You could have finished it any of those times and you kept trying to have a conversation with me instead, like an idiot, at the worst possible moments.”

The drag of his bad leg stopped for a step, then picked up again.

“So I figured I’d return the favour,” I said, “and pick a terrible moment of my own.”

He did not say anything after that, and I let him not say it, and we walked.

Then the tunnel opened, and neither of us said anything for a long while.

It was a chamber. Round, and wide, and low, and the veins did not run along the walls here because here they were the walls, a wet dark mesh grown over every surface of it, breathing very slightly in and out the way a chest does.

And it was full of people.

They were standing. That is the part I need you to understand before anything else, because I stood in the mouth of that tunnel and my brain kept trying to file what I was looking at under bodies, and bodies lie down.

These were upright. Dozens of them, spaced out across the floor with a horrible unhurried evenness, men and women and things that had not been either, all of them facing the walls, all of them with the dark branching lines running up their throats and over their jaws and into their hair.

None of them moved. None of them were dead. Death Sense went out across that room and came back full of small patient lives, every single one of them running slow, every single one of them waiting.

‘…’

‘It doesn’t eat them.’

‘It doesn’t even kill them. It just keeps them.’

‘It’s a damn pantry.’

Behind me the wyvern made a sound I had not heard it make before, low and continuous, and it began to back up.

Light had gone very still.

I turned to tell him to move, and stopped, because he was not looking at the room.

He was looking at me, and the lines on his throat had climbed back up past his jaw while I wasn’t watching, and his eyes had that ghastly crimson coming up behind them like a lamp being carried toward a window from a long way inside a house.

His hand had gone white on the hilt.

‘Ah, damn…’

Every head in that chamber turned around at once.