Chapter 551: This Damn Bastard!

Light came at me before the last head finished turning.

He was faster than he had any right to be on that knee, and the crimson in his eyes had gone from a lamp behind a window to the whole house on fire. I got Wren up by the exact width of my own good luck. The impact travelled through my forearms and into ribs that had already been rearranged once today, and I made a noise I am not proud of.

‘He’s stronger in here.’

The room is helping him.

‘The room is made of it, Wren.’

I gave ground. Three steps, four, my boots skidding on stone that gave slightly underfoot like the skin over a knuckle.

And the whole time, the floor of that chamber was coming alive around me.

They moved inward the way water finds a low place, unhurried, from every direction at once. Hide and scale and too many joints, heads at wrong angles. Claws went down on rock all around me with the sound of a hundred people setting cutlery on plates, and under it the serpent slid off its coil and started forward without ever putting its weight anywhere I could see.

The four people walked in with them. Arms swinging, feet finding the floor, the ordinary unhurried rhythm of somebody crossing a room to fetch something, and that was the part that turned my stomach over.

Death Sense opened wide and gave me nothing I could use.

Killing intent is the only thing it reads, and there was killing intent in every square foot of that room. Floor and ceiling included. It was like straining for one voice inside a stadium.

‘It’s flooding me on purpose.’

I ducked a swing that took a chip out of the wall behind my head, put my shoulder into Light’s chest, and bought about four feet.

I spat, dragged in half a lungful of that wet air, and spent it on him.

“Hey! Pretty boy! If any part of you is in there, this would be an outstanding time to say so!”

He came again. That was his answer.

Then the wyvern hit him.

Shoulder-first, from the side, and it took him clean off his feet and drove him into the base of the wall. Three good legs and every pound it had behind them. Nothing elegant about it.

Then it stood over him with its ruined wings half-mantled and its one eye fixed on him, and it held him there without biting down. Its foot rode the middle of his chest and the whole leg shook with the effort of staying where it was, and it did not press and it did not let go.

And it screamed.

It was a higher, worse sound than the mournful growl it had made on the ledge — the sound a creature makes when it is being asked to hurt the thing it loves. I heard it, and I decided in that chamber full of standing beasts that I was going to kill this creature personally and take my time about it.

‘Right.’

‘Where are you.’

It had come out of a wall the last time and gone back into a wall after, and I was standing in a room where every surface was the same wet dark mesh, breathing very slightly, and it could have been any inch of it.

But it had lied to me once, and that had cost me two trips into a wall to learn how.

The hitch. That fractional stillness right before the false move.

So I stopped hunting for a shape and watched the room breathe instead.

In. Out. In. And out. Everywhere at once, even and slow, the whole curve of it lifting maybe half an inch and settling again like something asleep on its side.

Except…

Behind me and low, forty feet along the curve of the wall, one patch of that mesh had gone still and stayed still. Holding its breath, the way a man does when he thinks you are about to look at him.

‘There you are, you son of a bitch.’

Running at it was the entire point of the invitation. The moment I committed, thirty of its collected would come down on my back, and that would be the end of the story.

So I did the sum instead, and the sum was short.

Death Sense costs nothing. It never has, which is the only reason I have any right to still be walking around down here. Under that there was a thread of water in the bottom of the well and not one drop more, and what it bought was one touch and one step.

After those… a dry socket behind my ribs and a sword.

‘Make them the right one and one, Cade.’

I put my hand flat against the flank of the nearest one. Warm through the hide, and moving with its breathing, and it did not so much as turn its head at me.

Nerotic Touch went into it and the hide went grey and papery under my palm and the whole animal came down on its side. The ones behind it crowded into the gap it left, and the gap I actually wanted opened four feet to my right.

I took it.

Feather Step, once, and I felt the last of it drain out from behind my ribs, that small cold emptying that means there is nothing at your back any more. I came out of the step inside the ring with the wall in front of me and Wren already moving.

The mesh tore open before I got there.

It poured out low and wrong the way it had in the tunnel, that general suggestion of limbs, that wet shifting nothing where a face should be.

And it was smaller than it had been.

That was the first good news of the entire day. I had put a sword in it, it had gone home, and it had not come back the same size.

This time there was no hitch anywhere in it. Fast, and desperate, and aimed square at the man who had hurt it.

I got Maggie’s dagger up in my off hand, because a dagger costs no essence, and I had no essence to spare.

And somebody strolled into the chamber behind me and spoke, bright and conversational, the way you greet a neighbour over a fence.

“Oh! You found it.”

‘…I know that voice.’

I turned my head. A genuinely stupid thing to do with a wounded collector mid-lunge, and I did it anyway, and I would do it again.