by Monte Cook
The hounds come through the brambles that she just left. She can only tell because she hears wings as the millibirds take flight. The stink of flesh burning hits her nose, sinks in. Her head feels like it’s full of coals. Dead bird coals.
Closer now. The sparking fills the air, so close and so loud, she flinches. Ducks her head. It almost causes her to fumble right off the rocky edge of the ravine. So many ledges in a single night. At least this one is natural. Of nature. Carved out by time and water. Not by the hands of humans bent to bondage.
A spark of blue breaks the night blanket to her left, and she swerves away. Follows the edge of the river as closely as she can without tumbling over. They can see she’s tired. They must know she won’t lead them to the base.
A crackle off to her left tells her the beasts are gaining, pulling up alongside her. Soon they will cut her off, narrow in on her like she’s game. Which she is to them. Nothing more.
You’re going to have to fight them.
Yes, yes, I know. But later.
Now.
And it’s true. The one on her left is coming, full bore, not caring about nature-made or the softness of the moss. Or the cliff edge where her feet are slip-slipping in their boots. She should have had Delgha make her sticky boots, not quiet boots. The jump kit beckons. She can’t see it, but she knows where it hangs. Approximately.
It’s the last thing she thinks as she steps once more and goes over backward. Tumble and fall. The crackling creature howling and howling after her. It moves like gravity doesn’t matter and she knows she’s fucked up as she feels its teeth skim and whistle against her knee.
Mid-flight – fall, really, if she’s going to be honest – she reaches for the jump kit. Hoping against hope. Her fingers catch rock, water, a branch that scratches her skin to high hell and twists her knuckle. A bit of leather. She closes her fingers on the last, braces herself for the wrench of shoulder that comes half a second later. It’s impossible not to scream, and then berate herself for screaming. The pain sears up her arm.
When this is all over, if she’s still alive, she’s going to have to drag herself to Thorme’s healing station and beg her for a patch. She’s always considered herself to have a high tolerance for pain, but tonight she has reached her limit.
But she’s swinging, not falling, and that’s something. Both feet push off the stone outcrops, swinging her far out over the rushing river below. The jump kit is designed to take her out far enough that she can jump into the deep pool in the river’s center. She can’t do that now. The fallen destriatch is down there somewhere. Electrifying the water. The kit’s going to have to take her to the far bank, if she hopes to get out of this.
On the near bank, she can see the destriatch, growing smaller. And then larger again as the jump kit carries her back toward them. They are doing something in the dark that she can’t quite see.
Two, three times, she pushes off. Gets leverage. Her knee wrenches. Her back and shoulder. Teeth gritted so hard she’s sure she’ll break one.
She doesn’t make it to the far bank. No amount of momentum is going to do it. The kit’s not long enough to take her there. Its arc is too short. That leaves her two options. Down. Or back to where she started.
She keeps swinging, thinking, pushing. As she does so, she dips her free hand into the opening of her hip bag. Shapes and textures slip through her fingers. Round. Poking. Soft. What does she have left in her bag? Nothing nothing nothing. For the first time ever, she has used up all of her contingency plans. She’s got nothing left except herself. She can only hope that’s enough.
Then, the thing she’s seeking that she’d almost forgotten she had. Triangular, heavy and metallic. She pulls it out with a yell of triumph and thumbs the device. Misses. Not once but twice. Her elbow bangs against something that she is afraid is the hound tumbling near her, but is only an outcrop.
She’d packed this cypher in case she needed to use it on Rillent’s glaives. Never expecting this. But here they are, and here she is.
Down is dangerous. Current-filled water. And in the dark, she can’t see to aim anywhere else.
Back where she started is dangerous. The beasts are lined along the edge of the bank, as if waiting for her to decide. Or as if they already know what she will do.
She changes direction, aims for the bottom of the ravine. Not the deep pool which is surely arcing with current, but for the shore. The rocky side that she knows is there, but only by instinct. It’s too dark to make out.
Her fall is silent and sure. So is her landing. Her head hits the gravel, her mouth is full of gravel. Her back twangs. She has a moment to think, “make that two patches, Thorme,” and then the grey swarms in and threatens to overtake her. She lets it for the count of two heartbeats, two breaths, then she pushes it back through nothing more than force of will. If she could see, if she could figure out how to open her eyes, she knows her vision would be black at the edges, fuzzing in. She tries to fight it.
The device tumbles from her grip. She pats the area around her until she finds it, seemingly, impossibly, unbroken. She picks it up and her fingers refuse to close. She grabs it with both hands. Holds it like she’s seen others hold a prayer totem, wrapping her whole hands around it, tugging it toward her.
She opens her eyes to the sound of electricity. Coming nearer. They’re winding down the side of the ravine as easy as flying. “You don’t have wings!” she wants to yell, but she realizes how little she understands these crackling, crazed creatures.
Devices don’t talk to her, but she sometimes talks to them. “You’d better work,” is all she can think to say to it. It comes out funny, because her mouth is awash with blood. She hadn’t tasted it until now. Better than the meat-sizzle of her breath.
She waits until the first of the crourhounds is nearly upon her. Breath and light and mourning. Her already sensitive skin sizzles in the near-heat.
Hits the button and throws up the magnetic shield.
The rush of air past her face is loud. So is the low howl of the first hound as the magnet hits its metal parts. For a moment, it seems as if it is still coming for her. As if it will land on her and destroy her. Mouth open. Crackling black teeth, as if they’ve been burnt into points. Slavering. It’s the one with its middle missing. Right next to her face.
And then, less slowly than it came, it begins to recede. Slow, its feet scrambling for purchase as the shield pushes it back. Her breathing is either louder than the crackling, or the shield blocks some of the noise.
The others – she can see four of them now – are coming down the shore, fast. The shield is invisible to her. She assumes it is to them as well. At least they don’t seem to be slowing down. When the next two hit it, she swears she can feel the cypher shake in her hand but knows that makes no sense.
The cypher’s not going to last very long. She can’t sit here and wait until they all run into it. She thinks about putting it in her pocket – portable shield – but at the last second, she drops it to the ground instead. Then she pushes herself up from the muck and mud of the river bank for the second time in this long dark night.
The destriatch are stuck behind her shield. Unless they shed their metal parts somehow, she thinks it will hold them until she can get where she needs to go. The treehouse. Not because it’s the safest place. It’s not. She’s going there because she knows it’s where Kyre will look for her. And because she needs to pass out, and she refuses to do it in front of Rillent’s monsters.
2. And When Everything Fails, There is Light
Kyre knew Aviend was up there, maybe dead, maybe alive, even before he began his climb into the treehouse. It wasn’t an actual treehouse, but that was the best name they had for the thick metal shaft that elevatored up to the top of the treeline and landed at a small shelter. There was no sign she’d passed this way, or climbed this climb, and still he knew in his heart that she was above him. And that was breaking him. Because of the silence. There was no sound up there.
> He halted at the doorway, his breath heavy as stones trying to leave his lungs. Gasping. Afraid to step forward and discover that what he feared was true. Afraid to stay still in case it wasn’t and he could still make a difference.
It was her size that shook him most. Her body, curled in a corner. He’d never seen her look so small. And he’d known her when she actually was small. When they both were.
He was touching his hands to his elbows, breathing coruscates beside us into the air before he even realized what he was saying. She was dead, she was dead, she was–
He realized she was alive when he saw the blood bubbling up from the gash on her face. Dead bodies didn’t push up blood. He thought. He hoped.
He’d never moved across a floor so quickly in his life. “Vi.” His hands and voice doing opposite things at the same time. His fingers found the med kit stashed in the corner, peeled back the seal. Inside, bearing Thorme’s fingerprints, the case was filled with boosts and bandages. There were pressed nuts and water in a silver pouch. He found the health boost he wanted and pulled it out. Still full. She hadn’t used any of it. Why?
Because she hadn’t been able to. Because she’d been here the whole time, unable to help herself. He should have gone faster. He should have left Quenn. He should have–
“Vi, listen…” What did he want to tell her? So many things. But he was silent, focused, as he prepped the health boost, pulled back her collar. Her clothing was soaked, her skin so cold it burned his fingers to touch her. So many times he’d touched her collarbone. Never as still or frozen as it was now. It was jarring, seeing the sides of her neck coated in blood and the blackness of charr.
He pushed the needle into the bubble of her vein to release the nanotech into her body. He took her hand; it hung inside his own without life.
She didn’t respond. He didn’t know what that meant. He was no chiurgeon, although Thorme had taught them all the basics, just in case. This was all he knew how to do.
If Quenn were here, Kyre wondered if he would have prayed. Kyre didn’t pray – he had nothing to believe in beyond science, and science required action, not prayer. He didn’t even realize that he was saying “Vi,” over and over as if he were invoking some ancient deity, until she said, “What?”
Her voice was quiet, shivered, and the rest of her followed suit, shuddering against him. “I’m skisting freezing,” she said.
All the words were there, inside his body, but he found none of them. Instead, he wrapped his body to hers. He could feel his warmth leaving, but he didn’t care. He warmed her until she stopped shivering, until she could say words without her teeth clunking together as if they might break. Until she could sit on her own and eat the nuts and drink the water.
Finally, she turned the silver pouch inside out and licked the salt from it, unabashedly. A second later, she looked at him from under tired lids. “I ate everything,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He pulled the packet from his pocket and held it up. “Thorme?” she said.
“Delgha, actually,” he said. “Even our contingencies–”
“–have contingencies,” she finished. The smile in her voice didn’t reach her face at all. As if her very muscles were too exhausted to even try. “Let’s go home.”
They had no dispatcher this time. No push a button and be somewhere else. Just their feet and their willpower taking them step by slow step again through the woods.
Going home was longer than coming. Every bone in Kyre’s body ached and dreamed of sleep. He was sure Aviend was worse. She’d run farther, faster through the night. The destriatch at her heels. The way they exuded the need to fear, like it was a scent, forced it upon you. That in itself was exhausting, never mind the running.
Never mind their failure to kill Rillent, which they hadn’t talked about yet. It was the right thing to do, saving Quenn. So why did it still feel like they’d made a mistake?
They hit the ankle-deep black muck of Slisto Swamp under the high sun’s filtered heat. Kyre kept one hand on the hilt of a shortblade, the other at the ready to help Aviend if she asked for it.
They hadn’t seen slistoviles here in years, but that didn’t mean the animate plants weren’t just waiting beneath the surface for that rare bit of walking prey. Their presence did mean they were likely to have the swamp to themselves. Few living creatures chose to slog through these deathwaters. Not even Rillent’s men would be keen on traipsing through this swampmuck.
“We’re almost there,” he said to her. She knew where they were, of course. It was just something to say, something he realized he’d gotten in the habit of saying to Quenn.
“Third time you’ve said that,” Aviend said. Her voice was stronger than it had been just a few minutes ago, he was happy to hear. It even carried a hint of her usual snip. He’d been picking up the pace as they went along, and so far she’d kept up. They both knew that the injection he’d popped her with wasn’t going to last forever. If she crumbled before they made it to the base… but this time they were really almost there. If they kept the pace, they’d make it before the boost wore off.
“Ghosts, I’ve never been so happy to see you bleeding as I was tonight,” he said, stepping around what he at first thought was a rock and then realized was a grey-backed shelled creature of some kind. It sank into the water and disappeared without so much as a bubble.
Aviend barked a laugh, followed by a soft groan of pain, and then another laugh.
“You’re horrible. I hope that when the slistoviles get you, they grow over your mouth first.”
“Now that’s just mean,” he said.
“You’re the one talking about how wonderful it is that I was bleeding.”
“You know exactly what I meant.”
The banter felt odd in his mouth, too light, too easy. It must have in hers too, because she fell silent in a sudden, solid way, as if shutting a door against a light. The splash of their boots filled the silence enough for a while. Dead snags rose up all around them, broken points aiming for the sky. From somewhere in the water, amphibians croaked their songs of mating or alarm or joy. But there was no sound of the destriatch. No sound of Rillent’s men coming. And that was a beautiful kind of no-noise.
“Tell me about the boy?” Aviend asked a bit later, her voice so quiet it barely carried to his ears. And then, as if she needed to remind herself of the good of it, she added, “The one we saved.”
As they mucked through the wet, he told her about Quenn. About how he wasn’t a boy at all. About his sister. About the ghost who touched him and his grandmother and his pendant.
“Gavanites? Really?” She shook her head. “It must be weird for him, being in the base. I guess he’d say temple, wouldn’t he?”
“I didn’t get a chance to ask. If he’s still there, I hope he can answer some things for us.”
“Yeah, like how he came to be in the one place where he could screw up our long-laid plans to save the world.” She winced, but he didn’t think the pain was physical.
“Do you think that’s what we were trying to do? Save the world?”
“Trying? Past tense? But I don’t know. Don’t you?”
He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t want to lie to her, so he said, “How long do you think the boost has?”
She didn’t look at him, but her voice carried strong. “Do you want me to pretend to answer that so we can avoid the topic?”
“Yes?” Killing someone to save the world felt… an awful lot like not saving the world at all. What did he feel about choosing to save Quenn? Mostly relief. Relief that he’d been given a way out of killing a man. But also out of the plan they’d worked so hard on for so long. Relief mingled with guilt and ran through his blood, light and heavy at the same time.
Aviend nodded, then made a small show of checking her body as she walked. “Then I’ll say that it’s wearing down. I’ve got some pain in my… everything. But mostly in the back of my head. Right… here…” She
reached up and touched it gingerly, feeling around with her fingertips. “What did I do to the back of my… skisting ghostfall. What…”
He winced. He hadn’t planned to mention it to her until they’d gotten back to the base. Or maybe never. She wasn’t attached to many things, but she was deeply, tightly attached to her hair. Because it reminded her of her mother, he thought.
“You cut my hair? You…” She’d stopped mid-swamp, her eyes wide. Her mouth was moving but she seemed to be having trouble finding any words.
“No,” he said. “I would never. But… did you get a little electricity, maybe? It looks more like a burn than a cut.”
“Those beasts,” she said. “Those horrible, electric, made-of-nothing, skisting brehmfilled beasts. I will kill them.”
“Sure. They’re horror beasts that shouldn’t exist belonging to a man who…” He almost said, “killed your mother” but caught himself at the last second. It wasn’t untrue, but it wasn’t where this conversation needed to go. Not yet. “…wants to rule the… I don’t know, Stere? World? They tried to kill you. But your hair is what makes you want to wipe them out?”
She shot him a look, one she typically reserved for devices that were misbehaving for her. He knew her well enough to know that more swearwords would soon follow.
“Truly, you can barely tell,” he said.
“I can tell. But I don’t care about how it looks. That much. I care about… I don’t know.”
“It’s just one more thing Rillent took from you without asking?”
“Yes.” She was moving forward now, splashing through the swamp, loudly. He hoped there really were no slistoviles waiting under the water, because if there were she was going to wake them all. “Yes, exactly that. I just… All I had were swearwords.”
He moved himself, catching up to her, no need to worry about noise now, he supposed. “I’m sorry.”
