Chapter 136: Her Hands Are Warm

Theo sat very still in his own parlor.

’Category V...’

He had fought a Category Two on a rooftop once, and finished it on his knees in serpent blood with his arms shaking. The Gate on the highway, the one that had given even the Heroes from the Agencies such a hard time, had only been a Category IV. And these people had stood on his lawn and faced a Category V.

’That must’ve been hell...’

Uthed moved the splinted hand into his lap before he went on.

"Four days ago. A little after four in the afternoon. It opened with no warning at all, and what came out of it came out ravaging."

Theo turned to face him, his fingers closing on the arm of the chair.

"Where... exactly?"

"About sixty feet off the porch. On the lawn, between the house and the water."

Theo’s eyes went to the window without him telling them to.

"And the forecast?"

"There was nothing, and nobody nearby saw anything coming either. Lady Estea has put in an order with the Hero Association for a Forecast Mast to be installed in the vicinity, but Aide Lance says that may take a while."

Odette came through with the tea. She set a cup down beside Theo and another beside Sesan, then went over to Estea and bowed a little as she lowered one onto the arm of the chair. She left a fourth at Uthed’s elbow, carried the last across to Asterion in the doorway, and went back to the kitchen with the empty tray against her hip.

"What were the things that came out?"

Asterion answered from the doorway, glancing once at the surface of his tea before he spoke.

"A hundred and nine heinous creatures. Nine of them were far more formidable than the rest. The disturbing part, however, was that there was no Warden and no Commander leading the legion."

Theo turned round in his chair.

"You were counting them."

"I am simply good with numbers..."

He looked at Theo a moment longer and went on.

"They came out low and fast, on four legs, longer in the front than the back. Flat heads. They did not go for the doors. They went for the treeline first, all of them, and that is why there is still a porch."

"They went for the trees?"

"They went past the house as if it were not there."

Theo sat with that one.

Beside him on the couch, Sesan had stopped swinging her legs. She took a handful of his sleeve and kept it.

Uthed turned his head a little toward the doorway and picked up where Asterion had left off.

"Asterion’s people were already up in it. I got to the top of the lawn and there were arrows in the air before I had my sword out, and we held them between the boundary and the water for about an hour."

"An hour."

"They were not the kind that tire quickly."

Estea spoke from beside the fireplace without turning her head.

"He is being modest, which is tiresome. He stood on the second step and killed forty of them on a staircase."

Uthed looked faintly pained.

"Mr Theo left one standing order, and it was your protection. I do not see where else I could have stood."

"Do I look as though I am complaining?"

"You do not sound pleased either."

Theo looked from one to the other, and his eyes came to rest on Estea.

"And where were you?"

Estea’s chin came up.

"At the western glass, where I could see both ends of the lawn and neither of them could. I told the elf when to pull his line back and I told the old man when to stop being brave. That is what I was doing, since you asked so politely."

’...She ran it.’

Theo put his cup down.

"Then what."

Nobody answered at once, which was how he knew the hour of fighting had not been the bad part.

Uthed set his good hand flat on his knee.

"Then something else came through, and the Gate closed behind it."

Theo did not move.

"Say that again."

"The Gate closed behind it. It came out, and the light went, and there was nothing there but the thing standing on your lawn."

’That’s not how they work.’

He had seen it with his own eyes on a rooftop, with violet blood drying in his hair. You killed everything that came through and the Gate stopped existing, as if it had never been there in the first place. It did not shut its own door with the last one still outside.

"What was it?"

"Tall. Taller than the house. It stood in the crater it had made and it did not look at us."

"It didn’t attack?"

"It simply walked forward."

Uthed lifted the splinted hand about an inch and set it down again.

"I went at it regardless, and I was in the air before I understood what a stupid decision that had been. The only reason I am sitting here is that it did not consider me worth stopping for. Something moved me sideways. I came down in the flowerbed, and I have not yet decided whether it was the thing or the ground."

"And then?"

"It went into the forest, north, and it broke the trees at the height of my chest for as far as anyone could see, and it did not come back."

Asterion spoke from the doorway.

"It did not go near the hollow."

Theo’s head came round.

"You’re sure."

"My god is in that hollow. I am sure."

For a moment nobody said anything at all.

Then Theo stood up and went out to look at his own lawn. Sesan let go of his sleeve when he rose, smoothed the place where she had held it, and did not follow.

The crater ran up to the porch steps, and the steps had come off their stringers on one side, and the grass around it was dead in a wide brown collar. He walked out into the middle of it, turned round slowly, and let the Genesis Eyes come open all the way.

’Domestic Manager. Tell me what’s out here.’

[Domestic Manager — surveying]

[Standing structures: 1. Undamaged]

[Burned: 109]

[Interred: 8]

[Fencing: absent]

[Note: 8 of the interred are not yours]

Theo crouched at the lip of the crater where they had missed one, a foreleg and part of a shoulder gone under a slab of turf, and put the eyes on it.

[Target: —]

[Realm: Enhanced]

[Rank: II]

[Status: Deceased]

[Note: this one came out running]

’Running.’

He stayed down there on his heels for a while with his forearms on his knees, looking at a leg that had been hurrying somewhere when it died.

Afterwards he went up through the boundary to the treeline, and the elves let him come, which they had never done quickly before.

Eight new places in the leaf litter, in a row, with a stone at the head of each one. The stones were flat river stones from Theo’s own shore, which meant somebody had walked down the lawn past a hundred and nine bodies to fetch them.

Asterion came up beside him and did not offer anything.

"Eight."

"Fifty-three now."

Theo kept his eyes on the row.

"Aide Lance told me to put a light on this treeline. He told me the last time he stood on that grass. I said I’d think about it."

"A light would have killed none of them."

"It would’ve given you a dozen seconds at least."

"We are creatures of the dark. A light would not have made us one second quicker at taking them apart."

Theo said nothing. His eyes had gone back to the first stone in the row and stayed there.

Asterion did not look away from him.

"You have fed sixty-one people since the day we came out of that aperture, without once asking what we were for. Do not stand in my camp and tell me what you were unable to do. It is pity, and it is undignified, and I do not have the patience for it."

’Fine.’

They stood there a while longer, and then Theo went back down the slope with the lake showing flat and grey through the gap in the trees, and his own porch light on, and a chair at the rail.

By then it was nearly dark. Estea had come out onto the boards with the flame-embroidered blanket over her legs and her hands folded, waiting for him the way she waited for people when she had been holding something since the afternoon.

"You noticed the part that matters."

"The Gate shut behind it."

"Yes."

"Gates close when everything that came out of them is dead."

Estea’s fingers moved once on the arm of the chair.

"That is what they do here. That is what they have always done here. And four days ago one of them put something on my lawn and locked the door after it."

Theo leaned on the rail.

"So what does that mean?"

"It means it was not leaking."

She let that sit exactly as long as she wanted it to.

"A leak has no opinion about what goes through it, Theo. That one had an opinion. And the hundred and nine were not hunting, they were fleeing, which you already know or you would not have spent twenty minutes crouched over a dead leg like a man reading a letter."

"...You watched me do that?"

"You are extremely easy to watch."

She turned her head toward the treeline.

"So the question is not what came out. The question is what came out first and what came out after, and in which direction the fear was pointing, and I would very much like to look at that ground myself before it rains. Bring me down there tomorrow and do not make a performance of carrying me."

Theo was already working out how to get a wheelchair across a collar of dead grass when the air went cold and wrong across his skin, the way it had on a rooftop a lifetime ago.

He came off the rail.

[Warning...]

[A Gate is within your premises]

’No. No, not while I’m standing here—’

[Category: —]

[You do not have access to this information]

’That’s three.’

Down the lawn, in the same churned ground and forty feet from the porch, a mouth of deep purple opened over the crater and hung there humming, drawing the dead grass toward it in a slow drift.

Nothing came out of it.

Theo got one hand on the back of Estea’s chair and Raindrop into the other. Behind him the sublevel door banged open against the wall, and Nischov came up the stairs shouting.

"Mr Theolyne!"

Theo did not turn round, and the doctor reached the top step with one hand braced on the frame and said the rest to his back:

"Her hands are warm."