Chapter 530: We Found The Janitor

The dead went out of the light in a straight line, and we followed it, because apparently none of us had learned a single thing all evening.

Ilse went first with her sword low. Brunhilde came last, unhurried, frost sighing off her boots and refusing to spread the way it wanted to. And I walked in the middle, which is where you put the injured man and the idiot, and I was comfortably both.

The drag marks were clean. That was the part I couldn’t stop looking at. A body hauled by something hungry leaves a mess, a wallow, bits shed along the way. These went out of the snow in two neat parallel grooves, wing-tips folded in so they wouldn’t catch, and every last one of them ran the same direction.

’Wren.’

I see it.

’Is that tidy? That looks tidy.’

It looks tidy.

’I hate that it looks tidy.’

Then we came around the shoulder of the ridge, and there they were.

The colony. All hundred of them, or close enough that counting felt rude. Not piled. Not eaten. Stacked. Laid in rows on the bone floor with their wings folded flat against their bodies and their heads all turned the same way, spaced with a regularity that made my stomach turn over in a way the actual fight hadn’t managed.

Ilse stopped dead.

"This isn’t a nest," she said. "Somebody’s clearing up."

And that was when I found the top of it.

I say found because I had to look for it, in stages, the way you find the top of a building when you’re standing at the foot. It was down at the far end of the rows, bent over the last body. Black. Not armoured-black or shadow-black. The specific dead black of a thing with no seam, no join, no rivet, no face, nothing anywhere on it that light could catch and come back off.

It picked the werebat up by one wing. It turned the body over, once, the way you check a plate for a spot you missed.

Then it set the thing down in line with the others and reached for the next one.

’...’

’...Oh.’

’It’s a janitor.’

I said it out loud. I couldn’t not.

"We’ve found the janitor. That’s — Brunhilde, that’s a janitor, that thing is doing chores—"

"I don’t know what that is."

Which stopped me flat.

Because she’d said it in a voice I had never once heard her use. Not the flat old judge’s voice. Not the icy one she saves for me. This was just a woman looking at something and finding nothing behind her eyes to compare it to, and Brunhilde is nine kinds of ancient, Brunhilde taught the Tyrant Empress to hold a sword, Brunhilde has met everything.

"You don’t know what it is," I repeated.

"I have never seen it. I have never heard of it. I do not know its shape and I do not know its make." A pause. "I would very much like to leave."

’Ah, damn...’

Here’s the thing though. It hadn’t looked at us.

Not once. We were standing in the open forty paces away having a conversation at normal volume, and the giant faceless thing kept working its way down the row without so much as a pause in its rhythm.

Naturally, I waved at it.

Ilse caught my wrist so fast I felt the bones grind. "Do not."

"It’s not interested in us."

"Yes," she said. "Keep it that way."

And she was right, and I knew she was right, and I want it on the record that we could have walked away right then. The road down was open behind us. The thing had a hundred bodies to file and no opinion about the three people watching it do it. All we had to do was be uninteresting for about ninety more seconds.

It set the last werebat in line.

It straightened up.

And it raised its head, and that was the first time the whole shape of it moved at once, and it looked past all three of us at the frozen sun burning over the ridge.

The sun went out.

I need to be careful about this part, because it didn’t shatter and it wasn’t struck. There was no flare, no crack, no falling debris, no sound of any kind. One moment there was a small blue star hanging in the vault of the layer, throwing clean cold light over the snow and the bone and three long shadows.

The next moment there had never been one.

The dark came down over the field like a lid going onto a pot, and it came down complete, and I lost my own hands.

Somebody’s breath went out hard beside me and I’m fairly sure it was mine.

’—the fuck—’

Then blue crawled back into the world in a thin ring around Brunhilde’s boots, a few paces of grudging frost-light, all she could hold in a place that was pressing her winter down to nothing. It reached about ten feet and stopped.

Brunhilde was standing very straight inside it.

And the thing was facing her.

It had crossed maybe half the distance to do it. I never saw a step. I never saw it move at all, I only saw where it had been and then where it was, and the space between those two facts had been deleted so cleanly that my eyes tried to hand me an apology for missing it.

Then something settled on the air. Not fear. I want to be specific here because I’ve spent this entire arc getting my fear handled by professionals, and I know the taste of it now, and this wasn’t that. This was the sensation of being looked over and sorted. Of standing in a room while somebody decides what’s rubbish and what stays.

It had decided about me already. I could feel exactly where it had put me, and it was nowhere.

It had not decided about her.

"Brunhilde," I said. "Why you."

"I do not know."

"Guess."

"I lit the dark," she said slowly. "And I killed a hundred things and left them where they fell." The frost at her boots pulsed once. "I made work."

Then she attacked, because she is what she is.

The first lance of ice took it in the chest, and it went in. Actually went in, a hand’s depth of crystal buried in that seamless black, and the thing rocked half a step back with its arm coming up late.

’It bleeds!’

The second lance hit the same spot and slid off it.

Not deflected. Slid. Like ice off a hot pan, except there was no heat anywhere in it, the thing was as cold as the room and getting colder. And I watched the place where the first lance had gone in seal over as if the surface had simply remembered it wasn’t supposed to have a hole there.

The third came in as a wave, her whole domain thrown at one target, everything she had left in a suppressed room. And it walked through the front of it and the ice grew backward, up the wave, toward her, taking her own cold and wearing it.

Brunhilde took a step back.

She had not done that. Not against the Hollow Raven, not against a hundred werebats, not in the whole time I’d known her. And she did it now, one short step on the bone, and I heard her breath change.

’It’s learning her.’

’It’s learning her, that’s what it — every time she hits it, it gets a look at what hit it, and then that stops working forever.’

And every part of my brain that keeps me alive stood up at once and said the obvious thing, which was: make it look at you instead.

That’s my whole job. That’s what I am on a battlefield. I’m the loud one, the bright one, the interesting one, the man who lights himself up like a festival and runs the long way round so the woman with the greatsword gets her seconds. I won the last fight doing exactly that. White flame was already climbing Wren, already at my knuckles, my weight already shifting onto my front foot—

’—no.’

I put it out.

Because it doesn’t kill things. It cleans them. And the only way to get on that list is to be worth cleaning, and the fastest way I know to become the biggest, brightest, most out-of-place object in a dark room is the thing I was one half-second from doing.

Cade.

’I know.’

You have never once in your life been quiet.

’I know, Wren.’

So I stood there in the dark and did nothing, and it was the hardest work I have done since I fell into this place. Every wound I had was singing. My best friend on the field was being taken apart by degrees eight paces away and my hands were empty by choice.

And Ilse was breathing beside me, warm, in a layer that has never once been warm.

’Don’t,’ I thought at her, uselessly. ’Don’t be interesting. Please.’

"Brunhilde." I kept my voice low and flat and boring. "It doesn’t want you dead. It wants the mess gone. So give it a bigger one."

She understood before I finished.

She turned away from the thing that was learning her, and she put everything she had left into the vault overhead, into the roof the colony had hung from, and a hundred feet of ancient bone and black stone came down across the field in a roar that shook the teeth in my head.

It buried the rows. All of them. Every neat, patient, hours-long line of folded wings, and the ridge, and the drifts, gone under a wave of rubble.

The thing turned toward it.

Not fooled. It wasn’t fooled, and I want to be honest about that, it didn’t fall for anything. It simply had a larger job now, and it went to do the larger job, because that is the only thing it does.

"Run," Brunhilde said.

We ran.

Down, in the pitch black, in a place with no sun and no moon and no stars and now nothing else either, three people going hand over hand down the throat of the layer with Brunhilde’s thin blue ring lighting maybe two steps of it. Nobody spoke. My arm had opened up again somewhere in the collapse and I couldn’t see enough to care.

We got a long way. Far enough that I let myself think the word away.

Then the sound went out of the world.

Not silence. I know silence, the layer’s full of it. This was every noise being taken away at once — my boots, my breath, the grind of stone behind us, the drip of water somewhere off in the rock. All of it lifted off, clean, the way the sun had gone.

Ilse’s mouth was moving. Nothing came out of it.

’...Oh, come on.’