Chapter 534: Do Not Name The Food

The gap under the slab was nine inches.

I know it was nine inches because I measured it with my hand twice, once when we got sealed in and once about an hour later out of pure boredom, and both times my palm went flat under the stone with a knuckle to spare and no more, because rock does not change its mind.

So whatever was moving out there could not get in.

’Right?’

Wren said nothing, which is the single most alarming thing Wren does.

’Wren.’

I’m thinking.

’Don’t think. Agree with me.’

I would love to. Cade, some of the things down here don’t have a skeleton.

’...’

’...Ah, damn.’

The sound came closer. Instead of footsteps, it was a dragging, wet, unhurried scrape, and then a long pause, and then more of it, closer each time by about the length of a man, and then the green glow at the bottom of the slab went dark as something put itself across the gap.

Ilse was already moving. She got herself between me and it without a word, which she has now done four times and which I have decided to stop having feelings about, and her sword came up low and flat in the dark.

Then the thing came through.

It came through the way you get a wet sheet through a letterbox. It just... reorganised. Whatever it had instead of bones let go, and about a hundred pounds of pale blind animal poured itself under nine inches of stone in three long horrible pulses and reassembled on our side of the slab, and then it stood up on too many legs and shook itself off like a dog. Grit came off it and rattled down the slab. It smelled like the underside of a stone you should have left alone.

We all looked at each other. Or rather, Ilse and I looked at it, and it pointed its front end at us and had no eyes to look back with.

Nobody attacked anybody.

’...’

’Okay.’

’Okay, so what’s happening.’

It was one of theirs. That was the first thing I registered, and it went into me like a splinter, because I had killed one of these nine paces from this exact crack about four hours ago — pale, low, many-legged, roughly pony-sized, blind as a stone. I had put three chains through it while it was running away from a footstep.

And this one had squeezed itself through a letterbox to get in here with us, and now that it was in, it did not appear to have any further plans.

It went to the back wall. It felt around with its front legs, testing the stone the way you test a stair in the dark. It found the deepest, driest corner of the crack, turned around twice, folded down into it, and made a small sound like a bag settling.

Then it went to sleep.

"...It went to sleep," I said.

"Yes."

"In our hole."

"It is not our hole," Ilse said. "It is a hole. We were here first, which in this place means nothing at all."

I sat back against the stone and looked at it in the green glow. Its sides were going in and out. There was a long ugly gash down its flank where something with better teeth had gotten a piece of it during the run, and the flesh around it had gone grey, and the grey was spreading in a way I recognised and did not want to think about while I was looking at it breathe.

’Death Sense.’

I opened it, carefully, the way you ease a door in a house you’re not sure is empty.

Nothing came back but a small life, running low, in pain, and not one single grain of killing intent anywhere in it.

’It’s not hunting us.’

’It has never hunted anything in its life, Wren, look at it.’

Then, because I am the way I am:

"I’m calling it Kevin."

Ilse turned her head very slowly.

"No."

"Too late. It’s happened. He’s Kevin."

"It is an animal."

"Kevin is an animal, yes."

"Do not name the food."

And there it was.

She said it flatly, without cruelty, the way she says everything, and she was already looking at the gash on its flank and doing the arithmetic that I had spent the last four hours very carefully not doing.

Because she was right. That is the horrible part and I want it recorded properly. Ilse was right.

We had no food. We had no water past the seep on the back wall, which came down slow enough that you could get a mouthful out of it about once an hour if you were patient and did not mind the taste of the rock. My well was a dry socket and had been since the mouth of the crack. And there, asleep in the corner, wounded and dying anyway, was a hundred pounds of meat with essence in it.

Essence is what buys Brunhilde back.

’Brunhilde.’

She came from a very long way off, and thin.

’...I am here.’

’How cheap are you now?’

’Cheaper than yesterday. Not cheap.’

’And Kassie. Maggie. Do you know anything at all about how they’re doing...?’

’You are about to ask me something and I would rather you did not.’

’...Sigh.’

The pause that came back was long enough that I heard the water on the wall, twice. So I tried the Nave myself. Kassie. Maggie. White Feather. Celestine. Four names, and nothing on the end of any of them, not a wall and not a door, only distance with no far side to it.

It was sort of the same with Brunhilde. But also different.

’Perhaps it is the sword. And whatever the conditions were when she was banished in there.’

Either way, I was stuck with this Drakonir until whenever, and she clearly hates me.

Which made it all worse.

’Maybe finding Light will help alleviate the mood.’

Immediately I thought about it, I understood how bad of a bad idea it was. That guy was the bone of my contention, and there was no way he would alleviate any mood. He was a sadist too.

Either way, I glanced at Ilse, wanting to make a bold suggestion to help save us. But now felt like an awful time. So I just swallowed it.

At least I thought I did.

"Hey, Ilse, you know you can just fuck me and everything will get better, right?"

Ilse did not move. The water kept coming down the back wall and Kevin’s sides kept going in and out in the corner, and she turned her head the same slow way she had turned it for the name, and looked at me.