Chapter 536: The Only Road Left Is Down

We watched it work for about an hour before we started down.

I don’t know why. There was nothing to learn. It came out of the broken country behind us the way weather comes over a hill, tall enough that I had to find the top of it in stages, and it walked out into the flattened stretch where the stampede had died and it began, patiently, to tidy up.

It picked things up. It turned them over. It set them down in rows.

A hundred creatures that had killed each other over a hole in a wall, and one huge faceless thing going along the line of them like a man clearing a table.

"It has not looked at us once," Ilse said.

"It won’t."

"You sound sure."

"I filed four bodies for it in the dark," I said. "I’m staff."

She glanced at me sideways. "That is the stupidest sentence anyone has ever said to me, and I was raised by Drakonirs."

’It’s also true.’

It’s also true, Wren agreed.

And it was. That was the thing I finally got straight, standing on that ledge with a dead animal in my stomach and a greatsword on my shoulder. It had never been hunting anybody. It had gone after Brunhilde because she kept making work, and it had gone after the sun because the sun was a thing that had been left running, and it had never once in all of that come at me, because I was not a mess and had never been one.

You cannot beat it. You cannot fight it. You can only avoid being something it has to deal with.

’That’s not a monster,’ I thought. ’That’s a caretaker.’

’This whole place has a caretaker, and it isn’t for us.’

I pulled the Dark Mantle out and put it on, just to see.

The world went slightly further away, the way it had in the silence. My own weight stopped being a thing I was announcing. Down on the flat, the tall shape kept working and did not so much as pause, which proved nothing at all, since it hadn’t been paying attention to me with the mantle off either.

"Can it see me?" Ilse asked.

"No. That’s the problem." I took it off and the world came back with a small unpleasant lurch. "It hides me. Only me. If I put this on and walked past something that wanted you, it would go straight through me to get to you and I’d be standing there invisible while it happened."

Ilse considered that.

"Then it is a coward’s cloak," she said.

"It’s a raven’s cloak. Same thing, apparently."

’Brunhilde.’

She came thin. She always comes thin now, from wherever the sword ends and she begins.

’...Speak up.’

’The mark. The one it put on you. Did it follow you in?’

There was a small pause.

’No.’ She said it more easily than she had said anything else. ’I wondered too. It was not on my body, Cade, it was on my presence. It had marked the thing that stood on the field and made cold and left a mess behind it, and there is no field in here. There is nothing in here to clean. Whatever it decided about me, it decided about a woman standing in the snow, and that woman is not currently anywhere.’

’So you’re safe.’

’I am stored,’ she said. ’Do not romanticise it. But yes. It cannot reach me and it has no reason to want to, and when I come out I intend to be a great deal more careful about what I leave lying around.’

’How long?’

’Weeks. Not days.’ She said it flatly, no softening, the way she does. ’It comes down every hour I sit here. It goes back up every time you spend. That is the entire arrangement and there is no clever way around it, so stop looking for one.’

’...Right.’

’And Cade. Talk to me on the way down.’

’I will.’

’You will forget.’

’I’ll be terrible at it constantly.’

’That is acceptable.’

Behind and above us, the ruined layer stretched off west to east, and now that we had height on it I could see the thing I hadn’t been able to see from inside it.

A road.

Not built. Worn. A wide flattened track running clean across the whole visible width of that country, older than the destruction sitting on top of it, the rock ground down and polished by a great weight passing over it a very large number of times.

"They’ve done that before," I said.

"They will do it again," Ilse said. "That is what a road is."

’...Great.’

’So they come back.’

’They come back, and they don’t know we’re here, and they never will.’ I turned it over. ’Honestly? I think I prefer that to something that hates me.’

"You would," said Ilse.

Then I went to the edge and looked down, and Death Sense opened without being asked.

It went down into that drop a long way, past where the green glow gave up, past anything I could put a number on. And it found one life.

One. In all of that.

It was so far below us that distance stopped being a useful idea, and it was so large that Death Sense simply declined the question the way it had declined the serpent, flinching back into me and handing over nothing but the animal certainty every cell in my body already had.

Asleep. Deeply, enormously, patiently asleep, in a way that felt less like rest and more like something waiting out a sentence.

And here is the part that put the cold up the back of my neck.

I knew the direction.

I’d felt it before. Up in the shallow country, weeks ago, kneeling at the edge of a river that had nearly finished me, staring out at a black horizon with nothing in it and no reason at all to keep staring. I’d told myself to let it rest. I’d made myself stand up and walk away from it, and I had been very pleased with my own good sense about it at the time.

Same pull. Same direction. It had been down there the whole while, underneath everything, and every layer I’d fallen through had brought me closer to it.

’...Ah.’

Cade.

’It’s been calling since the river, Wren.’

I know. I felt it through your hand. I did not say anything because you clearly did not want to hear it.

’That’s the most tactful thing you’ve ever done.’

Do not get used to it.

Ilse was watching my face.

"What," she said.

"There’s something at the bottom of this."

"There is something at the bottom of everything down here."

"Not like this." I couldn’t explain it and I tried anyway. "It’s the only thing alive in the whole drop. Everything else has cleared out of it. And it’s — Ilse, it’s been pulling at me since before I met you. Since the river."

She looked down into it for a while. She did not tell me I was imagining it, which I appreciated, and she did not tell me it would be fine, which I would not have believed.

"Then we should not go down," she said.

"No."

"We are going down anyway."

"Up is a hundred feet of collapsed vault. Back is a flat country with a caretaker in it and no food. Along is a road that five walking mountains use." I hitched the sword. "Down is the only direction that hasn’t already said no."

"That," Ilse said, "is the first genuinely sound piece of reasoning I have heard you produce."

"I’ve been saving it."

She almost smiled. Not quite. The equipment was clearly out of practice.

"What about the one you keep not mentioning," she said. "The Light."

’...Ah, damn.’

Because I had been not mentioning him, deliberately and continuously, since roughly the moment she’d asked where everyone else was.

"He’s down here somewhere," I said. "Or he isn’t. He fell when we all fell. If he’s alive, he’s the single most useful bastard in this entire place and I’d rather chew rock than say that out loud."

"You just did."

"I’d rather chew rock than say it twice."

Ilse adjusted the belt at her wrist, the one that had been tied to mine for four days and which neither of us had mentioned untying.

"Then we find the bottom," she said, "and if he is anywhere, he is between here and it."

And that was the whole plan. That was everything we had. A drop with no measured bottom, a thing asleep at the end of it that had been quietly asking for me since before I knew her name, a woman with no summon and no house who had decided, without ever once saying so, to stay, and a Calamity in a sword who got a little cheaper every hour I managed not to be interesting.

Behind us, the caretaker set down another body in a straight and tidy line, and did not look up, and would never look up, because we were not its problem and, with a bit of luck and a great deal of restraint, never would be.

I went first, because the sword was heaviest and the handholds were worst at the top.

The first hold came away in my fingers and went down without ever telling me where it landed.

"Brunhilde."

’I am here.’

"Talk to me."

’That is my line.’

’Yeah, well. It’s a long way down.’