Chapter 539: Whatever You Do, Don’t Touch The Walls

The first one came up the shaft wall without breaking the surface of the water at all.

That is the part I want written down properly, because it is the part that told me what we were dealing with. It did not swim. It did not push up out of the black and gasp and reach. One moment there was a wet rock face going down into the flood with the green wall-glow sliding on the runoff, and the next there was a hand on it.

Then an arm. Then too much arm, more joints in it than an arm has any business having, and then the whole pale bloated length of the thing hauled itself out of the water and up the vertical stone at a speed I associate with insects and not with anything that used to have a face.

It never once felt for a handhold. It already knew where they were.

It was up on our ledge before I had finished standing.

’Death Sense—’

It gave me everything at once, and everything was bad. Life, yes. Old life. Old in a way that made the Archmage feel like a recent development, and behind it, killing intent, thin and cold and entirely without any interest in whether I fought back.

And while it crossed the ledge toward us I did the sum I had been doing every hour since the flood started, the one I hate, the one Ilse taught me to stop pretending I could avoid.

Weeks of lying in a dead tunnel had put a thread of water back in the bottom of the well. Not much. Kevin had put in a little more. Two Feather Steps on the way up here had taken most of that straight back out.

What was left was three chains.

Not three castings. Three lengths. I could feel exactly where the bottom was, the way you can feel the last of the coins in a pocket without looking, a dry socket behind my ribs with one swallow left standing in it, and the number was three, and after that there was nothing at all in me but meat and a sword and whatever I could talk my way out of.

’Three.’

’Make them count, Cade.’

Ilse got to it first. She always does. Her sword came around flat and took it across the middle and it folded, and the folding was wrong, there was no resistance in it anywhere, the blade went through the way a hand goes through wet paper. Nothing sprayed. What came out of it ran down the flat of her blade grey and slow and went on running.

And it kept coming.

"It doesn’t care!" she shouted.

"They never do down here!"

I put Wren through the top of its skull because that is where I keep my optimism, and it made a sound like a boot coming out of mud and it grabbed my forearm with a hand that had far too many fingers, cold coming through the sleeve like water finding a seam, and I did the only free thing available, which was to plant my boot in its chest and shove.

It went off the ledge.

And in the water, it stopped being anything at all.

I did not see that. I felt it, through Death Sense, and it was better than seeing. One second there was a fast cold purposeful thing, and the next there was the same thing turning over and over in moving water with all those joints working against absolutely nothing, helpless as a dropped coat.

’...’

"Ilse."

"I felt it go slack."

"They’re not swimmers."

"They are climbers," Ilse said, and she said it the way she says everything, flat and useful. "They live on the rock. Keep them off the rock."

Which was a lovely piece of tactical thinking and lasted about eleven seconds, because that was when six more of them came up the shaft.

Then the ledge went under.

I want to be very clear that we did not choose to go into that water.

The flood came up the last four feet in one long shove and took the ledge and took us with it, and I got one breath, one, a bad one with grit in it, and then the black closed over my head and every sound in the world went thick and far away. My own heartbeat stayed. Everything else arrived late and from the wrong direction, stone knocking on stone somewhere underneath my boots.

I tried the flame anyway. Of course I did.

I drew up the smallest fire I know how to make, the thumbnail bead I learned in the cave above the river, and it came, and it cost me almost nothing, and it did almost nothing. Water does not care about a bead of white. It sat in my cupped palm about the size of a coin and showed me my own fingers, already white and wrinkled and belonging to somebody else, and roughly four inches of black, and the black past that came in a step closer to have a look.

Then I closed my hand on it and put it out before it could talk me into feeding it.

’No. Not this time. Not for light.’

Because I had something better, and it was free.

I opened Death Sense, and the dark stopped being dark.

I cannot explain this properly. It is not sight. Nothing had edges. But there were eleven cold old lives in that flooded tunnel with me and I knew where every single one of them was, the way you know where your own hand is with your eyes shut, and I knew which two were moving and which one was above me and which four were still crawling along the rock like a fist closing.

And I knew where Ilse was, because Ilse was the only warm thing in the entire world.

’...There you are.’

I went for her.

Not fast. There is no fast. Everything down there happened at the speed of pushing, my one lungful going stale and my legs doing the work in a medium that argued with every inch of it. Wren stayed in my fist, because opening the fist was not on the table. Twice the current rolled me over and both times I only knew which way up I was because the warm thing did not move.

And I felt the moment my body started reaching for the bright white panic that ends men in water. The chest going tight and helpful. The throat starting to make suggestions of its own.

I have drowned before. Nearly. Close enough that the difference is academic.

And I knew this feeling by name now, which turns out to be the entire trick.