Chapter 540: This Time, It is Awake

’I know you. Sit down.’

I stopped kicking. The panic went past me looking for somebody else.

Ilse was up against the wall.

She had to be. When you cannot see and cannot breathe, your body finds a surface and holds on, and it is the worst possible thing you can do in a tunnel owned by climbers, and she knew that, and her body had done it anyway.

Four of them were coming along the rock toward her, hand over hand over hand, the wall-glow smearing green behind them through all that moving water so that I got them as shapes and never once as animals.

I threw the first chain past her, into the wall above the nearest, and I hauled — and the pull took the thing off the stone and dropped it into open water, and Death Sense told me the exact moment it went from a predator to a bag of loose joints.

Three left on the rock. Two chains left in me.

I got a hand on Ilse’s shoulder and pulled and she nearly took my head off before she understood, a gauntlet knuckle skidding along my cheekbone hard enough that I tasted it, and then we were both in open water with nothing to hold and nothing to breathe, and the three still anchored came off the wall at us all at once.

Which was, I realised somewhere in the middle of it, exactly what I wanted.

Because coming off the rock is the one thing they are bad at.

Ilse understood it in the same second. She stopped cutting. Cutting had never worked. Down there a swing leaves your shoulder and then the water gets hold of it and hands it over slowly and politely, and by the time the edge arrives the thing it was meant for has already decided what to do about it.

So she started shoving, catching each one as it arrived and putting a shoulder or a boot into it and sending it away out into the current, and she did it four times in a row without a weapon and without a single flare of essence, because Ilse does not run on essence, Ilse runs on being extremely difficult to kill.

Then her hand closed on my collar and pulled up.

There was a pocket at the roof. Of course there was. Air gets caught where the rock domes, and she had counted the ceiling the way she counts everything, and she put my head into about nine inches of foul trapped air and held me there while I drank it. It tasted of wet stone and of something that had finished rotting a long time ago and had been waiting up there ever since to be breathed by somebody.

And the ceiling was a surface.

I felt them coming before I finished the second breath. Three of them, crawling upside down along the roof toward the only place in that tunnel where we could live.

’Of course.’

’The only place to breathe is the only place they’re fast.’

Chain two took the leading one off the roof and dropped it past my shoulder into the black.

Chain three I put into the rock itself, an anchor, a handhold, one loop of it round my forearm so the current could not take us out of the pocket while we breathed. The loop pulled tight and bit and kept biting, and I let it, because a numb arm is cheaper than a tunnel.

And then the well was empty.

Not low. Empty. That flat dead nothing behind the ribs where a thing used to be, and I hung there in nine inches of bad air on a chain I could not replace with two of them still coming and precisely nothing left to spend.

’Ilse.’

I could not say it. I got her wrist and squeezed twice, the way we had learned in the dark under the slab, and she squeezed once back.

Then we did it with our hands.

I am not going to dress that part up. There is nothing clever in it. Two people in a nine-inch strip of air at the top of a flooded tunnel, holding onto an anchor, kicking things off a ceiling with their boots as they arrive. She broke one at a joint with a downward stamp and I did not hear it go, I felt it, a dull double click coming up through the water into the bones of my knee, and then the pieces of it were drifting apart with the current the way weed does. The other got a hand on my ankle and I put my heel through its shoulder twice and it let go and went, still reaching, still patient, out into water it could do nothing in.

And that was the fight.

No flame. No power. A woman who is very hard to kill, a man with an empty socket behind his ribs, and one rule we had worked out in the first thirty seconds and then just kept applying until nothing was left to apply it to.

The flood took the pocket about a minute later.

It came up over the last of the air and I let go of the chain because it had gone out with the well and there was nothing to hold anyway, and the water carried us up through the throat of the rock in the dark with our arms round each other. The rock went past us on all sides at once and took skin off my shoulder in three places and I did not find out about any of it until much later.

[You have slain a level 6, Apex Beast. The Pale Clinger]

[You have slain a level 6, Apex Beast. The Pale Clinger]

’...Slain. Sure. Let’s call it that.’

Two. Out of eleven. The rest were still down there somewhere, turning over in the current, entirely unkilled and entirely unable to do anything about it, and I have decided that I am at peace with that.

We broke the surface into somewhere enormous.

I knew it before I could see anything, because the sound changed. Sound had been thick and close for weeks, a tunnel sound, walls answering everything. This came back off nothing at all. It went out and out and did not return.

We got to something. A shelf, a slope, a heap of old fallen rock, silted over and slick enough that my first two grabs took nothing but handfuls of it. I got an elbow onto it and hauled, and Ilse came up beside me, and the two of us lay on cold wet stone and did nothing but breathe for a very long time.

The water kept rising. Slower now. It had room.

"Ilse."

"Mm."

"Are you alive."

"I am extremely annoyed," she said, "which I have found is the same thing."

’...Heh.’

Then Death Sense opened by itself, for the third time in a week, and I let it.

It went out across that enormous flooded dark, and it found nothing, and nothing, and nothing.

And then, a long way down and a long way out, under all of it, it found the one life it will not measure for me.

Closer than last time.

And this time it was not asleep.