Chapter 727: Ninety-Nine
Chapter 727: Ninety-Nine
"Immune to fire," Ashkar said eventually. "To my fire, which nothing has been immune to."
"To darkness," said Benedict.
"To force. To pressure. To the collapse of space around it." Almond spat out the leather and breathed. "To poison, to cutting, to erosion. It’s not resistance, it’s refusal. There has to be one thing. John said there’s always one thing." He looked up at the four of them ringed around him in the firelight, and at the Infernal Knight standing sentry beyond it, and he grinned through the pain with his teeth stained red. "So we stop hitting it. We start reading the ground."
"That," Benedict said, "is the first sensible thing you have said in nine days."
"You wanted to set the river on fire."
"It was a suggestion."
The clue had been in front of him since the first hour. He had simply not known it was a clue, because it did not look like a monster. It looked like geography.
There was a bend in the river about a day upstream where the water slowed and went dark and split around a shoal of grey stone. Nothing remarkable in it. Rivers bend. But Almond had spent four days mapping the creature’s range, and on the fifth he spread that map across a flat rock and sat with it until his eyes ached, and what he finally saw was that the river did not want to bend there. The channel was wrong. The stone was too soft to hold a shoal like that. The old cut of the water still showed in the far bank, silted and forgotten, and something had moved that river, patiently, across what must have been centuries, so that it no longer ran through the bend at all.
"It rerouted its own world," he said softly.
Chimera Crystalist’s eye stopped turning. The thought it pushed into Almond’s mind arrived whole and cold. *It has been afraid for so long that its fear became the landscape.*
"Yeah." Almond stood, and winced, and started rolling up the map. "Let’s go see what a river monster is scared of."
They found the tree on the seventh day, growing alone on the shoal, bone-white, roots driven down through the soft stone into whatever lay beneath. Its bark wept a slow clear sap that beaded and hung and did not fall. When Almond touched it his fingers went numb to the second knuckle. When he brought a Fabricated Spirit near, the construct came apart in his hands like wet paper, unmade so completely that not even the residue of it remained, and he sat back on his heels in the shallows with his numb fingers held out in front of him and felt something move through his chest that he could only honestly call joy.
Ashkar stepped closer, and the steam rolling off him thinned and died where it met the air around the tree. He stopped. "My lord. It is eating my heat."
"I know." Almond was already laughing, low and disbelieving. "It eats everything. That’s the whole point. It doesn’t burn, it doesn’t cut, it isn’t a weapon at all. It’s an essence. It’s been standing here since before I was born, waiting for somebody stubborn enough to notice a river running the wrong way." He looked up at the five of them. "Ninety-nine other regions out there. Every one of them has something like this hiding in plain sight."
"You sound delighted," Benedict observed.
"I’ve been getting my ribs broken for nine days by something I couldn’t scratch. Yes, Benedict. I’m delighted."
It took three more days to work out how to carry it, which nearly broke him worse than the creature had. The sap unmade anything he made, which was the entire problem and also the entire point. Every vessel he fabricated dissolved. Every containment he built came apart. On the eleventh attempt he sat in the shallows with his head in his hands while Starlight Beast nosed at the ruined slurry of his latest effort, and it was the Infernal Knight, who had not spoken in eleven days, who finally lowered its helm and said, in a voice like a door closing in an empty hall, "It does not consume the tree."
Almond lifted his head very slowly.
"It does not," the Knight repeated, "consume the tree."
"Ashkar," Almond said, standing up so fast the water sheeted off him, "I need you to hold something extremely still."
He cut the wood itself and hollowed it with the Knight’s edge, and let the sap fill a chamber of its own bone-white heartwood, and built the rest of the thing around that. A spear, more or less. Ugly. Bound with cord he braided out of his own torn cloak, because nothing he fabricated could survive touching the shaft. It weighed almost nothing at all.
He weighed it in his good hand on the tenth morning and looked at the four of them.
"You cannot hurt it," he said. "None of you. So I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to make it certain of itself. Go in like you mean it, get the coil, get the jaws, make it commit everything it has. It’s never been hurt in its whole existence and I need it to believe that today is no different."
"And where will you be?" Ashkar asked.
Almond looked at the dark water where the river went cold and deep.
"Underneath it."
They gave him the fight he asked for. Ashkar went in first and the shallows exploded into steam, and the Infernal Knight followed him down with its blade full of light, and Benedict blackened the sky over the water while Chimera Crystalist’s four crystals hammered a rhythm into the creature’s flank that would have leveled a fortress. Starlight Beast ran the bank in a white streak, screaming, drawing the blind head around. And the thing rose out of the river the way it always did, vast and patient and utterly unafraid, and took all of it without noticing, and reached for the man standing in the middle of the water.
Almond met it head on. The coil came around and he did not dodge, and it broke him properly this time, something tearing deep in his side, and the water closed over his face and the current had him and dragged him down into the cold black where the thing lived and where every creature it had ever taken had learned, in its last few seconds, that there was nothing down here worth fighting.
Almond turned in the dark. Set his feet on the riverbed. And drove the spear up into the soft place beneath its blind head where the armor gave way to gill.
What came out of the Exceed Monster was not blood. It was sound, or something wearing the shape of sound, one shuddering note that emptied the river, and the water blew outward in a wall and took Almond with it and threw him a hundred paces up the bank. He lay where he landed. He did not move for a long time.
When he could turn his head, the creature was coming apart in the shallows, unmaking itself in silence, that slate armor going soft and grey and running away into the current like ash. And the river, freed of it, was already curling back toward the bend it had not touched in a thousand years.
Ashkar reached him first, steam hissing where he knelt in the wet grass. "My lord."
"Don’t." Almond’s laugh turned into a cough and the cough came up red. "Don’t touch the ribs."
"You told us to make it certain of itself." Benedict’s shadow was already pooling over the wound in his side, cold and careful. "You did not mention you intended to let it swallow you."
"I mentioned underneath."
"Underneath," Benedict said, "is not the same word as inside."
Then the sky wrote on itself.
It came in letters no larger than a fingernail held at arm’s length, blue on blue, and it did not congratulate him and it did not explain.
[1/100]
Almond read it once. He read it again. Ten days. One arm broken and reset. Ribs he could count from the inside. An entire wilderness of rivers and forests and blue ranks of mountains standing patient out to every horizon, and each of those hundred regions holding its own unkillable thing and its own hidden essence, waiting for somebody stubborn enough to notice.
Starlight Beast pushed its nose against his cheek. Chimera Crystalist’s eye rotated once, slowly, toward the mountains.
"Ninety-nine," Ashkar said.
Almond let his head fall back into the grass, and looked up at that ordinary, enormous sky, and started laughing.