Chapter 71: Blood on the Ramp

Chapter 71: Blood on the Ramp

The bronze doors were heavier than they looked. Dagna put her shoulder to the left one and it groaned open another foot, wide enough for the litter if nobody bumped the frame.

Silas bumped the frame.

Perrin hissed through his teeth.

"Sorry," Silas muttered, adjusting his grip on the front handles. Behind him, Alden said nothing, but his careful steps suggested the bite in his calf was troubling him.

Beyond the doors was a long hall, roofless in places, full of rubble and old leaves. At its far end a stair dropped away into rock.

Tavi had already gone ahead. A moment later Silas’s communicator clicked against his collar. "Stairs," Tavi’s voice said. "Long ones, steep, going down and curving left. Nothing moving. I can see light at the bottom."

"Understood," Leander said. "Dagna and I lead. Litter in the middle. Isolde, rear."

The stairs were worse than steep. They were worn into shallow bowls by centuries of feet, and the litter had to stay level or Perrin’s ankle swung. At the lower end, Silas faced downhill and held his handles high while Alden lowered his at the rear. Neither could see the next step properly. By the twentieth, Silas’s bad forearm was burning. By the fortieth, Alden’s breathing behind him had developed a catch.

Leander noticed. "Cross, give the back to Gareth."

They stopped on a wide step for Gareth to take the rear handles. Alden let go reluctantly and moved aside.

Silas didn’t turn around. He was holding the front of a litter on a narrow, curving stair in a sealed realm, and the person behind him blamed him for Lydia’s death. One shove would do it. One stumble that looked like an accident.

His hands are full, he told himself. Leander’s two steps below me. Isolde’s watching. And he’s not stupid.

Gareth carried the litter steadily all the way down. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. Silas could feel his attention between his shoulder blades like a hand.

Perrin, who had no idea about any of it, said faintly, "You two are good at this."

"Practice," Silas said, and Gareth made a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been so short.

Inside the case on his chest, the dart sat in its groove. Somewhere behind his ribs, through the bond, Nim was a small, quiet weight that had not moved since the courtyard. Silas was grateful for that.

The stair ended in daylight.

They came out onto a broad stone ledge, and the ground fell away in front of them.

It was a sanctuary sunk into the earth: a great round pit, open to a pale, sunless sky, with three tiers of ruined galleries stepping down its sides like seats around an arena. Ramps zigzagged between the tiers. At the bottom lay a dead garden of cracked flagstones and dry beds, and on the far northern side, an archway so large and so dark that it looked less like a door than a mouth.

"West side," Tavi said, crouched at the ledge’s lip. "Bottom tier. There’s a grate under the gallery. Someone’s behind it."

Silas looked. Under the lowest western gallery, behind a collapsed iron grille and a slab that had fallen across it, there was movement. A hand came through the bars and drew back.

"Alive," Leander said. "Right. West ramp, down. Same order."

The ramp switched back twice. They reached the first landing without trouble. At the second, Dagna stopped dead.

Below them, on the last stretch of ramp, something was waiting.

It resembled the pack hunters, but it was twice their size, its plates thick and crusted with something like old stone. A ridge of spines along its skull rose as they watched. Two ordinary hunters crouched behind it. The larger creature didn’t charge. It watched them with flat yellow eyes, blocking the only clear path down to the captives.

"Dagna, hold the landing," Leander said. "Caelan, the small ones. I want that big one off the—"

"Mine," Isolde said.

She walked past Leander before he could finish. On the way she drew her thumbnail down the inside of each forearm, unhurried, as though she were checking her sleeves. Blood ran out of both cuts and did not fall. It gathered beneath her hands in two thin, trembling lines, then hardened into something long and dark and pointed.

The elite came up the ramp to meet her.

Her first lance struck its shoulder and skidded across the plates, as the dart had in the courtyard. Isolde didn’t seem surprised. She stepped aside from its lunge with very little room to spare, and as it passed she let the second lance come apart in her hand. The blood went out in a fan of fine red threads, wrapped both of its forelegs, and anchored itself round the stone balustrade.

The creature wrenched forward. Some of the threads snapped under its weight, but the rest held long enough to pull its front legs out from under it. It went down on its chest and slid, scrabbling, three feet down the ramp.

Isolde was on it before it stopped. She drove what was left of the blood into the joint at the base of its skull, under the spines, where the plates met. Then she closed her hand.

Silas didn’t see what happened inside the creature. He saw it convulse once, all over, and go still.

One of the smaller hunters broke past the fight and came up the ramp toward the litter. Silas couldn’t let go of the handles. He reached instead, with Remote Grasp, for a cracked block of balustrade beside it, tore it loose with a jolt that he felt in his teeth, and dropped it on the hunter’s head. It staggered. Caelan put an arrow into its eye. The third went down under another arrow and Dagna’s boot.

Silas felt the cost settle behind his breastbone. Not much. More than he wanted to be spending this early.

Isolde stood over the elite with her arms at her sides. The cuts on her forearms were already closing. She was paler than she had been in the courtyard, and when she turned back up the ramp she swayed very slightly, then corrected it.

Alden reached out. "Are you—"

"Fine," Isolde said, and walked past his hand.

The bottom of the sanctuary smelled of dust and old water. Silas and Gareth set Perrin down behind a fallen column near the alcove. Caelan kept watch beside him while the others approached the grate.

Behind it was a deep alcove, a kind of storeroom under the gallery. The slab had fallen across the grille at an angle, pinning it shut. Through the bars, Silas saw faces: four of them, dirty and frightened, pressed back against the far wall.

"Help us," a woman said hoarsely. "Please. Corm’s hurt. He’s not moving."

"We’re here," Leander said. "Stay back from the bars. We’re getting you out."

Then the hissing started.

It came from everywhere at once: from the black archway on the north side, from the eastern galleries, from somewhere above them on the tiers they had just come down. Silas looked up and saw shapes moving along every level, dozens of them, slipping down ramps and dropping from ledges, spreading out in a long, patient curve that closed toward the grate.

"Dagna, shield the alcove," Leander snapped. "Caelan, high. Tavi, Isolde, flanks. Rooke, that slab. Sorne—"

"I can get inside to them," Maelin said.

Behind them all, Elyra Thale let out a long, put-upon sigh.

"Oh, for goodness’ sake," she said. "This is going to take all day."

She stepped out from behind Dagna’s shield and walked into the open.