Chapter 184: Two Against the Unknown

(Alash Vortex POV)

It had been looking at the three of us in turn, at the centre of each chest and never at a face. Every time its head moved, it moved more slowly, as if each choice cost it more than the last.

I went toward Elizabeth anyway. I crossed the broken stone with my eyes on her, and Daphne came with me, a step to my left.

By the time I reached her, its head had come back to me a fourth time, and this time it stayed.

I don’t know why it chose me. Perhaps I was simply the nearest now, standing over her with nothing in my hands.

It sank back a little on its hind legs. I didn’t know what that meant.

Elizabeth did. "Alash," she said, or tried to say. There was no breath behind it.

The forelimb unfolded toward me, bending in three places where there should have been one, and reached for the centre of my chest.

I put a Barrier in its way.

It came up pale gold between us, a single pane about the size of a door. The forelimb met it and didn’t strike so much as lean, with the whole weight of that long body behind it.

I felt it arrive behind my breastbone. It was the pull I had been told to avoid, and for a moment the edges of the world went dark.

In Merrow’s courtyard, a Tiger had leaned on my Barrier too. But a Tiger tires. This leaned, and went on leaning, and the pull went on with it.

Sorel’s note came back to me, word for word. You may use Barrier again. Please don’t.

The pane held. My Barriers hold by spending themselves, and this one began to spend. The gold thinned from the edges inward, and the pull in my chest grew to match it. The creature leaned harder.

Its head was a hand’s width from the gold. This close, it had no face at all. The pale lines moved under its hide like light under cracked ice, and the head was turned, very precisely, to the centre of my chest.

’What is that?’

[I cannot identify it.]

The System can tell me a cooldown to the minute, and which line of a letter I didn’t cross out. It couldn’t tell me this.

Behind me, Elizabeth was breathing in short, shallow pulls. I could hear every one of them. I could hold the pane, or I could turn around and heal her. I couldn’t do both properly, and I couldn’t do either for long.

"Drop it," said Daphne.

She was on my left, where she had said she would be. Her hands were up. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the place where the forelimb met the gold.

"If I drop it..."

"Drop it. Heal her."

Two nights ago, on a stair, she had told me that if something happened, she would cover me. I had told her I would stand very still and make it easy for her.

I let the pane go.

The limb came through the space where the gold had been, and Daphne made it heavy.

In one instant, that single limb weighed more than the rest of the creature put together. It dropped out of the air under its own weight and hit the flagstones hard enough to break them in a star.

The shoulder came down after it, dragged by the sudden weight of its own arm, and the whole front of the creature followed.

Its head struck the flagstones a foot from my boots.

For one breath it lay there, pinned to the stone by its own arm. I had seen Daphne put a Tiger on his knees in Merrow’s courtyard. I hadn’t known she could do this to a body that size in less time than it took me to blink.

This close, I could see the burns along its back already closing over, slow and certain. The broken foreleg folded under it hadn’t mended yet. Its hide was recovering while the bone beneath it stayed broken, and I couldn’t have told you why.

Then Daphne let go, all at once, before holding it could start costing her what holding costs.

I turned my back on it and knelt beside Elizabeth.

It was the most frightening thing I did all afternoon, and nobody noticed.

Elizabeth’s eyes found mine. She had enough breath for one word, and she spent it carefully.

"You."

"Me," I agreed, and put my hands on her.

Green light came up under my palms.

I went to the shoulder first, because that was the thing that was killing her.

The wound ran from the top of her shoulder halfway down her upper arm, deep, through the muscle and into the joint.

It had been bleeding since the first minute, hard at first and slower now. That isn’t the good sign people think it is. A wound slows when there is less left to push through it.

Under the light, the deep vessels closed first. The muscle drew itself together over them, layer by layer, until there was skin again.

The bleeding stopped. What she had already lost stayed lost. Her hands were still cold under mine, and her lips had gone grey. Healing mends what is torn. It doesn’t put back what has run out, and that would take days she didn’t have here.

Over my shoulder, through a gap in the broken walls, I could see the top of the steps.

Renn came up them at a run.

He went past the guards without slowing and put his palm flat against the empty air, as the older guard had. He pushed. He took his hand away, looked at it, and put it back.

The guards were all talking at once. I couldn’t hear a word of it. I could see Renn’s face while he listened, and it went still in a particular way, the stillness of a man adding up a column and not liking the total.

He looked straight at me without seeing me. He was looking at an empty platform with three of his charges on it.

I had broken his hold in front of his own guards. Sooner or later he would ask me why, and I had no better answer for him than I’d had for Daphne.

He lifted his whistle.

Two short calls came through the wall, muffled, as if from the bottom of a well.

Regroup.

He was pulling back everyone he could still reach. That meant James and Sophie, behind the fold, and the only way from the cairn to the gate ran up the lower path and past these steps.

Elizabeth had heard it too. Her eyes went past me to the steps.

"Regroup," she said.

"Yes."

"He’ll come back this way." She didn’t say who. She didn’t need to.

"Yes."

She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her face was very nearly arranged.

I went back to the ribs.

Two of them were broken clean through, low on the left, and a third was cracked and pretending it wasn’t.

I set them. There is no gentle way to do that. She made a sound I won’t describe, and then she took a whole breath for the first time since I had come through, and let it out, and took another.

"You shouldn’t be here," she said.

She had spent her first real breath on it. It came out low and furious and very nearly steady.

"I know."

"You broke the hold. Both of you."

"Yes."

Behind me, stone cracked, and something heavy hit the flagstones. I didn’t turn round. That was Daphne’s to deal with, and I had promised to make it easy for her.

Elizabeth looked past me at Daphne and the creature, then back at my face.

"You were holding," she said. "I watched you. Then you ran straight here." Her eyes didn’t leave mine. "How did you know?"

I had no answer. I had a true one, and I couldn’t give it, and I had never been any good at false ones with her.

"He knew," said Daphne, without taking her eyes off the creature.

The creature was up again.

It came at us from a new angle every time. It started toward me and finished toward Daphne. It turned its head to Elizabeth and reached for me. Three of us together had broken its aim, and it was slower for it, and much harder to read.

Daphne met every reach.

She never held it. She hit it, short and hard, at the instant a limb committed, and let go again before the weight could settle. A forelimb slammed into the flagstones. A hind leg buckled under it and straightened again.

Once it went for Daphne herself. She made its whole front heavy and stepped aside as it came down, and her face didn’t change at all.

Elizabeth was watching it over my shoulder. Propped against the parapet, with her ribs still knitting, she was reading it like a page.

"It’s weight," she said. "It goes back. Just before it reaches.

Daphne didn’t answer. The next time the creature sank onto its hind legs, she was already there, and the limb hit the stone half unfolded.

It happened twice.

The third time, it didn’t sink back at all. It reached from standing, with no warning, and I felt the air move against the back of my neck before Daphne caught it.

"It’s stopped," said Elizabeth. "It’s stopped settling."

"I see it," said Daphne.

She stopped watching its weight and started watching its legs. The broken foreleg was the one it trusted least, and she made it heavier every time the creature put it down, until it walked as if the ground under that one foot were deeper than the rest.

Then she looked up.

The shelf of cracked stone was still leaning out over the ruin of Elizabeth’s corridor. It had no business being up at all. The creature was circling underneath it, toward Elizabeth’s feet.

Daphne lowered one hand and pointed at the shelf.

I knew that gesture. The last time I had seen it, a storeroom roof had come down under a Tiger in Merrow’s courtyard. I leaned over Elizabeth before it fell, so that anything coming our way would have to come through me first.

The shelf came down.

It fell heavier than stone has any right to fall, and the creature went under it. Dust went up in a grey wall.

A piece of the shelf spun off the edge of the fall and hit me square between the shoulder blades. Mana Aegis took it without a flicker, and under me Elizabeth never felt it. Nobody saw. That is the whole point of it.

Elizabeth had built that shelf. She had watched it come down on the creature over my shoulder, and I saw her approve.

I put my hands back on Elizabeth and went looking for the rest of the damage.

The ribs were knitting. The shoulder was closed. The arm would answer her again, slowly, and badly for a while, but it would answer.

Then I found her channels.

They were raw from her palms to her shoulders. Whatever she had done to build this place had gone through them like floodwater, and left them scoured and hot.

I had felt channels like that once before, under my hands, in James.

My Healing went into them and found nothing it knew how to hold. Channels mend themselves, in their own time, and nothing I had ever learned could make them hurry.

I thought of Elizabeth waiting until she was thirty to learn what this afternoon had cost her, the same wait James already had in front of him.

I knew exactly one thing that made a body’s own recovery go faster.

I knew what it had done to James. I knew what Theoran had said, in a room Elizabeth had been standing in. Not one. Not for any reason.

I put the thought down. It didn’t go very far.

On my left, Daphne’s hands had begun to shake.

It was a small tremor, in the wrists that had only come out of their wrappings a few days ago. I looked at them. I always look at them.

She noticed. She didn’t take her eyes off the rubble.

"Still attached," she said.

Under the fallen shelf, the creature began to come out.

It didn’t push the stone away. It came out from under it as it had come through Elizabeth’s walls, joint by joint, folding backward and narrowing, with the pale lines blazing white through the dust.

Daphne lifted her hands for one more pulse.

The creature didn’t come out toward her. It came out low, behind the nearest heap of Elizabeth’s fallen wall, and for a breath there was nothing of it she could see.

Her pulse landed on the place where it had been. The heap groaned and settled under the weight, and the creature wasn’t beneath it.

She turned to find it again. Her hands came up shaking and too slowly, and the pain behind her eyes made her blink at the wrong moment.

It came round the far end of the heap, unfolding as it came, with its broken leg dragging and its head on the three of us.

I was still kneeling over Elizabeth with my hands full of green light."