I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 558: As The Days Go By

On the second day the tunnels widened out and stopped being tunnels.

We came into country instead. Black shelf rock going down in long steps, and standing formations that had been water once and had given up halfway, and a ceiling so far off that the green glow died before it got there. Sound went out ahead of us and came back late and wrong.

The wyvern hated it. It had been managing on three legs while the walls were close enough to lean on, and out here there was nothing to lean on, and it started stopping every few hundred paces to stand very still with its head down.

Light walked beside it the whole way with one hand on its shoulder.

Around midday he changed the order.

He moved Bren up behind the big man. He put the silent one in the middle. And he took the young one out of the centre and put him at the back, behind me, because the boy had spent all morning walking into the heels of whoever was in front of him and Light had run out of patience for it.

“He’ll trip somebody at the wrong time.”

“So put him beside you.”

He shook out the strap on his shoulder and settled it.

“Then I am watching him instead of the road. He can walk at the back and stumble into nothing.”

I thought that was sensible. I want that on record, because I have gone back over that hour a great many times and I cannot find the place where either of us was wrong.

We walked another two hours.

Bren dropped back level with me at some point and walked in silence for a while before she got to what she wanted.

“Is she your wife?”

‘…’

“No.”

“Sister?”

“No.”

She looked at Ilse’s face over my arm, at the braid gone to nothing and the black at the corners of her mouth.

“Then why are you carrying her.”

I had no clean answer, so I gave her the true one.

“Because she crawled forty feet after me when she couldn’t stand up.”

Bren took that. She walked a while longer, and then she said, “That’s a good reason,” in the tone of a woman filing something away, and went back up the line.

The next time I looked round, the back of the line was empty.

There had been no sound.

No cry. No scuffle. No stone turning over. Two days of walking with my ears open in a place where sound arrives late, and nothing came.

“Light.”

He turned. He counted. I watched him count, and I watched his face do the arithmetic and arrive somewhere he did not want to be.

“Stop!”

The line stopped.

‘Death Sense.’

I threw it out behind us and got the shelf, and the formations, and cold small lives in the rock a long way off, and nothing warm at all in a hundred paces of open ground.

He had been eight feet behind me.

We went back along our own trail for a quarter of an hour. Light found where it happened, or where he thought it happened, because the dust on that shelf held our boots and there was a place where one set of prints stopped mid-stride with both feet down.

Both feet down. He had been standing on them when he went.

The big man made a sound and put his hands on his knees.

Bren stood at the edge of the prints and did not cross them.

“He was at the back.”

“Yes.”

“He was at the back because he kept walking into people.”

Light said nothing at all to that.

Then Devant came down the shelf toward us, unhurried, from somewhere ahead where he had no business being.

He looked at the prints for a while.

“It takes the one that is alone.”

I straightened up.

“Where were you?”

“Ahead.”

“You said you’d walk the back half today. This morning. You said it out loud, and Light moved the water because of it.”

The boy considered that with the mild interest of a man remembering he had left a door open.

“So I did.”

‘…’

“Then what is it?”

“I have never seen it.” He crouched by the stopped prints and put two fingers in the dust beside them without touching them. “I have found what it leaves eleven times in ten years. Always the same. Always the one at the edge of the group, and always when nobody had a hand on them.”

Bren’s head came up.

“A hand.”

“Touching. Held onto. Any of it.” He stood. “That is what the eleven had in common. I could be wrong. I have been down here a long time and I have had a great deal of time to be wrong in interesting ways.”

“You could have told us this morning!”

That came out of Bren with more force than anything she had said since the lair, and it went out across that open country and came back at us from three directions.

Devant looked at her with something that was almost apologetic.

“Yes,” he said, and did not explain, and went back up the line.

I did not know his name. He had been with us two days. He had eaten beside me, and slept nine feet from me, and I had put a hand on his shoulder twice to steady him, and I had never once asked, because there had been a woman dying in my arms and a boy who could not be killed and a wyvern with a leg that was going bad, and asking a stranger his name had never made it to the top of the list.

Bren told me at the fire that night, without being asked.

“Teller,” she said. “He was a granary clerk. He counted sacks.”

Then she went and sat with her back to the rest of us for a while, and nobody bothered her, and when she came back she was fine and none of us said anything about it.

We walked the rest of that day roped together.

Light did it with the strapping off the packs. Not proper rope, just enough that everyone had a hand or a wrist attached to somebody, and the big man went in the middle of the line with two of them on him.

It slowed us badly. Devant did not say a word about the pace, which told me more than a complaint would have.

I had Ilse in my arms, so Bren walked with two fingers hooked into my belt at the back, all afternoon, without either of us mentioning it.

That night I checked her sternum and got nothing back, the way I had the night before, and the night before that.

‘Wren.’

I know.

‘How many days does that make.’

Three since he said eleven. He has since said nine, and this morning he said a week, and Cade, I want you to notice that I have not made a joke about any of it.

‘…Yeah.’

I sat up with my hand on Ilse and watched the fire go down, and about an hour before we broke camp I got up and walked out past the light with every intention of doing the thing that would have made all of this easier.

I came back with an armful of stones for the fire ring.

I do not remember picking them up.