I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 590: Seventy Chains

The basalt shelf was gone, and the rock tunnel beneath our boots was breathing.

Climbing back up to the shattered ledge where the Dragon of Thorns had died was out of the question. That entire slab of the chasm wall had sheared off into the black abyss behind us, and all that remained was the Throat, a jagged spiral crevice corkscrewing down through the meat of the mountain toward the bottom of the world.

Every ten seconds, the air inside the spiral pulled downward.

The pull came as one long in-breath, heavy enough to tug at the hem of my Dark Mantle and drag loose volcanic gravel skittering past my heels toward the dark. Three seconds of dead stillness followed. Then the out-breath came rushing back up the spiral, a wall of hot, damp air that smelled of old brine, scorched iron and wet stone.

Every step down jarred the snapped ends of my left collarbone together. The bone ground under the skin like two pieces of broken crockery, and the dark ink lines running up my neck pulsed in time with the pain. Unshakeable Spirit kept my knees locked and my head clear. It held what was left of that world-splitting scream outside my skull, though my teeth still hummed in my gums anyway.

Far below us, down where the spiral swallowed its own tail in the pitch black, something pulled tight.

CLANG.

The sound came straight up through the soles of my boots and slammed into my kneecaps without bothering to echo. A second later, the metal gave way with a sky-splitting crack, like an iron bridge snapping in half under a falling mountain.

Ahead of me, Ilse stumbled against the curved inner wall of the crevice.

She was still locked in her triggered form, with jagged amber scales ridging her forearms and shoulders. Her clawed fingers were slick with her own dark blood from raking at the base of her curved horns, trying to dig the echo of that scream out of her skull. She pressed her bloody palm flat against the basalt to steady herself while the hot out-breath washed over her face.

Staring straight down the dark slope, she spoke in a flat, rasping voice:

“Seven.”

Nobody had asked her to keep track. Counting paces, exits and supplies had always been how she kept the world in order, how she mapped a room before she bled in it. Down here, with her own blood turning traitor in her veins, the habit had rotted into something else.

CLANG.

The bedrock shuddered again and shed a rain of sharp black flakes from the low ceiling.

Ilse brushed one off her scales without looking up:

“Eight.”

I kept my right hand clamped around Wren’s hilt, using the scabbard as a cane against the slick stone, and let Kassie’s iron gauntlet haul me down a three-foot drop by the back of my collar. My boots hit the gravel. My collarbone shifted and sent a bright white lance of nausea behind my eyes, and I swallowed a mouthful of dry rust.

Blue light flickered in the dark right in front of my face, a delayed receipt from the mountain of uncreated ash we had left behind.

[Sovereign of the Ash: Authority over the Firstborn assimilated]

The letters dissolved into the hot draft without adding a single drop of warmth to my core. My well was still sitting at a flat zero. Dry down to the cracked stone at the bottom.

Despite that, Kassie was walking one pace ahead of my left shoulder with her greatsword resting across her pauldron, and Maggie was two paces behind my right. She carried Light over her shoulder by the belt of his trousers, and her silver chain dragged across the rock with a steady, metallic clink-clink.

I looked from Kassie’s spiked back to Maggie’s torn black habit.

Keeping both of them out here on a dry well was the easy part. The Main Hall in the Nave had been banking their resting time for weeks. Kassie had torn the Sanctum door off its hinges to get out here instead of waiting for an invitation, but the free window covered the bill for their bodies all the same. They could walk beside me until that banked clock ran dry without costing me a single unit of essence.

The problem was what happened when we reached the bottom of the stairs.

‘Zero essence in the tank. No Cathedral. No Throne. No Condemnation. Just two very angry women with sharp pieces of metal, walking straight into the living room of whatever just woke up down there.’

A faint, dry thrum came up through the leather wrap of Wren’s hilt against my palm.

You’re forgetting the best part, Boss. Your collarbone’s in two pieces and your sword arm’s shaking.

‘Thank you, Wren. I was worried I might get overconfident.’

She is going to eat us, Cade.

Notice how the kid didn’t use a single contraction on that second line. That was always how you knew the math was bad.

CLANG.

Two of them went at once this time, far deeper in the gut of the rock. The double detonation of parting iron made the spiral walls groan like the ribs of a crushed ship. A fissure split open across the path six feet ahead of Kassie’s boots and vented a jet of scalding steam that smelled of old blood.

Ilse walked straight through the grey vapor without flinching. Her yellow draconic eyes were fixed on nothing, and her bloody fingernails dug fresh half-moons into her scales.

Speaking to the dark rock under her feet, she counted:

“Nine. Ten.”

Double figures. Every time one of those links gave way, the air pressure in the Throat dropped another notch, and the next in-breath pulled a little harder at the backs of our knees.

Behind me, Maggie’s boots stopped crunching on the gravel.

I turned my head carefully, keeping my chin tucked to spare my neck. Light had slipped down from Maggie’s shoulder. He was on his own two feet now, though how he was standing was between him and the Radiant Judge. Dark blood had crusted from both of his ears down the sides of his pale jaw, and red tracks still leaked from the corners of his eyes. His burned left arm hung dead against his ribs.

Maggie reached out to take his good right arm.

Looking straight through her with glazed blue eyes that didn’t blink, Light spoke in a clipped, even tone:

“I can walk.”

He couldn’t even hear his own voice. The scream had blown his eardrums clean out, and he was pitching slightly to the left like a man walking the deck of a ship in a gale.

Maggie lowered her hand an inch. Her dead crimson eyes stayed on his face as she spoke flatly:

“Lord Cade. His eyes are empty.”

Light stopped following the curve of the wall.

Where the Throat twisted sharply to the left around a jutting pillar of black stone, the inner wall fell away completely. It opened into a sheer, unguarded drop that looked straight down the central shaft of the abyss. The next in-breath began to draw down the tunnel, whistling through the jagged teeth of the rock.

Light turned ninety degrees to the left and walked straight toward the drop.

His steps were long, measured and completely steady now. His boot heels clicked cleanly against the stone while the invisible pull from the bottom of the Precipice reeled him in like a fish on a line.

I lunged a step after him and barked before my snapped collarbone locked my chest up in a vice:

“Hey! Pretty boy!”

Light didn’t slow down. One more stride and his front boot was going to step out into three miles of nothing.

Devant was walking four paces behind him, turning his dented tin cup lazily between his pale fingers, his bare neck showing where Kassie had sheared his scarf off. He wasn’t smiling. He hadn’t smiled once since the scream started.

Watching Light’s heel cross the lip of the chasm, the boy spoke in a pleasant, unhurried voice:

“Do not hold on to him.”

His free left hand shot out at the same instant. His fingers closed like an iron clamp around the back of Light’s collar just as the knight’s weight tipped over the edge.

Devant didn’t strain. His boots didn’t skid an inch on the loose gravel. He simply stood at the brink of the drop holding a grown man’s dead weight over the abyss with one arm, while his right hand kept the tin cup level. Then he yanked Light backward onto the stone until the knight’s heels hit the wall.

He kept his fist wound tight in the torn fabric afterwards, pinning Light against the rock while the in-breath roared past them.

Kassie stepped back beside me, resting her gauntleted hand on the pommel of her sword as she watched the boy. She kept her voice low enough that only I could hear it over the wind:

“I still want to cut his head off.”

I swallowed and kept my eyes on Devant’s fist:

“Get in line. Right now we need his hands.”

CLANG. CLANG.

Two more snapped in quick succession, so close now that each boom trailed off into the shrill, singing whine of whipped steel.

Ilse’s lips moved soundlessly at first while her bloody fingers twitched against her thigh. Then the numbers came out in a whisper:

“Eleven. Twelve.”

Then the spiral wall in front of us simply stopped.

The rock tunnel sheared off in a jagged ring of black basalt and opened out into the roof of a space so vast that my Tactical Omniscience couldn’t find a single wall to bounce a line off. No chamber waited at the bottom of the Throat. No cavern floor, no stone ledge to catch our boots.

We stood on the broken lip of the chute and stared down.

Three hundred feet below the severed mouth of the tunnel, stretching away to every horizon under the crushing black dome at the bottom of the world, was water. An endless black sea without a single wave on it, drinking the dim light and giving nothing back.

The whole of it rose and fell in one unbroken swell, keeping time with the breathing in the dark.