The creature used her moment of inattention to rake her with the claws of its remaining hand. Evanne shied away from the strike on pure reflex but took a glancing blow, claws scoring her face and down her chest. She stumbled back, swinging the machete in a graceless one-handed arc and was rewarded with a hit to the monster’s head.

  Her blade stuck and there she was: connected to it by way of her steel. She dropped her shoulder and barged it, lifting the thing off its feet. It’s light, as if all the dreams have left it. Its fall threatened to tear her machete from her, but she was having none of that, wrenching the weapon from her enemy’s skull. It hit the ground, more of the green sap spattering to the stone.

  Unlike a living foe that would have taken a moment to wonder why a sword had entered its skull, or perhaps where its arm had gone, this thing started clambering upright straight away. It’s all purpose, like an old machine made of meat. She kicked it in the head, hitting it square in the jaw, and was rewarded with the popping clatter of freed teeth. After the monster realigned its jaw, it just kept trying to get up. It was fouled by having just one arm but seemed game for the challenge.

  Evanne swung the machete again, hitting it in the neck, and wrenched her blade free. As it tried to get back up again, she rewarded its efforts by a second strike that freed its head from the body. The head bounced away, the body slumping, and her blade clanged to the floor.

  She goggled at the machete’s handle, still in her hand. The ancients’ weapon, steel no doubt forged in the very heart of a star, had broken off at the hilt. She ignored the creature’s head, which was still animate, eyes tracking her, jaws working, because it wasn’t going anywhere. She saw that where the sap stuff hit the ground it smoked, pitting the stone and burning into the very heart of the bedrock. Evanne held her machete up for a closer look, seeing the blade’s nub equally ruined by whatever was in the monster’s blood.

  The one by the western door freed itself and ran for her just as the door to her back boomed again. Evanne snarled, lowered her head, and bullrushed the monster, hitting it square in the torso and taking it to the ground, where she buried the stub of her machete in its forehead, right into the brain.

  It didn’t appear to care, snapping and clawing at her. She punched it in the head over and over, its skull hitting the stone floor, rebounding up, and letting her do it all over again. It clawed her, careless of the ruin she was making of its head, and Evanne took slashes against her face, and through her jacket. She let the pain spur her on, right until something knocked her sideways.

  Another of the creatures was on her, and behind it she saw two more. She bucked her hips, tossing this one off, scrabbled on all fours, and lurched toward the broken doorway. She made it three steps before five of them piled on her and she was borne to the ground beneath a mass of dead, hungry things.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  They’d been trying to forge a light source, but nothing down here was burnable. Vertiline knew you couldn’t just set fire to a rat limb and use it as a torch, and besides, they were fresh out of rat limbs after Myryntir destroyed their enemies. The rest of the ancients’ materials were made of metal and stone, not handy wood. Or, the wood had long since perished in the passage of time’s march.

  She gritted her teeth, because she kept forgetting the Sway. Is it really forgetfulness, or do I resent it? Do I hate the power because it ties me to the Three, who have forsaken this world?

  It didn’t matter. The Sway was a tool, and her child might be in danger. She breathed in and spread the fingers of her metal hand over the ground before the tunnel. //LIGHT.//

  The floor glowed, the rat warren’s very walls illuminating. She crouched and was greeted by Hitch’s legs as they emerged from the wall. She surged upright, a hard word on her lips, but he beat her to it, a rare feat in itself. “Evanne fights an army of the dead.”

  Vertiline’s hand dropped to her sword. “Where?”

  “There.” He pointed at the western sealed door. “I can lead you through the tunnels to her, and⁠—”

  “No.” Vertiline walked past the spectre and his wide-eyed goggle and faced the door.

  The ghost hovered at her elbow. “There is little time.”

  “Then stop wasting it.” She drew sword, reminded of a time when her sister of the blade went into a tower after a certain luckless sinner while Vertiline faced the keep’s gates alone with nothing but glass and steel.

  She set her stance, picking the very same pattern as she’d used to assault the barred port of Calterburry’s castle. Her blade glowed a fierce yellow, and she struck with the Three’s Storm. The blade hit the ancient’s metal door and it shook the very frame. The metal glowed a sullen red but didn’t shatter or bend.

  Armitage arrived at her side. “Wife.”

  “Now is not the time, husband.”

  “What if she’s right there,” he pointed to the imagined base of the door on the other side, “and you bring this down on her?”

  Vertiline felt her lips press into a line. “She is not some snivelling fool. She is ours, love, and knows the way of things. She will step aside.”

  “Can you … break it a little easier, though?”

  Break it ‘easier’? Whatever is he on about? She gritted her teeth, and changed the angle of her blade, selecting a different stance in a different pattern. He stepped back as she swung Light, the door shuddering again, molten flakes coming free. Vertiline stepped along the line of the door as if it were a set of foes, swinging high to take their heads and low to their feet. She was Tresward, or once was, and her steps were fast and sure, the whole business taking three breaths.

  She stepped back as the door groaned, then collapsed.

  Beyond, a horror. What were surely corpses filled a large room. They were focused around a point, a seething mass of conflict, and Vertiline picked out urgent details. There, the end of Evanne’s blade. Over there, a spatter of red. And then a hand, cast out from the body pile. Her daughter’s fingers, bent, ragged, but still fighting as she clawed for freedom.

  Myryntir couldn’t kill all these, not with Evanne in there.

  Vertiline groped for a pattern, something that would deal with the horde. Something that will keep my baby girl alive. She felt her metal fingers tremble, the coolness of her mind melt under the onslaught of panic, a fog burned away by the sun. Armitage roared past her, hulking into the melee, careless of his own skin, taking slashes by the score.

  All while she froze, not a single pattern to conjure against the fear inside her.

  She heard Myryntir inhale, readying his weapon, perhaps unseeing of Armitage or uncaring, perhaps unaware of her daughter in the ruckus, or again perhaps uncaring. She spun and saw no, the creature wasn’t killing Vhemin for sport, his eyes intent, locked on Vertiline. She held her useless sword in weak fleshy fingers and threw her metal hand up as the dragon gouted lightning. Her metal fingers tangled about the burning cascade, and she rounded on the brawl, electricity on the leash. I don’t need the Storm. I just need to get in there.

  She charged, a scream breaking free, noise to get the enemy’s attention, and it worked. A clutch of creatures came for her and she wondered if there were too many for her alone without the Storm as her ally.

  Again, she missed the heart within her companions, because the sinner had started running before she’d caught the dragon’s twist of power. He was slower than her, body older, but his head start meant they clashed with the enemy at the same time. Vertiline struck with whipping energy, tendrils of power cascading into a foe, sending the monster across the heads of her enemies and into the western wall where it impacted with bone-crushing force.

  The sorcerer slipped between two, catching an arm in a curious hold she had no time to wonder at, before he kicked the legs from beneath his foe. It let her bring the dragon’s justice down in her hand, smashing the fallen monster. It convulsed as her fist clove skull, skin ash in an instant, bone fragmenting and scattering beneath her feet. He nudged his second enemy to her, and she drove her metal fist between its ribs, the body exploding into burning fragments. They turned as one and powered toward the main melee.

  Her husband, her love, her life, was on his knees. His body was a ruin, cuts everywhere, and terrible burns across his scales where his foes’ blood spattered him. The old injury dragged his back and shoulder, but his hand was around Evanne’s, holding their girl, trying to drag her free.

  Vertiline could tell he wasn’t strong enough, just as she could tell what the response must be. She needed no pattern, just the fear within her to guide her path. She pulled her fist back, then charged above Evanne, year upon year of footwork from the Three’s patterns keeping her steady. Vertiline swung a roundhouse, a ridiculous punch for the unschooled, but she had dragon rage in her fist, and she powered through five bodies in a single whirl.

  It bought time. Armitage dragged Evanne back. Don’t look. Don’t see. Not yet. Evanne might be dead. Past saving. Part Vhemin, but only part, and her father was beat beyond reason. Burning smoke from acid blood caused her eyes to water, but she didn’t need her eyes, not to blindly flail with her fear and panic and anger all bound together in the clutch of her metal fingers.

  Agony speared her, one of her foes striking with those vile talons into her back. Vertiline arched and took another strike in her gut. She turned, fingers trembling. I can’t let my fist open. I can’t. I will destroy everyone. I will kill those most beloved to me.

  A strike took her at the joint between collarbone and throat, and she went down, coughing, choking, tasting blood, fingers loosening, but no, dammit, a little more time, just a little more life.

  She looked up, a moment of calm, or perhaps time stretched because her life was ending. The sorcerer, Meriwether du Reeves, the man she’d originally condemned to die, stood above her. Old, and kind, and with her despite all she had done.

  He reached to her, fingers stretched, but she couldn’t reach back. The lightning in her fist raged for freedom. He said, “Let it go.”

  “You’ll die.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.” He said something in the ancient’s tongue, just one word, but the world held its breath. She heard the rumble of the Three’s anger, his doom waiting for his mistake. And she wanted to scream at him, not for me, but she couldn’t talk, the blood bubbling in her throat. He spoke a second word, and the lightning in her fist yearned for him.

  Meri said a third word as her fingers relaxed. The power of the dragon, amplified by the ancients, flowed to him. Energy coiled about him, blinding, brilliant, roaring louder than Myryntir. He grabbed it with both hands and laid about him as if with a mighty whip, and turned their enemies to char, ash, and a greasy residue.

  But she didn’t see how it ended. She didn’t see anything else at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Everyone had been working so hard to save Evanne they hadn’t noticed what happened to Tarragon. She’d leaped in just as the High Justiciar had, sword a living brand of white fire, battle cry on her lips, and been mobbed by a swarm of undead monsters.

  She got it, she really did. Evanne was in trouble, and Evanne was also a kind of lodestone for the mind. If anyone else felt about the maybe-Vhemin even a little like the way Tarragon did, they wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about her.

  It all went bad about the time Vertiline sent one of the monsters flying into the western wall. Tarragon saw a clutch of creatures over there, all coming off the racks they’d been stored on like tools in a well-kept workshop. She’d done the math, seen just how many would come if the once-fairy didn’t do something, and so she’d charged there.

  What with all the whips of lightning and furious cries behind her, no one remarked on her, or her sword. She was in the thick of it, a press of bodies all about her, and it seemed no matter how many limbs or heads she lopped off, there were more right behind them. She’d felt the whimper in her chest, the rake of claws on the side of her face, the burning heat of Requiem as the blade came too close to her now-human skin that couldn’t take the heat of a starforge anymore.

  Then, the dandy fop she’d discounted as a waste of calories used the old language, borrowed the power in Vertiline’s hand, and laid about him like justice itself. The whip of energy cleared the room, all standing corpses cut in half about waist-height. Tarragon would have been one of their number except she held Requiem in a desperate mid guard.

  The whip of energy parted against the blade’s edge with the sound of glowing steel quenched in water, the force of the impact picking Tarragon off her feet and throwing her right into the very same spot the High Justiciar had tossed an enemy a minute earlier. It was lucky, in a way, as the wall was weak from that blow, only dislocating Tarragon’s shoulder as she crashed through it in a shower of rubble. She landed in a dark room on the other side, Requiem tumbling from her nerveless fingers, blade glimmering out in sympathy. Tarragon slid across the floor, knocked her head, and slid the rest of the way in a daze, right until she sailed over a pit and fell, knocking elbows, knees, and skull on the way down to blessed darkness.

  Water on her face. Something damp against her lips. She couldn’t breathe.

  Tarragon screamed, convulsed upright, blade of her left hand lashing out, her right pulling back for a follow-up, and at that point she almost passed out from the pain. She thrashed, because there was someone there, right fucking there, in her grill and with hands on her, but he was saying things like it’s okay and calm down and hush, which she probably wouldn’t have listened to except for the pain in her sword-arm’s shoulder holding her back.

  She subsided, then scrabbled back. Tarragon was on a cot, old and threadbare blankets atop it, which she wanted to spend more time thinking about because they were made from her time, and things in her time didn’t wear out or become threadbare, not unless they’d seen eight hundred years of use, but no one down here could still be alive from that long ago, so there was clearly another explanation.

  The room was cosy, a warm glow coming from a portable heat lamp. She wanted to touch it, to see if it was real, because things that used electricity seemed to be in short supply, but there was another thing from her time just doing its job like it always did. A door lay beyond a man, and the man crouched at the side of the cot. The door was easier to focus on because there was something wrong with the man, so she started there. The door was open, and it was just an ordinary-ass door. Beyond was a corridor, leading no doubt to a den of horrors.

  Look at the man.

  She did. He was one of the living dead from above, but unlike them, he wasn’t trying to eat her face. Same basic mummified appearance, like all the water had been sucked out a long time ago, but without the ravening hunger. He held a damp cloth in one hand, and a spilled bowl of water was beside him on the floor.

  Her eyes slid to the bowl. “Did I do that?”

  “You’ve had a rough morning.” He picked it up, fussing with the cloth before putting it in the bowl and placing both aside. He sank on his haunches. “You fell quite a long way.”

  “Where’s Evanne? Where am I? Where’s Requiem?” Tarragon pushed herself away from the wall she’d hunkered against, then slumped back because, like a moron, she’d used her right arm for the trick. “Where is … everyone?”

  The dead man regarded her with surprisingly alive eyes and counted on his fingers. “Evanne is coming. You’re in my bedroom, which is at the back of my shop. My shop is the premier supply of anything you might need down here, although that hasn’t been tested for some years now due to a lack of customers. Requiem is wrapped in a towel in the kitchen, because it tried to kill me when I picked it up.” He frowned at the three fingers, then beamed as he extended a fourth. “Everyone else is with Evanne.”

  She looked at his fingers, then back to him. “Who are you?”

  “Would you like breakfast?”

  “Is it food or the flesh of your victims?”

  “Flesh from my victims would still be food, but I get your drift.” He stood, arching his back, and she heard what sounded like every bone in his body pop and click. “It’s eggs on toast. You have to use a kind of existential belief you’re eating eggs on toast, because the eggs are powdered and the toast is freeze-dried, but I’m sure you’ve had worse.”

  Tarragon felt herself unclench a little bit. “You’re dead.”

  “Yes.” He gave a sad nod.

  “And you’re not trying to kill me.”

  “Not yet. Your meat is juiciest when you’re relaxed and sated, at which point I’ll creep up behind you and,” he ran a finger across his throat, “before hanging you to drain in the larder.” He laughed, then sobered at the horror on her face. “That was a joke. Do people still make jokes in the world above?”

  “Only ones that are funny.”

  “It was pretty funny.”

  “Only if you’re not punching down.” Tarragon unclenched her jaw. “It’s like this. My whole life I’ve been small. Getting under people’s feet, in their way, and doing nothing useful. So people make jokes, calling me a Sandwich, or, or,” hic, “now I’m Big, they’ll drain my blood and hang me in a smoker.”

  “I didn’t say it was a smoker. I said it was a larder.” His dead eyes twinkled.

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “That’s right.”

  Hic. “I’m angry.”

  “You got it.”

  “I’m angry at you.”

  “Not quite but keep going.” The dead man crouched on his haunches again, perhaps to make himself a less formidable presence.

  “I’m angry at everyone?” She felt the curiosity in her voice and tried to hold onto the anger. “Because life’s unfair.”

  “Yes, but sometimes it’s unfair in your favour.” He shrugged. “Not many would get the chance to wield a sword of power, or hold the heart of the first, and I daresay last, Soulkeeper. They probably wouldn’t learn of the Three’s Wardens’ patterns or have a mentor like Helio who taught them how to be kind, even when it was hard. Because you are kind, Tarragon. You’re the gentlest person I know. Uh, who’s still alive, that is.”