B3Ch89-Clearing the Route(Sarah) (Patreon)

Sarah ducked into the tent with snow on her shoulders and a bundle of oilcloth under one arm, and she dropped it on the table in front of Harold so hard his inkpot jumped.

“There,” she said. “Your thing.”

Harold put the quill down. The bundle was about the size of a loaf of bread, tied with twine, and someone had tied the knots three times over. He pulled the twine loose and folded the oilcloth back.

Inside sat half of a disc of dark metal, broken clean across the middle, heavy as a brick for its size. The face of it was cut with lines finer than any smith on Gravesend could manage, and where the break went, the lines stopped dead. When Harold laid his palm on it, a sigil in the center woke under his hand and pulsed blue.

He stared at it. Then he laughed out loud, and he couldn’t stop grinning.

“Okay,” Sarah said. “What is it? Robert asks me every night what it does, and I didn’t have an answer for him, and he gets this little crease right here—” she poked herself between the eyebrows, “—when he doesn’t get an answer.”

Harold looked up at her, and he dropped his voice.

“It’s half the key to the System store at the heart of the goblin city.”

Sarah blinked.

“There are only a handful of System sites in the whole world,” he said. “Places where the System has an active presence. Holding one comes with a host of benefits, and this one’s sitting under the Blackjaw King’s throne room.” He tapped the metal. “It’s a big part of why I need to take that city for myself.”

Sarah shrugged. “Sure. Okay.” She dropped onto the stool across from him. “It was a pain in the ass to get, I’ll tell you that. It was way the hell back in the mountains; the golems were a pain to deal with. Beautiful valley, though.” She said wistfully.

Harold looked at her over the top of the key.

“But you loved every second of it, didn’t you?”

Sarah’s face split into a brilliant smile. “Sure did.”

He wrapped the key back up in its oilcloth and tucked it into the chest at his feet, then turned the lock and leaned back.

“How’s the perk drift going?”

The smile went away. Sarah looked down at her hands on the table and picked at a split in the wood with her thumbnail.

“It’s still hard to resist sometimes,” she said. “I can feel the pulses. The echoes. It’s like it’s always humming under everything.” She lifted her eyes to the tent wall, past it, east, and her voice went flat. “I can feel where the big ones are, Harold. All the powerful monsters out there. The communion keeps pulling me toward them.” She swallowed. “And we’re surrounded out here. It’s pulling in every direction at once.”

“Hmmm.” Harold rubbed his jaw. “Remember, perk drift is resisted with a firm will and a firm mind.”

“I know, Harold.”

“I know you know, Saratops.”

She rolled her eyes so hard her whole head went with it, but she smiled.

“And remember,” he said, “no telling anyone about your perks.” He leaned forward. “We did our research into Sokha. She may be loyal to the Hospitallers right now, but she’s also got ties to the Argent Circle. You have to be careful with her.”

Sarah opened her mouth.

Harold held up a hand. “Please, Sarah. Let me worry about this one. Betrayal is very common here.”

She shut her mouth again, but she scowled at him across the table. “It felt right in the moment.”

“It always does. That’s why people hate betrayal.”

The tent flap moved, and Adeline came in out of the snow with two cups of coffee steaming in her hands. She set one down in front of each of them, bent, and kissed Harold on the cheek, and then she was gone again with the flap swinging behind her.

Harold was still smiling at the flap when he realized Sarah was watching him.

She was smiling too. “That seems to be going well.”

Harold wrapped his hands around the cup and looked at the steam for a moment.

“She’s...” He let out a breath. “She’s amazing. I feel so much more clear-headed around her.” His voice dropped. “Life means more with her around. It gives me something more personal to fight for.”

Sarah’s face went soft, and she nodded.

“You needed that,” she said. “You seem so much more grounded. You were always rushing around to fix one problem or another, never stopping. Now you seem so much more...” she searched for it, “...you.”

“Mmm.” Harold sipped his coffee. “Well, what about you and Robert?”

Sarah blanched.

“What about Robert and I?” she demanded, as if he’d accused her of a crime.

“He seems to balance out your mindless charging pretty well,” Harold said, and knocked twice on the table.

Sarah's thumb found the split in the table again.

“He’s thoughtful,” she said slowly, “where I’m all instinct. And when the drift gets bad, I find myself reaching for him without thinking about it, just to have a hand on something.” She was quiet a moment. “And he’s warm. He sees the beauty in the world just as much as I do. He stops to look at things.”

Then the grin came back.

“And he’s hot.”

Harold rolled his eyes.

The flap snapped open again, and Mira stuck her head in, red-cheeked from the cold and bouncing on her toes.

“Sarah! You coming? We’re ready!” Then she saw Harold, and her eyes lit up. “Oooh, Lord Harold! How are you? Any chance you’ve got more potions for us? We ran clean out during the battle; it was awful—”

Harold chuckled. There was no dent in that girl’s mood that anything on Gravesend had found yet.

“I know you already talked to Finn, Mira,” he said. “And I know Jace lifted a crate from supply on top of that.” He turned his head and looked at the corner of the tent, where the lamp threw a deep fold of shadow between the canvas and a stack of crates. “He’s not nearly as sneaky as he thinks he is.”

The shadow was quiet for a long moment.

Then Jace stepped out of it, looking a little guilty.

“How’d you find me?”

“Your stealth is good,” Harold said. “But it doesn’t hide the mana it’s using nearly as well as you think it does.”

“Hmm.” Jace frowned at the floor, already thinking on it, and walked out of the tent. He caught Mira by the collar on the way past and dragged her out with him.

“Hey! Hey! I wasn’t done asking—”

The flap fell shut on her squawk.

Sarah was smiling at their antics. Harold got up, came around the table, and wrapped her in a hug.

“Go on,” he said into her hair. “I’ll meet you at the town. Move fast, and strike faster.”

Sarah hugged him back fiercely, her arms locked around his ribs hard enough to make them creak.

“I missed you, Harold,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I missed you too.” His voice went rough on it. “More than you’ll ever know.”

Sarah pulled back and looked at him, holding his arms.

“Happy thoughts, brother. What’s that thing you always say?” She tipped her head. “The hardest paths make the toughest people.”

Harold smiled at her.

“That’s true,” he said. “But the law of unintended consequences still hits just as hard.”

She punched him on the shoulder and went out.

Harold followed her to the flap and held it open. Outside, the snow had stopped, and the mountains stood up white and enormous against a sky gone pale blue with morning. Sarah stepped three paces into the camp, bent her knees, and jumped.

She went up far higher than any human should. The Sky Bound Body thinned the air around her, and she rose straight up past the ridgepoles of the tents, past the smoke of the cookfires, thirty feet, forty, and hung there for a heartbeat at the top of it with her arms flung out. Then she drifted down slow as a falling leaf toward her team. Cassian and Jampa were standing a little apart from the others, talking quietly, and they broke off and looked up at her with the same curious expression.

For a moment there, with the light behind her and the mountain towering at her back, Harold saw her as she used to be, the girl he’d lost the first time. His hand closed on the tent pole until the wood creaked under his fingers. She was growing up, and now he was sending her ahead of his army into the dark.

Sarah landed lightly in the snow, said something that made Robert laugh, and shouldered her pack and walked off. She threw a lazy wave over her shoulder towards him on the way off.

The snow on the goat track had frozen into a crust overnight, and every step Sarah took broke through it with a crunch and sank to the ankle.

Dorgan led. He went up the track at a steady, rolling pace that never got faster and never slowed down, his strapped ribs apparently forgotten, his axe across his shoulders with both wrists hooked over the haft. Theo walked at his elbow with his shield slung on his back, and he’d been asking the dwarf questions since they left the picket line. Sarah could hear them over the crunch of the snow, Theo’s voice low and careful and Dorgan’s coming back in a rumble.

“—so the beard braids aren’t decoration?”

“Decoration.” Dorgan snorted so hard he nearly lost his footing. “Every braid’s a deed, lad. Ye earn ’em. First kill, first delve, first child, first grudge paid. A dwarf with a smooth chin is a dwarf who’s done nothing.” He ran his thick fingers down one of his own, over the bronze rings knotted into it. “This one here’s the day mine clan woke. I put it in myself when our hearts woke up.”

“And the grudges? Bram called Grudmoot on—”

“Ah, now, the grudges.” Dorgan’s voice dropped into something almost fond. “The grudges are how we keep accounts with the world. A dwarf forgets a debt, he forgets himself...”

Theo was nodding along and drinking every word of it. Sarah smiled to herself. Sokha’s people were going in with the Legion tomorrow, behind them, and Theo had been chewing his lip about it since the plan came down. Asking a dwarf a hundred questions about dwarven culture. She was just happy he wasn’t trying to relate the dwarf to Lord of the Rings.

Behind them, Mira and Jace had attached themselves to the two scouts Sawyer had sent along. The scouts were lean, quiet men in gray and white, with bows across their backs. 

“So you just carve an arrow at each turn?” Mira was saying. “Like, just an arrow? Isn’t that kind of obvious? What if a goblin sees it? What if a goblin carves a different arrow? Have you thought about that? Because I’d do that, if I was a goblin.”

“Ain’t arrows,” the older scout said.

“Then what is it?”

“Each mark is different.”

“What does it look like?”

“Like what Centurion Sawyer told us to mark.”

“Mira,” Jace said, “they’re never going to tell you.”

“They might!”

Sarah let them fall back a little. Ahead of them was a long day of running in the tunnel, and they had to stay well out in front of the Legion and mark every turn before the army came behind them at a run. If the scouts did their job right, Harold’s people wouldn’t have to think about the road at all. They could just run it.

So the team had to run faster.

Gravel crunched on her left, and Jampa fell in beside her.

He walked bare-armed in the cold in his red robes as if it were a spring morning, his hands folded into his sleeves and his breath barely misting. He nodded to her and didn’t say anything for a while, and Sarah, who usually couldn’t stand a silence longer than four seconds, found that she didn’t mind this one.

She broke it anyway, though; she hadn't changed that much.

“Why’d you volunteer to come along?” she asked. “You could’ve stayed back with the Legion. Harold would’ve let you.”

Jampa considered the question for a few steps.

“I came to assess this threat to my community,” he said. “Lord Harold has offered us a new home in his Basin. It is a generous offer. But moving our people so far would be very hard for us, yes? Many of them are old. Many have never left the valley.” He looked up at the peaks. “So Lama Tenzin asked me to come to this war and see how much danger we are really in.”

“And what do you think so far?”

“So far, I think your brother has dealt with us very honestly.” Jampa’s mouth tipped up at one corner. “Though I am not sure he is completely sane.” He tilted his head, considering it. “Or perhaps he simply sees more than I do? I am here to find out, yes.”

Sarah’s jaw tightened. “He’s been through a great deal,” she murmured.

Jampa thought for a moment and nodded slowly.

“Yes. He has. I can feel his pain.” He glanced at her sideways. “I can feel yours, also. You're struggling too, I think. You are struggling to hold on to yourself.”

Sarah opened her mouth to tell him she was fine, but nothing came out. Jampa took one hand out of his sleeve and laid it on her shoulder.

It was like setting down a pack she’d forgotten she was carrying. The humming under everything, the pulse and the echo and the pull, all of it slid off her mind in one long breath, and in its place came quiet. She took a breath all the way to the bottom of her lungs for the first time in months, and the cold air burned on the way down and it was wonderful.

Beside her, Jampa stutter-stepped. His foot caught on nothing, and he stumbled once, then caught himself and kept walking, his face thoughtful in a way that looked a lot like pain.

“Ah,” he said softly. “You are dealing with just as much as he is, I think.” He was quiet a moment, his hand still on her shoulder, and his head turned slowly to the right. “What are these feelings pointing me toward?”

Sarah didn’t have to look.

“There’s one close,” he said. “A couple of miles up the mountain.”

She looked up past the track; the slope rose into a white wall broken by black rock, and somewhere above it, behind the crags, she could feel something big sitting on a ledge in the cold.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s probably a wyvern or something. I get pointed at strong monsters. One of my perks is really strong, and it drives me to do certain things.” She tried to make it sound like nothing. “It wants me to go up there.”

Jampa took his hand off her shoulder, and the humming came back. It was quieter, though, and further off, as if someone had shut a door on it.

He looked at her skeptically.

“Why do you not let it go?”

“What do you mean?”

“These feelings.” He waved a hand at the mountain. “They are just feelings, yes? They don’t make you do anything. You must make the decision to go up there on your own.” He tucked the hand back into his sleeve. “Own your mind. Own your body. And let the feelings go.”

Sarah stared at him.

“How...” She stopped and tried again. “How do you do that? You make it sound so easy.”

Jampa smiled at her, warm and very calm.

“I will teach you,” he said. “Meditation is very good for the mind and the soul.”

“Harold’s been telling me to meditate for a year.”

“Has he taught you how?”

Sarah opened her mouth, and shut it.

“Ah,” Jampa said, and he seemed delighted.

Ahead of them, Dorgan stopped dead in the middle of the track.

He’d come up against a stretch of cliff where the trail bent around a shoulder of the mountain, and the rock there was blank and gray and rimed with frost, no different from a hundred yards of rock on either side of it. The dwarf put one gloved hand flat against it and stood listening with his head cocked.

“Here,” he called back roughly. “We’re here.”The scouts cut Sawyer’s mark into the rock beside the blank stretch of cliff. The older one did it with the point of a knife in about four quick strokes, and when he stepped back, Sarah couldn’t see anything there at all until he tilted his head and the light caught it. It was a small, crooked shape, like a bird’s foot with one toe missing.

“That’s it?” Mira said. “That’s the big secret?”

“Yep,” the scout said, grunting.

“It looks like a chicken stepped on the rock.”

“Thanks,” he said simply.

Dorgan ignored all of it. He pulled off one glove, laid his bare palm on the stone, and rapped it with his knuckles in a pattern that went on longer than Sarah expected. Something deep in the rock answered with a grinding thump. A seam of darkness opened down the face of the cliff where there had been no seam a moment before, and a slab of stone as tall as two men swung inward on pivots so well balanced it barely whispered.

Cold air breathed out of the dark, and it smelled of stone dust and old iron and, very faintly, goat.

“In,” Dorgan said, already going. “And keep up. Yer Count’s legion’ll be on our heels by afternoon, and I’ll not have mine roads blocked by soft humans stopping to gawp.”

They went in at a run.

The scouts’ hooded lanterns threw two narrow beams ahead of them, and the beams caught walls cut square and smooth, with stone arches every twenty paces holding up the ceiling. The arches were thick as a man’s waist, and each one had a bronze plate bolted into its keystone, worn smooth by centuries of hands touching it for luck as they passed. A pair of iron rails ran along the floor, black and polished bright along the top where wheels had ground them, and they went on into the dark farther than the lanterns could reach.

Dorgan ran with the same rolling pace he’d used on the mountain. Every so often he stopped at a fork, pulled the oilcloth roll out of his coat and squinted at it in the lantern light, then sniffed the air from each tunnel mouth like a hound before he grunted and picked one. The scouts cut their mark at every turn. Then the team ran again, boots slapping the stone between the rails, the sound going away ahead of them and coming back.

Theo couldn’t stop looking at everything.

“How far does it go?” he asked, panting a little, swinging his head to stare at a side tunnel where a second set of rails curved away into the black. “The rails. How far?”

“Through the whole range, near enough,” Dorgan said. “Under it, through it, round it. Miles and miles of it, lad, and more miles than that. The Bronzeshoulder have been mining these mountains for centuries.”

“Centuries,” Theo said, awed.

“Aye. And it’s not just for the ore.” Dorgan jerked his chin at the rails. “Ye have to understand what the Bronzeshoulder were. They’re the connective tissue of the Dawi. The traders. Every clan has its own hold, its own mountain, its own craft, its own gods it favors. And the Bronzeshoulder go between. Iron from one hold to the next. Gems out, food in. News and marriages and grudges, all of it rode on Bronzeshoulder carts.” He snorted. “They’re amongst the most traveled of all the clans. And everywhere they travel, they dig. They’ve got tunnels over most of the places they go.”

“Are they safe?” Theo eyed the ceiling.

“Safer than yer roads up top.” Dorgan rapped a knuckle on an arch as they passed under it, and it rang dull and solid. “Every span reinforced. Every arch keyed. Bronzeshoulder don’t build a tunnel that falls down. They’d lose trade if they did.” He was quiet for a few steps. “Say what ye like of their honor, but they build good.”

“And when there aren’t any tunnels?”

“Then they go over the land, like anybody else.” Dorgan’s beard twitched. “They’ve got a breed of goat for it. Big shaggy brutes, sure-footed as spiders on any slope ye like, and strong enough to pull a cart. Bad-tempered as a drunk uncle. Bite ye as soon as look at ye.”

“Robert!” Theo called back over his shoulder. “Robert, come here. You have to hear about the goats.”

Robert jogged up between them, and in a few minutes the two of them were peppering Dorgan with questions from both sides. Dorgan grumbled at both of them and answered every single question, at length.

Sarah ran behind them, listened, and smiled. It was amazing to hear of an entirely different culture like this.

It started as a pressure behind her eyes. It was so faint at first that she thought it was the dark, or the dust, or the long run. Then it sharpened. Every fork they took, every turn Dorgan picked, the pressure got a little stronger, and the pull under it, the hum that never quite stopped, began to lean in one direction like a compass needle swinging toward north. Her stomach went tight and stayed that way.

She rubbed her temple without realizing it when Mira dropped back beside her.

“What is it?” Mira asked quietly. For once, there was no bounce in her voice. She was looking at Sarah closely. “I can feel it through the bond. Something’s got you all wound up.”

Sarah didn’t answer right away. She tried to let the feeling go like Jampa had coached her.

“We’re moving toward something,” she said. “Something very, very strong.” She lifted her hand and pointed down the tunnel, past the farthest reach of the lanterns. “Somewhere that way. And close.” She swallowed. “It gives me the same feeling of danger the elemental did.”

Ahead of them, Robert’s head came around. He’d heard every word.

He dropped back from Dorgan and Theo, fell into step on Sarah’s other side, and looked down at her with a slow grin spreading across his face.

“Experiment time?”

Sarah stared at him in shock.

“What do you mean, experiment time?” she said. “Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me to be careful? You’re always the one urging me to use caution! Every time! Every single time, it’s ‘Sarah, slow down,’ and ‘Sarah, think about it,’ and ‘Sarah, maybe we shouldn’t jump off the cliff—’”

Robert shrugged.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “But that was when we were off on our own. Nobody coming to help. Nobody knowing where we were.” He nodded back up the tunnel, the way they’d come. “Your brother’s bringing the whole Legion a couple of hours behind us. We’ve got support here.” He scratched his jaw. “And I’ve talked to Master Balfiel some about our training. About what he and the Count are planning for us. Those vials.”

He looked at her and grinned again.

“Seems as good a time as any to try it out,” he said. “I can go first.”

Sarah looked up at him. She was intrigued despite herself, and she could already feel her pulse kicking up in her throat, her blood humming, her fingers twitching toward the hilt of her sword. The pull in her chest swung toward the dark ahead and, for the first time in weeks, she didn’t fight it. She just looked at it.

Behind them, Mira leaned over toward Jace.

“This is their foreplay,” she whispered.

Jace rolled his eyes. But he snickered too, a little, under his breath. Through the bond, he could feel Sarah's excitement coming off her in waves.

Robert leaned down close to Sarah’s ear.

“Dibs on the first one,” he whispered.

Then he jogged off ahead to catch up with Theo and Dorgan, grinning to himself all the way.

They heard the gloomreaver’s nest before they saw it.

It came first as a smell. Somewhere past the third fork, the cold stone-and-iron smell of the tunnel turned sweet and rotten. Dorgan slowed. Then he stopped, crouched beside the rails, and put two fingers on the iron. He held them there a long moment, feeling for something only he could feel, and when he took them away his face had gone hard as the walls.

He looked at the dark ahead. Then he looked back at the humans, and his lips moved behind his beard.

“Stupid,” he muttered. “Stupid, stupid. Stupid humans.”

“What is it?” Theo whispered.

“Gloomreaver.” Dorgan said the word like spitting out a bad tooth. “Must have escaped from the deep dark. Blind as a stone and hears a mouse fart at a hundred paces.” He jerked his chin down the tunnel. “There’s a loading hall ahead where the rails cross. It’s made a nest of it.” He glared at Robert. “And ye want to go and poke it.”

Theo smiled at him.

Robert was already shrugging off his pack. He set it on the rails, dug into the top, and came out with a single stoppered vial wrapped in cloth. The liquid inside was a thick, sullen green, and when he pulled the stopper, the smell made the scouts step back.

“What’s that one do?” Jace whispered.

“Poison.” Robert grimaced at it. “Master Balfiel’s recipe, but Count Harold made it. It’s meant to halt our regeneration. Should make the fight much more even.” He swirled it. “There are others. The rest are for when we’re fighting something weaker, to bring us down to its level. Slow us, cut our mana, that kind of thing.” He looked down the dark tunnel and at the smell. “If this one’s as strong as Sarah says, I won’t need those.”

“It is,” Sarah whispered.

“Then down the hatch.”

He tipped it back. His throat worked once, twice, and he lowered the empty vial and shuddered all over like a wet dog. Sarah watched the veins on the backs of his hands darken until they stood out against his skin like ink lines on a map, and she felt it through the bond. There was a sick, hot heaviness in her own gut that wasn’t hers. She clenched her jaw and set it aside.

Robert swung his axe off his shoulder and rolled his neck.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Quiet now, everybody. We move up slow, I go in first, the rest of you stay back—”

“So is it a big one,” Mira asked, in her perfectly normal speaking voice, “or more like a—”

Something screamed in the dark ahead. It went down the tunnel and through the arches and came back again off every wall at once. Somewhere in the black, something enormous began to move, the clack and scrape of many legs on stone, and it was getting closer.

Mira’s smile faltered.

“Ah,” she whispered. “Shoot. My bad, Robert.”

Robert stepped forward with his axe.

His eyes had already adjusted. He’d gotten a perk that helped in low light back when he was working in the Landing, and the scouts’ lanterns, narrow as they were, were enough. Sarah saw the hall open ahead of him as he walked: a vaulted loading floor where four sets of rails crossed, cranes folded up against the ceiling, and the floor carpeted in bones. Pale bones, goat bones, the long skulls of wargs, and at least one dwarf, still in rusted bronze.

The gloomreaver came out of the dark on the far side of the hall.

It was huge. It had six legs, jointed like an insect’s and long as spears, and it walked high off the ground on the tips of them so the bulk of it swayed above the bones. Its body was armored in overlapping plates of slate-gray chitin, ridged, pitted, and scarred. It had no eyes. Its head was a smooth, wedge-shaped helm with a wide slit of a mouth across the bottom of it, lined all around with teeth like broken glass. And it had two forelimbs folded up beneath its head like a praying mantis, each ending in a pale, curved blade as long as Robert’s arm.

It stopped dead in the middle of the hall. Its head swung slowly from side to side as it listened.

Robert struck his axe against the iron rail at his feet. It rang through the hall like a bell.

The gloomreaver came at him.

It crossed the hall faster than anything that size had a right to move. Bones exploded out from under it in white sprays, and the right scythe came down at Robert’s head. Robert was already moving. Sarah felt the Foresight twitch through the bond, a cold prickle a heartbeat before the blade fell, and Robert went sideways on air, the Sky Bound Body thinning the space around him so he slid out from under the strike like smoke in a draft. The scythe hit the floor where he’d been standing and buried itself a foot deep in the stone.

Robert swung.

The axe came around in a flat arc and caught the gloomreaver’s foreleg at the joint. The edge bit, and Sarah heard the chitin crack, while the thing shrieked. Robert’s crafter perks let him understand an object's grain, find the seam in the wood or the joint in the bone, and the axe cut deeply where he hit. He was cutting chitin that should have turned a blade, almost as well as a mana blade.

But only almost.

The gloomreaver ripped its scythe out of the floor in a shower of stone and swung it backhand. Robert’s Foresight caught it, and he ducked, and the second scythe came in low from the other side where he couldn’t dodge, and it sliced him across the thigh.

Sarah felt it like a hot wire drawn through her own leg from the bond.

Robert went down to one knee. Blood sheeted down his thigh and pooled on the bones, black in the lantern light, and the wound didn’t close. The poison held the regeneration busy, and the edges just gaped and bled.

Beside Sarah, Cassian moved, his spear coming up.

Theo’s shield was suddenly in front of him.

“No,” Theo said.

“He’s going to—”

“No,” Sarah said, without taking her eyes off Robert. “Wait.”

She could feel him through the bond. He was hurt, badly, and the pain was a red roar under everything else. But under the pain, he was happy. He was so excited his heart pounded in Sarah’s chest. And they all got onto her for being reckless. She scoffed; he was just as bad.

Robert came up off his knee.

He floated up into the air; rather, the Sky Bound Body took his weight where his leg couldn’t. He swung the axe two-handed straight up into the gloomreaver’s helm-head as it lunged down at him. The axe hit the slit of its mouth and broke teeth, and the gloomreaver reared back, shrieking, and then it opened that mouth wide and screamed at him from three feet away.

The sound hit Sarah from forty feet off and knocked her back a step. Mira cried out and clapped both hands over her ears. One of the scouts went to his knees.

Robert took it full in the face.

Blood burst from his ears and his nose. He staggered sideways, eyes rolling, and the right scythe caught him in the side as he reeled and hurled him across the hall. He hit a crane support with a crunch Sarah felt in her own ribs, three of them going at once, and slid down it into the bones.

Cassian lunged forward.

This time Sarah got his arm. Her fingers locked on his wrist hard enough to grind the bones, and he stopped and looked down at her, and his face had gone white.

“Sarah. He’ll die.”

“He won’t.” She didn’t look away from the crane. “We’ve taken worse than that before, getting perks. All of us, we can feel him.”

“I can’t feel him!”

“Then trust me.” Her voice cracked on it. “He’s not scared, Cassian. He’s excited.”

Across the hall, Robert started to laugh.

It was a horrible sound, wet and broken and bubbling with blood. He rolled over in the bones and got his good leg under him. He got his axe under him too, using the haft like a crutch, and he hauled himself up. The gloomreaver came for him with its legs clacking and its head low and its mouth working, and Robert spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor and set his feet.

The Foresight flared.

Robert moved before it struck. He went inside the reach of the scythes, inside where they couldn’t swing. The air thinned around him, and he moved. He put his bad leg on the gloomreaver’s foreleg and his good one on its shoulder plate and climbed it like a ladder. He was above its head before it understood where he’d gone.

He swung the axe down with everything he had left.

It went into the back of the gloomreaver’s head where the helm met the neck, into the seam he’d found there. It bit through chitin and kept going until the axe head was buried to the haft. The gloomreaver went rigid under him. All six legs locked straight out at once, and it stood there, swaying, shrieking without sound, and then it folded slowly forward and crashed into the bones.

Robert rode it down. When it stopped moving, he let go of the axe, slid off its back, landed on his bad leg, and fell over.

He lay there in the bones on his back with blood running out of his ears and his thigh and his mouth, staring up at the crane overhead, and Sarah felt it come through the bond like warm water. It was joy, pure and stupid.

“Woooo,” Robert wheezed at the ceiling. “Oh, gods. Oh, gods, that was amazing.”

Sarah let go of Cassian’s wrist. There were white marks where her fingers had been.