Chapter 154: Down

The fire burned down to a bed of red coals.

Nobody had decided to make camp on Orvan’s ledge, but nobody suggested leaving either. Martha and Winsmoke had taken over the cooking entirely.

Ilse had stopped pretending to be offended and was asking Winsmoke how he had made the broth taste of smoke without any smoke in it.

Billy had parked at the top of the slope where the path came down. Terry stood at the bottom of it. Between the two of them, nothing could reach the ledge from the path without passing a Mythic first.

The children were the last to settle.

Brin fell asleep first, in his mother’s lap by the fire.

Ilse did not move him. She sat with one hand on his back and began to hum, very softly.

It was a slow tune with a lilt in the middle of it, rising and falling in a pattern of four notes that came back again and again.

Logan did not recognize it. But from the way Brin’s whole body loosened against her, it was a song the boy had fallen asleep to many times before. His breathing slowed and evened out before she reached the end of it.

At the back of the ledge, Teska and Vina had dragged two bedrolls together beside the snail rock. They lay facing each other, whispering. Every so often one of them giggled, and Helen or Ilse would glance over without saying anything.

Eventually the whispering stopped. When Logan looked again, the two girls were asleep with their hands still clasped between the bedrolls.

Solveig stood a pace from Vina’s bedroll with his blade resting point-down on the stone and both hands folded over the hilt.

Logan and Alice took the watch with Orvan.

They sat by the coals near the foot of the slope, where they could see both the path and the drop. Orvan sat with his axe across his knees and his great horned head tilted back against the rock.

"Your old man," Orvan said quietly. He nodded toward Rishin, who lay on a bedroll near the back wall with his eyes closed. "He did not like it when I spoke about the voice from below."

"No," Logan said.

"You know why?"

"No," Logan said again. "He has not told us."

Orvan shifted the axe on his knees. Then he said, "The woman on our rim. When she told us not to trust anything that calls from below, I asked her what she meant."

"What did she say?" Alice asked.

"She did not answer. She only looked at my daughter." Orvan turned his axe over slowly in his big grey hands. "I have been thinking about that look for nine days."

Vina woke because her hand was empty.

She did not know what had woken her at first. She lay on the bedroll with her eyes half open and her fingers curled around nothing, and then she understood. Teska’s hand was not in hers anymore.

She sat up.

Teska was walking away from the bedrolls. She was moving slowly toward the right edge of the ledge, where the green stalks grew thin and the stone dropped away into the dark.

Her steps were steady and unhurried, the way a child walks to the kitchen in the dark for a drink of water.

Vina rubbed her eyes. ’Where is she going?’

Then she heard the humming.

It was very faint. It was coming from somewhere beyond the drop, from below the stone, and it was a slow tune with a lilt in the middle. Four notes, rising and falling, over and over.

It was the song Teska’s mother had sung to Brin.

Vina looked toward the fire.

Ilse was asleep beside the coals with Brin still curled in her lap, and her mouth was closed. She was not humming. She was not making any sound at all.

Vina’s stomach went cold.

She got up off the bedroll. Behind her, she heard Solveig’s armor shift as the knight turned to follow her, the way he always did.

Just past the stalks, a soft light had appeared. It hung just below the lip of the stone, warm and golden like a lamp left burning in a window. It was bobbing very gently, in time with the humming.

Teska was walking toward it with her arms loose at her sides.

’Don’t trust anything that calls to you from below,’ Vina thought. She had heard the big man say it at the fire while she was turning over snails, and she had not understood. She understood now.

She ran.

"Teska!"

Teska did not turn around. She was three steps from the edge and still walking.

Vina caught her wrist and pulled. Teska pulled back, hard, and kept walking. Her face was calm and her eyes were fixed on the golden light, and she did not seem to know that anybody was holding her at all.

Two steps from the edge.

The light rose a little above the lip. Behind it, in the dark below the stone, Vina saw something long and pale shift against the rock.

’Down,’ Vina thought. ’When anyone you trust says it, you drop. You do not look and you do not ask.’

But Teska did not know the game.

So Vina said it for both of them.

"DOWN!"

She threw herself at Teska’s back with all her weight. Both girls went flat on the stone a single stride from the edge, and Vina locked her arms around Teska and held on.

Solveig was over them before Vina’s shout had finished echoing.

The thing below the ledge came up at the same instant. It rose over the lip in one smooth surge, and Logan saw it from across the camp as he came to his feet.

It was long and eel-like and the color of old bone. It had been clinging to the underside of the ledge with dozens of short hooked legs.

The golden light hung from a thin stalk that grew out of the top of its head, and below the light its mouth opened like a sack, ringed with needle teeth as long as fingers.

The humming was coming out of that mouth.

It lunged for the girls.

Solveig did not swing. A swing would have thrown the thing back over the edge, and a body that size falling through open air would have brought every hookwing on the far wall down on the camp.

He stepped forward and drove his burning blade straight down through the creature’s skull. The point went through bone and into the stone of the ledge beneath it, and pinned it there.

The humming stopped mid-note. The golden light on its stalk flickered, dimmed, and went out.

[ Lullmaw slain. ] [ Logan Wolf: +60 Tower Points ]

The camp came awake all at once.

Ilse was on her feet with Brin clutched against her chest. Orvan had his axe in his hand and was halfway across the ledge before Logan had taken three steps.

Helen came up off her bedroll with a sound Logan had never heard his mother make before.

Teska had begun to cry. It was a confused, frightened sound, the crying of a child who has woken somewhere she did not lie down.

"Mama?" she sobbed. "Mama, you were singing. I heard you singing."

Ilse stopped dead.

She looked down at the pinned creature with its dead lantern. She looked at the needle teeth in its open mouth. Logan watched her understand what had been humming her song into the dark.

Then she dropped to her knees and pulled Teska out of Vina’s arms, and held her daughter so hard that the girl squeaked.

Vina sat up slowly on the stone.

She was shaking from head to foot. She looked at the dead Lullmaw, and at Solveig standing over it with his blade still buried in the rock, and at Teska sobbing into her mother’s neck.

Then Rishin was kneeling in front of her.

Logan had not seen him cross the ledge. The old man was simply there, on his knees on the cold stone, holding Vina’s face between both of his hands. His hands were shaking almost as badly as hers.

"You did it right," Rishin said. His voice cracked in the middle. "You did it right, little one. You did it exactly right."

Vina stared at him. "She did not know the word," she whispered. "So I said it for her."

Rishin bowed his head until his forehead nearly touched hers. He had no other words. He stayed there with her face cradled in his hands, and his shoulders shook.

Helen had stopped a few steps away. She did not take her daughter from him. She stood with her hands pressed to her mouth and watched an old man hold her child as though she were the last warm thing in the world.

Solveig pulled his blade free of the stone and stepped back. Orvan came to stand beside him, looking down at the dead creature.

"This is what she meant," he said hoarsely. "The woman on our rim. Something that calls to you from below."

"Yes," Logan said.

"It used my wife’s song." Orvan’s voice was flat. "It lay under my ledge and listened to my wife put my son to sleep. Then it waited until my daughter was alone."

Alice came up beside Logan. She was looking at Rishin, still kneeling with Vina.

’He knew,’ she thought. ’He went still the moment Orvan said it, at the fire. He knew exactly what kind of thing makes that call.’

She did not let herself finish the thought. She did not want to know what Rishin had once heard calling from below, or whose voice it had used.

Nobody slept again on that ledge.

When the family was ready to move on, Orvan’s family stayed. Orvan wanted to rest his children before they walked any further, and Rishin agreed that it was wise.

He gave Orvan a short list of things in a low voice, and Orvan listened to every word of it the way Logan had once listened on a mountain.

Teska came to find Vina before they left.

Her eyes were still red, but her chin was up. She held out a closed fist and opened it. In her palm sat one of the empty snail shells from the rock, small and spiraled, still glowing faintly blue.

"For you," she said.

Vina looked at it. Then she reached up and pulled one of the ribbons out of her braids. She tied it around Teska’s wrist in a lopsided bow.

"We will see you further down," Vina said.

"Further down," Teska agreed.

They climbed back up the slope to the path in the same order as always, with Rishin and Vina leading.

Vina looked back at every switchback. Below them, Teska stood at the edge of the firelight with her parents, waving the wrist with the ribbon on it. She kept waving until the curve of the wall hid her.

Rishin made no comment about it. But Logan, walking two steps behind them, saw the old man’s hand close a little more firmly around Vina’s.

Logan opened his panel.

[ Tower Points: 110 ]

’Enough for one pull,’ he thought. He looked at Solveig walking ahead of him, with the Lullmaw’s dark blood still drying on his blade.

’And Solveig earned it, standing over my sister.’