Chapter 155: Pebble

Logan kept the panel open as he walked.

He had meant to close it after the Tower Points. Instead his eyes slid down past the hundred and ten, past the zero beside Abyss Points, to the line at the very bottom.

[ Time remaining: 362 days ]

They had slept three times since the platform at Hollowreach. The first had been in the house with the open door, the second on the Weeping Ledge, and the third beside Orvan’s fire. The Abyss had taken a day for each of them.

’Rishin told us not to count,’ he thought. ’The Abyss counts anyway.’

"You looked," Alice said beside him.

"I looked."

"And?"

"Three." Logan closed the panel. "Three gone."

Alice did not scold him this time. She only nodded and walked a little closer, so that her shoulder brushed his on the narrow path.

Past the next bend, the path did what it had not done since the rim. It turned left and went into the rock.

An arch had been cut into the wall of the Abyss, tall enough for Terry to pass under without ducking.

Beyond it a passage ran level for a dozen paces and then opened out. Rishin stopped at the mouth of it to let the rest of them see.

It was a cavern, long and low, and it ran alongside the face of the wall like a corridor in an enormous house.

Thousands of stone icicles hung from the roof. Water dripped from the tips of them in a patter that never stopped.

Where the drips had fallen long enough, stone had grown upward from the floor to meet them, and in many places the two had joined into pillars as thick as tree trunks.

The floor was a maze of shallow pools. Pale reeds grew out of the pools in dense stands, taller than a man. They leaned a little in a draft that Logan could feel on his face.

Along the right-hand side, the rock had broken through to the open air. A row of ragged holes looked out onto the drop like windows. The grey light of the Abyss fell through them in long slanting bars and lay across the water.

[ New area: Dripstone Gallery ]

"Remember this place," Rishin said. He had to raise his voice a little over the dripping. "Out on the wall, everything across the drop can see you. Under a roof, it cannot."

Sonic’s head came up at once.

"I did not say fly," Rishin added.

Sonic’s head went down again.

The Summoning Circle lay just inside the arch, on a flat table of rock that stood a hand’s height above the pools. Its blue symbols were mirrored in the water all around it, so that the ring seemed to float.

Logan stepped up onto the rock.

The units had gathered behind him without being asked, and he could feel them watching. It had been this way in every match he had ever played. There was a circle, a handful of Tower Points, and Billy vibrating at his elbow.

"Finally," Billy said. "Boss, I was starting to think you forgot how."

"I have a hundred and ten points, Billy."

"So do one. One is a start. You started with one."

’I started with one,’ Logan thought, ’and then I merged him with a wheel full of knives.’

He looked back over his shoulder. Solveig stood at the edge of the rock with Vina’s small hand in his gauntlet. There was still a dark stain along the lower half of his blade.

"This one is yours," Logan told him. "You earned every point of it."

"I stood where I was needed," Solveig said. "That is all."

"That is everything," Logan said, and he opened the circle.

[ Summon: Combat Unit x1 ] [ Cost: 100 Tower Points ] [ Remaining Tower Points: 10 ]

The symbols brightened from pale blue to white.

Light rose out of the ring in a column as thin as a spear shaft. Then it spread and thickened, and it took on the outline of a head and a pair of shoulders.

In the Warlord match, Logan had watched five hundred cards spill across a plaza in a single wave. He had sorted them the way a man deals a deck.

He could not remember the last time he had stood and watched one summon arrive, and he found that his hands had closed into fists at his sides.

The light faded.

A young man stood in the circle. He was lean and a little under Logan’s height, and he was dressed in patched brown leather with a pouch of stones at his hip. A sling of braided cord hung from his right hand.

He had sandy hair and a narrow, good-humored face. He stood with his weight on one leg, as though he had been waiting there for some time and had not minded.

[ Sling Shooter (Normal) Summoned ]

Logan forgot what he had been about to say.

Behind him, Billy had stopped vibrating.

"Boss," Billy said, in a very small voice. "Boss, that is me."

It was not, quite. But Logan knew that easy slouch and the set of those shoulders.

In his first match, before he had anything else, Logan had summoned a Sling Shooter. It was Normal-rank, the lowest rank there was, and it had fought beside him with nothing but a strip of leather and a bag of rocks.

Then Logan had merged it with a wheel of blades, and that was how Billy had begun.

There had been a great many merges since. Billy was a great wheel of dark metal now, and he could become a leviathan when it suited him. But somewhere in the middle of all that, he still wore the Sling Shooter’s crooked grin.

The first one had carried a scar. This one’s face was unmarked, and that was the only difference Logan could find.

The Sling Shooter looked around the gallery. He took in the pools and the dripping roof.

He took in the knight with wings of light, and the wheel the size of a cart that was staring at him with its blades gone slack. Then he looked at Logan and straightened up a little.

"Boss," he said. "Where do you want me?"

Billy made a noise like a kettle.

Vina had let go of Solveig’s hand.

She walked around the new arrival in a slow circle and studied him from his boots to his hair. He turned his head to follow her with a puzzled smile.

"What is his name?" she asked.

"Billy Junior," said Billy immediately.

"No," said Logan.

"Billy the Second."

"No. He is not you, Billy. He gets to be himself."

Vina crouched and looked at the pouch on the Sling Shooter’s hip. She poked it, and the stones inside clicked together.

"Pebble," she decided.

The Sling Shooter considered it. He glanced at Logan, and Logan nodded.

"Pebble," he agreed, and he grinned at her. It was Billy’s grin exactly. Billy made the kettle noise again.

Logan opened the new unit’s panel to set the name. He had done it hundreds of times, and he was halfway through before he saw that the panel had changed.

[ Sling Shooter ] [ Name: Pebble ] [ Rank: Normal ] [ Lifespan: 365 days ] [ Lifespan may be exchanged for Abyss Points at any Relic Shop. ]

He read the last two lines, and the warmth went out of him.

He had not opened a single unit’s panel since Hollowreach. He had told himself there was no need. He understood now that he had simply not wanted to see it.

Logan made himself open Billy’s.

[ Name: Billy ] [ Lifespan: 362 days ] [ Lifespan may be exchanged for Abyss Points at any Relic Shop. ]

He opened Solveig’s, and then Sonic’s. He went down the whole roster one name at a time, and every panel said the same thing.

Pebble was the only one of them with a whole year. The Abyss had not had him long enough to take anything yet.

’Three days,’ Logan thought. ’It has already taken three days from every one of them, and I did not even look.’

Billy had rolled up beside him. He could not see the panel, but he had been watching Logan’s face.

"What does mine say, boss?"

Logan told him.

Billy rocked back and forth on his rim while he thought about it.

"That is plenty," he said. "Do you know what I can do in three hundred and sixty-two days? I did a hundred Warlords in one match."

"You helped with some of them," Terry said from the arch.

"Most."

"Some."

Logan laughed, and it hurt a little on the way out.

Alice found him sitting on the edge of the circle’s rock, with his boots just above the water and another panel open in front of him.

She knew that panel. She had watched him use it more times than she could count.

[ Boundless Genesis ] [ Effect 1: Merge ] [ Select two units. ]

He had not selected anything.

"You are thinking about it," she said, and she sat down beside him.

"I am thinking about what I do not know." Logan kept his voice low. Across the nearest pool, Vina was showing Pebble a glowing snail, and Pebble was holding it up to the light as though it were a jewel.

"When I merge two units, one of them carries on," Logan said.

"He keeps his face and his memories and gets a stronger body. The other one becomes part of him. That has always been the whole of it. It was rank and skills and stats, and there was never a fourth thing."

"Lifespan," Alice said.

"Two units go in with a year each, and one unit comes out. What does his panel say?" Logan counted on his fingers.

"If it keeps the shorter of the two, then every merge I do costs somebody days. If it keeps the longer, I can pass a fresh year along. And if it adds them together."

He stopped there.

Alice finished it for him, very softly. "Then you are the only person in the Abyss who can make time."

’And if it is worse than any of those,’ Logan thought, ’I only find out by doing it to someone.’

"I am not testing it on Billy," he said. "I am not testing it on anyone who walked in here with me. And I am not folding Pebble into anything, because Vina named him."

"So you need fresh units."

"One to fold into Pebble, or two to fold into each other. Either way, somebody stays himself and we read his panel afterward."

Logan closed Boundless Genesis. "They do not even have to be my pulls. I built your first three Mythics out of cards you handed me."

Alice glanced at her panel and its fifty. Then she gave him a sidelong look.

"So whichever of us reaches a hundred first does the summoning."

"Yes."

"I am at fifty, and you are at ten." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "Try to keep up."

Rishin had lowered himself onto a dry hump of stone near the arch, where he could watch the reeds. Logan went and sat with him.

The old man was looking at Pebble. Vina had moved on from snails and was now making him demonstrate the sling. He was doing it gravely, one slow swing at a time, with nothing in the cradle.

"She named him," Rishin said.

"She names everything."

"Good. Let her." Rishin rubbed his right knee with the heel of his hand. "You will meet people further down who call theirs by rank. The Epic. The two Rares. It is easier to carry them to a shop that way."

Logan turned to look at him.

"Name every one you summon," Rishin said. "Make it hard for yourself. When it becomes easy, you have already lost more than a unit."

"Did you name yours?"

"Every one," Rishin said.

He did not say what had become of them, and Logan did not ask.

Logan had posted Pebble at the front of the rock to keep watch, mostly to give him a job.

Pebble took it with complete seriousness. He stood at the lip of the rock with a round grey stone loaded in the sling, and his eyes moved slowly from one stand of reeds to the next.

Then they stopped moving.

"Boss," he said. He did not raise his voice, and he did not point. "The draft is coming in through the windows. All the reeds are leaning left."

Logan followed his eyes to a stand of reeds beside the third pillar.

"Those three are leaning right," Pebble said.

As Logan watched, one of the three reeds bent slowly in the middle, in a place where no reed has a joint. Then it took a step.