Chapter 157: Under A Roof

It breathed out first.

A long gust rolled down the gallery and laid the reeds over toward them. It was warm, and it stank of pond mud and old meat. Then the pool around the mound heaved, and the mound stood up.

Water sheeted off its sides. Four legs as thick as the stone pillars pushed it up out of the pool, and a broad flat head swung around on a neck that Logan had taken for a boulder.

It was shaped like a salamander. It was also as long as a city bus, and its wet grey hide was pitted and ridged exactly like the rock around it.

The spikes on its back were real stone. They stood in two rows down its spine, each one as tall as Vina, and Logan understood how they had come to be there.

The creature had lain in that pool without moving for so long that the roof had dripped them onto its back.

[ Dripstone Elder ] [ Level: 14 ] [ Rank: Epic ]

Nyriel’s constellation had swept this gallery twice and had read the thing as rock, because its heart beat too slowly to notice. Now Nyriel gave Logan the numbers without being asked.

[ Attack: 180 ] [ Speed: 35 ] [ Constitution: 460 ] [ Arcane: 95 ]

Logan read them and felt no fear for himself at all.

’Epic-rank, Level 14,’ he thought. ’In the Warlord match I would not have broken stride for it. It cannot hurt me. It cannot hurt Alice or her parents.’

His eyes went to the people standing between him and that wide flat head.

’It can kill my mother by turning around too quickly.’

Rishin was already backing away.

He drew Vina with him one unhurried step at a time, until the two of them stood level with Daniel and Helen in the middle of the lane. Solveig moved with them.

Pebble had put himself in front of Helen with his sling loaded. It would have accomplished nothing whatsoever, and Logan decided on the spot that he liked him.

Garen rolled his shoulders, and Logan heard his neck crack.

"Finally," Garen said. "A proper animal."

He took one step forward. Then he looked back at Logan and Alice, sighed heavily, and took the step back again.

"No. My daughter has fifty Tower Points, and the boy beside her has ten. You two need this more than I need the exercise." He jerked his chin at the Elder. "It is yours. Isolde and I will mind everyone else."

"Before you move," Rishin said. He spoke softly, and his voice carried all the same. "Look to your right."

Logan looked. The windows ran along the right side of the gallery, wide open to the drop. Through each one he could see small grey shapes sitting in their holes on the far wall.

"Nothing leaves this gallery through those," Rishin said. "Not the beast. Not a blade. Not an arrow."

’Heaven-Splitting Line,’ Logan thought at once. ’It does not stop at the thing I cut. If I throw it toward those windows, it goes straight out into open air.’

Beside him, Alice had reached the same place.

"I shoot from the window side," she murmured. "Toward the rock. Then a miss goes into the wall and nowhere else."

"And I cut the same way."

They went right together, toward the windows and the slanting bars of grey light.

The Elder did not charge them. It planted its four legs in the pool and lowered its head.

Then it opened its mouth, and it kept opening it, until the gap between its jaws was as tall as a doorway and Logan could see down a ribbed pink throat.

[ Hollow Draw ]

The air in the gallery began to move.

It started as a breeze at Logan’s back. It did not stay a breeze.

The reeds bent double toward the open mouth. The water in every pool ran uphill in long ropes and streamed off the floor into the creature’s throat. Loose stones and the cracked bones of waders went rattling down the lane after it.

The pull plucked at Logan’s coat and could not shift him. There were forty levels of stats holding his boots to the stone.

His mother had four.

Logan looked back over his shoulder, and he saw all of it happen at once.

Helen’s feet went out from under her on the wet rock. Pebble skidded backward into her legs. Rishin pushed Vina’s hand into Solveig’s gauntlet and said two words that the wind took away.

Solveig drove his blade down into the floor to the crossguard. He wrapped his free arm around the girl and closed both wings over her, and the two of them did not move another inch.

Then Rishin’s bare feet slid.

He was Level 1, and he weighed almost nothing. All the skill in the world could not find a grip on wet stone where there was none to find. He went down onto one hip and began to slide toward the mouth.

Daniel had already planted his feet.

[ Rooted Stance (Lv1) ]

The brown lines ran from his ankles down into the rock. The Draw took hold of him the way it had taken hold of everything else in that gallery, and Daniel Wolf stayed exactly where he was.

Helen slid past on his left. He caught her around the waist with one arm and pulled her against his side. Pebble grabbed the back of his belt in both fists and streamed out behind him like a flag in a gale.

Rishin was sliding past on his right.

Daniel’s right hand was full. He was holding his rock.

Logan saw his father look at the rock. Then Daniel opened his fingers. The rock dropped and bounced once, and it went tumbling away down the lane into the dark of that open throat.

Daniel’s empty hand shot out and closed around Rishin’s wrist.

Behind them, a wall of pale light stood up across the lane. Isolde had raised it with one hand, and every unit that had begun to slide fetched up against it in a heap.

Garen had put himself two paces beyond Daniel with one arm half raised. He was not helping. He was making sure that if Daniel’s grip failed, nobody would travel further than the length of his arm.

’They have him,’ Logan thought. ’Now end it.’

He opened Sword Intent.

The Draw was not wind. It was a single cord as thick as his arm, running out of the Elder’s throat.

A few meters from the mouth it split into dozens of strands, and each strand had hooked itself into a different loose thing in the gallery.

One was fastened to his mother, and one to Pebble. One was wound around an old man’s ankles.

[ Reaper’s Stride ]

Logan crossed forty paces of gallery in a single blink.

There was a roof over his head and nobody across the drop to see how fast he moved. It was the first time since the rim that he had been allowed to.

He arrived beside the Elder’s jaw with the windows at his back and the rock wall in front of him.

[ Broken Chain ]

Grimlord’s Blade passed through the air in front of the open mouth, a hand’s width from the teeth. It cut nothing that anyone else could see.

The wind stopped.

Every rope of water fell back onto the floor with a slap. The reeds sprang upright. Down the lane, Logan heard his mother and Pebble hit the stone. He heard his father say a word he had never used in front of Vina.

The Elder’s mouth closed on nothing.

One small pale eye rolled toward Logan. The great flat head swung sideways at him like a slammed door, with all the weight of that body behind it.

Logan put up his left hand and stopped it.

The head struck his palm, and his boots did not slide. He stood there with his hand flat against a snout the size of a table, and he felt the creature strain against him and get nowhere.

"Alice," he said.

She was standing at the third window with her back to the grey light. She had been there since he blinked.

Arrow Intent showed her the place. It sat just behind the hinge of the jaw, in the soft skin under the first stone spike, and it was as bright to her as a lamp in a dark room.

She drew, and she stopped at half.

’At full draw this goes through the fatal point,’ she thought. ’Then it goes through the rest of the animal and through the wall behind it.’

She had never in her life tried to shoot softly. She let the string go as gently as she knew how.

[ Starflow Arts: Death Star ] [ Arrow Intent: Puncture ] [ Critical strike. Fatal point struck. ]

The arrow went in to the fletching and stayed there.

The Elder’s legs folded under it. It settled back into its pool with a long sigh of escaping air, and the two rows of spikes came to rest exactly as they had been. From a distance, it looked like a mound of dripstone again.

[ Dripstone Elder slain. ] [ Alice Rezvolt: +200 Tower Points ]

Logan took his hand off the dead thing’s snout.

"I had it," he said.

"You were holding it still for me. It was very kind of you." Alice opened her panel and turned it so that he could see.

[ Tower Points: 250 ]

"Two hundred and fifty," she said. "Remind me how many you have."

"Ten."

"Ten," Alice agreed happily.

She closed the panel, and the teasing went out of her face.

"Two pulls," she said, more quietly. "At the circle by the first arch, where nobody can see us but family. You merge them, and we read the panel."

Logan had been so busy counting his ten points that he had not looked properly at hers.

"After we have slept," Alice added. "I want to be wide awake when I find out whether you can make time."

Garen had come up the lane with his hands in his pockets. He looked at his daughter’s panel and then at the ceiling.

"I am a Tier-9 player," he said to nobody in particular. "I have no Tower Points at all."

"You gave it away, dear," Isolde called from behind him. "It was very gracious."

When Logan walked back down the lane, the four of them had not moved.

Daniel still stood rooted in the middle of it. His left arm was locked around Helen’s waist, and Pebble was still holding onto his belt. His right hand was still clamped around Rishin’s wrist.

Rishin lay on his side on the wet stone at the full stretch of Daniel’s arm. His robe was soaked to the shoulder.

He was looking at the thick fingers wrapped around his wrist as though they were a thing he had only ever read about.

"Got you," Daniel said. He was badly out of breath.

"So you have." Rishin’s voice came out strange. "I told your son that nobody catches anyone here. I told him so on the ledge at Hollowreach."

"You told him," Daniel said. "Nobody told me."

He hauled, and the old man came up onto his feet. It was the same pull that had lifted him off the grass in the garden.

Rishin laughed.

It began short and rusty, the way it had on the lawn. This time it did not stop.

It went on until he had to put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder to stay upright, and Isolde stared at him across the lane with her mouth open.

Solveig lifted his wings. Vina shot out from under them, ran straight to Rishin, and threw both arms around his waist. He only laughed harder.

’He said it to me like a law,’ Logan thought. ’And Dad broke it with one hand, because nobody had explained the rules to him.’

Daniel was the first to stop smiling. He looked down at his right hand and found it empty.

"My rock," he said.

"Daniel," said Helen.

"It was a good rock."

Vulkarn had not waited for anybody. The production unit had walked straight into the pool, and it stood with both palms pressed against the dead Elder’s flank.

The slow red glow in its chest had brightened to orange. It was making the low rumble that Xairon had once explained was joy.

It turned its head at the sound of Daniel’s voice. Then it reached into the Elder’s open jaws up to the shoulder and felt around inside.

It came out holding a slab of stone about the size of a loaf of bread.

Daniel took the dripping rock in both hands. "Thank you," he said, with real feeling. Vulkarn rumbled.

"You will only drop it again," said Synthia.

She had come up beside him, and she held out one hand with the palm up. Daniel hesitated like a man who has been asked to hand over his wallet.

"She can put one rune on anything," Logan told him. "It never wears off."

Daniel gave her the rock.

Synthia laid it on her anvil and turned it over once. She pressed her thumb against the flattest side. A small sigil sank into the stone, glowed white, and went dull.

[ Daniel’s Rock ] [ Rune of Return: Comes back to its owner’s hand when called. ]

Then she tossed it over her shoulder into the nearest pool.

Daniel made a wounded noise.

"Call it," Synthia said.

"Call it what?"

"It is a rock, Dad," Logan said.

"Rock?" said Daniel doubtfully.

The rock shot up out of the pool and slapped into his open palm.

Daniel stared at it. Water ran down his wrist and dripped off his elbow.

"Well," he said. "That works."

They made camp on the dry bank beside the second arch, and they slept there.

Xairon did not sleep. It spent the whole rest circling the Elder in one shape after another, and it stopped only once, to look over at Helen and Daniel in their plain travelling clothes.

"Epic hide," it said. "And stone that grew on a living back. I can do a great deal better for those two than shirts."

When Logan woke, he opened his panel before he could talk himself out of it.

[ Time remaining: 361 days ]

He closed it and got up.

Alice’s bedroll was empty.

He found her at the far end of the gallery, on the flat table of rock beside the first arch. She stood with her arms folded, and the blue light of the Summoning Circle shone up at her from the stone.

She had two hundred and fifty Tower Points, and she had clearly been waiting for him.