Chapter 162: Brood Mark

It dropped toward them without a sound.

Through the clouded light of the dome, Logan could see only a shadow. It grew as it fell. It spread until it covered a third of the roof, and then it swung aside and struck the wall of the slot above the first rib.

Stone cracked under its claws. Grit rattled down across the dome.

The warden had landed close enough for him to make out its shape. It was a hookwing. It had the same short, dense feathers as the thousands on the walls, and the same beak curved like a fishing gaff.

But the beak alone was longer than Terry was tall, and the eye that turned down toward them was the size of a shield.

[ Thousandwing Gaff Matron ] [ Rank: Mythic ] [ Scaled to: Tier-9 ]

Nyriel’s constellation flared inside the dome and gave him the numbers.

[ Attack: 41,000 ] [ Speed: 66,000 ] [ Constitution: 58,000 ] [ Arcane: 30,000 ]

’Without a single stack on me, my best stat is not a tenth of the smallest number on that panel,’ Logan thought.

He had stopped an Epic with one hand in the gallery. This thing could have killed him by landing on him.

"That is more like it," Garen said softly. He was not smiling.

The Matron did not attack.

She hung on the wall with her head cocked, studying the dome with one enormous eye. Inside it, more than twenty units and eight people stood packed together on a bridge of stone as wide as a cart.

Then she opened her beak and screamed.

It was not loud so much as sharp. Logan felt it in his teeth. Vina clapped both hands over her ears, and Daniel pulled her against his side.

[ Brood Mark ] [ The marked target is hunted by the flock, whether it moves or not. ]

Both walls of the Narrows emptied at once.

The sound was like gravel being poured onto a drum, and it did not stop. The clouded light above them went dark as bodies covered it.

All around the dome, from the crown to the stone of the rib, small hooked beaks struck and struck again.

[ Barrier: 100% → 93% ]

Isolde’s arms shook. She set her feet wider.

"I can hold this," she said through her teeth. "I cannot hold it and walk ten more of these."

[ Barrier: 93% → 88% ]

"She marked the roof," Alice said. Her voice was thin. "Not one of us. The whole roof."

"Because the roof is the only thing she can see," Rishin said.

He had put Vina’s hand into Helen’s, and he was standing in the middle of the rib with his head tilted back.

He looked like a man listening to rain. Nothing in his face showed that he was Level 1 and standing under a Tier-9 warden.

"Logan," he said. "Look at her. Not with your eyes."

Logan opened Sword Intent.

The inside of the dome filled with threads. He ignored them and looked up, through the light and the dark press of wings, to the place on the wall where the Matron clung.

A cord ran out of her throat.

It was as thick as a ship’s cable, and it came down through the storm to the very crown of the dome.

There it frayed into strands as fine as hair. There were thousands upon thousands of them, and each one led away to a single bird.

"She is not striking us," Logan said slowly. "She is pointing at us. All of them are following where she points."

"Then find the finger," said Rishin, "and cut it off."

"It is tied to the top of the dome," Logan said. "On the outside."

"Outside," Garen repeated. He looked up at the black, heaving roof, and Logan saw the idea arrive in his face. "Senior. The wall is already awake. Every bird on it is in the air."

"Yes."

"So there is nothing left to wake."

"That is her mistake," Rishin agreed. "She has spent the whole wall on one throw. For as long as her mark holds, speed costs you nothing out there. The birds themselves are nothing to a man of your Tier."

Garen rolled his neck. Both pistols had begun to hum in his hands, a low note that Logan felt in his breastbone.

"Isolde. Let me out."

She did not look around. A slit opened in the side of the dome, exactly as wide as her husband’s shoulders.

Garen stepped through it into the storm.

The hookwings hit him from every side.

They broke on him like hail on a statue. Logan watched their beaks skid off his coat and his face and his bare hands without leaving a mark. Garen did not even brush them away.

He raised both pistols toward the wall and fired.

Two lines of white fire went up through the flock and left two clean tunnels behind them. They struck the rock where the Matron had been clinging. She was not there.

"She moved!" Garen shouted. "I cannot see through this! There are ten thousand bodies between me and her!"

A shadow passed over the dome, far too fast to follow. The whole barrier rang like a struck bell.

[ Barrier: 88% → 71% ]

Isolde went down onto one knee. Her hands stayed up.

Alice had already nocked.

"I will find her," she said. "Mother, I need a gap. Above me, the width of my hand."

’I cannot hurt that thing,’ she thought. ’Not at Tier-4, and not without a single stack. But I do not have to hurt her. I only have to show my father where she is.’

She closed her eyes and drew.

She did not look for a bird in a cloud of birds. She asked the question she had learned to ask in the vault, the one that had found an invisible woman on a cliff.

Where does the arrow want to go?

[ Arrow Intent: Homing ] [ Starflow Arts: Stun Star ]

She released straight up through the gap in the dome.

The arrow bent twice around bodies that should have stopped it. It curved left, high over the second rib. It struck a patch of empty air and burst there in a hard white star.

[ Thousandwing Gaff Matron: Stunned for 0.4 seconds ]

"There!" Alice screamed.

Garen had already turned. Both pistols spoke at once, and this time the white fire ended in feathers.

[ Thousandwing Gaff Matron: HP 100% → 91% ]

The Matron came down on them like a falling roof.

Logan saw the beak arrive. It punched through the top of the dome as if the light were paper, and it stopped a hand’s width above Terry’s head. Then it tore free and left a ragged hole behind it.

[ Barrier: 71% → 58% ]

Hookwings poured in through the hole.

There were thirty or forty of them. Under Isolde’s roof, with nothing outside able to see in, they met a line of Mythic units who had not been allowed to move quickly since the rim.

"Finally," said Sonic.

He went through the first dozen in a crack of white lightning, and he was laughing. Billy took six more in a single spin. Terry reached up and closed one fist, and there were two fewer.

One bird got past them all.

It came in low along the stone, fast and silent, straight at the old man who stood watching the roof.

Daniel did not have time to shout. He threw his rock.

It was not a good throw. But it was a heavy rock, and the bird was small, and they met a pace in front of Rishin’s chest.

[ Hookwing slain. ] [ Daniel Wolf: +0 Tower Points ]

"Rock," Daniel said hoarsely.

The rock slapped back into his palm.

Rishin had not flinched. He glanced at the small grey body on the stone, and then at Daniel.

"Twice now," he said.

"I am not counting," said Daniel.

"Logan," Rishin said. "Now. Before she strikes again."

Logan was already moving toward the hole in the roof.

[ Reaper’s Stride ]

He blinked through it and landed on the outside of the dome.

It was like standing on a hill of glass in a blizzard. The hookwings struck him from every direction.

Each blow was no worse than being hit with a wet glove. But there were hundreds every second, and he could see nothing past the length of his arm.

His eyes were no use to him. He shut them and let Sword Intent show him the cord.

It came down out of the dark and plunged into the crown of the dome at his feet. It was thicker than anything he had ever tried to cut. He set himself and swung.

[ Broken Chain ]

Grimlord’s Blade bit into the cord and stopped.

It was like striking a ship’s hawser with a kitchen knife. A few strands parted. The rest held, and the shock of it ran up both his arms to the shoulder.

’Tier-9,’ he thought. ’I am trying to cut a Tier-9 skill in half with Tier-4 arms.’

"Not across it!" Rishin’s voice came up through the hole below him, thin and steady. "You are not strong enough to cut the rope, boy. Nobody is asking you to. Cut where it is tied!"

Logan looked down.

The cord did not simply touch the dome. At the very crown, it had wound around itself and closed, the way a rope is finished with a knot.

The knot was small. The whole weight of the Mark ran through a place no bigger than his fist.

’What is holding it together?’ he thought. ’Cut that.’

He reversed his grip. He set the point of the blade against the heart of the knot, and he leaned on it.

[ Broken Chain ] [ Insight gained. ] [ Sword Intent: 44% → 47% ]

The knot opened like a hand letting go.

Every thread in the Narrows went slack at the same instant.

The drumming on the dome stopped. All around Logan, ten thousand birds lost the single thought that had been driving them. They wheeled in confusion, and the slot was full of milling wings.

"Be still!" Rishin shouted. "Garen! Logan! Not a finger!"

Logan froze on top of the dome with his blade still pointed down. Below him, through the hole, he saw Garen lower both pistols and stand like a post.

The wall had only ever had one rule. With the Mark gone, it remembered.

Across the slot, the Matron was banking for another dive. Her Speed was sixty-six thousand. Nothing else in the open air was moving at all.

Every hookwing in the Narrows turned toward her.

They did not chase her. They were already there. They closed on her from above and below and from both walls at once, and Logan watched a creature the size of a barn vanish inside her brood.

They could not truly hurt her. Her Constitution was far beyond them. But they covered her eyes and fouled her wings, and they hung from her feathers by their hooks in clusters as thick as swarming bees.

She screamed again. This time there was no mark in it.

She struck the far wall blind. She came off it in a shower of stone, and she crashed down across the first rib, ten paces beyond the edge of the dome.

[ Thousandwing Gaff Matron: HP 91% → 84% ]

Garen walked to her.

He did it slowly. He put each foot down as carefully as Helen had on the stair below Hollowreach, and not one bird turned its head toward him.

The Matron lay heaving under a living blanket of grey. He stopped beside the great blind head. He set the muzzle of one pistol against the feathers behind her jaw and the muzzle of the other beneath her eye.

’He is not shooting through open air,’ Logan understood. ’The barrels are touching her. There is no air for the wall to see.’

"You looked at my daughter’s mother," Garen said, "and you pointed."

Both pistols fired.

The sound was swallowed by her body. Garen fired again and again, as fast as the hum in his weapons would let him. White light shone out through the Matron’s feathers from the inside.

[ Thousandwing Gaff Matron: HP 84% → 61% → 37% → 12% ]

A panel lit in the dark behind Logan’s eyes.

[ Grim Harvest (Lv3) ] [ Tracking: 1 being below 23% HP. ]

Twelve percent. She was under the line.

’One thought,’ he realized. ’I could take her from here, and eight hundred points with her.’

He looked down at the man who had given away the Elder with a shrug, and who had just walked out alone into a storm of beaks.

Logan kept his mind flat, and he waited.

Garen fired once more.

[ Thousandwing Gaff Matron slain. ] [ Garen Rezvolt: +800 Tower Points ] [ Wardens remaining: 1 ]

The flock had nothing left to hunt.

It thinned by degrees. The birds peeled away in ones and twos and drifted back to the walls, and each of them settled into its hole and turned its beak toward the Ribs again.

The slot was as quiet as it had been when Logan first looked over the Sill.

He climbed down through the hole. His arms were still numb to the elbow.

Garen came back through the slit in the dome with both pistols hanging at his sides. He was staring at a panel that only he could see.

"Eight hundred," he said. His voice was reverent. "Isolde. I have Tower Points."

"I am very happy for you, dear," Isolde said.

She was still on one knee. Her arms were still raised. Sweat had run down her temples and soaked the collar of her coat, and the hole in the roof above her was closing only a finger’s width at a time.

[ Barrier: 58% ]

Helen went to her.

She did not ask. She knelt down on the stone behind Isolde, and she put both arms around her and held on, exactly the way she had held a screaming stranger on a shelf of glowing stalks.

A Level 4 healer could do nothing for the HP of a Tier-9 player. Unbroken Hearth gave so little that the number would never have shown it.

Isolde leaned back against her anyway. She let her head rest on Helen’s shoulder, and some of the tightness went out of her arms.

"Thank you," she said. "Stay there. Just for a little."

Alice knelt on her mother’s other side and took her hand.

Rishin had walked to the front edge of the dome. He stood looking down through the clouded light at the zigzag of stone below them.

"One," he said. "Hesper saw that one, and so did her brother. Nobody has come back up to describe the second."

"Ten more ribs," said Logan.

"Ten more."

Pebble had come to stand beside the two of them. He had a stone in his sling out of habit. He was squinting down through the dome at the pale arches below, and his lips were moving.

He got to the end. He frowned, and he started again from the top.