Chapter 163: The Twelfth Rib

Pebble counted a third time before he said anything.

"Boss," he said. "How many of these did the lady at the table say there were?"

"Eleven," said Logan.

"That is what I thought she said." Pebble lowered his sling. "I make it twelve. I have gone down them three times, and it comes out twelve every time."

Rishin turned his head very slowly.

Logan pressed close to the clouded wall of the dome and looked down the slot. The arches zigzagged away below him, pale against the dark, each one a little lower than the last. He counted them with his finger against the light.

There were twelve.

"She counted them going down and coming back," Alice said. "She told us she could not stop counting. A woman like that does not get it wrong."

"No," Rishin said. "She did not get it wrong. There were eleven when she stood here."

Nobody asked him what he meant. Logan thought of a reed that bent where no reed has a joint, and of a mound with stone spikes in two neat rows.

’Everything on this layer looks like the ground it stands on,’ he thought. ’Why would the last thing be any different?’

They did not move from the first rib until the roof was whole again.

Isolde knelt with Helen’s arms around her and Alice holding her hand, and the hole above them drew shut a finger’s width at a time. When the last of it closed, she got to her feet. She was pale, but her hands were steady.

[ Barrier: 100% ]

"From here, nobody steps onto a rib until Logan has read it," Rishin said. "Every one. I do not care how much it looks like stone."

So that was how they went down.

At the top of each rib, Logan opened Sword Intent and looked at the arch ahead. Real stone had threads that ran deep into both walls, as thick and as dull as old roots.

He found them in the second rib, and in the third. Each time he nodded, and Isolde walked forward, and the dome went with her.

It was slow. Each rib was forty paces of bare stone as wide as a cart, with nothing on either side. At the end of each one, a few rough steps led down along the wall to the start of the next.

On those steps the hookwing holes were close enough to touch. The birds sat an arm’s length beyond the clouded light and turned their heads as the shadows of the party went by.

Vina stared at one of them for the whole length of a stair. It stared back.

Far below, the glow at the bottom of the slot grew brighter with every rib. It was silver-white and very soft, like the moon behind thin cloud.

Fourth. Fifth. Sixth. The threads ran deep each time.

By the ninth, Logan’s eyes ached from looking.

He read the tenth rib from the top of its steps. It was stone. They walked out onto it, and Rishin stopped them in the middle.

"Now look down," the old man said.

Logan went to the edge and looked over.

The next arch lay below them and a little to the right, exactly where it should have been. It was the same pale grey as the others.

It was the same width, and it had the same worn groove along its back where feet would go.

He opened Sword Intent, and his mouth went dry.

There were no roots in it. Nothing ran from that arch into the rock on either side. At each end, where it met the walls, there were clusters of small bright knots instead.

There were a dozen at one end and a dozen at the other, clenched on the stone like fingers.

A single warm thread ran down the middle of it from end to end. It was pulsing slowly.

"That one is alive," Logan said. "It is holding onto the walls. It has a spine."

Behind him, Helen’s hand closed on Daniel’s sleeve.

"And under it?" Rishin asked.

Logan leaned out further. Beneath the pale arch, half hidden by it, he could see the edge of another one. That one had roots.

"The real eleventh is underneath. It is lying on top of the path."

"It is lying where the path should be, so that you walk onto its back instead." Rishin’s voice was quiet.

"It will not move until we step on it, or until we make it move. It is the most patient thing on this layer. That is why nobody has ever come back to describe it."

Garen had come to the edge beside them. He looked down at the arch, and his thumbs moved on the grips of his pistols.

"Then we do not step on it," he said. "We hit it first, with everything, while it still thinks we are fooled."

"From under a roof," said Rishin.

All of them looked at Isolde.

She studied the gap between the two arches. It was about the height of a house.

"I can pull the dome down into a bell," she said.

"Long enough to cover this rib and that thing together. I cannot hold that shape for long, and it has no floor. Remember that. Anything that goes over the side of this rib falls out through the bottom."

"Family in the middle," Rishin said. "Flat on the stone. Vina."

"Down," said Vina, and she dropped.

Solveig knelt over her and laid his blade beside him. Helen and Daniel lay down on either side. Rishin lowered himself onto the stone next to the girl and kept hold of her hand. Pebble crouched at Daniel’s feet.

Garen whistled two notes.

Light opened on the rib behind him, and two of his units stepped out of it. One was a harpy plated in dull steel, with wings of jointed metal and a long instrument of wire slung across her chest.

The other was a broad, silent figure in black armor, and Logan could see no face inside the helm.

"Low and hard," Garen told them. "On my shot."

Isolde brought her hands together and then drew them apart, downward.

The dome stretched. Its lower edge sank past the sides of the tenth rib and kept sinking, until the clouded light hung around both arches like a bell around its clapper.

Only the two ends of the pale arch stuck out beyond it, where they gripped the walls.

Garen leaned over the edge and aimed both pistols straight down.

The white fire struck the middle of the pale arch.

Stone did not chip. The surface split instead, along a hundred seams that had not been there before, and Logan saw that it was made of plates. They lifted like the scales of a pinecone. Underneath them, a pale and many-jointed body flexed.

At either end, the fingers let go of the walls a few at a time and took a new grip.

They were legs. Each was as long as a tree and hooked at the tip, and there were dozens of them.

[ Palespan Rib Leviathan ] [ Rank: Mythic ] [ Scaled to: Tier-9 ]

[ Attack: 52,000 ] [ Speed: 9,000 ] [ Constitution: 120,000 ] [ Arcane: 12,000 ]

[ Palespan Rib Leviathan: HP 100% → 97% ]

"Three percent," Garen said in disgust. "For both barrels."

The harpy struck her wires. A chord like tearing sheet metal filled the bell, and the plates along the Leviathan’s back rattled.

[ Palespan Rib Leviathan: HP 97% → 95% ]

At the far wall, the front of the arch peeled away from the rock and lifted, while the legs just behind it held fast.

It had no eyes. It had a round mouth as wide as a doorway, ringed with rows of inward-pointing teeth, and it swung toward the tenth rib as slowly as a crane.

’Nine thousand,’ Logan thought. ’It is slow for what it is. It is still more than four times faster than I am.’

The head rose above them, and it came down.

It struck the top of the bell.

The whole dome flashed white. Isolde cried out, and the rib jumped under Logan’s boots.

[ Barrier: 100% → 64% ]

The roof held. The Leviathan could not get its head through from above.

So it came from below, where there was no roof at all.

Legs rose on both sides of the tenth rib at once. They came up over the edges of the stone like the fingers of a hand closing around a stick, and each hooked tip felt blindly along the bridge.

"Hold them!" Garen roared.

The figure in black armor caught one leg in both arms and stopped it dead. The harpy drove another back with a chord that made Logan’s ears ring.

Billy hit a third in his wheel form, and he bounced off it and nearly went over the side.

Terry did not bounce. He seized a leg as thick as his body and simply held on. It dragged him three paces across the stone, with his plates screaming, and he did not let go.

There were too many. One hooked tip slid past all of them, low and quiet, and found the middle of the rib.

It went under Solveig’s arm and through the hem of a small grey coat.

Vina screamed.

The hook had her. It was dragging her backward across the stone by the coat that Xairon had made too well to tear. Her hand ripped out of Rishin’s, because a Level 1 grip could not have held a kitten against that pull.

Solveig’s gauntlet closed around her wrist.

He had dropped flat and driven the fingers of his other hand into the rock. The leg pulled. Solveig held.

Between them, Vina hung stretched out above the stone with her eyes wide and white, and the sound she made went through Logan like a blade.

’He cannot cut that leg,’ Logan thought. ’He is Tier-4, and it is not. If he holds on, it will pull her apart. If he lets go, she goes over.’

He was fifteen paces away at the front of the rib.

"Logan!" Rishin was on his knees. Logan had never heard that voice come out of him. It was cracked straight down the middle. "The hook! Not the leg, boy, the hook! Cut where it is tied!"

[ Reaper’s Stride ]

Logan crossed the fifteen paces in a blink.

Sword Intent was already open. The leg was a cable he could never have parted. But the hook had gone through the hide of the coat, and where it gripped, there was a knot. It was no larger than a walnut.

He put the point of Grimlord’s Blade into it and leaned.

[ Broken Chain ]

The hook opened.

Vina flew forward into Solveig’s chest. He rolled over her and folded both wings shut, and the freed leg lashed across the place where she had been and struck sparks from the stone.

Rishin crawled to them on his hands and knees. He did not try to take her from the knight. He put his forehead down on the rock beside her head, and his whole back shook.

Logan did not stop.

"It is holding on with its legs!" he shouted to Garen. "A dozen at each wall! If I cut one end loose, the whole thing swings!"

"Then cut it loose!"

He went over the side of the rib.

He landed on the Leviathan’s back, on plates as slick as wet slate, and he ran along it toward the far wall. The body heaved under him.

The last few paces of it lay outside the bell. Isolde opened the light for him, and he went through it at a dead run into open air.

The right-hand wall emptied at him.

He had expected it. The birds broke over him in a wave, and he shut his eyes and let Sword Intent do the seeing.

They were only wet gloves. The first leg gripped the rock in front of him, and he found the knot at its tip and broke it.

[ Broken Chain ] [ Reaper’s Stride: 1 stack. ]

He broke the second, and the third. Every knot was a strike, and every strike made him faster. The mouth swung back toward him, and by then he was no longer where it bit.

[ Reaper’s Stride: 12 stacks. Speed +72%. ]

The twelfth leg let go of the wall.

The Leviathan had been built to lie across a gap. It had never been built to hang.

With one end loose, forty paces of armored body dropped away from the right-hand wall and swung down in a long arc, like a gate on a single hinge.

Logan jumped for the true eleventh rib beneath it, and he caught the edge with both hands.

The head of the Leviathan swept down through open air, far faster than he had been running.

The flock forgot him. It was no longer the right-hand wall alone. Both walls emptied.

The warden slammed into the left-hand wall with a crack that Logan felt in his teeth.

It hung there head-down by its last twelve legs. Its soft underside was turned outward, and the brood of a dead Matron covered it from end to end in a crawling grey sheet.

[ Palespan Rib Leviathan: HP 95% → 88% ]

"The wall is awake," Garen said. He sounded almost cheerful. "So there is nothing left to wake. Everything you have. Now."

He emptied both pistols into the pale belly. The harpy’s chord became a single unbroken shriek. The figure in black armor drew back one arm and threw a spear of shadow as long as a mast.

Isolde took one hand from the dome.

A crescent of white light spun into being above her palm. She did not even look. She flicked her wrist, and the chakram crossed the slot and opened the Leviathan from its mouth to its middle.

[ Palespan Rib Leviathan: HP 88% → 71% → 48% ]

Alice stood at the edge of the tenth rib with her bow singing.

She could see the fatal point at last. It sat just under the ring of teeth, and Arrow Intent lit it like a coal. She put an arrow into it, and another, and a third before the first had stopped quivering.

[ Starfall Cadence: 31 stacks. ] [ Critical strike. Fatal point struck. ]

’I am a candle next to them,’ she thought, and she drew again. ’But every one of mine goes in the same place.’

[ Palespan Rib Leviathan: HP 48% → 26% → 11% ]

Logan was hanging from the eleventh rib by his hands when the panel lit behind his eyes.

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

Eleven percent. He had no need to see it, and no need of a free hand.

He thought about it, and the warden died.

[ Palespan Rib Leviathan slain. ] [ Logan Wolf: +800 Tower Points ] [ Wardens of the First Layer slain. ] [ The Narrows is open. ]

The last twelve legs opened together.

The body fell away down the slot. The hookwings went with it in a long grey streamer, down and down into the silver glow, until both were too small to see.

Then the birds came back up. They drifted to their holes in ones and twos, and the Narrows was quiet.

Logan pulled himself onto the eleventh rib and lay on his back. It was plain stone. It had roots that went deep into both walls. He had never been so glad of a rock in his life.

"You waited on the first one," Garen called down to him. His face appeared over the edge of the rib above, upside down and grinning.

"I felt you waiting. I am Tier-9, boy. I know when somebody is holding a knife behind my back and being polite about it."

"It was yours," Logan said.

"And that one was yours." Garen’s grin widened. "Eight hundred. Welcome to the rich."

Isolde let the bell draw back up into a dome, and they came down the last steps together.

Xairon inspected the hem of Vina’s coat. There was a single clean hole in it where the hook had gone through. The Creation Sage looked more offended than Logan had ever seen it.

"It did not tear," Xairon said stiffly.

"No," Logan said. "It did not. That was the problem."

"I will make the next one tear."

Rishin was walking again. He had Vina’s hand in his, and he was holding it in both of his. He had not said a word since the tenth rib.

Vina looked up at him.

"You did not let go," she said. "It pulled me out. That is different."

"It is not different enough," Rishin said.

He looked at the hand in his. Logan saw him measure it, the small fingers against his thin ones, and he saw the old man’s face settle into a shape he recognized. Logan had worn that face himself once, on a mountain, before every swing.

"It will not happen a second time," Rishin said. "I gave away a great deal of strength to come here. I am going to have to get some of it back."

Pebble had stopped at the foot of the steps. He looked up the slot behind them, at the zigzag of pale stone climbing away toward the Sill.

"Eleven," he said. "She counted right after all."

Ahead of them, the eleventh rib ran out toward the far wall. Beyond its end the stone of the Abyss simply stopped, and the silver light came up to meet them.