Chapter 527: The Colony Of Bats [part 1]

The scream came from above and to the left, and it was a man’s, and there were no men down here.

I had Wren up before the echo finished. Ilse was already moving, sword clearing the sheath in one clean motion, putting herself at my flank without being asked and without looking pleased about it. Brunhilde didn’t move at all. She stood at the edge of her stalled frost with her head tilted, listening to a sound that had come and gone and left the bone underfoot ringing faintly with it.

"That wasn’t a person," she said.

"Yeah, I got that from the part where there aren’t any."

"It was a copy. Something down here heard a man die and kept the sound." Her hand settled on Glacies Aeterna’s grip. "It is using it to find out how many of us there are."

Cade, Wren said. The ceiling.

I looked up.

I couldn’t see them. That was the thing. The frozen sun Brunhilde had hung was still burning up there, throwing its clean blue light over the ridge and the bone-field and the three of us, and above that light was a vault of stone I’d taken for empty dark all evening. It wasn’t empty. It was textured. The whole vast underside of the layer was crusted with a shifting, breathing carpet of folded bodies, hanging head-down, wings wrapped tight, packed shoulder to shoulder in their thousands—

No. Not thousands. I made myself count a section and multiply, because a number is a thing you can fight and a carpet isn’t.

A hundred. Give or take.

’A hundred.’

’Cool.’

Are you trying to do the calm thing, Wren noted. The one where you’re not calm.

’I’m extremely calm. Ask anyone.’

The scream came again, from a different angle this time, and I understood the trick of it. They were passing it between them, throwing a dead man’s voice around the cavern to see which way our heads turned. Triangulating on us with our own attention.

Ilse’s voice came low and flat beside me. "Werebats. Vesperclaw. Colony." A beat. "This is a very bad place to be standing."

"Because of the hundred."

"Because of the ceiling." She jerked her chin up without taking her eyes off it. "They don’t fight on the ground. They live on the vertical. Every one of those things is holding a position it can drop out of, and the second we move, they start reading us with sound. In here it’ll be like standing in a lit room while a hundred people look at you through the window."

’Reading us with sound.’

I turned that over, and something in it caught. My boot shifted half an inch and rolled a rib against the frost, and the click of it came back to me off the far wall a beat later, thin and clean and perfectly placed. Naturally. The whole cavern was one big listening room, and we’d been standing in the middle of it talking.

"Brunhilde. Your winter’s suppressed down here. How much of it still works?"

"Enough to kill what comes into it. Not enough to reach them up there."

"That’s not what I asked. Can you still make it snow?"

She looked at me then, and I watched her get there about a half-second behind me, which for a woman who ended armies before my great-grandparents were born felt like an achievement I’d be dining out on for years.

"Snow deadens sound," she said slowly.

"Snow deadens everything. Fabric, powder, falling water, anything soft in the air eats the echo." I rolled my shoulder and felt the sealed wound pull, a hot little seam of protest under the leather. "They can’t see. Not really. They hear the shape of the room. So take the room away from them."

Ilse’s head turned. "You’ve fought something like this."

"I’ve fought a lot of things that were better at fighting than me. You learn to look for the plug." I lifted Wren toward the ceiling. "So. Brunhilde makes it snow. They come down blind and slow. And then—"

The first one dropped mid-sentence, because of course it did.

It came out of the carpet without a sound, wings folded flat, a black spear of muscle and membrane falling forty feet at a speed that had no business belonging to something that light. At the last instant the wings snapped open and it turned, hard, all that momentum wrenched sideways into a claw that went for my eyes.

I got Wren up.

The impact rang down the blade and shoved me back a full pace on the frost, and the thing was already gone, up and away and back into the dark before I could think about a counter. It left a smell behind it. Wet fur and old meat, and something underneath that like a room nobody had opened in a century.

A line of heat opened across my forearm where a claw had found the gap. Not deep. Not meant to be deep. The blood came up slow in the cold and sat there in a thin bright bead instead of running, which told me exactly how much of Brunhilde’s winter was still in the air, and the wound was meant to be fast, and to happen ninety-nine more times.

’Ah, damn.’

Then the ceiling let go.

They came off it in a wave, not all at once but in a rolling collapse, section after section peeling away and pouring down into the blue light with their wings snapping open, and the scream stopped being a copied man and became a hundred throats making the real thing, a shrieking wall of sound that hit like weather and made my back teeth ache. The air moved with them. I felt it come down the ridge in a stinking downdraft, cold at the front and warm behind, and every hair on my arms stood up under the sleeve.

"Brunhilde—"

"I heard you the first time."

She drove Glacies Aeterna down into the bone.

What came up wasn’t her killing frost.

It was gentler than that, which somehow made it worse to watch. A great white bloom of cold that went up instead of out, climbing the stalled edges of her domain and unfolding into the air overhead like something opening its arms.

And then the snow came. Fat, slow, silent flakes, filling the cavern from the ceiling down, thickening the light into a soft blue haze until I couldn’t see the far wall or the ridge or anything past twenty paces. It landed on my shoulders without weight. It landed on the bead of blood on my forearm and stayed there, white on red, not melting.

Then... the shrieking changed pitch.