NOVGO.NET Chapter 121: THE STORY RUNS DOWNHILL
Chapter 121: THE STORY RUNS DOWNHILL
Aiden ate dried meat with his back against Cinder’s flank. She rested her head on his leg, watching him.
She ate nothing. The Magma Sap was already the best food she had ever had.
Nyx stole three pieces of meat, its pale eyes curved in amusement. Then it handed one to the cat, who took it as if it had always belonged to it.
Miasma ate the venomous mushrooms she’d found along the way to the Fire Country, which he had kept in his bag.
His two beasts kept looking at Cinder. Admiring her new form. Or silently congratulating her.
He didn’t know which. He shared both sentiments anyway.
He left the shelter an hour after dawn.
The dragon’s gone up to tell whatever’s in the middle of this mountain about Cinder. Vane’s men are already downhill with a story. And a clerk in the Academy east annex is turning pages with my name still marked as absent.
Nothing up here is getting better while I sit in a dead man’s shelter.
He flexed his hands, the same hands that had carried a tremor for three weeks. Nothing. Steady all the way through.
His body had never been better.
The problem was getting down. The black glass was steep and uneven, and though the mountain heat now felt like a mild breeze on his skin, walking it would still take a day.
If only Inferno Resistance made me faster too. But I can’t be wanting too much from an already exceptional trait, right?
Cinder solved it.
She lowered the whole burning length of herself onto the stone, folded her forelegs, and waited.
The fire around her body sank lower, its heat no longer enough to burn.
"You thought about Miasma and Nyx? How kind of you."
He swung onto her back.
She stood up under him, careful, testing his balance before she took the first step.
He rode down a mountain on a fire.
Some Master Tamers ride their beasts into battle.
They should see mine.
He’d carried her once.
A dying wolf, all ribs and cold, down out of a burned den. Then across a country, on a road he’d walked at her pace because she couldn’t manage his.
Now she carried him, and she went slow on the bad footing for the same reason.
Six weeks ago I was the one holding you up.
This is better. Neither of us is being dragged.
The cat rode her new mane of fire the same as it had ridden her shoulder. It looked no more impressed by a Tier Three than it had been by anything else in its life.
Nyx settled on Aiden’s shoulder, loose for the first time in a week. It simply made small noises at the wind brushing its shadow. Nothing left to blind. Nothing left to hide from.
Miasma rode his sleeve and watched the trail ahead, the same as she’d watched it going up.
The sentinels let them pass.
They didn’t decide anything this time.
The biggest one stood off the trail as Cinder came down. Aiden got a good look at it in daylight: dark plates, the ridged back, the wings folded flat with orange light between the bones.
It dipped its head. A few inches. The kind of nod one worker gives another at the end of a shift.
Then it turned its eyes slowly to the slope. Watching. Guarding.
Three days ago you had to think about whether to eat us.
Now we’re something you nod at.
They cleared the killing shelves by afternoon.
The black glass gave way to grit, then to rock with things growing on it, and by mid-afternoon Cinderfall was in sight below them.
The town saw them coming a long way off.
People came out of doorways.
A woman pulled a child back inside, then let him out again to look. Some things were worth letting a child see so he had stories to tell later.
Nobody said anything. Nobody came close.
The broker met them at the edge of town.
The same man who’d pushed Aiden’s coin back across a table and told him the mountain wouldn’t even bother to eat him properly.
He looked at Cinder for a long time. Then at Aiden.
"Nobody comes down off the third shelf," he said.
"I didn’t exactly go to the third shelf." Aiden’s voice was still wrecked from a night of shouting through fire. "I went there for the Magma Sap and made a very poor decision in the neighborhood."
The broker didn’t laugh. He was still looking at the fire dancing across Cinder’s body.
"There were men through here at dawn," he said. "House colors. Coming down fast. Didn’t stop to sell anything."
Aiden waited.
"One of them was talking. Said he’d seen a hound turn into something with a mane of fire. Said it burned the cold out of the House’s own beast like a candle."
The broker finally looked away from Cinder.
"I told him he’d been up the mountain too long and seen a heat-ghost. He wasn’t listening. He was already going downhill, fast." He shrugged. "Like a man who needs to tell it before somebody else tells it better."
Aiden sat on a Tier Three and felt the ground shift under a plan he hadn’t finished making.
I went up that mountain as nobody.
A name a House scratched off a city ledger. Not worth the boot it’d take to step on me.
That’s the only reason I could climb it at all. Nobody watches where a nobody goes.
And now there are men running downhill with my story in their mouths.
He looked west, down the long road toward the flat clay-belt and the city past its villages.
By the time I get to the bottom, the bottom will have heard.
He’d meant to go back quietly.
Walk into the city through the sewers. Report to a clerk at the Academy east annex, get ink put back on the column beside his name, and be a nobody with a fake registration again.
That plan’s not working. Too many eyes saw us. Too many mouths will run.
I can’t walk a Solari Blaze Dancer bigger than Harken’s Frost Wolf through the Academy registration corridor without every proctor in the building coming to see.
And Vane will have told his version of who Cinder is first.
"Where will you take it?" the broker asked.
Aiden looked down the road west.
The city was still where he had planned to go. The Academy was still where he needed to return. The plan had changed. The destination hadn’t.
He put his hand on Cinder’s neck.
She turned her head and looked back at him, waiting.
"Home. I’ve got a clerk to see about a line in a register."
"But we’re not going in quietly."
He smiled.
"Downhill," he told her. "All the way. Let’s go find out how bad the story’s got by the time we catch it."