Chapter 813: The Wind Below

Nine hours into the descent, Lily stopped walking.

The eight thrones stopped with her. The circle of carried ground came to rest in the middle of a tunnel so wide its walls were lost in the dark.

"Do you hear that?" she asked.

Nobody did. They never did when Lily asked that question. She closed her eyes and tilted her head, and the others waited.

"Wind," she said. "There’s wind down here."

"There can’t be," Rudra said. "We’re forty miles under the shell. There’s no air moving anywhere."

"There is now." Lily opened her eyes. "And I’ve heard this wind before. It cut me open in front of a whole stadium."

Rudra went very still.

"Vantress," he said.

Maya confirmed it a minute later.

She stood at the front edge of the thrones with Farsight Loom spread out before her in thin silver threads. Every thread ran off into the dark and came back carrying something.

"It’s the group I felt yesterday," she said. "They’re close now. Maybe a mile east and a little below us."

"How many?" Almond asked.

Maya was quiet for a moment.

"Five," she said. "But the trail behind them is wider than five. I think they started with more."

Ainen let out a slow breath. "How bad is it?"

"They’re not moving anymore," Maya said. "Something has them pinned."

Almond looked at Lily. Lily looked back at him, and neither of them needed to say anything.

Kael Vantress had beaten them both in front of an empire. He had also bled for it, and he had looked at them afterward like a man who meant to see them again.

"East," Almond said. "Fast."

The thrones did not need a tunnel to go east. They made one.

Almond pushed the circle straight into the living wall, and the wall had no say in it. Flesh gave way like wet sand as the carried ground slid through. Behind them the tunnel tried to close, and in front of them it tried to hold, and neither one mattered.

The wind grew louder the farther they went. Soon everyone could hear it.

Then the wall in front of them tore open, and they came out into the largest chamber any of them had ever seen.

It was hollow and round like the inside of a lung. The walls rose and fell with a slow breath of their own. Far below, a pool of dark fluid churned at the bottom.

Halfway up the far wall, on a ledge of grown bone no bigger than a dining table, five people were fighting for their lives.

Kael Vantress stood at the center of them.

He looked the same as he had in the stadium, except for the blood. There was a lot of it. A pale dome of light hung over the ledge, flickering at the edges, and Almond knew without being told that it was Aegis Ward and that it was close to failing.

Things were hitting the dome from every side.

They were long and pale, with no eyes and no armor, and they moved fast. Much too fast. They crossed the chamber in the blink of an eye, struck the dome, and flashed away before any blade could follow.

"Those aren’t soldiers," Rudra said.

"No," Maya said. Her threads were already reading them. "The body grew them for him. They’re built to move exactly as fast as he does."

Almond watched one of the pale things cross the chamber in a single silver streak. He had seen that exact movement before, on a stadium floor.

"It copied Windrunner’s Grace," he said. "It watched him fight for two days and grew hunters that match his speed."

"Then it’s going to try to copy us too," Ainen said.

"Let it try," Rudra said. He stepped to the edge of the thrones. "It hasn’t seen these yet."

"Thunderwake Salvo."

The first blast went off right in front of the ledge. The second went off inside the first, and the third inside the second. The chain rolled across the whole face of the wall in a thunder that did not stop, and every blast fed the next one bigger.

The pale hunters were fast, but the explosions did not care how fast they were. They filled every inch of the air in front of the ledge, and there was nowhere left to dodge.

Eleven hunters came apart in the first four seconds.

On the ledge, Kael’s head snapped around toward the noise. For a moment, across the whole width of the chamber, he looked straight at Rudra.

Then he laughed. It was a tired, cracked laugh, but it was real.

"Emberfall!" he shouted. "Of course it’s you!"

The hunters turned.

Every one of them left the dome at once and came streaking across the chamber toward the thrones. There were dozens of them, and they did not slow down when they reached the edge of the carried ground. They simply jumped over it.

"They’re not touching the ground!" Maya shouted. "They learned!"

The first hunter came down from above at Ainen’s head. Ainen caught it on the flat of his cleaver and pressed his free hand to its pale skin.

"Vintage Eternal."

The hunter aged three hundred years in a heartbeat. It went gray, then brittle, then fell apart in his grip like old paper.

"Five left," Ainen said, counting his remaining uses. "Somebody else take a turn."

Lily took a turn.

"Nightcrown Legion."

Hundreds of dark constructs rose from the thrones in a ring and locked shields over the whole circle. They did not attack. They held. The hunters struck the roof of shields again and again, and not one of them got through.

"Threshold Unbound," Lily said, and the space above the shields changed.

A hunter dove at the roof. It crossed the line Lily had drawn in the air and simply was not there anymore. It came out a heartbeat later at the bottom of the chamber, headfirst into the dark churning pool.

Three more tried. All three ended up in the pool.

"I’m starting to like this deck," Lily said.

"Almond," Maya said. "The ledge."

Kael’s dome was cracking. Without the hunters on it, the chamber itself had turned on the Skytheum team. The bone ledge under them was sinking back into the wall, and the wall was closing over it like a mouth.

Almond pushed the thrones forward.

The circle crossed the open air of the chamber on nothing at all. Galvaren and Benedict held the forward edge, and the carried ground moved through empty space as if it were still solid rock, because inside the thrones, it was.

They reached the ledge just as the wall closed.

The wall hit the edge of the thrones and stopped dead.

For a long moment, the two groups just looked at each other across the edge of the carried ground.

Then Kael let the Aegis Ward fall. He stepped off the sinking bone and onto Almond’s ground, and the other four came after him.

"Vantress," Almond said.

"Regalon," Kael said. He was breathing hard, and one of his arms hung useless at his side. "I told you we’d meet again. I didn’t picture it like this."

The fifth member of his team stepped out from behind him. Almond knew her face at once.

"Vess," he said.

She gave him a small, crooked smile. The last time he had seen her, she had been standing on a ridge under a Regalon banner, pretending to be a stranger.

"Hello again," she said. "I promised Skytheum would be in contact."

"This is contact?" Ainen asked.

"This is what it turned into," Vess said. Her smile faded. "We came down on the first morning. Twelve of us."

Nobody said anything. There were five of them now.

"The body learns," Kael said quietly. "Every hour we fought, it learned more of how we fight. By yesterday it was growing things that matched us move for move." He looked at the thrones under his feet, then back at Almond. "It can’t learn this. Can it?"

"It’s trying," Almond said. "It hasn’t worked out how yet."

"Then we don’t give it the time."

Maya’s threads spread out again. This time, Vess stood beside her and told her what Skytheum had found.

"Everything in the body flows one way," Vess said. "Every tunnel. Every vein. All of it runs down toward one place."

"The heart," Rudra said.

"We never reached it," Kael said. "But we found the way in. There’s a vessel below this chamber. It’s bigger than anything you’ve seen down here, and everything goes through it." He shook his head. "We tried to cut it open for a whole day. It closes faster than any of us can cut."

Almond was quiet for a moment.

"It closes because it can grow back," he said. "So we make sure it can’t."

The vessel was two miles farther down.

It ran across the bottom of a cavern like a river made of flesh, so wide that its far side was lost in the dark. It pulsed with every heartbeat, and each beat shook the whole cavern. Eleven seconds between beats. Always eleven.

"Aegis Ward won’t hold much longer," Kael said. "And I’m not using the last card. Not yet. Not until we’re standing in front of whatever’s at the end of this."

"You won’t need it," Almond said. "I need one clean cut. Can you give me that?"

Kael looked at the vessel for a long time. Then he nodded.

"Windrunner’s Grace."

He was gone. He crossed the cavern in a silver streak, faster than anything the body had grown to match him, and his one good arm came up.

"Stormbreaker."

The cut went into the vessel like lightning into water. It opened a wound a hundred feet long.

The vessel began to close at once. The edges of the wound reached for each other, fast and hungry.

"Emberthrone Requiem," Almond said.

Fire filled the wound. It did not burn the flesh. It burned the space the flesh was trying to grow back into. The edges of the wound reached out and found nothing they could fill, because Almond had already taken that ground and would not give it back.

The wound stayed open.

The whole body screamed.

It was not a sound. It was a shudder that ran up through the cavern and the tunnels and forty miles of flesh, all the way to the shell of the world. Every wall around them flinched.

Then the heartbeat came.

It came late.

Maya counted it out loud, and her voice was shaking. "Thirteen seconds."

The next one came at fifteen.

Almond stood at the edge of the open wound with his hand still raised. Sweat ran down his face. Holding Emberthrone Requiem took every scrap of attention he had, and he could not let it go for even a second.

"How long can you keep that?" Lily asked quietly.

"As long as I have to."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the only one I have," Almond said.

Lily took his free hand and held it. She did not say anything else.

Kael came back across the cavern slowly, the silver gone out of his steps. He stood beside Rudra and looked down into the open wound.

Far below, past the burning edges, the dark went down and down. At the very bottom of it, something was glowing faintly with the slow, heavy beat of the heart.

"That’s the way in," Kael said.

"Then that’s where we’re going," Rudra said.

Kael looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at Lily and Almond, at Ainen and Maya, and at the eight Spirit Lords standing on their thrones.

"Together, then," he said.

"Together," Almond said.

Forty miles above them, on a Shelf half its old size, Marcus was laughing into a headset nobody could hear.