Chapter 814: The Fourth Shape

They went down into the wound together.

The eight thrones slid over the burning edge and dropped into the open vessel. Almond kept the fire alive around them the whole way, and every second of it pulled at him like a rope tied to his chest.

"How far?" Rudra asked.

Maya had her threads out below them. "Half a mile. Then the vessel opens into something much bigger."

"And once we’re through?"

"Then I let go," Almond said. His voice was tight. "I can’t hold this and fight at the same time. Not down here."

"And the wound closes behind us," Kael said.

"Yes."

Nobody said what that meant. They would be sealed inside the body, with no road back to the surface except whatever road they cut for themselves.

"Good," Ainen said finally. "I was worried we’d be tempted to turn around."

The inside of the vessel was a river.

It was dark and hot and it moved, rushing downward so fast that the thrones had to fight to keep their place in it. Things tumbled past in the current. Some of them were pieces of the body. Some of them were soldiers, carried down to wherever soldiers went when the body was finished with them.

The heartbeat came through the walls. Fifteen seconds. Then fifteen again.

"It’s still slow," Vess said quietly. She had not said much since the ledge. "Whatever you did up there, it hurt it badly."

"It’ll hurt worse soon," Rudra said.

At the bottom of the half mile, the vessel spread open into a chamber so wide that Maya’s threads could not find the walls.

"Now," Maya said.

Almond let go.

The fire behind them went out. Far above, the wound began to close, slowly at first and then faster. It sealed with a wet sound that echoed through the whole chamber.

Almond sagged against Lily’s shoulder and breathed.

The next heartbeat came.

Fifteen seconds. It had not gone back to eleven.

"It’s still hurt," Maya said. "The wound closed, but the damage stayed."

Almond laughed quietly. It came out more like a cough.

"Then it worked," he said.

The body was waiting for them.

It had learned from the lung chamber. It had learned from the vessel. It had spent a whole day watching the thrones slide through its flesh without being able to touch the ground inside them, and now it had worked something out.

The ground was carried. The ground could not be touched.

But the ground was carried by someone.

Spears burst out of the dark from every direction at once. They were long and thin and sharp as needles, and they came from far outside the circle’s edge. None of them aimed at the ground. None of them aimed at the people standing on it.

Every single one of them aimed at the Spirit Lords.

"Master!"

Sylvia’s cry came a heartbeat before the first spear hit her. It went through her shoulder, and her throne lurched sideways. For one terrible moment, the whole circle of carried ground tilted.

Almond felt it like a blade in his own shoulder.

"Hold!" he shouted. "All of you, hold!"

[Alfred: We hold, Master.]

[Galvaren: They’re aiming for us now. Clever things.]

[Ashkryon: Let them come. We have carried heavier.]

More spears came. Benedict took one through the leg and did not fall. Velkris caught two spears out of the air and snapped them. Nyssara’s throne dipped as a spear went through the Spirit Lord’s side, and a thin, cold sound came out of it, but the throne did not drop.

"Lily!" Almond shouted.

Lily was already moving.

"Mercyshade Sovereign."

A pale canopy spread out over the whole circle, a quarter mile wide. It did not heal. It held. Sylvia stopped bleeding the moment it covered her, and the spear wound in her shoulder froze exactly where it was, no worse and no better.

"That buys us time," Lily said. "It doesn’t fix anything."

"Time’s all I need," Almond said.

Kael was already looking out past the edge of the circle, reading where the spears came from.

"There," he said. "They’re all coming from the same kind of growth. See the ridges on the chamber floor? Every spear comes out of one of those."

Maya’s threads confirmed it. "Forty-one ridges. All around us."

"Then we take them," Rudra said.

"You’ll be off the thrones," Almond said. "Out on the body’s own ground."

"I know." Rudra drew his sword. "That’s why I’m not going myself."

He raised his hand.

"Hullbreaker Vanguard."

Hundreds of spectral marines poured out of the air around him. They wore old boarding armor, and they carried short blades and hooks and ropes, and they went over the edge of the thrones in one great wave. They hit the chamber floor running.

The spears turned on them at once. It did not matter. Marines went down, and more came behind them. They reached the first ridge and climbed it, and they did not attack it from the outside.

They cut their way into it.

The ridge shuddered. Then it split open from the inside and died, and forty marines climbed out of the wreck and ran for the next one.

"Forty to go," Rudra said.

Ainen took the eastern side.

"Ironpot Colossus."

Sixty feet of black iron rose up out of the ground beside the thrones. It was round and heavy and hot, and steam poured off its sides in thick white clouds. It stepped off the carried ground and onto the body’s floor, and the body tried to swallow it at once.

It failed. The ground under the Colossus boiled.

The Colossus walked to the nearest ridge and put both of its huge iron hands on it. The ridge began to cook. Spears tried to burst out of it and came out soft and gray and useless.

"Three," Ainen said, as the ridge went still. "Four."

Kael took the north.

His arm still hung useless at his side, and Almond could see how much it cost him to move at all. He moved anyway.

"Windrunner’s Grace."

He crossed the distance to the first northern ridge in a silver streak. Spears came up to meet him, and he was already gone. He reached the ridge, turned in the air, and brought his good arm down.

"Stormbreaker."

The ridge split in two. Kael was at the next one before the pieces hit the floor.

Vess and the three other Skytheum fighters followed him out, covering his back. One of them took a spear through the thigh and went down, and Vess dragged him back under Lily’s canopy before the next spear could finish the job.

"Stay there," she told him. "Don’t argue."

He did not argue.

The last ridge died forty minutes later.

The chamber went quiet. No more spears. No more hunters. Only the heartbeat, deep and slow, fifteen seconds between each beat.

Rudra’s marines came back to the thrones. There were far fewer of them than there had been, and Rudra looked at every one of them as they climbed back up.

Almond walked the circle. He stopped at each Spirit Lord.

Sylvia still had the spear hole through her shoulder, frozen under Lily’s canopy. Benedict limped. Nyssara was pale and quiet.

"I’m sorry," Almond said to them.

[Sylvia: Do not be, Master. This is what we are for.]

[Benedict: Honestly, it was worth it to see the Colossus cook that last ridge.]

[Nyssara: ...I am fine.]

Almond put his hand on Nyssara’s shoulder for a moment. Then he turned back to the others.

"Maya," he said. "Where is it?"

Maya was already looking down.

"Below us," she said. "Right below us. It’s close now."

The floor of the chamber opened on its own.

Nobody cut it. Nobody burned it. It simply pulled apart, slow and deliberate, the way a curtain is drawn back before a show begins.

Below it was the heart.

It was bigger than a mountain. It hung in a hollow of dark flesh so vast that the thrones seemed like a speck of dust above it. It was red and black and veined with old gold, and every fifteen seconds it beat, and the beat shook everything.

Nobody spoke.

Kael came back up onto the thrones and stood beside Rudra. He was bleeding again, but he did not seem to notice.

"That’s what we came down for," he said quietly.

"That’s what the whole world is standing on," Lily said.

Maya’s threads spread out over the surface of the heart. She was quiet for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice had changed.

"It isn’t just a heart," she said. "It’s old. Older than anything I’ve ever read. It was here before the shell. Before the world. The whole layer was built on top of it."

"Built on top of what?" Ainen asked.

Maya shook her head. "I think it’s what decides. Who climbs past this layer. Who doesn’t. Every Tier-100 that has ever been reached anywhere has to go through something like this."

"A gatekeeper," Almond said.

"Yes. But that’s not what worries me."

Maya pointed.

At the very top of the heart, in the middle of all that red and black and gold, there was a line.

It was thin and straight and gray. It ran down the center of the heart from top to bottom, clean as a cut, and it did not beat with the rest of the flesh around it.

Lily’s hand closed on Almond’s arm so hard it hurt.

"No," she said.

Rudra had gone completely still. Ainen set his cleaver down very slowly, as if he did not trust his own hands to hold it.

Kael looked from one of them to the other. "What is it? What are you looking at?"

Nobody answered him.

The seam opened.

It did not open wide. Just a little, the same way it always had when it was about to speak.

And a voice came up out of the heart of the world. It was calm and patient and very, very old, and every Regalon standing on those thrones had heard it before.

"Ananta Regalon," it said. "I told you I would come back."

Lily’s grip on Almond’s arm did not loosen.

"You destroyed three of my shapes," the voice went on. "The first one never arrived. The second one lost its strings. The third one sat down to a meal it should never have eaten."

The heart beat. Fifteen seconds.

"This is my fourth," it said. "And I have had thirty-seven years to learn every one of you."