Mechanically, it wasn’t altogether different from her other trysts. There were mouths and two tense bodies. He was strong, and so was she, which he knew when they were dressed but it took him a few minutes to understand it was still true when they were naked. She wouldn’t break. Neither would he. There were teeth, too, and there was some blood, which the sheet caught, and there was sweat and meat and bones and spit and slickness.
There were no strange-godded cities beneath the waves; there were no necromancers lurking in the shadows. There were no contracts, no gargoyles, no moon, no water, no Justice.
Just us, she thought, and laughed.
It was enough.
Well. Once wasn’t. So after a rest they tried again.
57
“I hate dungeons,” Tara said when they reached the third lightning-lit gallery. Far above, leathery wings fluttered, too large and loud to belong to normal bats. A grim red glow lit their path, and as they walked Tara tried not to think about the writhing shapes in the shadowed halls to her left and right, or the stone’s tremor underfoot like the quivering of a wounded animal’s skin.
“It is a neat effect,” Shale said.
“Neat is how a room looks when it’s clean. This place could crush us.” Crystal veins grew thicker on these walls, and their light left her shadowless and red. She switched off her hand torch. The tunnel narrowed; walls warmed her fingertips. She did not touch the crystal. “You know why we use anesthetic in surgery?”
“To spare the subject pain?”
“That’s a nice side effect, but the real benefit’s for the surgeon. Patients thrash when you cut them open. The body fights intrusion. Muscles clench and skew the scalpel.” Another peristaltic tremor passed underfoot. False sunset lit the curving tunnel wall ahead. She smelled ozone and salt and bone. Something creaked. She hoped it was not the wall. “If your theory’s right, we’re performing surgery on a mountain. How do you sedate a rock?”
“I don’t know.”
“Exactly,” she said, and then: “How long do you think we’ve been following this tunnel?”
“I—” He stopped. “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.” She showed him her watch. “Either we’ve lived through the last hour three times over, or she’s adjusting time for reasons of her own.”
“Are we still on schedule?”
“I have no idea.” She stuffed the watch back in her pocket, not bothering to conceal her frustration. “What’s fast here might be slow out there, or the other way round. The mountain’s reflexes are fiercer near the wound. Which is why it’s good and bad we’re getting close.”
“You expect trouble?”
Which was when they turned the corner and saw the bone-thing.
“You could say that.”
Their goal lay at the tunnel’s end: the largest gallery yet, daylit almost with crystal and flame. Tara ignored that for the moment.
The bone-thing filled the tunnel mouth. Creaking, chattering, tangling and unwinding, it was no one shape entirely: an enormous bat’s skeleton propped with smaller bones, needle-sharp tail links of cave mice and translucent ribs from dead blind fish, a surface monster’s horned skull bleached by centuries. Wings tipped with curved claws flexed. Crimson lightning arced within the cage of its chest. Claw toes screeched chalk-white lines against the tunnel floor. Its jaw opened to roar, but no sound came.
Shale stepped forward, but she held out her arm to block him. “Surgery. No anesthetic. The more we fight down here, the worse it goes for us.”
He growled. She knew how he felt.
The bone-thing pounced. Claw wings filled the tunnel.
Tara closed her eyes.
Fractal silver schema rushed toward her, the bone-thing a story told by the mountain’s need. Tara’s first aesthetic reaction was contempt. If she had submitted such sloppy work at the Schools, she’d have spent a week helping golems dig up corpses to remind her the costs of brute force.
Her second aesthetic reaction, though, was pleasure. Such baroque profusion of power! The bone-thing was so dense she could barely see its individual strands. Crufty dynamism at its best. No calculating mind would make something so excessive. But the bone-thing was made, for a purpose, which you could see if you knew where to look— Help me it hurts it hurts it HURTS—
So all she had to do (though quickly, because the clawed critter’s crossed half the distance between us already and only a fool trusts the arrow-flight paradox to keep her safe) was seize and redirect that purpose. I can ease the pain, if you help us.
She offered a simple contract to the bone-thing.
It fell in a clattering cascade. Wing tips drew sparks from stone walls as it tumbled. It landed in a crouch, so close it could tear out her throat before she blinked.
It did not.
It knelt.
She set her hand on the skull between its horns. Her fingers traced the bone’s grain. “Think I’ll call him Oss,” she said. Glancing over her shoulder, she caught Shale staring. “Come on. Let’s finish this before more show up.”
Oss drew its wings aside to let them pass, and followed.