But Mary’s equations did what we couldn’t alone. The darkness flowed over Audrey’s banks and spilled into the rest of us. It made me feel angry and strong and confident—and beneath that frightened at an anger and confidence nothing like my own. In turn, some of the strength of my own blood spilled over into her and Charlie. It sent their rivers foaming to rapids, and made a place of clear water within Audrey’s tumble of light and void.
And in that tumult of mixing blood, I could see clearly that some of the pulsating, airless cold still remained in me—my own contagion, not only an echo of Sally’s. If I had cut her loose on my own, earlier, would I have spared myself this? But I couldn’t regret staying with her.
And it didn’t make the work harder, that I must bear this for myself as well as for Audrey. It only meant that if I failed to save her, I would have my penance swiftly.
The chant ceased; our strengthened connection settled into place. Then the elders began singing. They’d moved to the edges of the room so that music wove around me from all directions. The words were familiar, though it had been long since I’d heard them: a chant offered to the sick, the dying, the grieving. The Litany of the Peoples of Earth was a part of it, but so too were prayers to all the gods, and something that was nearly a prayer to the listener—to be strong, to be patient, to endure, to wait and change.
The ancient words were comfort, a reminder that pain too was ephemeral. But I felt Charlie’s heart lurch, and knew how they sounded to his ears: harsh and alien and ominous in the progression of archaic tones. The elders sung in swooping altos that bubbled on the low notes, and in basses so deep they vibrated bone. I braced myself, clinging to the sound, hoping it would be enough.
At the first cut, I screamed. It was not only physical pain, where the knife bit into me below my collarbone. I saw my father lying still with blood seeping over half-formed gills. Twelve again, weak and terrified, listening to my mother’s prayers in the back of a van full of prisoners.
Before the knife pulled away I forgot that it would end. Then I heard the chant again, felt Charlie’s determination and fear and Audrey’s strange dark defenders, remembered that I must not run. But too, I felt Charlie gasp, heart painful in his chest. I pushed a little of my own blood over its boundaries, trying to share endurance I wasn’t convinced I had.
Ngalthr’s face, when I dared look, was grim. I had the luxury of screaming; he did not. I watched the knife descend and did not close my eyes, for his sake. Pain blossomed across my forehead, and blood. This time there was no memory, only a wash of heat that limned the cold within me but did nothing to lessen it. Desert and drought, and the sun burning away the last of the oceans. I would be reduced to ash; I had to flee. And there was a dark place I could go, far away, where I could hide.
But amid the burning I felt Audrey’s protective void, free of heat or cold or doubt. I had promised to stay here. I reached for it, knowing her defenses were dangerous but unable to care about anything beyond the pain and the fear and the holding on.
The blade lifted. I gasped, and bit down hard on my tongue so I couldn’t beg Ngalthr to stop. That pain was barely perceptible. I closed my eyes, focused my will on not begging, not running. Yet when I felt the knife brush my belly, I thrashed and could not force my body still. I heard crying, recognized it for Neko’s.
Cool, sharp-tipped hands grasped my arms and held them fast. I opened my eyes and saw Grandfather, his own eyes shut, but there and doing what was needful. I could not shame him. I relaxed my muscles, bit by bit, beneath his grip, and forced the rest of my body to follow. I closed my eyes again, and this time when the cool metal touched my navel, I controlled my reaction well enough that Ngalthr found his target. And screamed again as he did so.
Where the knife touched my mind, I saw Audrey fallen, still and cold as Sally. Charlie, withered and wrinkled and forgetting my name, screaming to see me as an elder. Neko, Caleb, Grandfather, piles of beloved, empty bodies. I clung to those I knew hopelessly lost, and stayed beside them as I had promised.
Cut after cut, fears and memories and exquisitely specific doubts and pains stripped utterly of context. But when I opened my eyes, when I could, I saw Grandfather still there, and Charlie and Audrey on either side. Audrey leaned hard against the altar, gasping, and Charlie stood bent and rigid. They held my hands so tightly that it would have hurt, if I were still capable of noticing such a pedestrian discomfort. I clung to them, and to myself: because I had promised, and because their shared strength gave me an anchor, and because the one fear that remained constant was of how much worse it would hurt if I turned away.
The knife bit hard into the join of neck and shoulder, and I felt myself falling into endless void, knowing at once that I had lost control and would drift forever fading, and that I must continue to hold where I was certain I’d already let go. And in the midst of that paradoxical terror, I felt the cold loosen its grip. Hooks that had dug fast into me, into Audrey, slipped.
Another cut, and I became convinced that Ngalthr had erred, that it would be me cut loose from my body and the cold left to take up residence. It would convince everyone that it was me, lead my friends to death and ruin. I tried to pull away, to stop it, but firm hands held me down. As Ngalthr lifted the knife, the cold went with it, pulling away from me and from Audrey like a withered scab.
Ngalthr gasped—we all did, I think—and he held the coruscating light on the tip of the knife, well away from the living humans around him. The chant changed, became more rhythmic and aggressive. The mass dimmed, pulsed, dimmed again, and flickered out at last.
I lay in the suddenly darkened room, pulse pounding, realizing slowly that I did not need to brace for the next cut. A broader awareness returned, beyond the lessened pain and the hands that had held me throughout: the stone now warm beneath me and sticky with my own blood, the smell of sweat, the remaining sting of myriad cuts, cold air that now seemed a balm, murmurs from the edges of vision.
Charlie leaned on the altar, drawing shaky breaths. Audrey eased herself down against the cool stone; through our link I felt it solid against her back. I tried to sit up, found that it was a bad idea and lay back again. Chulzh’th appeared with a damp cloth and began cleaning my wounds. I felt absurd for flinching where it stung. I managed to turn my head, and saw Caleb and Dawson and Neko.
“You okay?” Neko asked, voice squeaking a little on the question.
I laughed shakily, found that I could manage that though it hurt my throat. “I will—” I coughed, and pain shot through my chest. I swallowed hard, and Chulzh’th handed me the salt water she’d been using to wash me. I drank it greedily, and managed to say: “I will be. Give me a minute.”
“Aphra?” Audrey’s voice echoed too loudly. “I think we still have a problem.”