Chương 7

Blood or the Sea. Salt is salt. Harker was cold. The wet was an afterthought, and at a distant third was a foggy curiosity. Why was his stomach so warm? Vision came next, swimming up from faded depths into a cloying night. Hazy and wavering, light still filtered through from some unnamable source, enough to recognize that he dangled from a lip of too narrow stone.

What remained of his sweater was tangled around his arm and the eager grasp of jagged roots, the thick threads caught enough that it was half supporting his weight. My… my bag… It was just ahead, the side split open and his food and supplies scattered across the wet shale. Most had fallen over the edge and into utter shadow beyond. Harker tugged vainly at his tangled arm but there was no strength there. A deep enervation sapped him to the core, replacing his meager might with a looseness he couldn't shake.

Restricted breathing. Lancing pain across midsection. Left ankle stiff, swollen —he flexed his foot and gritted his teeth against a hot swell of agony. Broken. Worse, his left arm and side were a firestorm. They burned exactly where the warmest of the wet was pouring from him. Blood loss. Loss of coordination. He flexed the toes of his right foot. But at least I haven't lost my boots. There was a roar. Harker's heart hammered, and he fought to hear anything else above the rush of his pulse.

He swallowed, clearing something deep in his ears, and the roar pushed up at him from over the ledge. It wasn't an Illwrought. It was water. The deluge hadn't stopped. Rivers poured off of the sides of the canyon all around him, arcing off wind-smoothed boulders and down into the depths of the Drop. Over the lip of his little ledge, Harker couldn't see the bottom, but from the sound of it, the chasm was filling fast. The distant sound of white caps atop sharpened stone churned him to action.

He tugged at his tangled arm, freeing it with a sharp jerk. The ledge pulled at him, the Drop all but growling hungrily, but Harker dug his fingers into the thin layer of soil, clinging as tenaciously as any ragged root. The wounds on his left throbbed. His muscles weren't ready to be used like this, and more warmth fled from him, along with a sickly scent that was disturbingly familiar. The hound that got Mari… Her wound had smelled exactly the same. The Illwrought had got him good before they'd fallen.

Its claws had severed something deep in his arm and Harker could do little more than clench his fist. His right arm grasped onto thick-rooted weeds he didn't recognize, and he pulled himself closer to the cliff face. It cost him breath and no little amount of blood, but he was entirely atop the ledge now. From there, he could— The roar changed. It deepened into a hoarse rattle… and huffing breaths. The Illwrought! Where is it? He couldn't make anything out through the dark and rain.

The light was too dim to make out— The light? Harker glanced upward to the sky, expecting the moon or stars, but the storm clouds still occluded the heavens. Instead, the light emanated from ahead, just down the thin ledge, where a crevice broke into deeper stone. The light came from there. It was pale, tinged with an amber hue that limned his right arm he'd stretched ahead. There was… a sound. It was quieter than the swelling river or the huffing of the nearby beast, and yet more piercing than both.

It was as familiar as a song from a childhood memory. It was the salted comfort of hot broth and the rainfall on the ten thousand straws of a thatched roof. It sounded like home. Harker stretched out, digging his fingers into the thin soil as his booted foot pushed against whatever he could manage. Right arm. Right foot. He wasn't entirely sure why he'd started moving. His head was too fuzzy, yet he plied every bit of strength he could muster as his mind latched onto logic. Get out of the rain and the cold.

Warm up. Get a wall behind my back. Survive. Between one push and the next, time slipped loose. Harker's jaw ached where it had bashed into the rock ledge but he didn't remember it. He blinked, but it was too slow. He was soaked to the bone and he stopped feeling the blood seeping from his side. Not like this. He pulled himself forward again. Survive. The tunnel was before him. It was barely wide enough for his shoulders, but Harker wriggled himself through. Every inch was a stretch of agony.

Twice he got caught, hips caught on protruding stones. Harker twisted himself with a dogged strength until he slipped free, his lips bitten through and bloody as he emerged into a low-roofed cavern. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Stone slanted above, crushed against one another into a ceiling marred by a deep crevice. The light was brighter here.

Amber had turned a more brilliant yellow, emanating as if from the very rocks themselves—rocks that were covered in fungus, dirt, and roots that almost hid the signs of architecture. Cut blocks, cornices, and the same blobby shapes he'd seen thousands of times. Harker blinked, a shiver accompanying blurred vision. It's just like my home. The yellow light sharpened. It glimmered gold, deepened by steady, foaming beats. It thickened, waves that rolled over Harker's face. What is it? Sea-touched stone?

The sound of waves crashed over him. He'd never heard its like before, but it spoke to something inside of him. A memory he couldn't recall, baked into his very bones. It smelled of salt and damp, sounded of ceaseless roaring and trickling streams. It conjured images of dark waves and swirling foam beneath an endless star-flecked sky. The Infinite Sea? He glanced up again. The golden glow had coalesced into a point of brilliance.

The crevice welled with it before spilling outward, spreading liquid gold across the ceiling in strident ripples. Teeth sank into his right heel. Harker hollered, back seized in knots and he twisted around to see the Illwrought. It had squeezed its shoulders through the tunnel, but he was far more concerned with its jaws. The Illwrought snarled, savaging his boot and hauling him closer. Harker kicked and screamed. His broken ankle mashed into the creature's skull. Skin sloughed off the beast, an eye going with it.

The Illwrought didn't pause—it chewed harder, its claws scrabbling for purchase as it drove furrows into the earth. A gold droplet fell on the Illwrought's head—and a great many things happened at once. The creature's body seized and the gold spread through fur and torn ears. That deadened howl turned shrill with newborn panic and it scratched at its own skull, tearing at itself with daggered claws. The gold dug deeper, piercing through fur and flesh—melting it. Harker choked back bile.

Bloody meat and rotted tributaries opened to the air, stitched through with brilliant gold. Blue-green radiance shivered outward—the beast's own Water—absorbed. The strange metal pulsed, its least pieces sprouting jagged thorns. Stitches split, bones cracked, and the Illwrought's head jerked upward as a crown of golden thorns crested its skull. A nightmarish crown. The Illwrought fell apart. The corpse split into bloodless scraps that oozed blue-green Water, and even that was taken up by the golden swell.

It was all that remained, and it was far bigger than before. Each drop forced the gold higher, a wave that refused to fall. Harker scrambled back but his boot was still caught in the creature's jaws. He twisted, ignoring the pain of ankle and piercing fangs. He couldn't— The wave crashed down. Mid-stride, Sejal froze.

"I sense nothing." Adhira tossed her hood back, exposing a scowl to the night.

"What madness are you on about? I just felt it." The rain had stopped, but the Sea was raging all around them. Or it had been. An emanation had rolled over them from deep in the woods, diverting their search entirely and bringing them down this treacherous slope. Twice now she'd tangled her axe among Winter-frail vines, and even the trees bore thorns enough to kill. Sejal was ahead of Adhira, standing gracefully amid the thorns.

Her cloak blurred her silhouette until only her head stood out against the darker black of the night sky.

"All signs of the artifact have vanished." Adhira's breath caught in her chest. That couldn't be true. The feel of it had been so close! How could it have vanished out from under their noses?

"Wait." Adhira leaned forward.

"I see something."

"What do you—?" She passed her steward, ducking beneath a fungal ridge and through the rain-soaked weeds. Beyond the dripping veil from skeletal branches was an uneven stretch of mossy earth, and past that was the chasm, flush with the sound of a raging river. None of it concerned her. Instead, she was focused on a pale lump that had tucked itself against the largest of boulders. Adhira stifled her gasp.

"Salt and silt, there's a body." Sejal was beside her in a moment, her cloak barely having time to flutter before she was pulling Adhira back.

"Do not get close."

"He's breathing." Adhira knelt down, ignoring the clenched hiss of her steward. After all, she recognized the body: it was the boy from the general store. His cloak was gone and his satchel was almost as tattered as his cable-knit sweater, but his sharp features were unmistakable.

"How did he get here?" Sejal frowned, that glare of hers turning over the boy as easily as a leaf on their path.

"He was dragged from the Drop. Left here." She looked up and around.

"Whoever did it was clever. They covered their presence entirely." Adhira couldn't spot a bit of what her steward mentioned, save for what could have been a section of torn moss. She supposed it looked like drag marks, but everything was matted down with rainwater and runoff soil from uphill. The boy, meanwhile, was remarkably clean.

"I need…" The words were no more than a whisper from the boy's lips, but Adhira was close enough.

"... get out."

"Get out of what?" His eyes never opened, but his lips kept moving even when the sound vanished altogether. Sweat pooled on him, dripping down his sharp jaw and across his too skinny chest. Markings showed through his torn garments—wide scars across his left arm and stomach. He must have an Abyssal's own luck to have survived such wounds. Sejal knelt beside her, her strong fingers pressing at his throat.

"His heart beats, but he is feverish. Whatever happened here, it has not been good." The woman's mouth twisted. Adhira frowned.

"What is it?"

"Nothing." Sejal stood up.

"Your artifact is not here. There is only an injured boy…and the mercenaries are closing in." Adhira could hear them, though it was distant. A distant shouting over the rush of the chasm's river.

"We must go, iyeshi. Now."

"You're right." Adhira reached down and, with a light grunt, lifted the boy onto her back.

"He comes with us."

"Why."

"He was here when the artifact went quiet." She adjusted her shoulder.

"He may know something." Sejal opened her mouth—to chastise her, no doubt—but the calls from the forest grew stronger.

"Come, then. Quickly."