I Only Summon Villainesses

The great head turned my way and began to move, and I did the only intelligent thing left to a man with an empty well and two fingers gone to ash.

I ran like a coward.

There’s a version of this where I plant my feet and it means something. That version ends with me folded into a stomach the size of a cathedral, so I left it for braver men and worse tacticians, put the last thin thread of Ethereal Grace into my legs, and went.

Grace took the weight out of my body, which was the only reason my legs agreed to work at all. It didn’t cost much.

That was the whole point of it now, that and Feather Step, the two cheapest things I owned, because cheap was the only currency I had left.

Everything grand in my repertoire needed a well I had scraped down past its floor an hour ago.

So I fled on the small tricks, the ones I’d once thought beneath me, and I have never in my life been so grateful for anything I used to look down on.

Behind me the second eye opened its cold work on the pillars.

I felt it go past my shoulder, that spotlight made of nothing, and a column of stone I’d been about to shelter behind stopped existing. One breath a thing taller than a house, the next a hanging veil of grit that had forgotten it was ever solid.

I went through the veil with my mouth shut and my eyes streaming and I did not slow, because slowing was a decision and the pillar had just shown me what decisions cost out here.

”Faster,” I used what was left of my essence to command my legs. ”Faster, or we find out how the fingers felt about the rest of us.”

The head swung after me, always slow, always unhurried, and that was the true horror of the thing. Slow was all it needed.

One sweep of that skull crossed ground I’d have spent twenty strides on, and the ash-wind came ahead of it in a wall that stank of old temples and older rot, so I was running inside its breath before I was ever running from its teeth.

I needed to be out of the open. In the open it had every advantage a thing could have. So I ran for the one break in the forest of stone, a black seam low in the shelf where the pillars gave out, a crack in the world with cold air sighing out of it, and I threw myself into it half a second before the aging breath rolled across the ground I’d left.

The dark swallowed me whole.

And here’s the thing about the dark down there. My flame was all but dead, a white whisper around knuckles that could barely keep it lit, so I had no light of my own to run by.

What I had instead was the light of the thing chasing me. Three red spirals threw a dull furnace glow into the tunnel mouth behind me, and that glow reached past my shoulders and threw my own shadow long down the passage ahead, a thin ragged man painted on the rock, always running out in front of me.

So I chased my own shadow into the earth, and I knew exactly how close death was by how bright the walls glowed.

For a little while, the walls went dim.

The tunnel narrowed and turned and dropped, and the red light fell behind, and for a few blessed seconds I couldn’t feel the ash-wind on my neck.

The passage was too tight for a thing the width of a street. I let myself believe, for about the length of one held breath, that stone had finally done for me what all my attributes couldn’t. That the mountain itself had told the Archmage no.

’...Maybe,’ I let myself think. ’Maybe it can’t follow me in he—’

The wall beside me turned grey and sighed into powder.

The whole left face of the tunnel simply aged, a century of ruin spent in a heartbeat, and through the collapsing dust came the red glow, brighter than ever, because the thing had not slowed at the narrow places at all.

Why would it.

It didn’t need a tunnel to fit through. It made one, unmaking the stone ahead of its own skull and aging the rest to dust, wearing the mountain down to the width it wanted the way water wears a bank.

I had been running through solid rock and calling it safety, and it had been eating that rock a heartbeat behind me the whole time.

I ran. There was nothing else in the whole of me but running.

The tunnels sloped down and I let them, because down was away, and Grace made the falling easy where it would have broken my legs, Feather Step catching me across the gaps where the floor gave out into black.

My broken hand left dark smears on every wall I touched. My thigh had stopped pretending it would ever close. I was a leaking, guttering, half-dead thing pouring itself downhill in the dark, and the red glow came after me patient as a tide, and I understood with perfect clarity that I could not keep this up and it would never have to.

Then, under the grind of aging stone and the hiss of falling dust, I heard the other thing.

A roar, somewhere ahead and below, the deep steady thunder of a great deal of water moving very fast through a place with no light, and it was getting louder with every stride I stole, and Death Sense told me nothing about it at all. Death Sense reads life. It reads killing intent. It cannot read a river, because a river doesn’t want anything, and a thing that doesn’t want anything is a stranger to me in a way even the Archmage wasn’t.

So I ran toward a roar I couldn’t measure, away from a death I could, and I told myself that was a plan.

The tunnel opened without warning into a chamber that swallowed the red light and gave none of it back, and there, at the bottom of the dark, was the river.

A torrent of it tearing through the base of the cavern from one unseen wall to another, throwing up a cold spray that hit my face like a slap, moving with the flat murderous speed of water that has been falling through the earth for longer than there have been things to watch it fall.

There was no bank. There was a lip of wet stone where I stood and then there was the water, and no way across it that a man with a spent well and a dying flame was ever going to find.

Ahead, the river. Behind, the glow going bright as a forge as the great head forced itself into the chamber mouth.

’...Well,’ I breathed, backed to the very lip of the stone with nowhere left in the world to put my feet. ’One of you’s going to kill me. I’d honestly rather it was the one that doesn’t want to. Even though I had a deep seethed hatred for that one too.’

I didn’t get to choose.

The Archmage drove its skull through the last of the chamber wall, and the third eye breathed, that low grinding note going out ahead of it, and the breath meant for me went wide and struck the cavern roof instead.

And the roof was old. Everything down there was old. A whole span of stone that had held the weight of the mountain and held back the river’s higher reaches since before the first city was a thought went grey in an instant and let go all at once.

The ceiling came down. And the river came in.

Not the river I’d been looking at. The one above it, the one that stone had been holding back, a wall of black water taller than the pillars had been, arriving all at once with a sound that ended every other sound.

It hit the Archmage broadside and folded that street-long body like the ash-petals it shed, and it hit me a quarter-second later and the whole idea of up stopped meaning anything.

There was no swimming. There was no surface. There was only the water, colder than anything has a right to be, and enormous beyond either of us, and utterly without opinion on which of the two things it had just swallowed was a hunter and which was prey.

The last thing I saw before the dark took even the red light was one great red eye, turning, turning, a cartwheel of furnace-light spinning away from me into the flood as the current tore it end over end.

Then the river had me too, and I stopped being a man fighting a monster, and became what the Archmage had become in the same instant.

Something small and broken, carried away in the dark, going wherever the water decided, further and further from the stones where Wren still lay, and I couldn’t have told you which way was back if my life had turned on it.

It very well might have.

’...Ah,’ I thought, as the cold closed the last of it over my head. ’Damn.’