I Only Summon Villainesses

I have been deaf before. Took a hit to the side of the head in the Night Battle that put a whine in my ear for three days, and that was deafness, and I knew what it was.

This was not that.

Deafness leaves you something. It leaves you the sound of your own body, the wet click in your jaw, blood going round, the hum your head makes when it has nothing else to work with. That’s the floor. Nobody ever tells you it’s there because nobody has ever been without it.

I was without it.

I put my hand on my own chest and felt my heart going like a fist on a door and heard nothing come off it. I opened my mouth and shouted, hard, the full weight of it, and my throat tore and my ribs squeezed and the air went out of me into nothing at all.

’Wren.’

Here.

’Say something.’

I am saying something. Cade. Look at me — listen, you know what I mean, just—

’I hear you. I hear you fine.’

Because that had never been a sound. That had never once gone through the air. Whatever that thing had taken away from the world, it had not been able to reach into my own skull and take her, and out of everything I have ever been given in this life I don’t think I’ve been more grateful for a single item of it than I was for the smug talking sword in my hand right then.

Then Brunhilde’s light went out.

Not the way the sun had gone. Slower, uglier, more like watching someone lose. The blue ring at her boots pulled in from ten feet to five to two, and I saw her hand tighten on Glacies Aeterna and the frost try to answer her and simply not arrive, and then there was nothing, and I was standing in the deepest dark I have ever stood in with no ears.

’It’s eating her essence.’

That’s what it does. That’s the quiet. It’s not just sound.

’Where is she — Wren, where is she, I can’t—’

Someone grabbed my wrist.

I nearly took her head off. My arm came up with Wren on the end of it and stopped about four inches from where I’d guessed a person’s neck would be, and then that grip on my wrist turned into something deliberate. Two squeezes. Firm. Then two more.

Ilse.

’That’s Ilse.’

I squeezed back twice. She squeezed once. Then she pulled my hand, flat, and pressed my palm against something cold and curved and grooved with frost-scale, which was armour, which was Brunhilde’s hip, which meant she’d found her first and had been holding onto her this whole time.

’Okay. Okay, we’re three. We’re all three.’

And that was the entire conversation. That was everything three people could say to each other in the middle of it, and we had to build a language out of it right there, hands on wrists, taps and squeezes, in a dark so total that I couldn’t prove my own eyes were open.

’Wren, can you feel where it is.’

Give me a moment. Put me on the stone.

I crouched and laid the blade flat against the rock.

For a while nothing. My shoulder throbbed. The forearm wrap had gone wet again somewhere in the collapse and I could feel it running down into my palm, warm on the way out, cold by the time it reached my fingers.

Then:

It’s not behind us.

’What?’

Cade, it is not behind us. There’s nothing on the slope. Nothing coming down.

’Then where—’

Front. It’s in front of you. Ten paces. Maybe eight. It’s been there the whole time we were running.

’...’

’...Ah, damn.’

Because of course it had. Of course it hadn’t chased us. Chasing is for things that want you. It had let us run ourselves down the throat of the layer in the dark like idiots, and it had gone ahead, and now the three of us were stumbling straight into it with the mess still on our hands.

It hadn’t touched us yet. It was standing there in the pitch black waiting for the rubbish to finish arriving.

I squeezed Ilse’s wrist. Three times, hard, then flattened my hand and pushed back. Stop. Back up.

She got it. Small mercy. Whoever raised that woman raised her right, or at least raised her competent.

And that left me standing in front of two women I couldn’t see, one of whom had no essence left and a mark on her that I still didn’t understand, in absolute silence, with a bleeding arm, roughly eight paces from a thing that had put out a Calamity’s sun without slowing down.

Which was, I want to be clear, an insane place to remember an unspent reward.

’...The bird.’

What?

’The bird. The raven. Brunhilde killed it, I got something.’

The Lodestar had said it and I’d been busy bleeding at the time and had not thought about it once since.

[Dark Mantle]

I reached for it the way you reach for anything the Lodestar gives you, which is to say clumsily and hoping.

[Dark Mantle equipped]

Something came down over my shoulders that had no weight to it. Cold, and dry, and thinner than cloth. And then a sensation I have absolutely no vocabulary for, which was the specific feeling of being unfinished. Of some part of me that had always been sticking out into the world quietly folding itself away.

’Wren, what am I.’

You’re gone.

’Helpful.’

I am not being funny. I can feel the stone. I can feel her boots. I can feel the thing in front of us standing there like a post in a river. I cannot feel you and I am holding you.

So that was what a raven that hunted by stillness had left behind. Not a weapon. A way of not being there.

’Does it cover them?’

Silence.

’Wren. Does it cover them.’

No.

And there it was.

I could walk out. That’s what I want on the record about this bit. I had a black cloak off a dead bird and eight paces of dark and a thing that could not perceive me, and there was a road under my boots going down, and nobody in the world would have ever found out.

I stood there and thought about it for exactly as long as it takes to think a thing like that, which is about half a second, and then I let it go, because I have never once in my life been able to leave people where I found them and I have stopped pretending it’s a virtue. It isn’t. It’s a defect. It’s going to kill me. It just hasn’t yet.

’Okay.’

’New plan. Terrible plan.’

Say it anyway.

’It doesn’t attack things. It cleans things. It’s never once come at me, not in that cavern, not on the field, not now. It looked at me and put me in the pile marked not my problem.’

I’m listening.

’So the only way onto its list is to be mess.’

Yes.

’Then what’s the opposite of mess.’

Wren said nothing for a moment, and then she said, very slowly:

You are not going to do what I think you’re going to do.

I let go of Ilse’s wrist.

I walked forward into the dark, eight paces, seven, six, with my hand out in front of me and a cloak that made me nothing on my back, until my fingers touched a surface that was neither warm nor cold and had no seam in it anywhere.

Then I crouched down and felt around on the stone until I found what I’d tripped on coming down, which was a dead werebat, one of the hundred, dragged this far and dropped in the collapse.

I picked it up.

It weighed about as much as a bundle of sticks. I folded the wings in flat against the body, the way I’d seen them folded, and I turned it so the head faced the same direction as every other one I’d looked at all evening, and I carried it four steps and I set it down in a straight and tidy line.

Then I reached for the next one.

I want you to understand that I had no plan beyond that. I was a bleeding man in a dead world doing chores in the pitch dark next to something that could have taken my head off between two heartbeats, and my entire strategy was: look like staff.

I got the third body down.

And the silence broke.

Not all of it. A crack in it, a hairline, and through the crack came the small ordinary sound of my own breathing, which I had not heard in what felt like an hour and which nearly put me on my knees.

The thing had turned its head.

I couldn’t see it. I felt the air move.

’Wren.’

It’s looking at you.

’It can’t see me.’

It’s not looking with eyes, Cade, it’s looking at the row. It’s looking at the three bodies that got filed by nobody.

And it did not raise a hand.

It did not step.

It bent down, slowly, and picked up a fourth body from somewhere off to my left, and it folded the wings in flat, and it set it in line beside mine, and then it reached for another one, and it went back to work.

I stood there in the dark next to it, breathing, with a dead bat in my hands.

’...Huh.’

I’ve got you, Cade. I’ve got you.

’I’m on the payroll.’

Then the silence closed again, and the cold came in from behind me, and I heard, faint and far and awful, Brunhilde’s boots scrape on the stone as her legs went out from under her.

Because it hadn’t stopped hunting her.

I’d only stopped being litter.