I Only Summon Villainesses

I could hear.

That was the first wrong thing. I was standing eight feet from the source of it with a dead werebat in my hands, and I could hear my own breath, and the scrape of grit under my boot, and the small dry rustle of a wing folding when I set the body down.

Meanwhile, thirty paces back in the dark, Ilse was screaming and nothing was coming out of her.

’It’s not a field,’ I thought. ’It’s a list.’

Say that again.

’The quiet isn’t everywhere. It’s on them. I’m off the list, so I get my ears back. They’re on it, so they get nothing.’

Which means it can do that to whoever it likes.

’Which means it can do that to whoever it likes.’

I set the fourth body down in line, because I had absolutely no intention of getting back on that list, and then I turned around and walked into the black toward the place where I’d heard armour scrape.

I found her by feel. Boot, then greave, then the cold curve of a pauldron, then her arm.

Brunhilde was on one knee with Glacies Aeterna planted and both hands on the grip, holding herself upright on a sword the way Ilse had in the hollow, and the cold coming off her was thin. Not the clean biting winter that filled a room by arriving. Thin. Like a fire down to its last inch.

Ilse’s hand found my shoulder and gripped hard enough to hurt.

”She can’t hear us,” I said out loud, uselessly, to a woman who couldn’t hear that either.

Then it occurred to me that I had one channel left.

I’d had it since the cave. I’d been carrying it around for days like a coin in a pocket I never checked, this small foreign weight sitting behind my sternum where the Lodestar had put it. Brunhilde said I’d get used to it. Kassie had lived in that same place for the better part of a year and I still couldn’t reliably find her without trying.

So I closed my eyes, which changed nothing at all, and I went looking for the bond.

It took longer than I’d like to admit. There’s no organ for it. You reach with a part of yourself that has no name and no nerve endings, and mostly what you get back is your own heartbeat and a growing sense of being an idiot.

Then I found the cold.

’Brunhilde.’

Her head came up. I heard the pauldron shift against the mail, and that was how I knew.

I have never been so grateful for anything in my life.

’You can hear me.’

’I can hear you.’ Her voice in my head was smaller than her voice out loud. Not weaker. Just closer, the way a whisper is closer than a shout. ’You are very loud in here. We will be working on that.’

’You’re bleeding essence.’

’It is taking it. It has been taking it since it looked at me.’ A pause. ’I cannot make cold. I have not been unable to make cold since before your species had a word for winter.’

’Can you fight it?’

’No.’

Flat. No hedging. If you have ever needed to know how bad a situation is, find the most arrogant woman in it and ask her a direct question.

’Can you outrun it?’

’It does not run. It arrives.’

’Then it kills you.’

’It does not kill,’ she said, and that was somehow worse. ’It resolves. It has been resolving this since the field. I am not an enemy to it, Cade. I am a spill.’

And there it was, the whole shape of the thing, sitting in my chest in her voice.

It wasn’t hunting her. It had never been hunting her. It was going to keep at her, patiently, forever, taking a little more every time, until there was nothing left on the floor of the Precipice that needed wiping up. That was the entire plan. That was the entire thing it was.

I looked back at the dark where I’d been stacking bodies. Four of them, wings folded flat, heads all laid the same way, and me the idiot who’d helped.

’So we take the spill away.’

’Explain.’

’You go back in.’

Nothing came down the bond for three long seconds.

Then: ’No.’

’Brunhilde—’

’No.’ And the cold that came with it had teeth in it, thin as she was. ’I have been in the black room. Do you understand what you are asking. I was there for an age with no body and no ground and nothing to put a hand against, and then a stubborn half-blood child dragged a third of me out of it and I called that a mercy for nine years. I will not go back into a dark. Not one you make. Not one anyone makes.’

’It’s not the black room. It’s a bond. It’s my bond, you’re the one who tied it—’

’It is a dark and I would be in it.’

’You’d be a voice.’

’Yes.’

’Kassie’s a voice.’

’Kassie is a voice.’ It came out cracked. ’Do you imagine that is a comfort? I taught that girl to hold a sword. I have watched her at a distance for months as a sound in your head. It is not nothing, Cade, but do not stand there and tell me it is the same as standing.’

I didn’t have an answer.

Naturally. I never have an answer for the ones that matter. I’ve got a joke for everything and nothing for anything.

Then Ilse let go of my shoulder.

I felt her move past me in the dark, and I heard her boots, which meant nothing, and I heard her breathing, which meant she was close. And then I heard the small clean sound of a gauntlet being unbuckled and dropped on the stone.

She put her bare hand over Brunhilde’s hand on the grip of the sword.

That’s all. That’s the whole thing that happened. A woman who could not speak, who could not be heard, who had spent nine years being told by her own blood that what she was holding was unworthy of existence, reached out in the pitch black and put her bare hand on top of the hand of the summon that had left her.

And her hand was warm.

I felt it go through the bond. Not the touch. The recognition. Brunhilde had held that woman’s hand a thousand times through a third of herself, and she knew it in the dark by temperature alone.

’...Ah,’ Brunhilde said.

’She’s telling you—’

’I know what she is telling me.’ The cold in my chest had gone very still. ’She held me at a third for nine years and called it respect, and I called it a grave, and now she is asking me to be held at nothing.’

’Yeah.’

’By you.’

’Yeah.’

’And she has no way to say a word of it, so she is saying it with her hand.’

’...Yeah.’

’I hate this,’ Brunhilde said, ’very much,’ and then she let go of the sword.

[Your summon is returning]

[Brunhilde (Calamity) has been withdrawn to the bond]

[Warning — Spirit Essence reserves critical]

[Re-manifestation is not currently available]

The last of the cold went out of the air in front of me.

I felt her arrive behind my sternum the way you feel cold water reach your stomach, and Glacies Aeterna hit the bone floor with a clatter that I heard and Ilse didn’t, and then there was nobody kneeling in front of us at all. Just Ilse’s bare hand, closed on air.

’I am here,’ she said, from inside. Steady. She made it steady on purpose and I could feel the work it took. ’I am here. It is dark. Talk to me on the way down.’

’I will.’

’You will forget. You are very bad at this.’

’I’ll be terrible at it constantly.’

’That is acceptable.’

Behind us, out where the rows were, the sound of the Sentinel working stopped.

I turned around.

I still couldn’t see it. I could feel the absence of it, that post-in-a-river stillness, and I stood there with my heart doing something unprofessional while it decided.

There was no spill. That was the point. The mess had been removed from the field by the mess itself, and the four bodies I’d filed were filed, and there was not one single thing left in that stretch of the layer that anybody needed to do anything about.

The silence lifted off us like a hand coming off a mouth.

Sound came back all at once. Grit, breath, water dripping somewhere in the rock, the enormous ordinary noise of a world. And Ilse made a sound beside me that I am never going to describe to her, or to anyone, ever.

And the thing went back to work.

It picked up the next body. It folded the wings flat. It set it in line.

It never once looked at me. In fact I’m not sure, even now, that it ever knew there had been three of us.

We left it there, tidying up after a battle nobody would ever come to see, in a dark that had gone back to being the ordinary kind.

I bent and picked up Glacies Aeterna, which was heavier than a house and colder than anything I own, and I carried it because leaving it felt obscene.

Ilse got her gauntlet back on. It took her three tries at the buckle. Her hands were shaking again, and she let them.

”So,” she said, and her voice came out wrecked. ”You put her away.”

”She’ll be back.”

”With what essence?”

’...Ah, damn.’

”We’ll find some,” I said.

Ilse looked at me for a long moment in a dark where neither of us could see the other’s face.

”Down, then,” she said.

Because up was a hundred feet of collapsed vault, and behind us was a thing that cleaned, and the only road left in the world went the wrong way.