I Only Summon Villainesses

Afterwards, neither of us said anything for a long time.

It wasn’t the awkward kind. I have had the awkward kind, in better rooms than this, with better lighting and considerably fewer rocks, and this was not that. It was just quiet. Her head was on my arm and my arm had gone numb about twenty minutes earlier and I had made the executive decision not to bring it up.

Nothing was healed. I want that on the record, because the greedy part of me had been hoping, the part that runs the arithmetic even when I have told it not to. My well sat exactly where it had sat, low and flat behind my ribs. The cuts stayed cuts. Whatever it is that runs between a summoner and a spirit had not run between us, because she had said as much beforehand, and she is a summoner herself, and she knew the answer before I did.

So it hadn’t been for anything.

’...Huh.’

That was, I think, the strangest part. Everything I have done since I got to this world has been for something. Every single time. And this had been for nothing at all, and I lay there in the dark with a numb arm and could not work out why it felt like the most expensive thing I owned.

I tried Wren.

’...Wren.’

Nothing. Same as the last however-many sleeps. The hilt was warm only because my hand had been sitting on it for hours, and that was the entire extent of our relationship now.

I tried the well. Low, and staying low, and no way to change that in a tunnel where nothing lived.

Then, out of pure habit, because it is a habit now and I did not want to lose it:

’Brunhilde.’

The nothing that came back was a specific nothing. Not a wall. Not a door. Just distance with no far side to it, the same as every other time since I laid her sword flat against a wall about nine days ago and walked away from it like a coward with a good reason.

’Talk to me on the way down, she said.’

’I’m trying.’

”Who are you talking to?”

Ilse hadn’t moved. Her eyes were shut.

”Nobody. That’s sort of the problem.”

She thought about that.

”I used to talk to Brunhilde for two years before she ever answered,” she said. ”Every day. Out loud, when I was alone. It is not madness. It is a rope you throw across a gap so you can find it again later.”

”Did she ever tell you to stop?”

”She told me I had a terrible voice and no sense of when to be quiet.”

”That does sound like her.”

”It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me that year.”

’...’

We lay there.

And this is the part I have thought about a great deal since, so I am going to write it plainly. There were four other voices that used to live in my head. Kassie, who insults me. Maggie, who terrifies me. White Feather, who worries. Wren, who has never once let me enjoy anything. Add Brunhilde and Celestine and that is a crowd, that is a whole loud building of people, and I had spent months complaining about the noise.

Now there was one voice left in the world and it belonged to a woman lying on my numb arm, and she had used it to tell me a story about throwing a rope.

’Yeah,’ I thought. ’Okay. I’m not going to survive this if she goes.’

That was a new thought. I did not enjoy it.

Then the stream stopped.

I noticed it the way you notice a clock you had stopped hearing. The tunnel had a sound, it had had that sound the whole time we’d been lying in it, a thin constant run of water over stone about four feet from my head.

And it went away.

I sat up so fast that Ilse’s head hit the rock.

”Ow—”

”Listen.”

She listened. Then she was up on her knees with her hand held flat over the stream bed, and the last of the water was going out of it, draining away down the channel in a thin retreating line, leaving wet stone behind it.

Running backwards. Away from the direction it had been running all day.

’Death Sense.’

I threw it open, wide, further than I have ever comfortably opened it, and I got exactly what I have got every other time I have asked it about water.

Nothing.

Death Sense reads life. It reads killing intent. It cannot read a river, because a river does not want anything, and a thing that does not want anything is a stranger to me in a way even the Archmage wasn’t. I have known that since the night the water took me the first time, and I have known it the way you know a scar.

’Oh no.’

’Oh no oh no oh no—’

”Ilse. Up. Up, now, we’re going, we’re going up—”

”What is it?”

”It’s water!”

Then the tunnel told her itself, because the air changed.

It came out of the low channel ahead of us in one shove, a wall of cold displaced air that stank of deep stone and old standing water, and it went past us hard enough to flatten my hair back and put grit in my teeth, and behind it, a long way off and getting shorter, was a sound I had heard exactly once before and had promised myself I would never hear again.

The deep steady thunder of a great deal of water moving very fast through a place with no light.

We ran.

There is no clever version of this. There is no plan. There is a man and a woman in the dark going up a slope on their hands as much as their feet, and behind them the sound getting bigger the way a train gets bigger, and every branching channel a decision made in a quarter second by two people who could not see the ends of any of them.

Ilse chose. Every time, Ilse chose, because Ilse had been counting since the crack and had a map in her head made out of numbers, and I had a map in my head made out of panic.

”Left! Left, it climbed on the left—”

I hit a wall in the dark with my shoulder and went down and got up again and did not notice until much later that I had taken most of the skin off my forearm doing it.

Feather Step, once, and I felt the well drop and hated it and did it again anyway.

The first of the water caught us about a hundred paces up.

It came round our ankles almost politely, cold enough to burn, and then it was at the knee and pushing, and the push was the frightening part, because there is a moment when moving water stops being a thing you are standing in and starts being a thing that has an opinion about where you should go.

”The shaft!” Ilse shouted. ”There was a shaft, four branches back, it went up—”

”We’re not going back four branches!”

”There is nothing ahead of us that goes up!”

’...Ah, damn.’

She was right. She had the numbers and I had the panic, and the numbers were right.

We turned around, into it.

Going back down a flooding channel toward the thing that is flooding it is the single stupidest thing I have ever done and I have used a chain wrong in front of a woman I was trying to impress. The water was at my thigh before we got two branches and it was lifting me on every third step, and the noise had stopped being a noise and become a pressure in the middle of my face.

Ilse got there first. She got a hand into the shaft mouth, hauled herself half in, and turned around.

And then she grew.

I have seen her do it twice. It still does something to my stomach. Half a head taller, heavier through the arms and back, the horns pushing dark and blunt up out of her hairline, and she came down out of that shaft one-armed with the other braced against the rock and she caught me by the front of my shirt as the water took my feet out from under me.

She did not lift me carefully. She threw me.

I went up the shaft about eight feet, hit the wall with my back, got my elbows out, and jammed there like a cork with all the air knocked out of me and my legs kicking over nothing.

Then Ilse came up under me, fast, with the water already at the shaft mouth behind her, and she put a shoulder into my backside and shoved me the rest of the way with about as much dignity as you would expect.

The flood came up the shaft behind us and stopped four feet short.

Then it thought about it, and came up another foot, and stopped again.

We lay on the ledge at the top with our chests going like bellows and our legs soaked to the hip, and neither of us said anything for a long moment.

”You threw me,” I said.

”Yes.”

”By the shirt.”

”Yes.”

”That’s the second most humiliating thing that’s happened to me in this cave and you were present for both.”

Ilse put her head back against the rock. The horns were already going down, sinking away into her hair, and I watched her hands shake and then stop.

”You are welcome,” she said.

I dragged myself to the lip and looked down.

The channel we had been sleeping in was gone. Not flooded. Gone, filled to the roof, a black moving surface eight feet below us where a tunnel had been, and it was still coming, and it was coming from below.

That was the thing I could not get past.

Water goes down. Water has done exactly that since the beginning of everything, it is the one thing about water you can rely on, and this was coming up out of the deep channels underneath us and filling the world from the bottom.

’Something moved down there,’ I thought. ’Something big enough that when it turned over in its sleep, the water had to go somewhere.’

And then, because the Precipice has never once let me have a thought without charging me for it, the first of them came up out of the dark water below and broke the surface.

Not one thing.

...Many.

Pale, and bloated, and very old, turning slowly over in the black as the flood carried them up from wherever they had been lying since before anyone alive had a word for it.

’...Oh, come on.’