I Only Summon Villainesses

I told Light on the seventh day, walking, while he had Ilse.

That was deliberate. I have never in my life asked another man for help with something inside my own head, and I found I could only manage it if neither of us had to look at the other while it happened.

He listened all the way through. The hollow, the hot pan, the wyvern’s leg arriving in my head in sequence and feeling like my own idea. The week of it. The firewood. The stones.

When I finished he walked about forty paces without saying anything.

”You are certain you tried.”

”I’m certain I stood there and meant it.”

”That is a different sentence.”

”I know it’s a different sentence. That’s the whole problem.” I stepped over a run of loose shale and heard it go down the slope behind me. ”A man who can’t be bothered knows he can’t be bothered. He can hate himself about it. I can’t get near enough to hate myself. I go for it and my hand comes back with something else in it and I’m pleased.”

Light shifted her weight higher on his shoulder.

Then he said, quite calmly:

”My door has been shut since the lair.”

”You told me that. You said it as a fact about the Precipice.”

”I said it as a fact about my luck.” He was looking straight ahead. ”Every gate I have ever been in, I could put that animal away and take it out again. Here I cannot, and I have been treating that as weather. I have not once sat down and asked why.”

’Light has not asked why.’

That is the part that put the cold in me. Not the door. The man. I have known Light for a year and I have wanted to kill him for most of it, and the one thing I would put money on is that he asks why about everything, constantly, in an irritating voice, usually while I am bleeding.

”Say it again.”

He glanced at me.

”Say the words. Out loud. Why can I not open my door.”

Light opened his mouth.

He walked eight or nine paces with it half open and then closed it, and the look that came over his face I have only seen on him once before, in the lake cavern, when he had a thing in his eyes that was not him.

”I was going to tell you about the wyvern’s dressing.”

”I had the sentence ready,” he said slowly. ”It was about the bandage. It arrived the way any thought arrives.”

We walked.

Bren came up on my other side at some point, because she has stopped waiting to be invited into things, and she walked with us a while and then said what she had been chewing on.

”Can I say something stupid.”

”Please.”

”We were in that room for a long while.” She had her thumbs in the strap across her chest. ”Months. I don’t know how many. And we weren’t chained. There were no doors on it. The thing that kept us went out for days at a stretch and left us standing there.”

’...Oh no.’

”And not one of us walked out.” She said it flatly, the way she says everything, and that made it worse. ”Not one. Not once. And I’ve been trying since the fire to remember what my reason was, and I can remember having one. I just can’t get hold of what it was.”

Light had gone very still beside me, which is difficult while carrying somebody.

”How many of you tried the tunnel?”

”None of us.”

”None of you ever walked to the mouth of it and looked out?”

”No,” Bren said. ”And that’s mad, isn’t it. That’s a mad thing for four people to not do for months.”

Nobody answered her. There was no answer anybody wanted to say in front of the others.

So here is the shape of it, and I put it together on that shelf with a woman’s blood dried into my sleeve and a tally scabbed over on my forearm.

It is not me. That is the good news and it is the worst news I have ever received.

Light cannot open a door and has never once asked why. Four people stood in an unlocked room for months and cannot remember their reasons. Devant says a thing and does the other thing, eleven times, twelve, and says it is not deliberate. And I walk out past the firelight every night with one job and come back with kindling.

Four different people. Four different failures. Every single one of them dressed up as ordinary.

And the only thing the four of us have in common is where we are standing.

’It’s the place.’

I did the next part of the arithmetic in about two steps and then wished I had not.

Because if it can take a decision out of a man’s hands and leave him certain the hands were his, then no one walking on that shelf could account for why they were walking.

Light could not tell me why he had agreed to come. He said Cade needed organising, and then he heard himself say it and stopped.

Bren could not tell me why she had stood in that chamber.

I could not tell you, with my hand on anything I care about, why I chose down instead of up at the lake. I had reasons. I have always had reasons. I gave them to Ilse and I gave them to Devant and I wrote them on the inside of my own skull and every one of them still feels like mine.

’That’s what it does. It gives you the reasons.’

We stopped early that evening, because Ilse’s breathing had started doing something I do not want to describe.

I sat with her and Light sat across from me and neither of us had anything left to say about it, and eventually he asked the only question that mattered.

”Then do we go down.”

”She has days,” I said. ”Maybe not that. The heat is down. There’s no version of this where she gets it by going up.”

”That is a reason.”

”Yes.”

”It is a very good reason.”

”Yes.”

He looked at me over the top of a fire that was mostly embers.

”And you cannot prove it is yours.”

”No,” I said. ”I can’t.”

We sat with that for a while, two grown men in a hole in the world, entirely unable to establish whether we wanted what we wanted.

”Then we go down,” Light said, and got up, and went to check the wyvern’s dressing.

I have thought about that a great deal since. He did not pretend the problem was solved. He heard it, he agreed there was no floor under any of it, and he stood up and went and did the next practical thing, and I think that is the closest to courage I have seen from anybody down here.

Devant took the watch he had said he would not take.

I was still awake an hour later when the big man made a sound from the edge of the camp.

Not alarm. Something else.

I got up with Wren in my hand and went out to the lip of the shelf where he was standing, and Bren came after me, and the two of us looked out where he was pointing into the dark below us.

A long way down, in the black, there was a thin crooked line of red.

It was not firelight. Fire moves. This sat in the rock the way a scar sits in skin, and it went on out of sight in both directions, and even from up there I could feel the air coming off it on my face.

Warm air.

The first warm thing in the Precipice.

’Three days, he said... and it has been three.’

I stood there on that lip with the heat on my face and the woman behind me breathing wrong, and I could not tell, and I still cannot tell, whether the thing rising in my chest was relief.