I Only Summon Villainesses

I went in after him with a chain out and Emperor’s Dominion off the leash and the crimson coming off me in a wall, and I lit up forty feet of empty cavern with nothing standing in any of it.

Just the floor. Just the warm stone and the grit, and our own boot marks from that morning, pressed in and going nowhere.

And one thing lying in the middle of it.

The length of bone he had sharpened back in the lair, when Light put him at the front because a big man at the front makes everyone behind him walk faster.

It had rolled about two feet and stopped.

There was no blood on the floor of that cave. None. I had watched him get opened, and I stood in the exact place where it happened, and the stone under my boots was dry, which made everything I had just watched feel like a lie.

I crouched and put two fingers on it anyway, right where the worst of it should have been. Grit. Heat coming up out of the rock. Nothing wet. I lifted the chain and ran its light up the walls and across the low ceiling, and there was nothing on those either. No scrape, no handprint, no drag mark going anywhere.

I came back out with the bone in my hand, and I did not know what I was supposed to do with it. It was lighter than it looked. The grip end was still warm, and that was the rock’s doing and not his.

Light had Bren under the arms. She was not crying. She was doing the thing she had done at the stopped prints, standing at the edge of a place and refusing to walk into it, except this time she could not get her breath under control, and she was furious about that too. Every time her chest hitched against his hold, her jaw clamped down on it.

The silent one had gone four or five paces down the slope and was standing with his back to all of us, facing out, his arms hanging straight at his sides.

Ilse was upright with one hand flat on the rock, and she had turned herself round to face the cave mouth. She could not see it. She had never seen it. She had put her back to the only exit and faced the dark anyway because I had shouted, and she had done it while a man she had known for eleven days was being taken out of the world behind her, with no way of knowing it had happened.

”Is it still there.”

”...No.”

She let the hand come off the rock and flapped it at me. ”Then breathe.” She looked me over from boots to hairline, and her mouth went flat. ”Why do you look decorated, and the others look shitty?”

I couldn’t manage a grin for that. I couldn’t manage an answer either, because now I was saddled with even more to be responsible for, and I hadn’t worked out where to put any of it.

Afterwards, when we had moved down the slope and put four hundred paces between us and that cave, Light came and sat on his heels in front of me with his hands hanging loose between his knees, and looked at the bone across my legs.

”He was standing with us.”

”Yeah.”

”All of us. Within arm’s reach.”

”Nobody had a hand on him.” I put the bone down flat on the stone between us. ”We stopped roping. We stopped roping the day we reached the seam, because the shelf was wide and the walking was easy and nobody said anything about it. Including me.”

Light looked at the bone for a while. He didn’t touch it. Light touches everything he intends to clean, and he didn’t touch it.

”Devant said two of them would die.”

’Yeah. He did.’

And there it was, and I have not been able to get out from under it since.

For weeks I have been cutting that boy’s contradictions into my own forearm in blood, fourteen of them, one for every time he opened his mouth and his hands went the other way. They run in a crooked row up the inside of my arm, most of them scabbed over, the last one still pink around the edge of a blister. He said the wyvern could not make eleven days. The wyvern flew this morning. He said he would take a shift, and slept through it. He said Ilse would not wake.

He said two of the four would die.

That one came true.

I sat on a warm rock with a dead man’s bone across my legs and worked out that the frightening thing about a machine that always gives you the opposite is the day it gives you the answer straight, because then you have no idea which of the other fourteen were the lie.

Bren came over an hour later and sat down without being asked, the way she does now, close enough that her sleeve brushed mine.

I had been putting it off, and I made myself do it.

”Bren. What was his name.”

She opened her mouth.

Then she closed it, and sat with her hands in her lap, and looked out over the plain for a long time. Out there the black shelf ran flat to the edge of the light and simply stopped.

”...We didn’t talk in there.”

”Months.”

”Months.” Her voice came out worse than it had in days, all scrape and no air. ”I know he snored. I know he’d give you his water and pretend he wasn’t thirsty. I know he could sleep sitting up.” She rubbed her thumb over the flat of her own palm, hard, like something was on it. ”There’s a name in my head and I can’t tell you whose it is. That’s what that room did to us.”

I looked down at the bone.

Two now. Teller, who counted sacks in a granary, and a man who carried more than any of us and was glad about a lizard.

’...I didn’t ask him either. I had a whole week.’

Wren did not make a joke.

She did not say anything at all for a while, and then she said the thing I had been waiting for her to say since I woke up feeling like a man with his life handed back to him.

You saw it and they didn’t.

’I know.’

That is new. And most likely means you’re regaining some agency but doesn’t mean you can trust yourself.

I inhaled deeply, looking forward with a grave expression.

’I know I can’t...’