House of Blood

”*Move!*” Kaelen roared.

I was already moving. I had the girl in both arms, her head lolling against my shoulder, and I was running along the spine of a black hill that had decided to wake up. The stone bucked under my boots. Cracks raced ahead of me, spilling gouts of pale dust. Somewhere below us, the huge, lidless eye swiveled and followed.

”Where?” Tamsin was gasping behind me. ”Where do we *go?*”

”The cave! Emmet’s still in the cave!”

I’d forgotten him. God help me, for ten minutes I had forgotten a fourteen-year-old boy who was asleep on a pile of furs with a dead man’s coat under his chin.

”He’s on the *far* side,” Kaelen snarled. ”Down the north slope. Two hundred paces!”

”Then *run!*”

”I am *running!*”

Tamsin wasn’t. I heard it before I saw it: the hitch in her breath, a ragged, defeated wheeze. She’d taken a hit from the girl that I wouldn’t have wanted on a horse. She stopped, bent over with her hands on her knees, and said, ”Just a *moment.*”

”Tamsin, no—”

The rock under her feet went soft.

---

It didn’t crack. It *swallowed.*

The black stone around her ankles turned to something like warm wax and flowed up over her boots in a smooth, greedy tide. She yelped and tried to step back. The stone closed over her left foot like a hand. She tried to pull free and the hill *clenched.*

I heard the bones go. A wet, low, crunching sound, like a wagon wheel rolling over a rack of ribs.

”AH!” Tamsin screamed. ”Oh, God, *my foot—*”

Kaelen was already on her. She hit the soft stone on her knees with the axe up and brought it down on the rock around Tamsin’s ankle, once, twice, three times, but each blow only rippled the surface like a stone dropped in water. The hill didn’t care. It was patiently, steadily *chewing.*

”The eye!” I shouted. ”The eye’s tracking her!”

*Valerian,* Aurelix said, in a hard, quick voice. *It hunts what stops. The beach hunted what stood. The grass hunted what answered. This one hunts what* rests.

”*Don’t stop moving.*” It came out of me like a prayer. ”*That’s the rule. Don’t stop.*”

”I can’t move!” Tamsin shrieked. ”I’m *stuck!*”

I looked at the girl in my arms. At Kaelen’s cracked axe. At the long, grey, empty miles of ridge running down toward a cave mouth where a boy was probably waking up right now, hearing the world fall apart.

I put the girl down, as gently as I could, in the lee of a boulder.

Then I put my right hand on the guard on my left forearm.

”One,” I said. ”Count it.”

*Valerian.*

”Aurelix. *Count.*”

*...Two minutes forty,* she whispered. *Go.*

---

The guard clicked.

The shadow came up out of the stone like water out of a well. It didn’t care that the ground was soft. Shadow never does. It poured into the cracks between the black rocks and filled them with night, and out of the night, huge and silent and wearing a helmet shaped like a closed door, rose Atlas.

”*Her leg,*” I said.

The knight bent. A great black gauntlet closed around the stone eating Tamsin’s foot, and he *tore.*

The hill screamed.

I don’t know how else to say it. The whole ridge let out a low, tearing groan, and the soft stone peeled back from Tamsin’s leg in long, glistening strips. She screamed too. I got my arms under her shoulders and *hauled.* Her boot came out, and then the rest of her leg did, and what came out wasn’t a foot anymore. It was a mess of black bone-splinters and red pulp, wrapped in the shredded remains of a boot, dangling by a flap of skin from above the ankle.

”Cut it!” Kaelen bellowed. ”*Cut it, it’s dead!*”

”I know!”

Atlas’s halberd came down in a single clean stroke. Tamsin’s scream turned into a high, thin wail, and then she was sobbing and clutching my arm, and the stump was bleeding in a hot red torrent across the rocks.

*Valerian,* Aurelix said. *Hold her down.*

Kaelen did it. She put her whole weight across Tamsin’s chest. I pressed my black hand against her knee. Aurelix slid down my arm in a thin thread of gold and touched the stump, and the smell of burning meat filled the air.

Tamsin didn’t scream. She’d gone past it. She just stared at the sky, shaking, with her teeth locked, and a thin string of spit ran down her chin.

”Twelve,” she whispered. ”I... I got twelve.”

”You did great,” I said, and my voice cracked. ”You did *great.*”

”Don’t be nice to me,” she gasped. ”It’s *creepy.*”

---

We ran.

Atlas carried Tamsin. I carried the girl. Kaelen went in front with the cracked axe, taking the slope in huge, sliding strides, and I heard the hill chasing us the whole way, a slow, grinding, wet rumble, like a giant dragging its knuckles over gravel.

*One minute,* Aurelix said. *One minute, Valerian.*

The cave mouth came up out of the dusk.

Emmet was standing in it.

He had the silk coat clutched in both fists and his mouth hanging open, and he was staring up the ridge at the thing that had just opened its eye. He wasn’t moving. Not an inch. He was frozen, and under his feet the black stone had started to *rise,* in a slow, wet, hungry wave, to lap at his ankles.

”EMMET!” Kaelen screamed. ”*Move!*”

He didn’t hear her.

I put everything I had into my legs. I threw myself across the last thirty feet, with a girl in my arms and my lungs on fire, and I *kicked.* My boot caught him in the chest and sent him flying out of the cave mouth, skidding over the stone on his back, and the rock where he’d been standing closed with a *clap.*

He lay there, staring at me.

”Don’t *stop,*” I said. ”Whatever happens. Don’t *ever* stop.”

He nodded. His eyes slid past me to Tamsin, dangling from Kaelen’s shoulder with her leg ending in a black, smoking stump, and the color drained out of his face.

”Close your mouth, boy,” Tamsin croaked, without opening her eyes. ”You’ll catch flies. Or worse.”

He laughed. It came out as half a sob. Then he scrambled up and ran at my heels, still clutching the silk coat, and I decided then and there that this kid was going to live if I had to carry him on my back for the rest of my life.

*Thirty seconds,* Aurelix whispered.

*Valerian, the door!*

I turned.

Behind the cave, in the dark, the stone had split. A narrow tunnel yawned in the cliff face, dry and straight and black as a gullet. It hadn’t been there before. It smelled of salt, and old iron, and somebody’s cold cooking fire.

*It opened for us,* Aurelix said.

”What?”

*It opened* for *us.*

I didn’t have time to wonder why. The ridge was heaving. The huge eye was a hundred feet away and closing. I snapped my fingers at Atlas, who tossed Tamsin to Kaelen like a sack of grain, and I put my left hand on the guard.

*Eight seconds.*

”Go!”

We dove into the dark.

The guard clicked shut behind me, and the shadow went out of my body in a long, cold gulp, and Atlas dissolved on the threshold, and the tunnel mouth rumbled closed in our faces.

For a moment there was only the dark and our ragged breathing.

Then, from somewhere deeper in, a *light.*

---

Far out over the northern sea, a girl with four black wings stopped flapping.

It wasn’t her choice. Beneath her, vast and hot and shuddering with effort, a dragon had begun to slow. Nox’s long neck swung round, and a single enormous slitted eye regarded her with something close to alarm.

*We are close.*

”I know,” Wren said. ”I can *see.*”

She could. Ahead of them, thick in the fog, a mountain rose out of the water like a rotten tooth. And all across it, scattered over its broken ridges and dripping valleys, hundreds of tiny lights had opened, red and green and gold. They glittered like a city at night.

They were all turned the same way.

”What *is* that?” she whispered.

*The thing we were warned about.* Nox’s voice was deeper than the sea. *Wren. The air above that island is not empty.*

”I don’t *care.*”

*It is* hungry.

”I don’t *care.*” She was shaking. She pressed a hand to her chest, to the place where a link had been silent for three weeks, and for just a heartbeat, so faint she nearly missed it, it *fluttered.*

A flash of gold. A thread of warmth. Somewhere on that island, small and fierce and very far away, someone was alive.

”He’s there,” Wren said, and the tears on her face went to ice in the wind. ”He’s *there,* Nox.”

The dragon said nothing. But his wings beat once, hard.

And far beneath them, in the dark water of the northern sea, something very large and very patient opened its mouth.