Chapter 110: I’m Not Asking

He fought it for eleven minutes at the top of the world and there is no honest way to make that read as a fight.

He put the knife into it twice more and both times the dark shut it. He got a hand into the gap under the bark at the shoulder and tore some of it away and had it back off him in a second and a half.

It broke his left forearm across a rock. It took the top of his ear, and the blood went down inside his collar and froze there. It let him get up three separate times, and the third time he understood what the letting-up was for, and he stood in the road with his arm hanging and worked out the last of the arithmetic.

’It’s never once tried to end this. It killed forty of them in a night and it’s spent eleven minutes on one man with a kitchen knife. It’s showing me.’

’...Showing me what.’

The cold came in from all sides at once. It stood somewhere in front of him and it did not breathe this time.

And the dark went round it, and held it, and closed over it, the way it had closed over the knife wound, the way a thing closes over what is its own.

’Oh. It’s showing me whose it is.’

Theo stood in the black on a mountain road with a broken arm and nothing left to protect.

He had one thing in his coat pocket, and it was four feet of carter’s line with a wrist loop spliced in it, and he did not take it out.

Then he stopped.

He put the knife down in the snow, point first, and left it standing there. He got his back straight, which cost him something. He put both hands down at his sides with the palms turned out and open.

And he did not ask for anything.

That was the whole of it, and it took him no time at all once he got there.

’I’ve been trying to spend you. Every hour of tonight. Cover, an edge, six inches of shadow off a boulder, something to put between me and it. I’ve been standing in front of the biggest thing I’ve ever been near and haggling.’

’I’ve nothing left to buy you with, and nobody left to buy you for.’

’I’m not asking.’

[Note: No Investment has been detected]

[Note: There is no return on this]

[Note: You did it anyway]

Theo shut his eyes on a mountain where his eyes had been useless for nine hours, and stood still, and let it be dark.

The dark came.

It came the way water comes into a boat, from every direction at once and without any noise, and it was not a wind and it did not touch the snow. Two miles of blacked-out valley moved. The hole in the daylight over Harrowgate moved. All of it, every cubic yard of the thing that had eaten a road and a waystation and forty-one people, turned in the air like something enormous rolling over in its sleep, and it came up the pass, and it went into him.

Through his open hands first. Then his chest, then his mouth, then the backs of his eyes.

Theo went down on one knee in the road and made a sound that had nothing to do with pain.

It went on for a long time.

When it finished, the night was still there.

That was the first thing and he understood it before he was even upright. Ordinary night. Stars over the pass, hard and small, and the grey coming up in the east behind the far shoulder, and snow going blue in it.

The monster was still there too.

Eleven feet in front of him, standing in the middle of the road, in the open, with the light of an ordinary pre-dawn coming down on it and nothing whatsoever wrapped around it any more.

Theo looked at it properly for the first time in nine hours, at the bark, and at the torn place in the shoulder where his hand had been.

’...That’s it?’

Then he stood up.

The mountain was full of shadow. Every rock had one. The road had a rut and the rut had one. The thing standing in front of him had one, lying off to its left across the snow, thin and blue and eleven feet long, and Theo could feel it the way he felt his own hand.

’All of you at once.’

It came at him.

He did not move out of the way, and he did not put anything between them, and he took it by the throat out of the air with a broken arm that had stopped mattering, and he put it into the road so hard that the sound came off the far wall of the pass and came back.

Then he did the rest of it.

He did it with his hands, and with the road, and with the rock face, and with the dark, which stayed where he put it and moved when he wanted and lifted the thing off the ground when he had no hand free. He took it apart at the shoulder where the bark had a gap in it. He put it through the shrine on the spur on the way down the mountain and did not stop. It got away from him twice and he brought it back both times, out of the shade under the rock, out of the black of the store doorway at Harrowgate. There was nowhere left on that mountain for it to go that did not belong to him now.

The last of it happened four hundred yards up the north road, at a stake with eight inches of pine standing out of the frozen ground.

It did not close.

Afterwards, Theo sat down in the snow next to what he had done, in the daylight, with his arm in his lap. The light came up the pass and got into the snow and made it painful to look at.

He was still there some while later when the panel came.

[CLASS TRIAL — CONCLUDED]

[Participants: 42]

[Survivors: 1]

[Objective: none was ever set]

’...Say the rest of it.’

[Class acquired: FAVORED BY DARKNESS]