Chapter 115: Adrenaline

The third level went down.

The burnt pine ran out at the lip of a bowl half a mile across, and below that the trees came back three times the size, black columns forty feet round with the bark gone to glass, and the ash in the bottom of it was deep enough to take a man to the hip.

Donzo stopped them at the lip and stretched, both arms over his head, entirely at his ease.

"Theo walks front."

Yura’s spear butt came down in the ash.

"He’s Mundane Early."

"He’s the one who keeps going forward." Donzo did not look at her while he said it. "Front, Theo. Twenty yards ahead. Sivvy behind you, Bethe on the left, Yura on the right, me at the back where I can see all of it."

’Twenty yards. Not ten... far enough that nothing behind me arrives in time.’

Theo went out to twenty yards.

He walked it for an hour with Raindrop drawn and the ash coming up over his boots at every step, and behind him the four of them made a great deal of noise not talking to each other.

Around noon by his stomach, Bethe came up level with him. She did it the way a person does a thing they have been ordered to do and hate, getting to his shoulder and saying nothing at all for eleven paces with her eyes on the trees.

Then her jaw worked, and she leaned in and whispered gently.

"So. Theo, is it? You know we could have a good time later, away from all of this. I hear Dungeon sex is a different experience on its own."

Theo said nothing for a second, then smiled.

"Interesting. One more thing to try with my beautiful wives."

She went silent, blinking.

’He has... wives? At what age?’

Meanwhile, Theo asked her plainly.

"Who helped set your hand?"

"...He did."

"Was it broken before he set it? If not, do you want it broken?"

Bethe walked a few more paces away from him and did not answer. She dropped back after that, and Theo let her go and kept walking, and he heard Donzo call something cheerful down the line, and he heard nobody laugh.

Then the light died.

It went in one second, the way a lamp goes when you put the cap on it. All of that thin dirty dusk between the trunks emptied out, and Sivvy’s torch was a small yellow point behind him lighting up her own fingers and nothing else, and somebody swore and somebody else said a name.

For Theo the whole bowl came up like noon.

’...Oh, that’s not fair at all!’

He could see everything. Every column, every drift, the roots standing up out of the ash like knuckles, the four of them behind him with their hands out in front of their faces, and, coming down the slope on his right at a flat run through forty feet of standing timber, the thing that had turned the light off.

[Target: Dark Flame Direwolf] [Realm: Enhanced — Early Stage] [Attribute: Dark Fire — the flame consumes illumination within its radius] [Note: Hunts by body heat. Light sources are not targets. Bodies are.]

It was eighteen feet from nose to hip. Black fire came off its shoulders in sheets and poured back over the spine like something spilling uphill, and where it ran the world stopped being lit, and it made no sound at all in eight inches of ash.

Theo had about a second and a half.

’If I use anything he sees it, and if I don’t, Bethe’s closest and she can’t draw... ash it is.’

He drove Raindrop into the ground, hooked his boot under a root, and threw himself sideways down the face of the drift, and he brought the whole top of it with him. Forty feet of loose ash came off that slope in a grey wall and went across the Direwolf’s path chest-high, and the thing went into it blind and came out the other side wearing it.

Ash on black fire.

It went up. Not brighter, hotter, the flame swelling out along the animal’s flank as it burned what had stuck to it, and for one and a half seconds every man and woman in that bowl could see, and the Direwolf could be looked at.

"THERE," Yura roared. "TEN O’CLOCK, TEN—"

Then it was on him.

Theo took the first strike standing and it put him eleven feet backwards into a trunk, and the trunk came apart. He went through it in a shower of glass bark. He hit the ash on his shoulder, rolled, came up with no sword, found the sword by the crossguard sticking out of the drift, and got it in time to put the flat of it between his own chest and a jaw the size of a door.

The heat went through the steel and into his hands and stayed there.

’That’s fine. That’s absolutely fine.’

He walked backwards under the weight of it with his boots ploughing two long trenches in the ash and his arms shaking, and he could see, perfectly, that Donzo had come round to his left exactly as Sivvy said he would.

And then Donzo was not there any more.

’...And there it is.’

Yura’s spear went in behind the shoulder. It got four inches and stopped on bone, and she was lifted off her feet and thrown, and she came down badly and did not get up quickly.

Sivvy put both daggers into the hind leg and got one of them out again.

Theo went under the jaw.

He did it the only way a man with a sword and no ideas can do it, which is to stop backing up. He dropped, let the teeth close on the air where his head had been, and came up inside the reach of the thing with his shoulder in its chest, and he put nine inches of Raindrop up under the jaw at an angle and did not stop pushing when it hit bone.

The Direwolf reared and took him off the ground with it.

He hung there, both fists on the grip, twelve feet up with his boots off the world and black fire washing over his forearms, and Hardening was the only reason he still had forearms.

’Come on, come on, you awful thing, come DOWN—’

It came down.

It came down on its side with him under it and the sword through the roof of its mouth, and eight inches of ash saved his ribs and a great deal else, and the whole bowl went white with the last of its fire going out at once.

Then the light came back, thin and dirty and wonderful.

Theo lay in the ash under a dead animal the size of a cart and laughed, which hurt considerably.

’That was the worst piece of swordsmanship in the history of the Tower and it worked... Uthed would actually kill me!’

They got the thing off him.

Yura had a shoulder out of its socket and put it back against a trunk without making a noise. Sivvy was shaking so hard she could not sheathe her one remaining dagger. Bethe stood over Theo with her broken hand held against her stomach and looked at him like he was a thing that should not be there.

Theo sat up in the ash and pushed his sleeves back to see how bad the arms were.

They were not bad.

They had been open to the muscle four minutes ago. The burns had gone waxy and pink and were closing while he watched, the way they had been closing since a lake house and a set of stairs, and he was so tired that he was halfway through rolling the sleeve back down before his brain caught up with his hands.

A shadow came over him.

Donzo had crouched down at his side, close and friendly, one forearm across his knee. He was not looking at Theo’s face. He was looking at Theo’s arms.

"Do that again."

"...Do what?"

"That." Donzo reached out and turned Theo’s wrist over with two fingers, unhurried, the way a man turns over a coin he has been given and is not sure about, the smile still on. "You’re in the Mundane Realm, Early, right? And yet you came off a Dire and you’re closing. Nobody closes. Nobody in this Dungeon closes."

Theo pulled his arm back and made it look like tiredness.

"Adrenaline."

"Adrenaline," Donzo agreed.

He stood up and looked down at Theo in eight inches of ash with all four of them watching, and he was pleased in a way that had nothing in it at all.

"Boss chamber’s an hour east. We’re going in."

Yura’s head came up.

"With this? With her hand and my shoulder and—"

Donzo turned his back on her and started walking.

"We’re going in. And Theo’s walking front."