Chapter 145: A Moderate Affinity

The creature finally noticed Theo running. It whipped its tail round in a long, rippling arc, and the slimy skin along it bunched and burst into spikes.

Theo leapt into the sky to avoid it. But the tail rose after him and slammed right into him, crashing him through several trees.

It wrapped around him and constricted as it shoved him on through the trunks. Then something exploded against the monster’s monkey-like head again, and another hole opened in it.

But the holes were healing fast. Darkness crawled across the gaps, and in no time the head was as good as new.

Even so, that had at least earned Theo a moment. He gathered his strength and pushed against the constricting limb, but the harder he pushed, the harder it squeezed.

He paused for a moment, and then closed his eyes.

Darkness bristled out of him in spikes and stabbed into the limb from every side. They sank deeper, slowly, and then he pulled against it a second time. This time the limb shattered around him like a burst of water.

Theo dropped nine metres into wet bracken and came up running before his boots had finished sliding.

"MR THEO!"

Uthed was at the edge of the dark with a twelve-kilogram cylinder held over his head in both hands, one of them splinted, waving it like a man flagging down a train.

"I have it! I have the—"

"PUT IT DOWN. Did you bring the sparker?"

Uthed put the cylinder down and slapped at his coat with his good hand, and came out with a battered kitchen sparker on a length of string.

Theo slid in beside him on both knees and took it, and it was wet, and the cylinder was wet, and his hands were wet.

Because it was raining now. Properly raining, the drizzle having turned into the kind that comes down in ropes and finds the inside of a collar within a minute, and the churned ground had started to shine.

’Of course. Of course it is.’

[Limitless Body — Adaptation in progress]

[Foreign attribute: Unnatural Darkness]

[Resistance: forming]

’Not now! I’m busy!’

Uthed was already talking, fast, the way he talked when he was frightened and refusing to be.

"Mr Theo, what is the gas for? Truly. What is it for?"

"Fire."

"You do not have fire."

"I’ve got a fire affinity."

Uthed stared at him.

"You have never used it."

"No."

"Not once in your life."

"Not once in my life."

Theo wiped the water out of his eyes with the back of his wrist and looked out at thirty metres of slick black hunched over the flattened forest.

"It eats darkness. It’s eaten every single thing I’ve thrown at it since midnight, and it’s eaten shadow, and it’ll eat anything else I make out of me. Fire’s the only thing in me it hasn’t tasted."

He cracked the valve. The hose hissed, and the smell of gas came up off the wet ground at once.

"So tonight I use it."

And now the other half of it, which he had not said out loud and was not going to.

An affinity did not grow by being owned. It grew by being used, and the only way through to High was to stand somewhere Moderate was not enough and keep asking anyway. Uthed had told him that two months ago on the lawn. Uthed, who had studied affinities his whole life and never been given one.

’So let’s ask.’

Theo put his right hand out flat over the hissing hose and reached for something he had never reached for.

Nothing came.

He reached again, harder, the way he pulled at Shadow Sword when he wanted it to answer, and the inside of his forearm went hot and stayed hot and produced absolutely nothing at all.

’Come ON.’

[Affinity: Fire — Moderate]

[First draw attempted]

[Draw unsuccessful]

"Mr Theo—"

"I know."

The Serpent came round.

It came the way weather comes, without any hurry in it, sixty metres of ruined forest disappearing under the drag of a body that did not walk so much as arrive. Asterion’s arrow went through the top of its head and out again and made no difference whatsoever.

Theo reached a third time.

And on the third time, the heat in his palm caught.

A flame stood up out of the middle of his wet hand. It was the size of the one on a birthday candle, yellow and ordinary and wobbling, and it was not a weapon, and it was not a wall of anything.

Theo looked at it with his mouth open.

’THAT’S FIRE! THAT’S ACTUAL—’

The rain put it out.

’...’

’That’s the most humiliating thing that has ever happened to me.’

[Affinity: Fire — Moderate]

[First draw successful. Duration: 0.4 seconds]

[Note: ambient conditions are unfavourable. Obviously]

He got it again, and lost it again, and got it a fourth time by running twenty feet with his hand cupped against his chest like a man carrying soup, and that one lasted almost two full seconds before the water found it.

The gas cloud was no better. It came out of the hose and went nowhere, rolling off the lip of the crater to lie down in the mud while the rain pressed it flat.

Theo had six kilos of it out of the bottle and not one thing to light it with.

Then the Serpent got a hand on the ground he was standing on and folded it.

He went over backwards into the water with the cylinder skidding away from him and the sparker gone out of his fingers. The tail came across and took the tops off four trees where his head had been, and Theo lay flat on his back in three inches of standing rain and could not get his ribs to work.

Above him the whole sky was falling into his face, a hundred thousand ropes of water coming down out of black cloud, hitting his open eyes, hitting the flame he no longer had.

’I can’t burn anything while it’s raining, and it’s not going to stop raining, and I can’t make it stop raining—’

Theo stopped.

He lay in the water with the rain hammering his face and watched a single drop come the whole way down out of the dark and land on his cheek. For about two seconds, he did not think about the monster at all.

He thought about a hallway in his own house, and a woman standing barefoot at the end of it, and how a glass of water in that hallway would grow a skin of ice from the inside out just because she had walked past it.

’...I don’t have to stop the rain.’

Theo turned his head and looked for his sword.