Chapter 213: The Seam

The cats climbed toward him.

They came off the walls of the crack in a slow red glitter, above the man’s ledge and below it. They did not hurry. They moved the way the Hollowthroats had moved toward Edda’s voice, as if they had all the time there was.

The man saw them. He pulled himself back against the wall with his broken sword held out in front of him, and his arm shook.

"Sonic," said Logan. "Get him out."

Sonic was already gone.

He went down into the crack on Stormheart in a flash of white light, straight down past the falling river.

Lightning went out of him in a fork. It struck two cats off the wall above the ledge, and they fell away into the dark without a sound.

Garen was on his knees at the lip with both pistols out.

He fired downward, again and again. Every shot struck glass. A cat on the wall below the ledge burst into red fragments, and another lost its grip and went tumbling.

Alice knelt beside him with her bow. She shot past Sonic’s shoulder at a cat that had reached the end of the ledge. The arrow went through its neck, and it slid off the doorstep of stone and was gone.

Isolde could not put a dome down there. She stood behind them with her chakram in her hand and watched the rim of the bowl, where the canyons came in.

"Logan," she said. "The walls up here."

He looked. The walls of the bowl were moving too.

The units met the cats that came down into the bowl.

Halden held the mouth of the nearest canyon with his halberd. Terry stood in front of the family with his arms spread.

Billy went round the edge of the bowl at full speed, and every cat that came off the wall ahead of him went down in pieces.

Hob stood beside Helen. Link stood before Vina. Neither of them moved from those places.

Down in the crack, Sonic had reached the ledge.

Logan saw him land on the ledge and take the man under the arms. He saw Sonic heave him up off it, and the man cried out with pain.

Then Stormheart flared white, and Sonic came up out of the crack with the man hanging from his arms like a sack.

He landed hard beside the crack and set the man down. Helen was already there.

The man lay on his back on the red gravel and stared up at the ember roof.

He was young. Under the dirt and the cuts and the starved hollows in his cheeks, he could not have been much older than Logan. He had his father’s eyes.

"Tavin?" said Vina.

The young man turned his head. He looked at the small girl kneeling beside him, and then at the broken shield in Link’s hands.

"That is mine." His throat was raw. "How do you know my name?"

"Your father," said Vina. "He has all your scars. He smiles every time a new one comes."

Tavin stared at her. Then he shut his eyes, and his face crumpled, and he put his arm over it.

Helen’s hands were glowing green against his ribs. She did not stop.

Then the crack made a noise.

It came from far below, under the roar of the falling river. It was a long grinding sound, like stone being dragged over stone, and it was coming up.

The cats stopped.

All of them, in the crack and in the bowl, stopped where they were. Then they turned their heads toward the crack, together, and they went still.

"Oh," said Tavin from the gravel. His eyes were open again. "Oh, no. She heard. She is coming up."

"Who?" said Logan.

Tavin did not answer him. He was looking at the edge.

A claw came over it.

It was as long as Logan was tall. It was red glass, curved and sharp along its whole edge, and it bit into the gravel at the lip with a sound like a plate breaking.

A second claw came up beside it. Then a head.

It was a cat’s head, but it was the size of a cart. Its face was plated with red glass in great overlapping scales, and its eyes were the dull glow of the roof above.

Its ears lay flat. Along its cheeks, scars of white glass crossed and recrossed the red, so many of them that some of the plates were more scar than glass.

It pulled itself up over the lip and onto the gravel.

Its body was the length of a house. Every plate on it glittered. When it moved, it moved like all of the cats at once, low and silent and certain.

It looked at Helen.

[ Redglass Brood Mother ] [ Rank: Mythic ] [ Scaled to: Tier-9 ]

[ Attack: 52,000 ] [ Speed: 7,800 ] [ Constitution: 120,000 ] [ Arcane: 9,000 ]

"Warden," said Isolde.

"Units," said Logan. "All of you. Now."

They went for her together.

Terry hit her shoulder head on and was thrown back across the gravel. Halden’s halberd came down on her flank and bit into the plates there. Billy went in low under her chest and came out the other side trailing red fragments.

Hob put his head down and drove his horns into her side.

She turned on them. One sweep of her claws sent Billy spinning across the bowl. Her jaws closed on Halden’s halberd and wrenched it out of his hands.

Garen fired. Alice loosed. Isolde’s chakram went into her face and came back wet.

The Brood Mother shook her great head and came on.

"This is wrong," said Alice.

She had put three arrows into the same place on the Mother’s neck. They had gone in. Red glass had cracked round them.

"It is not deep enough," she said. "It should be deeper. Every hit is landing half."

Logan saw she was right.

Halden’s halberd had bitten a hand’s depth into the plates of the Mother’s flank. The wound was there. It was half the depth that blow should have made.

’Half,’ he thought. ’Every wound on this layer is half.’

’Somebody is carrying the other half for her.’

He opened Sword Intent.

The color went out of the bowl.

The fight was laid across his sight in threads, the way it always was. The units were steady shapes. The cats on the walls were tangles of red light. The Brood Mother was a great knot of it, burning in the middle of the gravel.

And from the knot, a thread ran down.

It was thin and red and taut as a bowstring. It ran from the Mother’s chest, over the lip of the crack, and down into the dark below.

Logan followed it down with his eyes as far as he could see. It did not end.

’That is it,’ he thought. ’That is the one who loves her most. It is down there, and it is taking half of everything we give her.’

Then he saw the other threads.

They were fainter, and finer, and they were everywhere. They ran between every person in the bowl.

There was a thread between Garen and Isolde, and it went both ways. Another joined Bram and Edda. Vina’s ran to his mother, and so did his father’s, and his mother’s ran back to his father. Alice’s ran to him.

There was a thread from the old man as well.

It did not go to anyone in the bowl. It left Rishin’s chest and crossed the gravel, and it went over the edge beside the Mother’s. It sank into the dark, and it did not end either.

Logan did not let himself follow it.

And there was one from him.

It ran out of the middle of his chest, across the gravel, to Helen.

He stared at it.

’Broken Chain,’ he thought. ’It cuts what holds. It cut the cold off two clasped hands in the Foot.’

He could cut it. He knew that, looking at it. One stroke, and every wound he took on this layer would be his and nobody else’s.

He did not know what else it would cut.

He looked at the thread. Then he tore his eyes from it, and he did not look at it again.

"Mom," he said.

Helen looked up from Tavin’s ribs.

"The warden is sharing," Logan said. "There is a thread going down past the lip. A thing down there loves her, and it is carrying half of every hit. We will never kill her from up here."

"Then go down," said Bram. He had his hammer up.

"I cannot." Logan’s voice cracked. "If I go down there, I will be hurt. I know I will. Every cut I take, she takes half of."

Helen looked at him.

She looked at him for long enough that the Brood Mother’s claws raked across Terry’s chest plate behind her, and the scream of the glass on iron went through all of them.

Then she took her hands off Tavin, wiped them on her knees, and stood up.

"Logan," she said. "Go."

"Mom..."

"I told you to stay out of the way, and you did. Now I am telling you to go." Helen’s voice was steady. "Go down there and cut it. I will carry whatever you bring back."

She held his eyes.

"I have been carrying you since before you were born," she said. "Go."