Chapter 220: Bait

Isolde came down the rope to them.

Logan heard her coming, one hand over the other on the grey line. Then her face was there in the white, beside Alice’s, close enough to touch.

"Look at me," Alice told her mother. "I will look at you both. You look at me."

So the three of them stood with their heads together in the fog. Alice’s eyes went from Logan’s face to Isolde’s and back again. Isolde’s eyes stayed on her daughter.

They were red. She did not blink.

"He is a fool," Isolde said.

"I know, Mom."

"He has always been a fool."

"Logan," said Garen.

His voice came from out in the white, a few paces off the rope. It was perfectly calm.

"I cannot see a thing. Can your scanner?"

"Nyriel," said Logan.

Logan did not look away from Alice to see the points. Nyriel laid them across his sight the way it always did, over whatever he was looking at, and he was looking at her.

The family were pairs and threes along the rope. The units were a cluster at the head of it.

Garen was a single point, alone.

The great point was far off, on the other side of the rope. It was not moving toward him.

Not yet.

"It has not found you," Logan said.

"It will." Garen sounded cheerful. "My count has started dropping. That should be bait enough for anybody."

"Everyone," Logan told the units. "Come off the head of the rope and go to Garen. Follow his voice."

"Yes, Lord," said Halden.

"It cannot see you. It never could. Stand round him in a ring, near enough to touch him. When it comes up, I will tell you where."

"Boss," said Billy. "How will you tell us where if you are looking at the lady?"

"I can see it without looking. Go."

They went.

Logan watched their points move away from the rope through the white, toward the single point that was Garen. They gathered round it. They stopped.

"I have company," said Garen. "Terry is standing on my foot."

"Sorry, sir," said Terry.

"Do not move it. I like knowing where you are."

Then the great point turned.

It came slowly at first.

Logan watched it come round in a long curve across the floor, the way it had come round toward Edda. Then it straightened. It came faster.

"Garen," he said. "It has you. Left side. Coming in low."

"Thank you."

"Terry, you are on his left. It will rise beside you. Halden, behind Terry. Billy, go wide."

The air on the rope did not go cold. The thing was not coming for any of them. It went past the rope and on, straight toward the lone point in the white.

Isolde’s hands were locked round Alice’s wrist. Her eyes did not move from her daughter’s face.

"Now," said Logan. "It is there. It is coming up now."

He heard it rise.

He heard the long cold sigh of it in the fog. He heard Garen’s pistols fire, both at once and then again, a hard hum and crack. He heard Terry roar.

"Its mouth!" That was Halden. "Lord, its mouth is open. It has him!"

"Terry!"

There was a grinding sound, like a great weight being forced against a thing that did not want to move. Logan knew that sound.

He had heard it in the Silver, when Terry put his hands in the jaw of the Floodwake Hullback and held it.

"I have it, Lord!" Terry’s voice was strained past recognising. "I have the jaw. Sir is inside. He is inside the mouth!"

Isolde made a sound. It was not a word.

Alice held on to her mother’s face with both hands.

"Look at me," she said. "Mom. Look at me."

Isolde looked at her. Her whole body was shaking.

In the fog, the pistols kept firing.

They fired faster than Logan had ever heard them fire. They fired from inside the cold, again and again. Every shot was a flat hum and a crack, and every one went up.

"Billy!" Logan shouted. "The underside, behind the jaw. Solveig, the same. Halden, cut where Terry is holding."

He heard Billy’s blades scream. He heard Halden’s halberd come down, and down again.

The great point in his sight shuddered.

Then it went still.

There was one more shot. It was louder than all the others. It sounded as if it had been fired straight up into the roof of the world.

[ Whiteout Drift Leviathan slain. ] [ Garen Rezvolt: +800 Tower Points ] [ Warden of the Seventh Layer slain. ] [ The Well is open. ]

The Whiteout lifted.

It did not drift away. It rose. The whole wall of white lifted off the stone floor in one slow sheet, the way a cloth lifts off a table when somebody pulls it from one corner.

Light came in under it. It was the pale glow of the Seventh Layer, and it fell across a wide grey floor where they had seen nothing but white for so long.

Isolde was already running.

She ran without looking at anyone, across the stone toward the ring of units, and the units stood aside for her.

Garen was lying on his back in the middle of them.

He was soaked from head to foot in a pale slime that steamed in the cold air. One sleeve was torn off. His arm was bleeding where teeth had been. Both pistols were still in his hands.

Beside him lay the Leviathan. It was already coming apart, melting back into fog, sinking away into the floor.

Isolde dropped to her knees beside her husband.

He opened his eyes and looked at her.

"There you are," he said. "I did tell you not to look."

"I am looking now."

"So you are." He lifted the hand with the pistol in it and put it on the back of her neck. "Seven, I think. I stopped counting."

She put her forehead down against his and held it there. Her shoulders were shaking.

Garen let her. He looked past her at the rest of them, coming across the stone.

"Somebody get Helen," he said. "Please. I believe it bit me."

Helen got there.

She knelt on his other side and healed the arm while Isolde held on to him. She did not say anything while she did it. Her hands were steady.

Logan stood with Alice and looked past them, across the stone, to where the Whiteout had been.

It was gone. The floor ran on, flat and grey and bare. Two hundred paces off, in the bare floor, there was a hole.

It was round, as wide as a house. A low wall of grey stone ran round its lip. From where he stood, Logan could see the top of a stair going down into it, turning round and round its inside wall into the dark.

Rishin stood where the rope began, with Vina’s hand in his. He was looking at the Well.

Logan opened his panel.

[ Time remaining: 323 days ]

It held. Alice was standing beside him, and she was looking at him.

He looked at Garen, lying on the stone with his wife’s head on his shoulder.

’Three hundred and nineteen,’ he thought. ’Ten fewer than Vina. And he walked out into it on purpose.’

He did not ask Garen whether it had been worth it. Garen had his eyes shut, and his hand was still on the back of his wife’s neck.