Chapter 580 The Invoice Arrives For Overdrive

The silence after the rumble in the dark below was heavier than the basalt shelf hanging over our heads.

Devant stood at the lip of the drop with his dented tin cup balanced in his fingers, looking down into the black. Without the scarf, his neck was bare, and the burned side of it looked like wax that had run and set again. He didn’t look back at us or move. He just watched the dark.

I was still flat on my back, watching blue system text scroll across the sky like a receipt nobody had asked for.

[All Active Summons have gained +1 Fortitude]

[Current Fortitude: Kassandra (9.7), Magdalene (8.2), White Feather (8.3), Celestine (9.0), Brunhilde (9.4)]

[New attribute acquired: Throne of Corpses]

[New attribute acquired: Stigmata Sentencing]

[New attribute acquired: Voice of God]

[New attribute acquired: Chooser of the Slain]

[Dark Essence bound in soul core]

[WARNING: Vessel integrity critical]

’Great. Vessel integrity critical. Just what I wanted to hear after setting my own soul on fire.’

The black lines across my ribs burned like ink made from crushed embers. I tried to draw a breath, and my lungs wouldn’t open. Instead my chest jerked, and I coughed up a glob of something dark and flaky onto the stone beside my face.

It didn’t look like blood. It looked like rust, dry and brittle, as if it had flaked off an old gate.

I checked my well. Empty, dry down to the bedrock. I tried to squeeze out a trickle of spirit essence, just enough to numb the fire running up my spine, and nothing came. Not that a trickle would have fixed this anyway. Overdrive was over, and now the invoice had arrived, written in my own skin.

Kassie stepped over the grey carcass of a dead drake and stopped beside me, the toe of her armoured boot an inch from my ear.

She didn’t ask if I could walk, and she certainly didn’t offer a hand.

She reached down instead, grabbed the belt at the small of my back, and hoisted me clean off the stone with one arm. Then she slung me over her shoulder like a sack of damp grain.

I groaned as I hit her shoulder, my head hanging down her back toward her heels.

"Kassie. You’re killing me."

Her iron palm came down on my lower back hard enough to rattle what teeth I had left.

"Shut up, maggot. Stop whining."

’Right. Romance isn’t dead. It’s just hanging upside down.’

She turned and marched toward the far side of the shelf, where Light and Ilse had ended up.

Light sat in the grey dirt beside the huge carcass of the adult dragon, his left arm pinned against his ribs. It was burned coal-black from the elbow down to the knuckles. His white hair was matted with soot, and his stare was fixed on the dead beast’s glazed eye. He hadn’t said one word about the wyvern since the fighting stopped. He didn’t look up as we came over, either.

I cleared my throat from somewhere around Kassie’s hip.

"Hey. At least you don’t have to feed it anymore."

The joke died the second it left my mouth. Light didn’t flinch or blink. The muscle in his cheek just kept twitching, his jaw clamped so tight I could almost hear his teeth grind.

I shut my eyes. Stupid. Grief got no jokes.

When I opened them again, I kept my voice low and plain.

"I’m sorry, Light. She was a good beast."

He didn’t answer, but his shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. That was all I got, and it was more than I’d earned.

A few feet away, Ilse lay slumped back against a boulder. Her clothes were scorched to rags and her skin was red and blistered from the dragon’s breath, but her amber eyes were sharp. She was counting her breaths, and her ribs rose and fell on the count like a drill.

Her gaze went to Kassie first. Then it came up, sour and steady, to my upside-down face.

"Is that the woman you were screaming for when you broke the door?"

She didn’t lose count to ask it.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Kassie didn’t acknowledge the question either. She only shifted her grip on my belt with a grunt that nearly cracked another rib. Ilse closed her eyes, pressed her lips into a thin line, and went back to counting.

Devant walked past us, his boots clicking lightly on the basalt, and stopped where a narrow ramp of rock sloped down into the throat of the mountain. He glanced back over his shoulder, pleasant as ever.

"The path up is gone. We should go down."

Kassie stopped dead. Her gauntlet clamped down on my waist until the iron bit into my hip bone, and when she spoke it came out low and quiet, which with Kassie was always worse than loud.

"Why would we follow you, boy?"

Devant tilted his head and gave her a polite smile. His amber eyes didn’t join in.

"Because I know the way, and you carry a corpse."

I lifted my head an inch. The black lines on my neck pulled tight like fresh stitches.

"What’s your price, Devant?"

He turned his back on us and took his first step down the slope.

"I’ll name it when you’re worth something."

’Charming. Absolutely delightful.’

I looked down the dark slope, then at the back of Kassie’s armour, which was the only other view I had.

"We follow him."

Kassie growled low in her throat, but she didn’t argue. She fell in behind Devant, carrying me like luggage. Light got to his feet slowly, holding his black arm rigid against his chest, and followed without a word. Ilse pushed herself off the boulder, wincing as her scorched skin pulled, and brought up the rear, counting her paces under her breath.

For two hours we walked through the dark, winding down a narrow shelf of stone that spiraled toward the floor of the chasm.

Twice during the descent, Light lagged behind. I watched him from where I hung. Each time, he drifted toward the outer edge of the path, his boots stepping closer and closer to the drop, glassy-eyed and half asleep on his feet.

Then his foot would skid on loose gravel, his head would snap up, and he’d shake himself awake and stumble back to the middle of the ledge, looking around like a man who had walked into a room and forgotten why.

He couldn’t explain it. He didn’t even try.

Whatever was down there was pulling at him, and the deeper we went, the harder it pulled.

By the time the ledge opened into a flat, sheltered shelf, my ribs had gone numb. Kassie dumped me onto the stone without ceremony. I landed with a dull thud and gasped as the pain shot up through my core.

We made camp in the cold dark. Nobody lit a fire.

I lay against the rock wall, closed my eyes, and reached into the Soul Sanctum. The rusted doors stood wide open now, broken where I’d punched through them. But the moment I tried to pull a second spirit into my core, my broken vessel shuddered. The ink lines flared hot down to the bone, and my core locked up tight.

’Oh no...’

My body couldn’t hold two summons. Not like this.

I looked into the Nave anyway.

Beyond the threshold, four figures stood waiting in the gloom. The one closest to the doorway wore a nun’s habit without a single crease, and a line of silver hair showed under her veil, catching the faint light of the Sanctum.

Maggie.

Her crimson eyes were fixed on me through the gap, cold and unblinking.