Chapter 20: The Harmless Rift

At first there was nothing but cold, dark, and the weight of black water pressing on his chest, and then his head broke the surface and he could breathe again.

Aren got his feet under him shakily. The water only came to his knees now, though it was still cold enough to make his bones ache, and the light had changed. He was standing in a stone hall so big he couldn’t see the far walls, lit by the same flat, sickly glow he remembered from the Training Rift, a light that came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

All around him stood vats. Huge round tanks of stone, each as wide as a house and taller than two men, rose out of the flooded floor in long rows. Rusted pipes ran between them, and every vat was filled to the brim with dye: deep red, dark blue, a poisonous yellow-green.

’A dye house inside a dye house. Either the Rift copies whatever it opens in, or the dye house was copying the Rift. I don’t like either answer.’

He waded cautiously toward the nearest vat with his sword held above the water, and he had gone maybe ten steps when something soft and cold wrapped around his ankle and squeezed.

He didn’t stop to think about it. He threw himself at the vat, caught the thick stone rim with both hands, and dragged himself up out of the water in one ugly heave, and the thing came with him, still clamped on. It was a grey, slick tube of muscle as long as his arm, with no eyes and a round mouth full of tiny circling teeth that was already working at the leather of his boot.

[Dye Leech. Rank F: Level 5.]

He slammed his heel down hard on the rim with the leech underneath, twice, until it let go and slid back into the water. Then he looked down properly and saw, with growing horror, that the water around the vat wasn’t still at all. There were ripples everywhere, dozens of them, maybe hundreds.

So that was why nothing had ever crawled out of this Rift. Everything here lived in the water, and it didn’t need to leave, because anything stupid enough to walk into its water would come to it.

’The city guard called it harmless. Well, they weren’t wrong, as long as nobody walks in. Good thing I’m famous for my judgment.’

He stayed well out of the water after that and moved along the tops of the vats instead, just as he had once crossed the roofs of Salt Lane. The rims were wide but slick, and the gaps between them were sometimes a long jump and sometimes a careful walk along a rusted pipe with the black water waiting below. Moonlit Step kept his landings silent.

He was halfway along a pipe between a red vat and a blue one when the first Vat Crawler pulled itself out of the dye in front of him. It was the size of a big dog and built like a crab, with a flat shell of grey stone, six thick legs and two heavy claws, and blue dye ran off it in long strings. It had no eyes either, only two thin feelers that waved slowly in the air, tasting it.

[Vat Crawler. Rank E: Level 3.]

The feelers found him quickly, and the Crawler raised both claws and came at him along the rim.

He didn’t have a plan, or a pile of rocks, or anywhere to run except down into the leeches. What he did have was the instinct he had taken from Rook, so he let that instinct look for him. He saw its weight. He saw that it moved its front legs before its back ones, so that for half a heartbeat on every step the front of its body tipped up, and he saw a thin, pale line of something softer than stone under the lip of its shell, right where the front legs joined.

A claw swung at his face. He leaned back and let it pass, and when the Crawler stepped forward and its front lifted, he put the point of his sword into that pale line and leaned on it.

The Crawler shuddered, folded its legs, and slid off the rim into the blue water, which immediately began to boil with leeches.

’Okay. Okay, I can do this! I can absolutely do this.’

He did it six more times over the next two hours, and not all of them were pretty. The fourth one came over the rim of a vat he had thought was empty and caught his left calf in a claw before he could turn, and something in his leg made a noise that legs shouldn’t make. He killed it anyway, but there was blood running steadily into his boot afterward, and every step after that was a little slower.

By the time he reached the far end of the hall, he had seven cores in his pocket, each the size of an egg and glowing a cold sea-green. He absorbed two of them sitting on the rim of a red vat with his bad leg stretched out in front of him.

[Experience gained: 38% of current level.]

The other five he kept. Each one was worth most of a gold crown at Old Mag’s, and he still owed Rook money at twenty percent, a number he had been turning over miserably every night since Wednesday.

Through a doorway at the end of the hall lay a round chamber full of black water, and in its middle, rising like an island, was a low platform of stone. Something enormous was asleep on it.

[Vat Mother. Rank E: Level 8.]

It was a Crawler that had kept growing long after it should have stopped, as big as a wagon, its shell crusted with a hundred years of old dye in layers of red and blue and green. Each of its claws was as long as he was tall. Leeches circled the platform like guard dogs, and under the creature’s body something gleamed.

’The Rift’s heart. Kill the guardian, take the core, and the whole place closes. Simple. Except for the part where it’s Level 8 and I’m barely Level 2.’

He made his list in the doorway. Stronger, bigger, better armored, and his leg was hurt. But it was asleep, which meant he would get exactly one attack.

A pipe ran from the doorway across the chamber, high above the water, to a broken vat behind the platform. He crawled along it on his stomach, painfully, one slow inch at a time with his bad leg dragging, and neither the leeches nor the Vat Mother noticed him. When he dropped onto the platform behind it, its bulk hid him from the feelers.

Up close, the pale line under its shell was thicker than on the small ones, and much, much harder. A sword wasn’t going through that, not with his arms.

He laid his bare hand flat on the crusted shell and thought one word.

’Zero.’

The door opened inside him, and under his palm the shell stopped being hard.

He drove his sword into the pale line with all his weight and it sank to the hilt. The Vat Mother screamed, a grinding shriek that shook the whole chamber, and its body heaved and a claw came sweeping blindly around behind it. In that same second his own body was as soft as paper, which was the price, and the edge of the claw barely brushed him and still opened his side from his ribs to his hip like a knife through wet cloth.

He stubbornly refused to let go of the sword. He hung onto it with both hands while the thing thrashed and his blood ran down the stone, and when the second ended and his body came back, he pulled the blade free, stepped back and raised it.

There was nobody down here to see.

The crescent came off his blade as long as his forearm and as bright as the moon. It went into the wound in the creature’s side and out the other side, and the Vat Mother’s claws dropped onto the stone with a crash that rang around the chamber. The leeches stopped circling.

Aren sat down hard with his hand pressed to his side and simply breathed, which felt like the most important skill he had.

[Experience gained: 71% of current level.][Rank E: Level 1 → Level 2.]

The heat of the guardian’s core closed the worst of the cut, though not all of it, and when he could stand he tore strips off his shirt, tied them tight around his waist, and limped over to the thing that had gleamed under the creature’s body.

It wasn’t a core. It was a stake of black iron as long as his arm, driven deep into the stone, its surface covered in tiny carved runes packed so close they looked like scales. It was humming, a low steady vibration he felt in his teeth, like something huge breathing very slowly far below.

Beside it, half in the water, lay a dead man in a soaked grey robe. The Vat Mother had not been kind to him. A bone-handled knife hung at his belt, runes along the blade.

’Nothing came out of this Rift because nothing was supposed to. It didn’t open by accident. Someone came down here and drove this into the floor.’

He thought about the seven red lights across the city that night, after eighteen years of never more than one a month.

’Someone opened all of them!’

He closed his hand around the stake. It was ice cold, and the humming crawled up his arm into his chest. It didn’t move at all when he pulled, so he set his feet and pulled with everything he had, his leg screaming and the cut in his side tearing open again under the bandages, until the stake came out of the stone with a sound like a long breath let go.

The chamber shook. Far back in the hall, vats cracked one after another like ice on a pond. The Rift was closing.

He ran desperately.

He came up out of the black water in the cellar of the old dye house with the stake in one hand and his sword in the other, gasping and half frozen and bleeding through his bandages. Behind him the red light shrank to the size of a door, then a window, then a coin, and went out.

Outside, boots hit the cobblestones, and a rough woman’s voice was giving orders.

"...nobody’s touched it since last night, the guard said. Two by two, shields first. Watch the water."

He definitely didn’t wait to meet them. He scrambled up the rubble of the back wall, hauled himself onto what was left of the roof, and lay flat on the wet slates, trying to breathe quietly.

Through a hole in the roof he watched six hunters in mismatched armor come into the cellar behind a big woman with short red hair and a heavy hammer on her shoulder. He had seen her last night at the market, holding the line around the merchant quarter’s Rift. Rank C.

She stood at the edge of the black water. It was calm, and there was no red light anywhere.

"It’s closed," one of the hunters said. "Must’ve closed on its own."

"Rifts don’t close on their own." She crouched and touched something on the stone, then lifted her fingers to the light, and Aren’s stomach turned over, because it was blood. His blood, dripped from the edge of the cellar on his way out.

She stood up and looked slowly and carefully around the empty cellar, and then up at the broken roof, straight at the hole he was lying beside.

"Someone was here before us," she said.