Chapter 3: Threshold Summoner

Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Threshold Summoner

The bronze doors opened on their own.

They didn’t swing so much as sigh apart, and a breath of cold air rolled out that smelled like wet bone and old incense. Beyond them lay a round chamber, its walls stacked floor to ceiling with skulls in carved niches, thousands of them, each with a green-gold candle burning in its eye socket. At the center, on a raised altar ringed by water, something was kneeling.

Garrick went in first. The hunters followed. The porters stopped at the threshold, the way porters always did.

The bell stopped ringing.

The thing on the altar stood up.

It kept standing up. Three meters of it unfolded from a kneel like a crane lifting a load: a skeleton armored in its own bones, ribs fused into a breastplate, vertebrae layered into pauldrons, all of it crusted white with barnacles. A crown of fingerbones sat on its skull. In one hand it held a chain, and at the end of the chain hung a censer the size of a barrel, leaking smoke the color of a bruise.

Dex’s voice was barely a breath. "The Ossuary King."

The King swung.

It wasn’t fast. That was the worst part. Elias watched the censer come around in a long, lazy arc, and he watched Brody plant his feet and raise his brand-new shield, and he watched the stiff strap drag the shield up half a second late.

The censer kissed the steel.

The shield didn’t dent. It melted. It ran like candle wax, glowing orange, and poured down over Brody’s arm, and his scream bounced off a thousand skulls. The chain kept coming. It caught Colt across the back as he turned to help, and his armor went black and smoking where it touched. He went down face-first in the water, screaming too.

Two seconds. Maybe three.

Petra’s healing light flared and guttered. Vance loosed three arrows at the King’s skull, and they burned to ash in the smoke before they landed. Garrick hit it once, a granite fist into the bone plate of its knee, and the sound was like two boulders colliding. The King didn’t even look down.

At the bottom of its swing, the chain went slack for one heartbeat, the censer swaying. Then the King drew it back again.

Elias saw the slack. He filed it away, because his brain did that even while the rest of him was screaming.

"Out!" Garrick roared. "Everyone out! Fall back!"

The hunters broke for the door.

Sato dragged Brody by his good arm. Petra and Vance hauled Colt between them, his back still smoking. Elias stood in the doorway with forty kilos of loot on his shoulders, grabbing Petra’s sleeve, pulling her through, stepping aside so the others could pass. That was what porters were for. You held the door.

Garrick came last, granite feet churning the water, and for one stupid second Elias thought the guild master was reaching out to pull him along.

Garrick’s stone palm hit him square in the chest.

The shove lifted him off his feet. He flew backward through the doorway and landed hard on his pack in the black water. By the time he got his head up, Garrick was standing in the doorway with both hands raised, and stone was pouring out of his palms.

A wall. It rose from the floor like a tide coming in, grey rock stacking itself brick on brick, sealing the doorway from the bottom up.

"Porters draw aggro," Garrick said. His stone face didn’t move. "Nothing personal, Pierce. Buy us a minute."

"Garrick—"

Through the shrinking gap at the top, Elias saw Dex.

Dex was fighting. He’d dropped his pack and was clawing at the stone, trying to climb it, screaming Elias’s name so hard his voice cracked in half. Vance grabbed him by the collar and hauled him back. Dex twisted and swung at him, and Vance hit him once across the jaw and dragged him out of sight.

The last brick slid into place. The light from the nave went out.

Behind him, the chain began to swing.

Elias ran.

He didn’t decide to. His body did it for him, the way it had when he was twelve and the Crimson Break was falling out of the sky. He dove behind the nearest pillar as the censer screamed past, and the stone where he’d been standing hissed and ran like wax.

The King turned. It had no eyes, only two green candle flames burning in its skull, but it turned toward the splash.

Sound, Elias thought. It tracks sound.

He tore a bag of relic coins off his pack and hurled it across the chamber. It hit the water with a crash, and the censer followed, smashing a row of skull niches to powder. He sprinted for the next pillar. He threw a bundle of rosaries. Then a potion vial, which burst bright pink against the far wall. Then another bag. Then his porter’s hook.

Every throw bought him two seconds, and he spent every two seconds running.

He was down to the empty pack when the King stopped chasing the noise.

It stood very still in the middle of the chamber, candle-eyes flickering. Then it turned, slowly, and looked straight at the pillar where Elias was hiding.

He threw the pack. The King didn’t follow it.

The censer came around the pillar.

It caught him across the ribs.

There was no pain at first. There was just a sound, a wet crunch he felt more than heard, and then he was flying, and then he was lying on his back in the water with his jacket smoking and his whole left side made of fire.

He tried to breathe. Nothing happened. His chest moved, something inside it grated, and no air came in.

Above him, the candles in a thousand skulls stared down. The water was cold against the back of his neck. Somewhere far away, on the other side of a stone wall, a man who was about to be very rich was walking out of a gate.

Mira, he thought. Mira’s going to be so angry.

The Ossuary King stepped over him. Water streamed from its barnacled bones. It raised the censer high overhead, chain pulled taut, and the bruise-colored smoke poured down over Elias like a shroud.

He watched it. He couldn’t do anything else.

Then something opened in front of his eyes.

It wasn’t the King, and it wasn’t light, exactly. It was a window, a pale rectangle hanging in the air like the lens of Dex’s Appraiser, except this one didn’t belong to anyone else. It was his.

[Threshold detected.]

[Class awakened: Threshold Summoner.]

He stared at it. The words meant nothing. His vision was going grey at the edges, and the censer was beginning to fall.

Then the air above him tore open.

It split down the middle like paper, a seam of white-gold light so bright that the King’s candle-eyes flinched. Wind roared out of it, carrying smoke, the smell of blood, and the clash of a battle that wasn’t happening here. And out of that light, someone stepped down into the water beside him.