Chapter 45: The Seam

Chapter 45: Chapter 45: The Seam

Tobin unscrewed the lid.

Cold poured out of the thermos like fog off a winter lake. The broth inside was pale blue, almost white, and so cold that frost crawled up the outside of the steel the instant the air touched it. Tobin’s breath turned to vapor in the middle of a furnace.

"Frost broth," he said. "Glacier moss, ice-salt, and the heart of every cold thing I could find in three gates. Took me two days." He looked at the magma rolling toward them, five meters away now. "It was supposed to be for after."

Then he drew back his arm and flung the whole thermos, broth and all, in a long, arcing spray across the surface of the magma.

Where it landed, the world went white.

Frost exploded across the molten rock in a crackling sheet, spreading faster than Elias could follow. Steam screamed upward in a wall. And under the steam, the glowing orange surface of the magma went dark: grey, then black, a crust forming across the whole width of the tunnel like ice forming over a lake in the space of a heartbeat.

The flood stopped moving.

"Thirty seconds," Tobin gasped. "Maybe. The heat underneath’ll eat through it."

Cracks were already spreading across the black crust, glowing faintly orange from below.

In the Link, the red coil beneath the crust stopped swimming. It had felt the cold. Its head swung upward toward the surface, toward them, rising fast through the magma.

"It’s coming up," Marcus said. "Right in front of us."

"Good," Elias said.

The crust ten meters ahead bulged. Then it shattered, and the Wyrm’s head burst up through it in a fountain of black rock and orange fire, jaws wide, coal-red eyes blazing, its neck rising out of the flood like a tower.

It rose over them. Higher. Its head nearly scraped the tunnel roof, and it hung there for a moment, swaying, its jaws dripping molten rock.

Then it began to arch backward, the way it had before, curving its neck like a drawn bow, getting ready to strike down at the four people trapped against the wall.

Elias didn’t wait for it to finish.

He ran onto the crust.

It was like running across a frozen lake that was already melting. The black rock cracked under his boots with every step, orange light glowing up through the fractures, heat searing up through his soles. Quick Step lengthened every stride. Three steps. Four. He felt the crust give way behind his heel and kept running.

"Elias!" Aveline shouted.

The Wyrm’s body rose out of the magma in front of him, a wall of black basalt plates. He didn’t slow down. He jumped, caught the edge of the lowest plate with both hands, and swung himself up onto the Wyrm’s back.

The plate was hot enough to burn. He felt his palms blister through his gloves.

He held on anyway.

The Wyrm felt him.

Its whole body bucked like a horse trying to throw a rider. Elias slammed face-first into the plate he was clinging to, and his feet swung loose over the crust below, and for one sickening second he hung there by his blistered fingers. Then he got a boot onto the edge of the plate beneath and shoved himself upward.

He climbed.

Hand over hand, plate over plate, up the Wyrm’s rising neck like a man climbing a cliff in an earthquake. The plates were ridged and slick with dripping magma, and where their edges overlapped, molten light leaked out through the gaps and scorched his sleeves. The Wyrm thrashed side to side, slamming its body against the tunnel walls, trying to scrape him off. Rock exploded around him with every impact. Chunks of the ceiling broke loose and came crashing down.

Below him, Aveline had planted herself in front of Tobin and Marcus with her bent shield raised over their heads. Boulders the size of chairs bounced off it, one after another. She didn’t move.

"Marcus," Elias shouted over the roar. "I need it to arch! Make it look up!"

"Copy."

The rifle cracked. A blue round struck the Wyrm square in its left eye.

It didn’t kill it. Nothing Marcus had could kill it from the front. But the Wyrm screamed and threw its head backward, away from the pain, the way any creature flinches from a wound to the eye.

Its neck arched.

Under Elias’s hands, the plates began to move. They slid apart along the back of the neck, just behind the skull, exactly where the Link had painted that long red line. The seam opened. Molten light blazed out of it, white-orange and blinding, so hot that the air above it rippled like water.

Elias was a meter and a half below it, clinging to the side of the neck.

He had one second. Maybe less.

He let go with his right hand, drew the old Ironfang dagger from his belt, and threw himself upward.

No echo this time. No borrowed fire. Just his own legs, and Quick Step, and every one of the twenty-four points of Strength he’d poured into his body after the Glass Orchard, everything he’d built night after night in the warrens and the gullies and the foundry.

He reached the seam as it began to close and drove the dagger down into it with both hands.

The blade sank into the molten light up to the guard.

The Wyrm screamed. Not like before. This sound came from somewhere much deeper, from the core of it, a shriek that shook the whole mountain. Its body convulsed. Elias held on to the dagger with both hands, his knees locked around the edges of the plates, and twisted.

Something inside the seam cracked, a sharp sound like ice breaking on a frozen river.

Then the dagger broke.

The old steel couldn’t take the heat and the force at the same time. It snapped clean at the guard with a high, clear ring, and the blade stayed buried in the Wyrm’s neck while Elias was left holding nothing but the hilt.

It didn’t matter.

The molten light in the seam flickered. Dimmed. And along the Wyrm’s whole enormous body, from its head to the coils still buried in the flood below, the orange glow between every plate began, very slowly, to go dark.

The Wyrm fell.

It didn’t collapse all at once. It sagged, the way a tree goes over when the last fiber of its trunk gives way, slowly at first and then faster. Elias felt the neck tilt beneath him. He let go and dropped, and hit the black crust hard, and rolled, and felt it crack under his shoulder.

The Wyrm’s head struck the tunnel floor beside him with an impact that threw him into the air. Then the whole mountain began to shake.

[Boss defeated: Mine Wyrm.]

[Level up: 14 → 15.]

[Rank up: C → B.]

[New summon slot unlocked. Summon slots: 3 / 4.]

[Gate collapse in 5:00.]

He barely saw them. The ceiling was coming down.

"Up!" Marcus was shouting. "The walls stopped moving! The tunnels are holding still! I’ve got a path!"

With the Wyrm dead, the mine had stopped shifting. Every passage the Link drew stayed exactly where it was. And there, back up the tunnel where the walls had ground shut, a crack had opened as the mountain shuddered. It was narrow, and jagged, and it led up.

Aveline reached Elias first. She hauled him off the crust one-handed as it shattered behind him, molten light welling up through the gap where he’d been lying. His hands wouldn’t close. His palms were raw and blistered. She didn’t ask. She just threw his arm over her shoulder and ran.

But Elias twisted out of her grip for one second, back toward the Wyrm’s fallen head, and grabbed the thing he’d seen glowing in the broken seam behind its skull: a core the size of a fist, red-black and veined with orange, like a coal that had been dreaming of being a volcano. He shoved it into his jacket. Then he let Aveline drag him into the crack.

They climbed. Through the crack, up a collapsing passage, across the upper levels with rocks crashing down behind them. Marcus called every turn. Tobin carried his last remaining cleaver in his teeth so he could climb with both hands. The countdown ticked in the corner of Elias’s vision. Two minutes. One.

They came out through the red tear in the cliff face with eleven seconds to spare and fell together onto the rusted metal landing at the top of the stairs. Behind them, the gate let out a long, rolling sigh, folded down to a line, and was gone.

It was dawn. The sky over the quarry was grey and pink, and the air was so cold and clean it hurt to breathe.

At the bottom of the stairs, Dex was standing at the kiosk with his phone pressed to his ear.

"—yes, I’ll hold," he was saying. "No, I need Director Crane specifically. It’s an emergency, my friend’s been in a B-rank gate for almost four hours, and—"

He looked up and saw them.

The phone slipped out of his hand and clattered onto the gravel.

"Three hours," Dex said faintly, "and fifty-eight minutes." Then he sat down hard on the bottom step and put his face in his hands.

Elias lay on his back on the rusted landing, staring up at the pink sky. His hands were burned. His clothes were scorched. In his left fist, he was still holding the broken hilt of the Ironfang dagger, the guild’s crest worn almost smooth. He didn’t remember deciding to keep it.

Tobin sat down beside him, pulled the last thermos out of the pack, the one labeled FOR LATER. DON’T YOU DARE OPEN IT EARLY, and unscrewed the lid. Steam curled out, sweet and warm. Honey, and milk, and something like cinnamon.

"Now," Tobin said, "you can open it."

Elias drank. It tasted like every good morning he’d never had.

In the corner of his vision, one window was still waiting, patient and quiet.

[Summon slots: 3 / 4.]

He thought about a hospital bracelet in a drawer at Merridan General. About a footnote in a textbook. About drawing something out like a thread from cloth.

Tonight, he thought.

Tonight.