Chapter 162: The Rider Who Rang Without a Bell

Water covered Harrow’s mouth.

Jiang pushed harder beneath his wrist. The rider’s head rose against the stone roof, leaving room for one ragged breath.

"Useful bird," Harrow said.

Jiang considered lowering him.

"Friend," Harrow corrected before Jiang could test the difference.

Rill’s voice came through the cataract. "Keep insulting your rescuer. It tells me how much air you have."

"Then I am drowning in excellent health."

Aylin reached the pocket first. She had wrapped the descent chain around her forearm and crossed the wet shelf on one knee. Her injured palm was bleeding through the fresh grip.

She put her good hand beneath Harrow’s jaw. "Jiang, move when I have him."

Jiang watched her shoulder take the weight. When Harrow’s mouth stayed above water, he slipped beneath the shelf.

Darkness narrowed around his body.

Harrow’s hip harness had twisted into a fork of broken bell metal. One strap crossed his thigh. Below it, the leg bent against the current and did not move with the rest of him.

The blue flight line left the rear ring and ran down through a slot in the basin floor.

It was tight enough to hum.

Something heavy pulled at the far end. Once. Pause. Then two uneven tugs.

Harrow struck the shelf with his free knuckles in answer.

One knock. A pause. Then two.

The load below eased.

Harrow and Bracken had learned those tugs before they ever wore a homebell. Pressure asked for stillness. A released line offered movement. Bracken could ignore either one, and sometimes did when the rider misunderstood the wind. The ease below was an answer, not obedience.

Jiang pressed one foot against the line. A living tremor returned through his webbing, too broad and slow for a human hand.

Bracken was still there.

Jiang surfaced beside Harrow and pecked the rear harness ring.

"I know," Harrow said. "Cut me loose and Bracken takes the long road down. I dislike climbing back up when I have already broken the leg for it."

Aylin looked at the water where the blue line vanished. "Can Slate take Bracken’s weight?"

"If Slate can hook a wyvern he cannot see through a slot his shoulders cannot enter."

Rill slid into the air pocket on his back, chain across his chest. "You sound difficult to rescue."

"You sound surprised," Harrow said through the water.

Rill touched two fingers to Harrow’s wet hair. Harrow closed his working eye for one breath, and all the jokes left his face.

Rill’s hand stayed there. Harrow had once hauled him out of a storm by that same hair, then cut it crooked with a saddle knife because frozen strands kept catching Rill’s mask. Neither man mentioned the memory. Rill’s thumb moved once against the scar above Harrow’s ear.

Then the line below tugged again.

Harrow knocked the shelf. Bracken answered.

No bell passed between them. The saddle line carried what each body did to the other.

"He is hanging by the breast rig," Harrow said. "Left wing caught somewhere below. Every time the reef shifts, this harness takes him before the stone does."

Rill tested the jammed hip strap. Harrow swore at him with enough invention to reassure nobody.

"We free your body and keep the rear line loaded," Rill said.

"That is the shape of the problem."

"I was hoping age had made you patient."

"Age made me right sooner."

Slate screamed outside the cataract.

Rill clipped his chain to Harrow’s chest ring and pulled twice. Slate took the new load from the outer shelf. The harness rose a finger’s breadth before the blue line snapped taut toward Bracken.

Harrow’s broken leg shifted.

His breath ended in Rill’s shoulder.

Rill lowered him at once.

"Rear ring first," Harrow said when speech returned. "Move the Bracken line from my hip to your chain. Then take me out of the bell."

The transfer point lay beneath the water.

Jiang dived before anyone asked.

He wedged his broad back under Harrow’s hip so the current could not twist the injured leg farther. The line pin sat against his cracked beak, flat on one side and mushroomed by stone on the other.

Black-green fibers quivered beyond it in the lower slot. Each pull from Bracken rubbed them along the blue leather. If the line frayed through before the pin moved, no chain above would know where the wyvern had fallen.

No hand could reach it from the air pocket. His beak could.

Jiang caught the flat end and pushed.

Pain ran from the hatchling’s tooth mark into his crown. The pin moved enough to expose a wet edge.

Aylin’s knife appeared through the upper crack. She could not see Jiang’s face or the line below it.

"Stone side or body side?"

Jiang struck the stone with one foot.

The blade moved toward the rock.

He tapped once more.

Aylin set the knife flat against the pin and pressed. Her palm failed halfway. Rill put his thumb on the back of her hand without closing over it.

"Together?" Rill asked. Aylin answered by setting her injured hand more squarely behind the knife.

They drove the pin through.

Bracken’s line came free of Harrow’s hip ring.

Rill’s hook caught it before it could fall. Outside, Slate dropped under the sudden weight and beat both wet wings against the cataract.

Around all four bodies, the hanging basin shuddered.

Jiang stayed under Harrow while Rill pulled the rider’s chest chain and Aylin cut the jammed thigh strap along its torn edge. Bell metal scraped across Harrow’s coat. His body slid out of the fork and settled onto Jiang’s back.

For several heartbeats, penguin and rider shared the same water.

Harrow did not try to stand. He used the shelf and Rill’s shoulder to reach the air pocket, then kept one hand on the blue line Rill now held.

Bracken pulled once through the transferred line.

Harrow answered on Rill’s hook.

The wyvern below eased again.

"We can take you up now," Aylin said.

"No," Harrow said without softening it.

She waited for the rest.

"Slate has Bracken’s weight through Rill. Pull me upward, Rill changes angle. Change the angle, and the line saws across whatever has his wing. We move together or we leave him hanging alone."

Rill looked toward the cloud above. Mottle and Ilex held the far end of every safe return they had.

He did not argue.

Aylin bound Harrow’s injured leg to the unbroken one with a strip from the ruined thigh strap. The rider watched her knot.

"I had a homebell when this began," he said. "Bracken heard his mate calling from under the reef. Same breath. Same little break she makes near an egg."

His working eye found Jiang.

"The call did not change when Bracken answered. I cut our bell away before the root could learn his side too. Threw it into the overflow and watched it fall."

"Then what answered us?" Rill asked.

"Not ours," Harrow said.

"Another pair vanished east of your route."

"I heard wingbeats over there once. I also heard my own mother ask me to come home, and she has been dead since my first saddle. Sound is cheap under this cloud."

Rill flinched at the lesson returned to him.

Harrow gripped his sleeve. "Hope is not proof. You taught me that back after I taught it to you."

Lightning opened the cloud beneath Slate.

A long body rolled through the white. Old bells shone between wet teeth. Black-green fibers streamed from the creature’s jaw and vanished into the lower rain.

Mottle’s ordinary homebell struck one tooth.

Rill tapped Slate’s chain once, waited, and tapped twice.

The Bellwyrm rolled away.

From inside its mouth came one note, two close answers, and Harrow’s exact late third beat.