Chapter 164: Harrow Held the Line Underwater

Bronze screamed when the last support tore free.

Rill drove his free hook through Bracken’s blue line before it vanished into the slot. The pull took him off his feet. His chest struck the shelf, and the hook skipped toward the edge with sparks jumping from its point.

Slate caught the chain through his saddle ring.

Slate’s wounded flank folded. One wing slapped the cataract while the other found air, and for an ugly moment rider and wyvern slid together toward the white drop. Rill hooked an elbow through the shelf chain and held on.

Below his hands, Harrow sank to the shoulders.

The torn rear strap around his forearm had caught beneath a curved piece of old homebell. Bracken’s line ran over that bronze arc before dropping into black water. Harrow’s body pulled one side down. Whatever held Bracken pulled the other.

Rill reached for him again.

Harrow struck the hook with his fist.

"I said the blue line."

"I have the line."

"Then feel what happens when you lift me."

Rill pulled Harrow’s chest chain no farther than the width of a finger.

Bronze rolled under the water. Bracken’s line jerked tight enough to sing, and a muffled cry came through the stone beneath Jiang’s feet.

Rill lowered Harrow again.

Old bronze settled back. The cry stopped.

Harrow had become the weight keeping its broken crown tilted away from Bracken.

Jiang snatched the lost wooden toggle from the shallows and forced it between Rill’s fingers. He tapped the submerged slot, then his own chest.

Aylin understood first. "He can get under the bell."

"He can also drown under it," Rill said.

Jiang bit the line tied through the toggle and went down before either human could spend his air arguing.

Since Jiang last entered it, the slot had narrowed. Bell metal crowded one wall. Red stone crowded the other, and the black current carried loose strands that brushed his face like wet hair.

Behind him, Aylin wedged her knife into the crack above the bronze arc. She laid her cut palm against the stone.

Natural Essence entered a fracture already there.

It did not mend the shelf or strengthen her hand. The old crack merely stopped closing while the pale light held its edges apart. Aylin’s arm began to shake almost at once.

"A few breaths," she warned.

Jiang had already used one.

He squeezed through sideways.

Below him waited the hollow of a homebell large enough to shelter a flight pair. Its crown lay on its side, buried in roots and fallen stone. Water had filled everything except a pocket trapped beneath the upper rim.

Bracken hung crooked inside it.

Bracken’s breast rig had snagged on the bell tongue. His left wing disappeared beneath the bronze crown. Each frightened pull tightened the blue line and dragged the metal deeper across the wing joint.

His right wing beat the water without room to open. One rear claw had split against stone. The other scraped a pale groove through the black growth covering the floor.

Jiang touched the trapped wing with one foot.

Bracken’s head snapped around.

Teeth closed over Jiang’s shoulder binding.

The bite crushed wet cloth against the old wound and drove his body into the bell. Jiang did not fight the jaws. He struck the bronze beside Bracken’s muzzle with his beak instead, once, then twice.

The sound went nowhere useful.

Bracken shook him hard.

Above the water, Harrow felt the answer travel through blue leather.

He took the line from Rill’s hand for as long as his fingers could close around it. His first pull was the old request for stillness.

Bracken kept biting down.

Harrow changed the second pull. Short, long, then a late pressure against the line, the same mistake he had once turned into a lesson for Rill.

The pale jaws stopped moving.

Bracken had heard that changed ending through storms, bad landings, and one foolish rider learning not to give the same emergency answer twice. No spell held his teeth open. He chose to release them.

Jiang drifted free with blood leaking beneath the shoulder wrap.

He found the blue line against Bracken’s breast and followed it to the bell tongue. The heavy clapper had punched through the leather rig and pinned it to the floor. Above that, black-green fiber bound the broken crown to the stone in a nest of wet cords.

The cords tightened whenever a stolen bell rang outside.

Jiang put his feet against the clapper and shoved.

His bad leg buckled. The backward claw caught in a groove and saved him from being swept under Bracken’s body, but the clapper did not move.

The air pocket shivered above the wyvern’s crown.

Jiang kicked toward it, broke the surface, and found room for half his head. Bracken’s muzzle rose beside him. The wyvern emptied his lungs in a hot gasp that smelled of blood and old copper.

Jiang drew one breath. Bracken drew two.

Then Jiang dived back to the clapper.

He wedged his good flipper beneath its narrow end and used his belly against the bell floor. He could not lift it. He could make it rock.

Once. The clapper rocked.

Again. Bronze scraped stone.

On the third movement, he released the toggle.

The pull line jumped in Aylin’s hands.

"Now," she said sharply.

Rill leaned into Bracken’s line. Slate backed from the shelf one claw at a time, taking the changing weight through his saddle ring. His cut flank trembled, but he did not turn from it.

The heavy clapper rose.

Bracken tore the breast strap free.

The bronze crown rolled onto his trapped wing.

Harrow’s rear strap snapped tight around his forearm. His shoulder struck the lower lip, and the bell stopped before its full weight came down.

Blood left his mouth and vanished in the cataract.

Rill lunged toward him.

"Hold your end," Harrow said.

His voice had gone quiet. Rill obeyed because Bracken’s wing was still beneath the other end of the sentence.

Jiang pushed his crown under the pale wing joint. Bracken fought the pressure, then felt the small body lifting where the bell pressed hardest. The wyvern folded his outer feathers instead of beating them.

Together, they found the narrow angle the crown had not crushed.

Bracken pulled his wing.

The first attempt left blood in the water.

The second freed the flight feathers and nothing else.

Above them, Aylin’s pale light guttered along the crack. Stone moved against her knife. Her injured knee slipped from the shelf, and she caught herself with the same palm holding the Essence in place.

Her cry reached Jiang as a tremor through the bell.

There would be no fourth attempt.

Harrow unwrapped the rear strap from his failing hand.

Rill saw him feed its loose end through the iron ring at his own hip, then through a tooth of basalt beneath the shelf.

"Do not," Rill said.

Harrow pulled the knot down against his body.

The strap would hold the bell where his arm no longer could. It would also hold him beneath the water when the shelf closed.

Rill reached for his knife.

Harrow tapped the blue line once, paused, then gave it the late changed beat.

Bracken went still below.

Harrow looked at Rill. Water climbed over his lips before either man tried to turn the moment into a speech.

Rill struck the same beat against the hook.

Bracken answered through leather.

Jiang braced both feet against the bell and thrust upward with his whole body. Bracken folded the trapped wing until bone and wet feathers passed through the opening together.

The joint came free.

Slate felt the weight change and hauled.

Bracken surged toward the air pocket. His right wing tore water behind him. The freed left one stayed tight to his side, but his rear claws found the bell rim and drove him through the slot.

Aylin let the crack close behind his tail.

The stone took her knife.

Jiang turned back immediately.

Harrow was gone from the air pocket.

The rider hung under the shelf where the locked strap had pulled him. His working eye was closed. One hand remained curled around the blue line, though Bracken no longer needed its weight.

Jiang caught Harrow’s coat in his beak and pulled.

The cut strap held.

He planted both feet against Harrow’s chest and worried the knot until his cracked beak slipped. On the next bite, the leather edge parted. Jiang dragged the loose end through the iron ring.

Harrow rose with no help from his own body.

Rill caught him at the surface.

For several breaths, Rill held Harrow’s face above water as if the order of rescue could still be corrected. Aylin pressed fingers beneath the rider’s jaw, then laid an ear against his mouth.

Bracken hauled himself onto the outer shelf. His freed wing sagged in the rain. He crawled past Slate and lowered his pale head until his nostrils touched Harrow’s hair.

No one told him what the stillness meant.

Bracken stayed there until Rill buckled Harrow into the empty carrying web over Slate’s spine.

When they lifted the body, the broken bell below lost its counterweight.

The crown rolled over.

Black-green cords ripped free of the floor in a single thick braid. They did not end in Bracken’s trap. The feeder ran through bell after buried bell, threaded into the cliff beneath the nursery, and pulled taut toward the Red Aeries above.

Somewhere inside the mountain, a stolen homebell rang.

The exposed braid answered by drawing the whole drowned reef one handspan closer to the cataract.